When I was a kid, I lived near an old guy, Mr Lamont, a retired man who’d once been an accountant. He must have been short of dough because one year, when the Royal Agricultural Show came to town, he hired on as a skeleton. He turned up at the showgrounds where they dressed him in a bodystocking painted with luminous bones and paid him to leap from the darkness, scaring people as they rode the Ghost Train. At day’s end, I’d hang around his front gate and pester him for stories of these emaciated ambushes and their resulting panic.

He spoke of those Ghost Train adventures in low tones, like it was a secret between us that our fellow townsfolk were such suckers, so yellow, not the heroes they pretended to be. Oh, how those passengers in his stories squealed and swore and buried their heads in each other’s shirtfronts when he appeared from the dark in luminous bones. Sometimes, they sprang out of their train carriages and stampeded for cracks of daylight. If one did it, they all did it, Mr Lamont said. No one lingered. Once the first chicken made a break for reality, the carriage........

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