Nothing settled me. Not the wine or Pete’s pleasant chatter. After he retired, I lay awake for hours trying to reassure myself that there were no such things as ghosts, running the whole terrifying ordeal over and again in my mind, trying to come up with alternative explanations.
Pete had been asleep when I’d entered his bedroom and he hadn’t awoken for hours, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t carried out an elaborate practical joke. What if he’d had some kind of hidden tape recorder that played a sound track of footsteps? In the dark, I’d have imagined those footsteps were coming down the stairs and getting closer all the time. It must have been Pete who closed the door, too, and flicked the light on and off. He’d only told me the ghost story—which probably wasn’t even true—to add to the im
