I reached over and tousled his hair.
“I can understand that,” I said. “It is a very big old house.” He nodded. We were in the kitchen, where it was light and warm. I put down my magazine on the kitchen table. “What kind of story would you like me to tell you?”
“Well,” he said, thoughtfully. “I don’t think it should be too scary, because then when I go up to bed, I will just be thinking about monsters the whole time. But if it isn’t just a little bit scary then I won’t be interested. And you make up scary stories, don’t you? I know she says that’s what you do.”
“She exaggerates. I write stories, yes. Nothing that’s been published, yet, though. And I write lots of different kinds of stories.”
“But you do write scary stories?”
“Yes.”
The boy looked up at me from the shadows by the door, where he was waiting. “Do you know any stories about Click-Clack the Rattlebag?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Those are the best sorts of stories.”
“Do they tell them at your school?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“What’s a Click-Clack the Rattlebag story?”
He was a precocious child, and was unimpressed by his sister’s boyfriend’s ignorance. You could see it on his face. “Everybody knows them.”
“I don’t,” I said, trying not to smile.
He looked at me as if he was trying to decide whether or not I was pulling his leg. He said, “I think maybe you should take me up to my bedroom, and then you can tell me a story before I go to sleep, but a very not-scary story because I’ll be up in my bedroom then, and it’s actually a bit dark up there, too.”
How do paragraphs 4-18 develop the problem of the story?