A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Where does the story take place?
A tenant sees the former owner of his rented house in a room with no exit.
A man hears a familiar tapping in a room where no one else can be.
A physician arrives after a sudden death and finds the family's account impossible to reconcile with the room.
A physician tests a friend’s fear of an inherited watch and sees how serious it is.
At a solemn funeral, the widow looks once more through the coffin glass and screams.
Staley Fleming sees a dog beside his bed every night, but it vanishes when he sits up.
Neighbors keeping vigil beside a dead woman in her mountain cabin witness something they cannot explain.
Two men agree to fight with knives in a house said to be haunted.
A mother is murdered, a father vanishes, and three accounts tell different parts of what happened.
A Union soldier returns to the Tennessee home he left after a bitter family split.
Two eager parents try to trap a schoolteacher into marrying their daughter, but their sacred evidence is less reliable than they think.
A frightened schoolboy’s failed Greek exam becomes a family crisis about poverty, ambition, and punishment.
A drunken father asks his patient son for money, then confesses every lie without finding the strength to stop repeating them.
A practical railway guard hires a matchmaker and explains, in exact detail, the wife required for his future happiness.
An unknown name on a civil councillor’s visitor list turns a small puzzle into a consuming spiritualist obsession.
A conscientious husband hires a midwife by night, but his rigid sense of fairness turns every ordinary exchange into an ordeal.
A bored husband reads his wife’s rambling letter and lectures her ignorance, exposing a contradiction in what he expects from women.
A polite writer grants an aspiring dramatist half an hour to read her work and discovers that she has brought five acts.
A family council debates whether to shield a privileged young forger, while the accused listens and decides what kind of man he is.
A harmless sound in a wedding kitchen convinces a schoolmaster that scandal is about to ruin him.
A writer tends a wounded widower beside his wife’s coffin and listens as he tries to explain a despair he cannot explain to himself.
A respectable official finds a bundled baby on his doorstep and assumes his secret affair has finally caught up with him.
A bored lover gains a child’s confidence, then turns the boy’s secret meetings with his father into ammunition for an adult quarrel.
Fresh from Crimea, a young wife condemns her companion’s holiday flirtation while describing her own trip in increasingly revealing detail.
