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Forthcoming titles

(Book titles are subject to change)

A Royal Engineer in the Low Countries

A Cavalry Surgeon at Waterloo

With the Third Guards during the Peninsular War

The First and Last Campaigns of the Great War

Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Vincent O'Sullivan

Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Algernon Blackwood

Narratives of the Anglo-Zulu War

and many others

The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Wilkie Collins: Volume 1

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The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Wilkie Collins: Volume 1
Leonaur Original
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Author(s): Wilkie Collins
Date Published: 2009/07
Page Count: 584
Softcover ISBN-13: 978-1-84677-821-6
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-84677-822-3

The first volume of this comprehensive collection

Wilkie Collins, author of ‘The Moonstone’ and ‘The Woman in White’ needs no introduction. He was considered the father of the detective story and his tales of mystery are well known and highly regarded. Collins also had a taste for the supernatural, the gothic and tales of terror, peculiarity and unease. All suited his style very well. This three volume Leonaur collection, available in softcover and hard cover with dustjacket, brings together what is, perhaps, an unprecedented collection of his writings in the supernatural and horror genres. This first volume contains the novel ‘The Haunted Hotel’ which combines mystery and the ghostly in the evocative setting of Venice, the novella ‘Mad Monkton’, and three novelettes and eight short stories including: ‘Memoirs of an Adopted Son’, ‘My Black Mirror’, ‘Miss Jeromette and the Clergyman’, ‘Mr Percy and the Prophet’, ‘Nine O’Clock’, ‘The Siege of the Black Cottage’, ‘The Dream Woman’, ‘The Dead Hand’, ‘The Biter Bit’, The Fatal Cradle’ and ‘The Dead Alive’.

As the welcome light diffused itself over the room, she turned from the table and looked toward the other side of the bed.<br>
In the moment when she turned, the chill of a sudden terror gripped her round the heart, as with the clasp of an icy hand.<br>
She was not alone in her room!<br>
There—in the chair at the bedside—there, suddenly revealed under the flow of light from the candle, was the figure of a woman, reclining.<br>
Her head lay back over the chair. Her face, turned up to the ceiling, had the eyes closed, as if she was wrapped in a deep sleep.<br>
The shock of the discovery held Agnes speechless and helpless. Her first conscious action, when she was in some degree mistress of herself again, was to lean over the bed, and to look closer at the woman who had so incomprehensibly stolen into her room in the dead of night. One glance was enough: she started back with a cry of amazement. The person in the chair was no other than the widow of the dead Montbarry—the woman who had warned her that they were to meet again, and that the place might be Venice!<br>
Her courage returned to her, stung into action by the natural sense of indignation which the presence of the Countess provoked.<br>
“Wake up!” she called out. “How dare you come here? How did you get in? Leave the room—or I will call for help!”<br>
She raised her voice at the last words. It produced no effect. Leaning further over the bed, she boldly took the Countess by the shoulder and shook her. Not even this effort succeeded in rousing the sleeping woman. She still lay back in the chair, possessed by a torpor like the torpor of death—insensible to sound, insensible to touch. Was she really sleeping? Or had she fainted?<br>
Agnes looked closer at her. She had not fainted . Her breathing was audible, rising and falling in deep heavy gasps. At intervals she ground her teeth savagely. Beads of perspiration stood thickly on her forehead. Her clinched hands rose and fell slowly from time to time on her lap. Was she in the agony of a dream? or was she spiritually conscious of something hidden in the room?<br>
The doubt involved in that last question was unendurable. Agnes determined to rouse the servants who kept watch in the hotel at night.<br>
The bell-handle was fixed to the wall, on the side of the bed by which the table stood.<br>
She raised herself from the crouching position which she had assumed in looking close at the Countess; and, turning toward the other side of the bed, stretched out her hand to the bell. At the same instant, she stopped and looked upward. Her hand fell helplessly at her side. She shuddered, and sank back on the pillow.<br>
What had she seen?<br>
She had seen another intruder in her room.<br>
Midway between her face and the ceiling, there hovered a human head—severed at the neck, like a head struck from the body by the guillotine.<br>
Nothing visible, nothing audible, had given her any intelligible warning of its appearance. Silently and suddenly the head had taken its place above her. No supernatural change had passed over the room, or was perceptible in it now. The dumbly-tortured figure in the chair; the broad window opposite the foot of the bed, with the black night beyond it; the candle burning on the table—these, and all other objects in the room, remained unaltered. One object more, unutterably horrid, had been added to the rest. That was the only change—no more, no less.<br>
By the yellow candlelight she saw the head distinctly, hovering in midair above her. She looked at it steadfastly, spellbound by the terror that held her.<br>
The flesh of the face was gone. The shrivelled skin was darkened in hue, like the skin of an Egyptian mummy—except at the neck. There it was of a lighter colour; there it showed spots and splashes of the hue of that brown spot on the ceiling, which the child’s fanciful terror had distorted into the likeness of a spot of blood. Thin remains of a discoloured moustache and whiskers, hanging over the upper lip, and over the hollows where the cheeks had once been, made the head just recognizable as the head of a man.<br>
Over all the features death and time had done their obliterating work. The eyelids were closed. The hair on the skull, discoloured like the hair on the face, had been burned away in places. The bluish lips, parted in a fixed grin, showed the double row of teeth. By slow degrees, the hovering head (perfectly still when she first saw it) began to descend toward Agnes as she lay beneath.
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