The Spider

Perhaps the strangest and most disturbing of all the stories written by Hanns Heinz Ewers, the famed German author, dandy and occultist."When the student of medicine, Richard Bracquemont, decided to move into room #7 of the small Hotel Stevens, Rue Alfred Stevens (Paris 6), three persons had already hanged themselves from the cross-bar of the window in that room on three successive Fridays." A series of inexplicable suicides in the same hotel room, on a Friday afternoon, between the hours of five and six, brings a young medical student, Richard Bracquemont, to the Hotel Stevens, determined, so he says, to solve the mystery, and claiming particular knowledge that will enable him to do so.The woman across the way from Bracquemont, in an apartment on the other side of the street, is equally dubious. And with her movements that mimic that of a spider she entrances Bracquemont, leading him into a game of eerie mimicry where the reader cannot be sure whether she is, like Bracquemont, a hapless player in a bigger, more sinister chain of events that are in actual fact directly linked to Room No. 7.Which all brings us to the window and the seemingly supernatural power it holds over the inhabitants of Room No. 7. The notion of "seeing into the other side" comes into full play; is what the occupants seeing the truth as a matter of reality, and is that what drives them to all commit the same act? Or does the window make them see something out of the ordinary?

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