Dark Entries

by Robert Aickman

Apart from anything else, Pendlebury found that the light just sufficed to fill the waiting room with dark places which changed their shape and kept him wakeful with speculation.

The glass through which he glimpsed life as he sailed that morning imparted this rainbow-watery transient clarity of colour, while compressing and encircling with a boundless edge of uncertainty.

but the concealment of Fleet was supreme and final, a wonder of imagination and ingenuity, an echo from the deep unconscious.

“No. I draw no decorative distinction between the sexes, my darling,” she replied in the same even tone of slightly patient commonplace. By now, however, something strange in the terms of her earlier answer had passed the resistance necessarily strong in any human mind to such strangeness, and had in part entered Carfax’s consciousness. “You talk the most sweet nonsense, dearest Ariel,” he said. “And nonsense with a lovely strangeness about it. Lovely nonsense.”