About the following story, Campbell explains: “I was asked to write a new tale for an anthology of stories about fear. I still have some I haven’t told yet. I’ve published a few recently that touch on the afterlife. We must hope they’re fiction.”

* * *

Someone else he didn’t think he’d ever seen before leaned down as if to let him count all her wrinkles. “I wish I’d had the chance to say goodbye to my grandmama, Jonathan.”

Another lady dressed in at least as much black and holding her wineglass askew parted her pale lips, which looked as though they had once been stitched together. “Now you know she’s at peace.”

As he remembered how his grandmother’s cheek had felt like a cold crumpled wad of paper he had to kiss, the winner of the wrinkle competition said “What a brave little soul. He’s a credit to his mother.”

“And his father.”

“Careful or you’ll drip.”

The stitched lady straightened up her glass. “We don’t want stains on your lovely carpet, do we, Jonathan? They don’t make them like that any more.”

He thought the elaborate carpet felt like the rest of the house — furtively chill and damp. “I can just hear her saying that, old Ire,” his father joined him to remark.

“Her friends never called Iris that,” the stitched mouth objected. “Oh, whatever’s wrong, you poor little fellow?”

While Jonathan struggled to think of a reply that wouldn’t be the truth, his mother hurried over to confront his father. “Are you upsetting him, Lawrence?”

“Only saying I could hear your mother pricing the contents of the house. Half of it Jonno wasn’t supposed to touch,” he confided to the wrinkled ladies. “You must have felt like you were living in a museum, did you, Jonno?”