“To read is always to experience a haunting, to be alone while in the company of another consciousness, to receive messages from a person who isn’t there,” nellstevens writes.
My friends and I used to tell one another ghost stories when we were young. It was the nineties, and we lived in Oxford, England. There was a period—we must have been eleven or twelve—when nothing compelled us more than made-up fear, and each day we’d rush to school eager to share some newly concocted tale of horror.
In the days that follow, Bethany’s body is discovered, and the police launch an investigation. At night, Alice lets the dog sleep on the floor beside her bed, and, whenever she wakes up, scared and alone, she reaches out a hand for him to lick; the animal’s warm tongue on her palm soothes her. And then one morning she goes downstairs to find her parents ashen-faced at the breakfast table. Alice begins to sweat: they have found out the truth, she thinks.
In the best version of this story, the teller held your hand as they spoke, and when it came time for the licking part they stroked their finger across your palm. There were variations on the theme—sometimes Alice deliberately set the dog on Bethany, sometimes the police investigation loomed larger in the plot—but what remained constant was the licking of the hand at night, the ghostly scrape of a dead tongue across your palm.
Around the same time, I began fervently reading ghost stories. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps, when you sense something shadowy about yourself, you start looking in the shadows for understanding, or at least meaning of some kind. What I did see clearly was that my interest in ghosts endured, long after my friends had moved on. We no longer swapped scary stories in the cafeteria, stroking each other’s palms.
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