As a rule of thumb, John considered himself to be fine with spooky stuff as long it didn’t involve children or animals. Not that he had much experience, but from watching terrible movies on Channel 4 at an age at which he should not have been watching terrible movies, he considered himself inoculated to all kind of horrific things. It was only as he had gotten older that he had begun to flinch at stories of bad things happening to children and animals.
Perhaps that was why he liked Terry, perhaps his sad story about his dead cousin made it easy to feel sorry for him, and everyone knew that feeling sorry for a boy was the beginning of falling in love.
There was supposed to be somewhere you phoned when spooky stuff happened, ghosts and aliens, that kind of thing, he thought, shifting his w
