It is a big old house, and when I was a boy I believed there were ghosts living in it. My mother said ghosts are mean old people who don’t go away even after they die, and that is all there is to it. My father said, he served in the Great War and he’d seen no ghosts, but he had seen plenty of the dead. Like my father, I do not believe in ghosts. In my dream I was alone in the house upstairs, and I could hear the floorboards creaking. It is an old house and it breathes as if it were alive, grunting and farting, but it is only the water in the pipes or the rats in the attic or the floorboards contracting and expanding with the weather. That’s all there is to it. In my dream I felt a great dark presence in the house. It stalked from room to room, but quietly, like a parent, and I hid in my room. It was coming close to my door and still I knew there was no one else in the house, and that I was truly alone. I called out, Father, Father, but he was not there. When I was born he had touched me with his calloused fingers and traced my face, so he could see me: God took his eyes in the Great War with gas.
