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.

I did not wait to see who was carrying it. Every instinct I own came online at once and I threw the truck in reverse, backed out onto the county road so fast I nearly put it in the ditch, and got myself pointed toward home. As I straightened out I looked one last time down Miller Lane. The lantern had stopped about halfway. It just hung there in the fog, waiting, and behind it the house was completely dark. Every window black. Like it had never been lit at all.

I drove home shaking. I told my father the next morning, expecting him to laugh. He did not laugh. He set down his coffee and asked me if the light had come off the porch, and I said yes, and he went a shade paler and told me his own father had seen the same thing as a young man, a lit house and a lantern coming down the lane, and that the family rule after that had always been simple -- you do not turn onto Miller Lane after dark, and if you find yourself on it and the house is lit, you leave before the light reaches you. He would not tell me what happens if it reaches you. I do not think he knew. I do not think anyone who found out came back to say.

The house is still there. I have driven past the mouth of Miller Lane in daylight since, on purpose, to prove to myself it is just a wreck. And it is -- in the sun it is nothing, a collapsing gray farmhouse with empty windows and a sagging porch, sad and ordinary. But I have never once driven back that lane, day or night, and I never will, because I saw it lit and I saw the lantern start toward me, and some invitations you are only meant to decline the one time.