(Art is “Zbrush Doodle: Day 1750 - Festive Pumpkin” by UnexpectedToy.)

For today, here is the atmospheric opening of the short story “Haunted!” by Jack Edwards, originally published in The Weekly Tale Teller #83 (December 3, 1910), as found in Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories edited by Mike Ashley (2018):  

When Roydon came down the stairs he saw it waiting for him, and as usual it vanished as he approached. He went into his bedroom, which, with the rest of the rooms of the flat, was on the floor below the studio. The chintz-covered chair complained in all its wicker frame at the heavy descent of his body. A large blue-bottle from the lime-trees below the half-opened window buzzed in the silk of the casement blinds, and the hot sunlight lay in bars on the floor. The roar of the motor traffic on the north side of the square, modulated by the distance, bore with it the faint jangle of a piano organ like a treble melody half drowned by a tuneless base, but he did not hear the noise of the street any more than he noted the golden noon or the buzzing of the fly or the creaking protest of the chair.  

His hands were limp, and his legs stuck out stiffly before him. His chin was sunk on his breast, and his eyes goggled beneath his frowning brows. It was the face of a man who had begun to be afraid.

He sat thus, looking neither to the past not to the future, but permitting only the horror of the present to absorb him.

To-day it had seemed more tangible. He had faintly discerned a face; the blurred outline of a form; a suggestion of limbs.

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