Candle Face's Lair: The Price of Speaking

March 28, 2024

Main Subjects: Candle Face

• Victim #22
• Victim #10
• Victim #18
• Victim #19
• Victim #11

As dusk turned into night, I lit a candle. Its light set shadows moving across the room. I settled into my massage chair, thinking about which spirit might come next and what I might ask now that I seemed able to speak to them directly. I closed my eyes.

The air turned hot. The candle flame twisted into ugly shapes. Then Candle Face herself appeared. Her face seemed to melt in front of me, and flames flickered inside the hollows where her eyes should have been.

She didn’t speak at first. She only stretched out one sizzling hand. The wax-like skin pulled longer than it should have, wrapped around me, and held me in a crushing grip that felt like fire. In an instant, my living room was gone. I was back in her world for the second time. Her Lair. Her hell.

Candle Face was furious. She accused me of crossing a line between the living and the dead. The Lost Soul, Victim #22, who had spoken to me the night before last, had broken some forbidden rule, and she held me responsible. She meant to show me the damage I had done while believing I was helping.

Her Lair stretched out like an abyss. Everywhere I turned, I heard the cries of her victims. The air stank of decay. Candle Face led me through it again, and the only light came from her burning form.

With each step, the horrors became worse. Spirits were trapped in devices that made no sense and offered no mercy. Their bodies were twisted, stretched, bent at impossible angles. Their screams filled the air. Dark shapes, most of them roughly human, seemed to power those devices and feed off the pain they caused.

In one part of her Lair, the Lost Souls were hunted by shadows that took the shape of their worst fears. Giant spiders with glowing eyes. Ghostly figures whose faces warped into cruel copies of loved ones. Beasts and things that seemed built only to attack the mind. The souls ran winding paths that led nowhere but back into the hands of those fears. There was no rest. No way out.

In another part of the Lair, the Lost Souls stood in a silence more disturbing than screaming. Their mouths were sewn shut. They watched the worst moments of their lives replay over and over like a film with no end. Shadowy figures yelled cruel truths and lies into their ears, stories of how their lovers had moved on. The souls were forced to watch their husbands and wives having sex with their new lovers while the world of the living forgot them. It wore at their sanity and left them desperate to scream, to beg for mercy that would never come.

Further in, other spirits were trapped in mirrors. But the mirrors didn’t show them as they were. They showed monstrous versions of them, loaded with every guilt, shame, and regret they had carried in life. The mirrors made every small failure look unforgivable. Every insecurity became something grotesque. The souls tried to look away, but the mirrors always moved back into view.

Then I saw Victim #10. The woman who had mocked Candle Face and shown off her devil tattoo. Now she was trapped while shadows wearing the faces of her old companions circled her and jeered. They flaunted marks like hers, all of them burning.

Not far from that, I saw Victim #18 and Victim #19. They were trapped in a constant replay of their last meeting. The woman who loved to run was caught in an endless sprint, her Walkman filling the air with bleak music. The man who killed her was dragged along behind her by their fused hands, horror all over his face. Shadow figures chased them, shaped by his guilt, his fear, and what he had done.

These souls were there for Candle Face’s amusement. I couldn’t shake the thought that my speaking with them had made it worse.

Deeper in, I saw a worse cycle still. Some spirits relived their final moments again and again, each time with more pain than before. Victim #11, the woman from the shack, went through the repeated rapes, the betrayal, and the knife going into her chest, only for it all to begin again just as life left her body. Nearby, a man died in a burning building over and over, the flames taking him each time before he was restored to burn again.

This was Candle Face’s hell, a place of pain she ruled with pleasure. Her laughter moved through the caverns, stripped of anything human. Watching it, I felt hopeless. And I understood. This visit was a warning. A look at what waits for anyone who interferes in her affairs.

Then Candle Face turned that fury on me.

“Foolish mortal,” she said, and the ground shook. “You dared trick one of my Icnopilli into answering you directly, breaking a silence that has governed the dead for ages. Did you think your actions meant nothing? Did you think you were saving them? Your ignorance has done real damage. Your need to interfere feeds their suffering. Every Icnopilli that came to you for relief has now been cast deeper into torment because of what you did.”

She towered over me. Flames moved in the hollows of her eyes. Hot drops from her sizzling skin struck my face.

I wanted to answer her. I wanted to argue, to beg, to explain. I couldn’t get the words out.

“You have not helped,” she said. “You have harmed them. You have condemned them. And now you will see the agony you caused. You will carry it.”

I had tried to do more than listen, and I had crossed into something I didn’t understand.

“You thought you could investigate me. You thought you could speak for the dead,” she said. “You are a rift, Ray. Your presence brings ruin.”

Then she was gone.

When I opened my eyes, I was back in my massage chair, soaked in sweat. The candle had burned out. What I had seen settled into me. The screams. The torment. Her words felt like a verdict.

And I thought about the Lost Soul who had stood in my home the night before last, looking at the brownies on the counter. He had been a man broken by homelessness and addiction, then pulled in by the false promise of salvation. The man who had first approached him with stories of Candle Face had been one of her followers, using the desperation of the homeless to draw them in. Candle Face was a predator who used suffering as bait.

After seeing her Lair, I had proof. She feeds on the weakest places in people and waits until they have nothing left.

Then I thought about his last words to me when he refused the brownies. “Sometimes it’s better to leave certain wants unfulfilled.”

I should have listened more carefully to what he was really saying.

This visit showed me how dangerous speaking with the Lost Souls really is. In trying to offer comfort, I may have dragged them into deeper torment. I won’t try to question them again. I’ve already done too much damage.

Personal Note to My Readers

During that encounter, Candle Face used a term I didn’t recognize. I wrote down what I thought I heard, then spent hours trying different spellings based on the sound of it. At first, I didn’t know what language I was dealing with. I searched phonetic variations, compared dictionary entries, and kept narrowing the possibilities until the trail pointed toward Nahuatl. That led me to the Online Nahuatl Dictionary hosted by Wired Humanities Projects, where I found this entry: https://nahuatl.wired-humanities.org/content/icnopilli. The word was icnopilli, glossed there as an orphan, a fatherless child, or a person deserving of compassion.

That definition caught my attention for another reason. Mr. Smoe described Candle Face as compassionate. At the time, I didn’t know what to do with that. I saw too much cruelty in her for that word to make sense. After finding icnopilli, I had to ask whether this was the kind of compassion he meant. Was her compassion tied to the abandoned, the broken, and the dead in some older, harsher way?

I can’t say that one word proves exactly who or what Candle Face is. Still, if I heard her correctly, this may be the first real clue I’ve found to her origin. It may point to something much older than I first believed.

The investigation continues in the three most recent entries below. Each adds to the record on Candle Face (Isabel), the Lost Souls, and the Fugitives. You’ll find every entry to date in The Journal.