One Dark Night: 13 Masterpieces of the Macabre

An artist can't shake the eerie, cold embrace from the ghost of his jilted love. An enormous rat with baleful, glaring eyes, possesses the spirit of a notorious hanging judge. A hauntingly beautiful woman appears to a student in his dreams--and then in flesh and blood. . . . From old-fashioned ghost stories by H. G. Wells and Guy de Maupassant to chilling tales that defy description by literary masters Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Washington Irving, One Dark Night is an extraordinary collection full of gothic mood and ghastly haunts. Rich in atmosphere and creepy detail, these terrifying tales illuminate the darkest corners of the mind and make real our most innate fears. One Dark Night will sate even the most intrepid reader's hunger for the macabre. Beware of reading them past midnight!

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n't shake the eerie, cold embrace from the ghost of his jilted love. An enormous rat with baleful, glaring eyes, possesses the spirit of a notorious hanging judge. A hauntingly beautiful woman appears to a student in his dreams--and then in flesh and blood. . . . From old-fashioned ghost stories by H. G. Wells and Guy de Maupassant to chilling tales that defy description by literary masters Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Washington Irving, One Dark Night is an extraordinary collection full of gothic mood and ghastly haunts. Rich in atmosphere and creepy detail, these terrifying tales illuminate the darkest corners of the mind and make real our most innate fears. One Dark Night will sate even the most intrepid reader's hunger for the macabre. Beware of reading them past midnight!

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Lennox Robinson(1886-1948)Long associated with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Lennox Robinson was bestknown as one of Ireland's finest playwrights. He also wrote novels,biographies, dramatic criticisms, and tales of the supernatural. "TheFace" is an experiment that explores what the mind can conjure, develop,make real. The reader and young Jerry Sullivan alike are pulled into thisplace where the mysterious becomes tangible. This is my favorite story inOne Dark Night.Never in the daytime or in bright sunlight could you see it, but sometimesjust before sunset when some sinking ray of the sun was reflected from therock to the lake's dark surface, and always in moonlight and on clearstarry nights then, lying flat on the top of the cliff and peering overyou could see the face quite clearly.It lay in the deep pool at the foot of the cliff, a few yards from theshore and apparently a foot or two deep in the water. First it appeared asa piece of white rock with a film of lakeweed floating across it, thengradually your vision cleared and you saw the pale features distinctly,the closed eyes and the long dark lashes, the curved eyebrows, the gentlemouth and the fair hair which half hid the white neck and which sometimesdrifted like a veil across the face; below the neck the pool lay in deepershadow, and no one had ever been able to tell the shape of the beautifulcreature that lay there.It was a precipitous climb down the face of the cliff and no one but JerrySullivan had ventured it, but as he touched with his fingers the water ofthe pool the face shivered away, and stretching his arm deep into thewater it met nothing except a tendril of lake-weed. Only once had heclimbed down because he was afraid that if he probed too deeply the facewould disappear forever--for it was days after he touched the water beforehe saw it again; for the future he was content to gaze at it from above.He had known it all his life. He could not have been more than six yearsold when his father had led him to the cliff's edge and shown him thesleeping face in the water. He had never been afraid of it as were some ofthe other boys, on the contrary when he was sent to drive the sheep fromone hill to another he would contrive to pass the lake either coming orgoing, he would loiter there until the sun sank and risk a scolding whenhe got home; but hardly a week passed without his seeing the face.Up among those lonely mountains he saw few women. There was only hismother, old now and grey, and a mile or two to the west the MacCarthy'scottage with the two girls Peg and Ellen, coarsely featured both withthick black hair, and the few other women he saw from time to time wereeither coarsely dark or foxy red. Was it any wonder that he turned fromthem to the fair face floating in the water? any wonder that as he grewolder he judged every woman's face by that hard standard and found themall wanting.His father died when he was eighteen years old and Jerry lived on with hismother, tilling the little bit of land, cutting turf on the side of themountain, driving the sheep. It was a lonely, silent life--for he was anonly child--and his mother often urged him to take a wife, but he made theexcuse that while she was there he wanted no other woman in the house, andthough she remonstrated with him she was well content to remain solemistress of the cottage to the day of her death. He never told her ofthose hours he spent by the lake; hidden in a fold of the hills no one sawhim go there, the neighbors shunned the place as haunted, and as the yearscrept by the face grew to be more and more particularly his own.Fifteen years after his father's death his mother died, and when thefuneral was over he climbed the mountain and stared for a long time intothe water. It was a stormy winter evening and as the sun went down a paleyoung moon appeared. Never had the face been so clear, never had it lookedmore lovely. He had felt very lonely when the earth was thrown on hismother's coffin, now he felt quietly content. He had nothing left in theworld to love except this face. It had no rival now, he could pour out allthe love of his heart in adoration of it.And so for three years it went on like this: more and more he shunned theneighbors, more and more time he spent by the lake. He began to neglect the farm, for what pleasure was there in working only for himself? And to the overtures of the match-makers he was either morosely silent or roughly violent. He spent now whole nights on the cliff; sometimes he thought he saw a stirring of the eyelids and the fancy grew in him that after sufficient concentration of devotion on his part the eyes would open; already the cheeks seemed less pale, the mouth had parted slightly, he thought he saw a gleam of white teeth.He grew worn with watching. The woman in the water seemed to draw hervitality from him, and as her cheeks grew fuller his own grew thin, and asher face flushed his paled until one evening gazing down at those closedeyes he saw the lids stir and stir again and at last very slowly theyopened. The eyes behind them were dazzlingly blue and they met his greyones with a long comprehending look. Everything he had ever hoped to seein a woman's eyes was there, and half in terror, half in joy, he gave acry and drew back from the cliff; when he looked again a second later theface had vanished.

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