Algernon Blackwood

“ Few might find the chance that you now have, but if you only spent your love freely, without definite object, just letting it flow openly for all who need, you would reach hundreds and thousands of souls like me, and release us! ”

“ I was afraid of a stroke.
“ ‘I know nothing about Carey, or who he is,’ continued the man quietly, ‘and the name my body had I have forgotten, thank God; but I am the man who was frightened to death in this house ten years ago, and I have been frightened ever since, and am frightened still; for the succession of cruel and curious people who come to this house to see the ghost, and thus keep alive its atmosphere of terror, only helps to render my condition worse. ”

“ You needn’t laugh! That’s how I felt. Small things, you know, touch the mind with great earnestness when terror is there—real terror. But I might have been at a middle-class tea-party, for all the ideas I had: they were so ordinary!
“ ‘But I thought you were the caretaker I tipped this afternoon to let me sleep here!’ I gasped. ‘Did—did Carey send you to meet me?’
“ ‘No,’ he replied in a voice that touched my boots somehow. ‘I am the man who was frightened to death. ”

“ It was not the old fool, Carey, I had interviewed earlier in the day and made my plans with. My heart gave a horrid jump.
“ ‘Now who are you, pray?’ I said. ‘You’re not Carey, the man I arranged with this afternoon. Who are you?’
“I felt uncomfortable, as you may imagine. I was a ‘psychical researcher,’ and a young woman of new tendencies, and proud of my liberty, but I did not care to find myself in an empty house with a stranger. Something of my confidence left me. Confidence with women, you know, is all humbug after a certain point. Or perhaps you don’t know, for most of you are men. ”

“ We went in, he shuffling after me through the unlighted hall up to the first floor where the murder had taken place, and I prepared myself to hear his inevitable account before turning him out with the half-crown his persistence had earned. After lighting the gas I sat down in the arm-chair he had provided—a faded, brown plush arm-chair—and turned for the first time to face him and get through with the performance as quickly as possible. And it was in that instant I got my first shock. The man was not the caretaker. ”

“ Unessentials leaped up and puzzled me, and I thought of what the papers might say if it came out, and what my ‘smart’ brother-in-law would think, and whether it would be told that I had cigarettes in my pocket, and was a free-thinker.
“ ‘The man who was frightened to death!’ I repeated aghast. ”

“ And, what’s more, I’ll tell it briefly, without trimmings—I mean without unessentials. That’s a thing story-tellers never do, you know,” she laughed. “They drag in all the unessentials and leave their listeners to disentangle ”