Every Halloween night, if you stand at the end of Birch Lane and look north, you can see a light on top of Hemlock Hill. Just one. Small and yellow and steady, like a lantern hung on a nail. There's no house up there. There's no road up there, not anymore. There's just hemlocks, and rocks, and the old stone walls of sheep pastures that went back to woods a hundred years ago.

Everybody on Birch Lane knows about the light. Nobody on Birch Lane goes up to look at it.

Which is exactly why, on Halloween night when Danny Kowal was eleven and his brother Pete was nine, the big kids dared them to.

"Go touch the lantern," said Mikey Albers, who was thirteen and had a pillowcase full of candy bars to prove how brave he was. "Go touch it and come back, and we'll give you half of this."

Danny should have said no. He knew it. But Pete was already looking at the pillowcase, and Danny was the big brother, and big brothers don't say no in front of Mikey Albers.

So they went.

*

The old logging road went up the side of the hill from the end of Birch Lane. It was easy at first, wide and flat, with the moon coming through the branches and the dead leaves crunching under their sneakers. Pete held the flashlight. Danny held Pete's sleeve. They could see the light up ahead through the trees, and it didn't look scary at all. It looked almost friendly. Like somebody had left a porch light on.

Then the road ran out.

It didn't end. It just sort of faded, the way old roads do, into ferns and rocks and fallen trees. And the fog came up out of the hollow, and the moon went behind a cloud, and when Danny turned around to look back down the hill, he couldn't see Birch Lane anymore. He couldn't see anything but trees that all looked exactly the same.

"Which way did we come?" Pete whispered.

Danny didn't know. That was when the flashlight went out.

Pete shook it. Danny shook it. Nothing. It was very dark under the hemlocks, and very quiet, the kind of quiet where you can hear your own heart. Somewhere off to the left, something big stepped on a stick. Crack.

And then, right in front of them, not twenty feet away, there was a light.

*

It was a lantern. An old-fashioned one, with a glass chimney and a wire handle, swinging a little from somebody's hand. The somebody was an old man in a long gray coat, with a beard like a snowdrift and a floppy hat pulled down low. He held the lantern up high so it shone on the boys, and he looked at them for a long moment, not angry, not smiling either. Just looking. The way a teacher looks at you when you're somewhere you shouldn't be.

"You boys are off the path," the old man said. His voice was soft and creaky, like a door in an old barn.

"We're lost," said Pete, who was nine and not too proud to say it.

"I know it." The old man turned around. "Follow the light. Stay close. Mind the rocks."

And he walked off into the trees. Not up the hill. Down. And the boys, because there was nothing else to do, followed him.

They walked for a long time. The old man never looked back, and he never hurried, and the lantern swung back and forth, back and forth, and wherever it shone, the ground was smooth and clear, like a path somebody swept every day. Danny noticed after a while that the old man's boots didn't make any sound on the leaves. He decided not to mention it to Pete.

Then the trees opened up, and there was a fence, and a yard, and a back porch with the light on, and a plastic skeleton hanging on the door, and Danny realized it was their back porch. Their own house. Their mother was in the kitchen window, doing dishes.

"Thank you, mister," Danny said, and turned around.

There was nobody there. There was no lantern. There were just the dark woods going up the hill.

And way up on top of Hemlock Hill, small and yellow and steady, just where it always was, the light.

*

The next morning at breakfast, they told their grandmother. They'd planned not to, but Pete couldn't stand it.

Grandma put down her coffee. "A gray coat," she said. "And a beard."

They nodded.

"That'd be Mr. Asa Wheelock," she said. "He kept sheep on that hill when my grandmother was a girl. Every night he'd walk the fences with his lantern to make sure none of the lambs had gotten out and gotten lost. He used to say he couldn't abide anything being lost in the dark, not a sheep, not a dog, not a person. When he got too old to walk it, they say he sat up there on the porch of his cabin with the lantern lit anyhow, just in case." She picked up her coffee again. "That cabin fell in before I was born."

After breakfast, the boys went out to the back fence in the daylight to look for the path the old man had led them down.

There wasn't one. There was just a steep, tangled hillside full of rocks and fallen hemlocks and brambles taller than Pete. No path at all. Nobody could have walked down that in the dark.

But at the bottom, right by their fence, on a flat gray rock, sitting there as if somebody had set it down to rest for a minute, was a small, perfect, old-fashioned lantern wick, black at the tip. Still warm.

Danny kept it in a matchbox in his sock drawer until he was grown. He never did get that half a pillowcase of candy from Mikey Albers.

He never asked for it, either.

~ THE END ~