Some ghost stories, especially in the Gothic mode, are remorseless re-enactments of historical violence. Link’s tale turns this convention upside-down and creates playful layers of uncertainty and doubt. A summary would give too much away. Let’s just say that there’s a scholar who lives in what might be a haunted house, but the narrative focuses on his twin daughters rather than his research, and involves their Dead game (a “let’s pretend that they have been playing every day for 274 days now” which allows them to do whatever they want to), a mysterious babysitter who takes care of them while their father meets a woman in the woods, a dead poet and his daughter, and the Specialist’s hat, which hangs in the attic. Like a close-up magician dealing her cards, Link sets out everything in deceptively simple sentences whose contradictions, elisions and ambiguities are puzzles and trapdoors in a game she plays with the reader. Whether or not the twins are really dead, the identity of the babysitter and the nature and provenance of the Specialist and his hat, if the father’s rendezvous is the rehearsal of a past tragedy – all remains teasingly ambiguous to the very end.
First published online in Event Horizon, 1998. Collected in Pretty Monsters, Viking, 2008, it can also be read here
A Personal Anthology 