PAYMENT OPTIONS

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 Charles Dickens—Volume 2

enlarge Click on image to enlarge
enlarge Mouse over the image to zoom in
The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Charles Dickens—Volume 2
Leonaur Original
Qty:     - OR -   Add to Wish List

Author(s): Charles Dickens
Date Published: 2009/09
Page Count: 388
Softcover ISBN-13: 978-1-84677-847-6
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-84677-848-3

A second helping of fiction with the chilling touch of fear from Charles Dickens

The works of Charles Dickens are justifiably famous and timeless classics. His most famous ghostly tale, ‘A Christmas Carol’ has become THE Christmas ghost story and has been filmed and dramatised for the stage and radio on numerous occasions. It is also well known that Dickens had a particular palate for the fiction of the strange, other worldly and bizarre, indeed there have been collections of his strange and weird tales published in the past. This special Leonaur collection is different containing, perhaps, an unprecedented 35 novellas, novelettes and short stories within two coordinating volumes available in soft cover and hard cover with dust jackets. 
This second volume of Dickens fiction of the bizarre and ghostly contains two novellas, ‘The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain’ and ‘The Cricket on the Hearth,’ two novelettes, ‘The Haunted House’ and the highly regarded, ‘The Chimes’ and ten shorter pieces including ‘The Ghost of the Brides Chamber.’ ‘The Ghosts of the Mail.’ ‘To be read at dusk.’ ‘The Queer Client.’ ‘Trial for Murder’ and more equally gripping tales that contribute to what is, perhaps, one of the most comprehensive collections of Dickens’ strange fiction ever published.

The Phantom, which had held its bloodless hand above him while it spoke, as if in some unholy invocation, or some ban; and which had gradually advanced its eyes so close to his, that he could see how they did not participate in the terrible smile upon its face, but were a fixed, unalterable, steady horror melted before him and was gone.
As he stood rooted to the spot, possessed by fear and wonder, and imagining he heard repeated in melancholy echoes, dying away fainter and fainter, the words, “Destroy its like in all whom you approach!” a shrill cry reached his ears. It came, not from the passages beyond the door, but from another part of the old building, and sounded like the cry of someone in the dark who had lost the way.<br>
He looked confusedly upon his hands and limbs, as if to be assured of his identity, and then shouted in reply, loudly and wildly; for there was a strangeness and terror upon him, as if he too were lost.<br>
The cry responding, and being nearer, he caught up the lamp, and raised a heavy curtain in the wall, by which he was accustomed to pass into and out of the theatre where he lectured,—which adjoined his room. Associated with youth and animation, and a high amphitheatre of faces which his entrance charmed to interest in a moment, it was a ghostly place when all this life was faded out of it, and stared upon him like an emblem of Death.<br>
“Halloa!” he cried. “Halloa! This way! Come to the light!” When, as he held the curtain with one hand, and with the other raised the lamp and tried to pierce the gloom that filled the place, something rushed past him into the room like a wild-cat, and crouched down in a corner.<br>
“What is it?” he said, hastily.<br>
He might have asked “What is it?” even had he seen it well, as presently he did when he stood looking at it gathered up in its corner.<br>
A bundle of tatters, held together by a hand, in size and form almost an infant’s, but in its greedy, desperate little clutch, a bad old man’s. A face rounded and smoothed by some half-dozen years, but pinched and twisted by the experiences of a life. Bright eyes, but not youthful. Naked feet, beautiful in their childish delicacy,—ugly in the blood and dirt that cracked upon them. A baby savage, a young monster, a child who had never been a child, a creature who might live to take the outward form of man, but who, within, would live and perish a mere beast.
Used, already, to be worried and hunted like a beast, the boy crouched down as he was looked at, and looked back again, and interposed his arm to ward off the expected blow.<br>
“I’ll bite,” he said, “if you hit me!”<br>
The time had been, and not many minutes since, when such a sight as this would have wrung the Chemist’s heart. He looked upon it now, coldly; but with a heavy effort to remember something—he did not know what—he asked the boy what he did there, and whence he came.<br>
“Where’s the woman?” he replied. “I want to find the woman.”<br>
“Who?”<br>
“The woman. Her that brought me here, and set me by the large fire. She was so long gone, that I went to look for her, and lost myself. I don’t want you. I want the woman.”<br>
He made a spring, so suddenly, to get away, that the dull sound of his naked feet upon the floor was near the curtain, when Redlaw caught him by his rags.<br>
“Come! you let me go!” muttered the boy, struggling, and clenching his teeth. “I’ve done nothing to you. Let me go, will you, to the woman!”<br>
“That is not the way. There is a nearer one,” said Redlaw, detaining him, in the same blank effort to remember some association that ought, of right, to bear upon this monstrous object. “What is your name?”<br>
“Got none.”<br>
“Where do you live?”<br>
“Live! What’s that?”<br>
The boy shook his hair from his eyes to look at him for a moment, and then, twisting round his legs and wrestling with him, broke again into his repetition of “You let me go, will you? I want to find the woman.”<br>
The Chemist led him to the door. “This way,” he said, looking at him still confusedly, but with repugnance and avoidance, growing out of his coldness. “I’ll take you to her.”<br>
You may also like