Friday, February the 4th, 2005
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Here are three brief tales of the uncanny.
One. I was sitting in a bower on a bright summer's day, the air heady with verbena, eating my snack. All of a sudden, gruesome suppurations of foul-smelling extraterrestrial hideousness began oozing from my jam sandwich, and I swooned. When I came to, I had a tiny radio transmitter implanted in my forehead, but I remained unaware of it for the rest of my life.
Two. They called him MacTavish, and he was the village wrestler. He lived in a room above the post office. No other living being ever set foot in the room until the day MacTavish died. They found him lying on his bed, as if he were asleep, but there was no doubt that he was dead, for hovering above his chest was a baleful phantom, emitting gruesome suppurations of foul-smelling extraterrestrial hideousness which it poured into a funnel inserted into MacTavish's right ear. They closed up the room and nailed the door shut and it remained unopened for the next hundred years.
Three. “Hand me that chaffinch, young Cubbit,” said Jarvis to his lantern-jawed assistant. Jarvis was a top bird scientist, and every Tuesday he devoted to the study of chaffinches. They were out wandering the hills, Jarvis and Cubbit, and the boffin had spotted a chaffinch near a babbling brook. As the knock-kneed youth clumsily picked up the chaffinch, he heard a scream behind him. Spinning round, dropping the chaffinch in the process, he saw Jarvis being engulfed by a giant fod. The poor lad scampered back to the lab and told what had happened to Mrs Purgative, the kindly old washerwoman. “Well! I never heard of such a thing!” she exclaimed. And she hoisted her mop on her shoulder, took Cubbit by his withered hand, and led him far, far away, all the way to Gondwanaland.
Source : Six Hundred And Twenty Uncanny Tales, Together With A Pen-Portrait Of Victoria Principal by Dobson (out of print)