Every library has a room the public does not get into. Ours is where the short stories are kept. When you order a candle, a reading from the closed stacks comes with it: one story, chosen for that candle, set by us as a small book you can read on your phone or print out, and yours to keep. Ghost stories, mostly, from the years when the ghost story was at its best, and we picked each one because it belongs to the hour its candle is named for.
Midnight Study: The Mezzotint, by M. R. James
Start with this one. A collector buys an old engraving of a country house by moonlight, nothing much, a lawn and a row of windows and a front door. He puts it down. When he picks it up again, there is a figure on the lawn that was not there before. That is the whole story, and it is one of the best ghost stories ever written, because James never once raises his voice. The picture only changes when nobody is looking at it. The people in the story work out what is happening a little after you do, and that gap is where the dread lives. About twenty minutes. Read it at the desk with the lamp on, and then decide whether you are going to look at the wall behind you.
The Lamplit Shelf: The Tractate Middoth, by M. R. James
A young library assistant is sent to fetch one book from the stacks and is found in a faint beside the shelf. Somebody was already standing there in the dark, and had got to the book first. That is the first few pages. After that it is a hunt: a dead man's will hidden inside a Hebrew book, a niece who needs it, a nephew who wants it more, and something in the stacks that has been keeping an eye on that book for a very long time. This is James at his most enjoyable, sly and quick, with a chase through a library at the heart of it, and, unusually for him, it ends well for the right people. About half an hour. If you have ever stopped at the same shelf every time you walk past, this is your story.
The Reading Chair: The Room in the Tower, by E. F. Benson
Some people have the same dream for years. The man telling this one has had it since he was sixteen: a house he has never been to, a dinner table of strangers, and a woman at the head of it who looks at him and says, Jack will show you your room. I have given you the room in the tower. Every time, those words are where the dread begins. Then one summer a friend invites him down to the country, and he walks into the house. This is Benson's most famous ghost story, and it is the best kind of frightening, the kind that starts as a puzzle you cannot put down. About twenty minutes, and the last line lands exactly where it should. Sit down in the chair for this one. You will not get up until it is done.
The Fireside Chapter: The Signal-Man, by Charles Dickens
Dickens wrote this for Christmas, to be read aloud by a fire, and it is the best ghost story he ever wrote. A traveller climbs down into a deep railway cutting to pass an hour with the signal-man who keeps the box there, alone, beside the mouth of a tunnel. The man is steady, careful, good at his job, and frightened half to death. Something has been appearing at the red light by the tunnel with its sleeve across its face, and every time it has come, something terrible has followed on the line. Dickens had walked away from a train wreck not long before he wrote it, and you can feel that in every line. About twenty minutes. Shut the door, put the candle between you and the dark side of the room, and read it straight through.
The Herbarium: The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, by H. G. Wells
Wells wrote this the year before The Time Machine made him famous, and you can watch him finding out what he is good at: take an ordinary man and a small warm room, and let one impossible thing in. Wedderburn is a quiet bachelor with a hothouse and nothing much to say for himself. At a sale he buys a shrivelled brown root that came back from the Andaman Islands beside the body of the man who collected it. He takes it home, pots it up, and waits. One afternoon, while his cousin is out, it flowers. About a quarter of an hour, which is roughly how long the flower takes. Read it in the afternoon with the window open, and then go and check on your plants.
The Morning Reading Room: A White Heron, by Sarah Orne Jewett
The only one of the six that ends in daylight, which is why it belongs to the morning candle. Sylvia is nine and lives with her grandmother at the edge of the New England woods, where she knows every bird by its call. One evening a young man with a gun walks out of the trees. He is kind and good-looking, he collects birds, and he will give ten dollars, a fortune, to anyone who can show him where the white heron nests. Sylvia knows. Before dawn she climbs the tallest pine for miles to be sure. What she does when she comes down is the whole story, and people have been arguing about it for a hundred and forty years. About twenty minutes. Read it with the first coffee, before anyone has asked you for anything.
How you get yours
The link is in your order email, one for each candle you bought. If you leave your address at the desk, the form at the bottom of any page, we hand you the first one, The Mezzotint, straight away. More stories will join the stacks as the seasons turn.
