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'You cannot mean to say, sir . . .' I began. 'You do not mean to say that the stories you tell me are from these children's lips?'

Uncle Montague nodded.

'But how can that be?' I asked, faltering slightly as the children craned forward, seemingly hanging on my every word. 'Surely that would mean . . .'

'Yes, Edgar?'

'Surely that would mean these children - some of these children, at least - were . . . dead?'

At that word the figures all around us leaped away and disappeared into the trees, peering out from behind the trunks, and though they were beshadowed as before, I knew that every eye was trained on me.

'They do not like that word, Edgar,.' said Uncle Montague. 'It disturbs them.'

'It disturbs them?' I said, only the fear of running headlong into one of these phantoms stopping me from fleeing that instant.

'They bring me their tales and I listen,.' my uncle went on. 'William was the first, though I knew his tale all too well, of course. Ever since then, they have been coming to me. I am like a strange cousin of the Ancient Mariner, Edgar. Do you know the poem?'

The children were regrouping around us now.

'Yes, sir,.' I said. 'Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We had to learn great pieces of it by heart last term.'

'I am doomed, not as he was to tell his own terrible tale, but to listen to the tales of these lost children. It is my punishment and my penance.'

One of the children now reached out a tentative hand towards me and, despite my sympathy for their suffering, I let out an involuntary whimper of fear.

'NO!' boomed my uncle in a terrifying voice that opened an unwanted window on to the figure he must have struck in his days as headmaster. I recoiled instinctively and the shadow children did likewise.

'He is not yours,.' said my uncle. He turned to me again and his voice mellowed. 'Forgive them, Edgar. They are drawn to your beating heart, to your body's warmth. They have a terrible hunger for life. They mean no harm, but their touch . . . can chill to the bone. It is time you went home, Edgar.'

'Yes, Uncle,.' I said, but still remained where I was, unable to turn my back on those spectral creatures.

'Come, children,.' said Uncle Montague, gathering them about him as if they were setting off on a nature ramble. 'I don't suppose I shall be seeing you again, Edgar.'

'I do not know, sir,.' I said.

'I would quite understand,.' said Uncle Montague with a sad smile. 'Though I should miss your visits. It has been a comfort to me to have someone to share those tales with. Farewell, Edgar.'

With that he turned away, and the children followed him along the path. I watched, heart pounding, until the glow of his lantern became a firefly in the distance.

I realised now that the names he had spoken when he first appeared - Joseph and Matthew - were names of boys from the tales: Joseph, who had been the victim of the creature who guarded the elm tree, and Matthew, who had fallen to his death after being confronted by his own horribly disfigured self.

As I watched, one of the children turned and began to walk back towards me. I say 'walk', but it was a grim mockery of a walk - a strange lurching hobble. I knew who it was before my uncle spoke his name.

'Matthew!' he called reproachfully. 'Come along.

Leave Edgar be, there's a good lad.'

The beshadowed spectre came to a halt a few yards from me and seemed to cock his head quizzically. He shuffled a little closer and I had a dread that I might see that terrible face, the face that had driven the living Matthew to his death.

'Matthew!' called my uncle again, more forcefully this time. Matthew turned and hobbled away. Air rushed back into my lungs and I realised I had been holding my breath.

Finally I gained the courage to turn and head homewards. Uncle Montague had put 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' in my head and a verse came back to me as I hurried along, head bowed, hungry for the dull normality of my parents and my home:

Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And