Nightmares & Geezenstacks Read Online Free PDF

program into his pocket and returned to the hallway, along which he walked in search of the stairs.
    Behind one closed door which he passed he heard someone, obviously an amateur, picking out tunes on what sounded like a Hawaiian guitar. He knocked upon this door but a scurrying of footsteps and silence was the only answer. When he opened the door and peered within he saw only a decaying corpse hanging from the chandelier, and an odor hurled itself upon him, so nauseating that he closed the door hastily, and walked on to the stairway.
    The stairway was narrow and winding. There was no banister, and he clung close to the wall as he ascended. He saw that the first seven steps from the bottom had been scrubbed clean but in the dust above the seventh step he saw again the two winding trails. Upon the third step from the top they converged, and vanished.
    He entered the first door to his right and found himself in a spacious bedroom, lavishly furnished. He crossed immediately to the carven poster bed and pulled aside the curtains. The bed was neatly made, and he saw a slip of paper pinned to the smoothed pillow. Upon it was written hastily in a woman’s handwriting, Denver, 1909 . Upon the reverse side, neatly written in ink in another handwriting, was an algebraic equation.
    He left this room quietly and stopped short just outside the door to listen to a sound that came from behind a black doorway across the hall.
    It was the deep voice of a man chanting in a strange and unfamiliar tongue. It rose and fell in a monotonous cadence like a Buddhist hymn, yet over and over recurred the word Ragnarok . The word seemed vaguely familiar, and the voice sounded like his own voice, but muffled by many things.
    With bowed head he stood until the voice died away into a blue trembling silence and twilight crept into the hallway with the stealth of a practiced thief.
    Then as though awakening, he walked along the now-silent hallway until he came to the third and last door and he saw that they had printed his name upon the upper panel in tiny letters of gold. Perhaps radium had been mixed with the gold for the letters glowed in the hallway’s dimness.
    He stood for a long moment with his hand upon the knob, and then at last he entered and closed the door behind him. He heard the click of the latch and knew that it would never open again, yet he felt no fear.
    The darkness was a black tangible thing that sprang back from him when he struck a match. He saw then that the room was a counterpart of the east bedroom of his father’s house near Wilmington, the room in which he had been born. He knew, now, just where to look for candles. There were two in the drawer, and the stump of a third, and he knew that, burned one at a time, they would last for almost ten hours. He lighted the first and stood it in the brass bracket on the wall, from whence it cast dancing shadows from each chair, from the bed, and from the small waiting cradle that stood beside the bed.
    Upon the table beside his mother’s sewing basket lay the March 1887 issue of Harper’s , and he took up the magazine and glanced idly through its pages.
    At length he dropped it to the floor and thought tenderly of his wife who had died many years ago, and a faint smile trembled upon his lips as he remembered a dozen little incidents of the years of days and nights they had spent together. He thought, too, of many other things.
    It was not until the ninth hour when but half an inch of candle remained and darkness began to gather in the farther corners of the room and to creep closer, that he screamed, and beat and clawed at the door until his hands were a raw and bloody pulp.

SECOND CHANCE
    Jay and I were in the stands at New Comiskey Field in Chicago to watch the replay of the October 9, 1959, game of the World Series, and play was about to start.
    In the original game just exactly five hundred years ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers had won, nine to three, which had ended the series in six