FICTION - NARRATION - HORROR
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certain houses, like certain persons manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need portray them. They may boast an open countenance and an ingenious smile, and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being, that they are evil willy nilly. They seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighborhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased, and perhaps with houses. The same principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof long after the actual doers have passed away that makes the goose flesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evildoer and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of a tingling nerves creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror stricken without apparent cause. There was manifestly nothing in the external appearance of this particular house to bear out the tales of the horror that was said to reign within. It was neither lonely nor unkempt. It stood crowded into a corner of the square and looked exactly like the houses on either side of it. It had the same number of windows as its neighbors, the same balcony overlooking the gardens, the same white steps leading up to the heavy black front door, and in the rear there was the same narrow strip of green, with neat box borders running up to the wall that divided it from the backs of the adjoining houses, apparently to the number of chimney pots on the roof were the same, the breath and angle of the eaves and even the height of the dirty area railings. And yet this house, in the square that seemed precisely similar to its 50 ugly neighbors was, as a matter of fact, entirely different, horribly different.