The Farmhouse at the End of Miller Lane

Miller Lane is a stub of dirt road that turns off the county highway and runs maybe half a mile straight back to a single abandoned farmhouse, then stops. There is nothing else on it. The house has been empty since before I was born -- my father remembered it empty, and his father did too. It is the kind of place kids dare each other to walk up to, a gray two-story with a sagging porch and blank black windows, sitting alone at the end of that lane with fields and then forest behind it.

I would not normally have any reason to be on Miller Lane at all. But one night I missed my turn off the county road in heavy fog, got twisted around, and pulled onto what I thought was my own street to turn back. It was not. My headlights swung across a dirt track running dead straight into the fog, and at the far end, half a mile back, was the farmhouse. And every window was lit.

I sat there with my foot on the brake. I knew that house. Everyone in the area knew that house, and knew it had no power, no owner, no one who had set foot in it for decades. But there it was at the end of the lane, glowing warm and yellow out of every window, upstairs and down, like a family was home and had just sat down to supper. In the fog it looked almost welcoming. That was the worst part. It looked like somewhere you would want to go.

And then one of the downstairs lights moved. It detached itself from the house -- a single warm point of light, the size of a lantern held at a person's side -- came off the porch, and started down the lane toward me. Unhurried. Bobbing gently, the way a lantern bobs when someone is carrying it at a walking pace. Coming to meet me. Coming the whole half mile down that straight dirt track to the mouth of the lane where I was sitting.