2003-02-21 - 2:48 p.m.

I have the spookiest room in our new house. It's in the attic space usually reserved for the kind of screaming, feral offspring that have to have their meals pushed through a specially reinforced flap in the door. The rickety old furniture goes some way to maintaining an atmosphere that treads the back corners of bohemian Parisian garret / 19th century lunatic asylum chic. The oddest accessory that the previous occupants saw fit to leave is a child's desk and chair, which occupies the far corner and although quite modern, is still very eerie. Ghostly children are only eclipsed by actual living ones in the amount of inherent terror they seem capable of instilling in me. I envisage many a night waking up screaming as I'm confronted by some spectral infant sitting at the desk, sitting through a lesson it didn't live to conclude, perhaps recounting a sing-song version of its multiplication tables, or at least it would be had its tongue not been wrenched out, leaving it with a gaping bloody hole from which it emits its haunting wails. Then again, I could just stop eating cheese.