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The story had held us round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as on Christmas

Eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.

The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered

us for the occasion. An appearance of a dreadful kind to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it.

Waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also herself before she had succeeded in doing so the same site that had shaken him.

It was this observation that drew from Douglas, not immediately but later in the evening, a reply

that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention.

Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following.

This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce, and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later, but that same evening before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.

I quite agree, in regard to Griffin's ghost or whatever it was,

that it's appearing first to the little boy

and so tender an age adds a particular touch. But it's not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have involved a child.

If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children?

That was the curtain rising on the turn of the screw by Henry James, and we're talking about it here on

HP Podcraft. Strange studies of strange stories. I'm Chad Fyfer.

And I'm Chris Lanky. Our reader is once again Greg Johnson.

Doing an excellent job, but I'm going to warn you.

We're swapping him out for another reader as we go along, Rachel Laki.

If one reader gives the effect another turn of the screw,

what do you say to two readers?

By the way, earlier in the year,

...