The lamp in the upstairs window, and the custom nobody would explain

One autumn, years ago now, I rented a room in a house at the end of a lane, in a village small enough that the bus came twice a day and stopped if you waved.

The woman who let the room was kind and plain spoken about everything except one thing. Every evening, as the light went, she climbed the stairs and lit a small lamp in the window of the end room, which was otherwise empty, and left it burning until morning. On the third night I asked her why.

She said it was for the road. I said I did not follow, and she said, in the tone of someone closing a drawer, that it had always been done, and went down to make the tea.

I am a coward by trade. I write about the thing at the edge of the lamplight precisely because I would rather not look at it directly, and here was a whole house arranged around not looking. So of course I did not ask again. I lay in my room at the other end of the landing and watched the thin line of light under the empty door and let my mind do the work that a good village knows better than to do out loud.

Was it to guide something home, or to tell something it was not welcome. Was the road the lane outside, or some older road that the lane had merely been laid over. Did the light keep a thing out, or did it keep a promise, and to whom. I had a dozen answers by the week's end and the house offered none of them, which is the only honest thing a house can do.

That is the whole secret of the trade, if there is one. The custom explained is a custom defused. Tell me the lamp wards off a particular named spirit with a particular habit and a particular weakness, and I will nod, and I will sleep soundly, and I will forget it by spring. Leave it unexplained, a small flame kept nightly for a reason the keeper will not give, and it follows me across twenty years and onto this page.

I never learned what the lamp was for. I have come to think the woman did not entirely know either, that she had inherited the doing without the reason, which is how most of the old customs actually travel. The fear is not in the answer. It never is. The fear is in the perfectly ordinary person who lights the lamp anyway, every night, just in case, and will not tell you why, and is not wrong to keep it burning.

We are into the dark half of the year now, when the light goes before supper and the wind finds the gaps. A good season for leaving a small lamp on. I will not tell you what for.

Customs kept without explanation are the heart of The Quiet Weeks, set in a fjord village where only three houses still keep the old silence after dark.