The 8th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

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So we meet again – for the eighth time. What could be more significant, more full of omen? Promisingly ominous, I trust.

There is a town in the north of England where one sometimes sees a queer-looking dog. At first one only glimpses it occasionally – as one rounds a corner, perhaps – or as it does. Then, shrinking into oneself from the street winds, one begins to observe it more often. In the end, one seems to notice it constantly: and then one knows that one is about to pass from this brief and troubled existence, to which the reading of a good ghost story seems often the only antidote.

Once more no author awaits within whom the reader has encountered before in this series. Once more a firm course has been steered between the merely horrific to the right of us and the merely scientific to the left of us. Throughout we commit ourselves to another world altogether: which none the less exists all around us; of which we are a part at least as much as of the familiar and material world; and which occasionally we see, hear, and even touch – or which touches us. There is no instant or guaranteed pathway through the borderland, and Mrs Christie’s tale will serve to illustrate the dangers which can attend the desperate belief that there is; but it is none the less a completely open question whether this daily world is the dream or that other world we seem to glimpse so seldom. The most confining of all errors is to suppose there is no refuge from the hard facts: for these are primarily time and disappointment. From that lugubrious misconception let our nine authors open an eighth door.

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