This room of mine, where for three weeks now I had been so prosperouslyat work, was growing a haunted and a terrible place to me. Never oncehad I seen in it anything outside the ordinary, nor heard any sound thatbetokened another presence except my own and that of the flapping flameson the hearth, and I told myself that it was I, or, more exactly, myfanciful sense of the unseen and the unheard that was troubling me andcausing this ghostly invasion. Yet the room itself had a share in ittoo, for downstairs, or out in the windy April day, or even just outsidethe door of the room, I was wholly free of this increasing obsession.Something had happened here which had left its mark not on materialthings, and which was imperceptible to the organs of sight and hearing,the effect of which was trickling not merely into my brain but filteringthrough it into the very source of life. Yet the explanation that aphantom was arising out of the past would not wholly fit, for whateverthis haunting was, it was getting nearer, and though its lineaments werenot yet visible, they were forming with greater distinctness below theveil that hid them. It was establishing touch with me, as if it was somedenizen of a remote world that reached across time and space, and wasalready laying its fingers on me, and it took advantage of smallphysical happenings in that room to encompass me with its influence. Forinstance, when one evening I was brushing my hair before dinner, a whitefeatureless face peered over my shoulder, and then, with an arrestedshudder, I saw that this was only the reflection of the ovallooking-glass on the ceiling. Or, as I lay in bed, before putting out mylight, a puff of wind came in through the open sash, making the stripedcurtain to belly, and before I could realize the physical cause of it,there was a man in striped pyjamas bending over the bed by the window.Or a wheeze of escaping gas came from the coals on the hearth, and to myears it sounded like a strangled gasp of someone in the room. Somethingwas at work, using the trivial sounds and sights for its own ends,kneading away in my brain to make it ready and receptive for therevelation it was preparing for it. It worked very cleverly, for themorning after the curtain had shaped itself into the pyjamaed figurebending over the other bed, Hopkins, when he called me, apologized forhis attire. He had overslept himself, and in order not to delay further,had come down in a coat over his striped pyjamas. Another night thebreeze lifted the cretonne covering that lay over the bed by the window,inflating it into the shape of a body there. It stirred and turnedbefore it was deflated again, and it was just then that the coal on thehearth gasped and choked.
Some of my 150+ short stories have appeared in France, but hardly any have come out in the US, although when odd stories surface I get some wonderful responses from writers I greatly admire, like Harlan Ellison, who sent me a signed edition of his own collected stories.
The Collected Ghost Stories Of E F Benson Free Download
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