Charles Beaumont 12 min read

Jittery Henry Ritchie sloshes his martini every time the doorbell buzzes, seven years of that banshee's wail have him at the breaking point, on an evening that is about to become very strange indeed.

Charles Beaumont's 1956 story is a wry, unsettling psi-powers and social-SF tale. Sharp, atmospheric, superbly told. Read it for a story from a master of The Twilight Zone era, where an ordinary domestic irritation opens onto something eerie and dreamlike, in a well-crafted golden-age piece that finds the uncanny lurking just beneath the suburban surface.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

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

Illustrated by

Remington