Several years ago, I had an idea for the holidays: I would write a short story to read to my wife, Theresa. Ghost stories are, for some reason, a tradition in Britain; the Cambridge don M.R. James, whose work I admire, wrote ghost/horror stories to be read at Christmastime to his friends. They usually featured a mild-mannered antiquarian like himself and would begin slowly with bits of scholarly detail, very dry. This would go on for about two pages—the stories are quite short—before readers realized, 10 or 15 pages later, that they'd never sleep again ...
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