Don Berry 21 min read

In the cold gray dawn light through the huge picture window, Johnny pulls on his boots, his hawk-like face unreadable, as his wife wakes with a start and reaches, hesitant, for a cigarette.

Don Berry's 1959 story is a taut horror and psi-powers tale of dread and hidden menace. Atmospheric, unsettling golden-age SF. Read it for a moody, slow-building story where an ordinary morning is charged with unspoken fear, and a terror that comes as sound closes quietly in.

In its time

Published in 1959, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

21 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Ed Emshwiller