The Ghost Story

Can a story just disappear from a library book in a burst of flame?

The library at Upper Snodsbury, where I had my first job, was a throwback to a previous age. The walls were lined with bookshelves that reached to the ceiling and the solid fixed island stacks were packed with dusty leather-bound volumes that were hardly ever borrowed.

It was not long into my time there as Assistant Librarian that I became aware of one particular “regular”, a man in his fifties who visited several times a week. He was not a library member and never borrowed anything but would take a book from the shelves and sit at a table to read it.

I was curious to see what his taste in literature was, so I looked over his shoulder as I passed by from time to time. It was always the same book, and he invariably had the book open at the same place.

It was a venerable copy of the Complete Ghost Stories of M R James, who was arguably the best ghost story writer of all time. All the stories are worth reading, but why did the man only appear to want to read the same one?

And which story was it? I knew many of them very well, such as “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and “Number 13”, which had always struck me as being particularly spine-chilling, but from how the man opened the book it appeared…