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Private Notes
The story begins with the narrator, who’s standing by a fire in an unknown room, confidently announcing to a couple of rather creepy elderly people that he’s never seen a ghost and is not easily frightened. These creepy people – a man with a withered arm and an older woman – warn the narrator ominously that he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing (we don't know the details yet) by his own choosing. The sense of foreboding increases when another even more ghoulish old man suddenly appears. This "man with the shade" (7) enters the room and coughs up a storm. In the midst of a tense silence, the narrator asks to be shown to the haunted room. The man with the withered arm tells him to take the candle outside the door. If the narrator wants to go to "the red room" on "this night of all nights" (16, 23), says the old man, he has to go alone. The narrator doesn't seem to be phased by these warnings, gets directions from the man with the withered arm, goes out the door, picks up the candle, and leaves the others behind. After a walk up a spiral staircase, through a long, moonlit passageway, and up a small flight of stairs he finds himself at the door of the red room. We learn from the narrator, who now feels slightly nervous, that he is in Lorraine Castle. It’s been abandoned for eighteen months, since "her ladyship" left it behind. (We learn that the old people are the custodians, or caretakers, of the castle.) Apparently there have been many little incidents in this haunted, red room, dating back to the "tragic end" (31) of a joke played by a husband on his young wife there long ago. Most recently, a young duke died while trying to spend a night in the haunted room. This news doesn't bode well for our narrator, who is trying to do just what the duke did. There is a sense of the narrator's bravado fading The narrator enters the red room, which is large, dark, full of black and red furnishings and creepy shadows. He walks round of the room with his ca
Tells of how the legendary Arachne finds herself in the clutches of a spider-obsessed collector and of the deal she makes with the collector's wife Lydia.
Feisty Edwardian bride Sylvia has triumphed against the odds in her society marriage, but gradually becomes aware of a strange and threatening presence in the woods...
Mr. Williams, the curator of a university art museum (implied to be Oxford) purchases a mezzotint from an art dealer. The painting changes each time Mr. Williams and the colleagues he enlists look at it. In the end it is suggested that the painting depicts a poacher named Gawdy (who had been hanged) kidnapping the heir of a Mr. Arthur Francis, who hanged Gawdy for poaching on his land.
Evans and Hooker happened to overhear the general location of a jungle treasure. While the two saw this as an opportunity those who buried the treasure knew something the treasure hunters did not.
'... and then something happened. Something we couldn't see, but felt - something that made us afraid with a sweating fear. Some- body - something - came into the room...'
'Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged pole ferret, but it was his most treasured possession. Its very presence in the tool shed was a secret and fearful joy ...'
Two men are discussing the folklore of the private schools they attended. One tells of a Latin teacher named Mr. Sampson who kept a Byzantine coin that he would show his students. The narrator's friend gives the teacher a strange message in Latin which translates to "remember the well among the four", though he doesn't know why he wrote it. Later another paper shows up translating to "If you don't come to me, I'll come to you" and it visibly worries Sampson. Later at night the narrator's friend sees a man sitting on Sampson's window-sill, but when he returns with the narrator he's gone. Sampson is missing the next day. Years later a body is found - with Sampson's coin - in a well that sits between four trees.
For years now, Mr Adamson 's hatred had been with him, not only when he ran, but all day, and often at night, too. Sometimes in his dreams it seemed to him that his running companion, his hatred, stood just behind him, or at his very elbow.
In hunting to death a small tabby cat, Octavian had done a thing of which he scarcely approved himself. But Octavian kept chickens -at least he kept some of them; others vanished, leaving only a few bloodstained feathers to mark their going.
She dropped a stone down the well, and said ' Fancy being where that is now, clutching at the slimy sides, with water filling your mouth, looking up to the little patch of sky above.
The bacteriologist took up a sealed tube. 'Here is the living thing - bottled cholera. It is a deadly thing to have in your possession.'
"A flat head rose up, and small, watery-blue eyes glittered with malevolent intent, while jaws opened to their fullest extent, and Mr Faversham was permitted to view a pink-lined cavern that was equipped with two yellow, pointed fangs..."
The boy laughed, a laugh in which the snarl had nearly driven out the chuckle, and then plunged out of view into a yielding tangle of weed and fern. 'What an extraordinary wild animal' thought Van Cheele.
There was about it so horrible an air of menace that, moaning with fear, he rushed from the room.
They found him lying dead in a mangrove swamp with one of these orchids crushed up under his body. Maybe that plant cost him his life to obtain.
'What do the folk around here say about me?' asked Stoner. 'They be bitter agen you, mortal bitter. Aye, 'tis a sad business, a sad business.'
'My father used to declare that the last time he slept here, the ghost of Jerry Bundler lowered itself from the top of his bed and tried to strangle him.'
