Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

But there are times when my uncle’s face rises before me. After all, we were the same blood; our sympathies had much in common; under any given circumstances, our thoughts and feelings must have been largely the same. I seem to see him in that final death march along the unlighted passageway — obeying an imperative summons — going on, step by step — down the stairway to the first floor, down the cellar stairs — at last, lifting the slab.

I try not to think of the final expiation. Yet was it final? I wonder. Did the last Door of all, when it opened, find him willing to pass through? Or was Something waiting beyond that Door?

Perchance To Dream by Michael Joyce

It seemed to him that he was a commercial traveler, sitting in the corner of a third class smoker on a train bound for a small town on the East Coast. It seemed that he was making this journey not on account of business, but of some family affair. In his pocket, he knew, was a letter from his sister, the first she had written him for some years; an urgent letter begging for his help, yet so vague in its terms that he wondered whether she herself knew from what danger or misfortune she was asking him to save her. It seemed that her fears were in some way related to her husband, but she did not suggest ill-treatment; there was a reference to her little boy, but she did not say that he was ill. He had never seen his sister’s child, but, looking back into the dim past, he found an old dislike of her husband, whom he remembered as a tall, raw-boned, redheaded Scot, a chemist in a small way of business and a dabbler, he seemed to have been told, in chemical experiment.

The vagueness of the letter was tiresome to a man who, though he had no living interest in his sister and had made no effort to see her for several years, was yet too much a brother to leave her appeal unanswered; for there was no doubt that she longed for his support, whether in fact she needed it or not, and for this reason, perhaps, her ill-chosen words had given him uneasiness, her very poverty of expression leaving in the mind a dim fear, too shadowy to combat. Such feelings, however, the traveler determined to ignore, finding it more comfortable to fancy that the husband’s business was failing and that this was merely a request for money to avert impending bankruptcy — the plain meaning tortured into the likeness of an indefinable foreboding by the sense of shame that begging excites in decent people. So, his mind was at rest; he hoped that the loan — common sense would call it a gift — need not be large; but money was at least a thing he understood, and on this understanding he settled down to read a magazine for the rest of his journey.

This was not, it seemed, his first visit to the town; perhaps he had been there on business. On leaving the station he found that he knew how to reach the road his sister lived in, although he had certainly never called at the house itself. It was a desolate evening at the dead end of autumn; what few visitors the town could boast had left it long ago, and indeed it was hard to imagine what could ever have brought them there, for the front was low and undistinguished, the beach poor and dirty, the buildings cheap and tawdry; the speculators who had hoped to popularize the place had run mean streets of semi-villas out into the fields, where the roadway and the pavement petered out in heaps of rubble and clay. The whole place was stamped with squalid failure.

He found his sister’s house on the outskirts of the town, where a nagging wind set the peeling posters flapping on an abandoned hoarding and drove a flock of straws and papers along the empty street. The house was badly built and out of repair like all the rest. For some time there was no answer to his knock, and when at length the door was opened it was slowly, as with suspicion. It seemed that for the moment he did not recognize his sister, so changed was she from the plump easy woman whom he had pictured as the writer of that letter. Now he could better understand his uneasiness at her appeal, for she was pale and thin, disordered in her dress and harassed in expression. She had acquired little nervous movements which seemed new to him and which distressed him. He had expected her to greet him with some warmth of gratitude for his prompt response to her letter, and was surprised to find her manner cold and constrained.