Andrew Fetler 8 min read

A lodger insists to his landlady that he keeps hearing a child talking to itself beneath his window in the night, but there isn't a single child in the whole village, and never has been.

Andrew Fetler's 1963 story is an eerie dystopian and social-SF tale. Unsettling, atmospheric golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly disturbing story that builds mounting unease from a small domestic mystery, where a phantom voice and an empty village hint at something deeply wrong, in a well-turned golden-age piece with a creeping sense of dread.

In its time

Published in 1963, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

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