We began before night fell, but usually at sunset, anticipating the darkness with an unnatural pleasure. The oldest cousins told the scariest stories, and so we quietly let them begin, with a strange sort of glee that one has when it is known that there is a benign danger ahead. The stories were of people we knew, sometimes even farmers and relatives we had met with just that day. There was the story about the child who had been left out on the haunted swing alone, only to become deformed by a jinn. And then the story of missing jewels, where a witch, paid-off surely, held a séance to recover them.
