There is a mountain with a lamp on it. There used to be a hundred and eight, one at every niche along the stone steps. Now there is one, at the top, in a stone hut the size of a cart: a bronze lamp with three wicks, and a wall of shallow niches each holding a small sealed jar with a date written on it.
The old keeper walked that path every night for fifty years. He was told what to do and never why. Fill it before it burns low. Never let all three wicks go out at once.
The winter he handed over, he put the oil jug into the young man's hands and said: when the lights down in the village start going out one by one, don't go down. The young man asked what he should do instead. There was a long pause, and the old man said: fill it.
Then he went down the steps and did not come back up.
The village had been empty for thirty years. That night its lights came on, one after another, a whole grid of them in the dark below. Then the lights began to climb — and the first dead lamp niche on the path lit itself, and the second, and the third, coming up the mountain in order.
The three wicks shook. He poured oil until they steadied. Footsteps came up the last of the steps, a great many of them, and stopped outside the door, and a shadow reached in across the floor and came no further.
It was still there when the sky began to go grey. Then it thinned out and was gone, and the wicks were burning, and his hands would not stop shaking.
He got up and went to the wall of niches and read along it — jar after jar, each with a date. The last full one was yesterday's.
The next niche was empty. Cut into the stone at the back of it, already, was today's.