Uncanny Stories

A terrified bird flew out of the hedge ... Then, suddenly the room began to come apart ... ... each held there by the other’s fear ... moving slowly, like figures in some monstr...

Its aspect was familiar and yet unfamiliar, and slightly repugnant to her. The altar, the crucifix, the lighted candles, suggested some tremendous and awful experience the detai...

That—her wanting to sit with him in the library—was what they had the awful quarrel about, the day before she died: that and the paper-weight, the precious paper-weight that he...

But though it was dreadful to “work” her gift that way, to make him do things, there was another way in which she did work it, lawfully, sacredly, incorruptibly—the way it first...

“You know what I mean,” he said. “The Thing that keeps me awake. Of course if I’d slept last night I’d have known it wasn’t there. But when I didn’t sleep—”

For Milly kept her at it. Milly urged her on. Milly, in Milly’s own words, sustained her. She praised her; she praised the Secret, praised the Power. She said you could see how...

She put away at once the fatigue that pressed on her (the gift still “worked” in a flash for the effacing of bodily sensation). She told herself that, after all, her fear had do...

Milly went on. “And now he won’t come out of the house. He says he’s being hunted. He’s afraid of being seen, being found. He’s in there—in that room. He made me lock him in.”

Yes, there’d been a divorce. Silver had behaved very decently. He’d let her bring it against _him_, to save her. But there were some queer stories going about. They didn’t get r...

As he went back up the hill he meditated on his position. He was right to make it clear to her, now that she had begun to care for him. He would have told her long ago if he had...

He swung round sharply. There was nobody there. But the door, which had been shut a minute ago, stood wide open. A cold wind blew in, cutting through the hot, stagnant air. He g...

It was not enough to dispose of Mr. Greathead’s dead body; he had to behave as though Mr. Greathead were alive. Mr. Greathead had disappeared and he had to account for his disap...

“And there’s another grand mistake, my lad—your thinking that I’m haunting you out of revenge, that I’m trying to frighten you.... My dear Steven, if I’d wanted to frighten you...

“Pardon me, I have not. I was once Hegel’s devoted disciple. An entrancing fantasy, the Triple Dialectic. But I came to see that yours, sir, was the safer and the saner system,...