First post of Candlemass

Lately, I've been thinking about something that happened to me when I was younger. Today, I have a somewhat hard time telling the difference between what's real and what's not. I guess I've always sort of had that problem. I have some memories that I know can't be physically possible, but I also had a really vivid imagination, especially when I was younger.



Even today, my memory remains spotty about my childhood, mostly because I can't necessarily trust what I believe.

So I can't really trust this memory either, even though it happened to me when my memories start getting clearer and less dubious.

From ages 12 to 16, I was somewhat friends with a man named Candlemass.

For clarification, I'm not religious, and I was never raised with any sort of religious affiliations of any sort in my life. In fact, I only recently learned what Candlemass is, seeing as I'd never celebrated it before. Thinking about it now, it's especially odd that he would have chosen the name Candlemass.

In any case, I had always associated a sort of feeling with Candlemass. It was the sort of feeling that you're being watched by something that could eat you alive, painfully and slowly, but you couldn't see it. I would feel him, particularly strongly in small, closed in spaces, which you might think is typical, but this was never a generalized sort of feeling. I always knew it was this one thing, except I never saw it until after my 12th birthday.

A little after my 12th birthday, I would sort of half-wake to a man in my room. I couldn't see him clearly at all, sort of like the Hat Man, or a shadow person. He was always sitting kind of hunched over on my desk, looking in the direction of my bed. I was always stricken with the impression of something watching me, and so it would always scare me awake. When would wake up all the way and shout, he would be gone. This happened for about a week before it just kind of stopped, because I had taken to mostly sleeping in the living room at that point.

Then, in the summer time, I started seeing him again, when the days were really hot, but he was a lot more clear. It was never really normal that I should see him, and I think I kind of knew that. I would wake up, and see him kind of chilling on my desk, watching me. His hair was short and really pale blond, and stood out from his head. His face was sort of long and angular, but he had a scar that ran down his cheek to his mouth and twisted his lips a little. When I actually saw him clearly for the first time, I wasn't scared of him at all. I think I asked him what he was doing in my room, but he just sort of disappeared.

Candlemass had a thing for fire. We never really had any coherent conversations, and he actually said very little to me when I was at that age. Sometimes, when I would ask him questions, he would smile and laugh a little, like I was funny. But the thing he liked to do most around me was snap his fingers, and make a flame pop up between them like he was a lighter. And then he would make it dance across his knuckles like a magician. It sounds kind of cool, but it was actually pretty scary. He would always look straight at me, and would ask "Play?" I never really said anything back to him about that, but it seemed kind of rhetorical, because he wouldn't stick around long after that.

I think I might have my Nana partly to thank for Candlemass, in case he wasn't real. When I was younger, my great-great grandmother was still alive, and we would call her Nana. She was, as you might guess, exceedingly old, but she would tell you some really crazy stories. One of them in particular was the little man who lit fires, which was why she hid matches, and never allowed them near her.

At one point, I asked this dude for his name, in one of the more lucid incidents. He was busy whittling one of my pencils into a really sharp little stake when I asked him who he was, and he answered without looking up,

"James Vermeer Candlemass."