Ghost Story

by Peter Straub

No, it was worse than that. It wasn’t merely that the lives within would be brutalized by poverty, but that they would be twisted, malformed

If you wrote down the things Hardie said and looked at them afterward, you’d find the errors, but just listening to him talk, you’d be convinced of anything.

But now we are like spiders dancing in a fire.”

It can’t be true, we tell ourselves; such things do not happen. But they do happen, and we did see them.

“That thing ain’t ever gonna give up the ghost.”