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    Tales of Mystery & Imagination: Level 4
    Tales of Mystery & Imagination: Level 4
    Tales of Mystery & Imagination: Level 4
    Ebook106 pages1 hour

    Tales of Mystery & Imagination: Level 4

    By Edgar Allan Poe

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    About this ebook

    This book includes six of Edgar Allan Poe's spellbinding stories
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCompass Publishing
    Release dateFeb 24, 2009
    ISBN9781599662770
    Tales of Mystery & Imagination: Level 4

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    Reviews for Tales of Mystery & Imagination

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    • 3/5
      Poe has so permeated popular culture and the general zeitgeist of modern-day society that even if you haven't actually read the stories, you know them. "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," are just the most famous horror/suspense pieces. Just as dark and spooky are "The Black Cat," and "A Descent into the Maelstrom."

      Unfortunately, if you actually read a lot of these tales you realize that the writing itself is almost unbearably wordy and dated, so that the stories lose much of their original power. Put simply, most of the stories, due to familiarity and antiquated style, are just not that scary. Similarly, Poe's forays into the absurd -- "Loss of Breath" and "Some Words with a Mummy" -- fail out of the gate and pale in comparison to his Russian contemporary Nikolai Gogol. "Loss of Breath" in particular reads like a less intelligent and entertaining version of Gogol's "The Nose."

      Surprisingly, perhaps the greatest effect is achieved in his murder mysteries. "The Murders at the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," "The Gold Bug," and "The Purloined Letter," are some of the earliest prototypes for the detective genre, and they offer a uniformly compelling reading experience. Of the horror stuff, "Pit/Pendulum," "Red Death," "Amontillado," "Black Cat," and "Maelstrom" are my personal favorites.
    • 4/5
      "An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day." D.H. Lawrence.Burying people alive, ghosts, macabre deaths of usually delicate and young women, dark magic, effects of inebriation and hallucination, torture, whirlpools sucking people out of their time, fatal plagues, torture, abnormal psychological states, obsessional behaviors... William Blake in prose.If D.H. Lawrence was any close to right about his predicament I wouldn't have liked to be in Mr.Poe's skin, such horrors!That Poe lead a tormented and dysfunctional life is no secret. Haunted by the death of her mother when he was barely a toddler and later by the long illness and ultimate death of the love of his life(his cousin Virginia)whom she married when she was only thirteen, Poe struggled to keep afloat between the feelings of abandonment and loss and his growing ill-health and addictions which eventually killed him in mysterious circumstances at the age of 40.Whether this gloomy life served him as inspiration or he released his pain into his work, the extremeness of his imaginative creations managed to capture attention, if not acceptance.The sickness-the nausea-The pitiless pain-Have ceased, with the feverThat maddened my brain-With the fever called "Living"That burned in my brain.Considered the father of the short story, Poe manages to control the soul of the reader, nothing intervenes or distracts once you are engulfed in one of his curious and terrifying tales, you feel pulled down by an inexplicable and exotic sort of nostalgia which catches at your breath and prevents you from stopping to read. But make no mistake, Poe plays with you, giving you hope in a futile attempt to search for the truth and offer a plausible explanation for the unaccountable, even though you know deep inside that the end will be doomed from the start.His literary quality is irrefutable, he borrows from the European Gothic tradition and adds elements of detective stories, creating a new register which seeks for the horrendous truth, for the paincuts into your soul, although sometimes a rare kind of beauty oozes from the text, whether conscious or unconsciously I can't say:Then silence, stillness, and night were the universeBut mainly, Poe appears as a ruthless, crude and pessimistic voice who wants to put order amid the chaos, who wants to explain the inexplicable to elevate the name of the artist; offering an alternative to the newly born optimism, complacency and materialism of his age, and asking for nothing in return. He didn't seek for approval and often had to endure rebuke, few of his contemporaries valued his work at the time and being considered an oddball he was banned from society (or he excluded himself willingly).It is through the anguish and torment expressed in his poems and short stories that it is plausible to imagine his existence rather miserable and that he suffered from a precariously balanced state of mind. But then, once again, I ask myself the same question which always arises when I try to link the real life of a writer with his work, was it his eccentricity that made his works so special? Were they the product of a genius or a deranged mind ? Or both?The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life, and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045. As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall step over to Ponnonner's and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.In any case, although his haunted mind offered no respite, Poe's lucid writing managed to push the scales of reality and redefine the artistic world of beauty and lyricism towards a new daring approach where the probability of terror and darkness prevailed and where the motto could be summed up as to deny what is, and explain what is not .As it usual happens in real life, neither black nor white, just a blurred smudge of indistinct grey.
    • 4/5
      Great book! It contains the seeds of all modern narrative of this style. The ilustrations are great.
    • 4/5
      Spiral down dimly lit streets liined with madmen and their black deeds, through cold twists of catacombs, and across a sea that strikes with tight, angry fists. From the tortured mind of Edgar Allan Poe, three tales--"The Cask of Amontillado, " "The Black Cat, " and "The Fall of the House of Usher"--speak to the hidden places within us all.
    • 4/5
      5 stories of famous writer, Edgar Allan Poe.These are not fun,but just horrible.I like ''the Fall of the House of Usher'' best .I was scarced of it very much.If you are not interested in horror ,I don't recommend this.
    • 4/5
      Nice collection of 22 of Poe's most popular works stories.
    • 3/5
      The kind of this book is fantasy and horror.The story was written by Edgar Allan Poe,who is the master of horror.In this story,a man is expressed as mad person.However,he doesn't think he is mad and he do what is cruel.For example,he kill animals which once he loved and... I don't like this story because the story has only dark and depressed expressions.When I read this book,I feel gloomy.I couldn't enjoy reading this story.
    • 2/5
      I found this really hard going. I am not a big fan of horror stories as I scare easily but I found this strangely unmoving and very difficult to read. I think the main issue was the writing, expecially his sentence construction. If he could express something back to front, in a convoluted roundabout way he would. I lacked the patience to decipher it and kept re-writing it in my head. Very disappointing.
    • 5/5
      A fantastic collection of Poe's short stories. I definitely want to get my hands on the complete collection of his works after reading this. May favourite stories have to be "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Premature Burial". His ability to creep me out never ceases to amaze me no matter how many times I read the same story
    • 5/5
      All of the greatest Poe works are here, the design of the book as well as the binding are very well done. The interior illustrations and typesetting are better than more expensive Poe collections. It is really fantastic work overall.
    • 4/5
      Read the bulk of these as an older child decades ago, but some were new to me this time. The landscape-descriptive ones (Domain of Arnheim; Landor's Cottage) did not appeal to me but were interesting as examples of P's writing before he started the heavy supernatural and mystery things; the same descriptions are used in the later tales to more evocative result. Dupin in the mysteries was more Holmes-like than I had recalled. P's evident philosophical and linguistic erudition had completely passed me by in my youth. His style seems more lush to me than it did then. And I hadn't noticed the recurring themes of burial alive, of strength of will causing the dead to retain their souls, of the perverse impulse (specifically mentioned in both the Imp of the Perverse and in the Black Cat). Still good reading!
    • 5/5
      Harry Clarke's vivid and disturbing illustrations, reminiscent of the work of Aubrey Beardsley, bring hideous life to Poe's stories, and I find myself returning to both the stories and the illustrations again and again.

      My parents had a copy of the original version of this book, published by Tudor Publishing Co. Calla Editions has done a truly excellent job with this reproduction, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

      If you have any interest in either Poe's fiction, or weird art, this book will give you a lifetime of enjoyment--and if you're lucky, a nightmare or two!
    • 4/5
      I remember visiting the Edgar Allan Poe museum the last time I was in Richmond, Virginia. At the time I don't think I had read any of his work, except perhaps The Raven. The museum was a creepy place, as you might imagine, with a lot of dark wood and eerie pictures and a strange garden that seemed to be in permanent shadow. It was a strange place and he was a strange man – a hard writer to pin down: distinctly American, but hugely influential in European letters; not technically a very brilliant writer, and yet the founder of half a dozen new literary genres.Reading him feels, to me, like an act of almost shameful self-indulgence; rich but sickly; you feel you need a brisk walk afterwards. His weird stories mark a bridge between the Gothic and the new movements of symbolism and decadence and, later, the genres that would become known as horror and science fiction. He also invented the modern detective story.I think of him as one of those writers that translates easily. In the same way, Tolstoy is venerated by non-Russians while native speakers find his prose mediocre. French speakers often say something similar about Victor Hugo. And the French were, it must be said, quite obsessed with ‘Edgar Poe’, particularly after his works were translated by Baudelaire.Quelque chose de monomanique was the shrewd judgement of the Goncourts. Hard to argue with that. The predominant theme is death, but death elevated to a supernatural vividness and importance. The archetypal image of his works, for me, is the image of the young, beautiful, dead woman. This trope features heavily in ‘Morella’, ‘Berenice’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘Ligeia’ – and indeed in Poe's own life, because he married his thirteen-year-old cousin and she went on to die of tuberculosis when she was twenty-four. The death clearly left a lasting imprint on him.So, yes: thanatophilia. I'm rolling out the long words. But it's true. Have a look at how he chooses to end ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, for instance:And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.Sleep tight, kids! Another story ends: ‘the grave was still a home, and the corrosive hours, co-mates.’ Another ends: ‘there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.’ Another ends – well you get the idea.Poe's prose is melodramatic and rococo and makes full use of Grand Exclamations! And italicised phrases of dread! Oh the Horror and the Agony! And nothing but the drear grave and the worm for evermore! And so forth. But he is also imaginative and, sometimes, positively economical, setting the scene brilliantly in just a few short sentences and creating an atmosphere all his own (what Allen Ginsberg called his ‘demonic dreaminess’). His vocabulary, steeped as it is in the high-flown tradition of dark romanticism, was a constant delight to me, built of ornate items like sulphureous, pulsation, exergue, faucial, chasmal, cachinnatory, asphyctic and many more goodies besides.Jorge Luis Borges said that Poe's writings as a whole constitute a work of genius, although each individual piece is flawed. This is a very appealing assessment. He is an important writer, and often a very fascinating and enjoyable one – but that said, I don't really feel the desire to spend all that much time in his company.However, make sure you get a version with Harry Clarke's angular, Beardsley-esque illustrations. They are superlative.
    • 5/5
      Edgar Allan Poe is the savior of Gothic literature: not only is he largely responsible for salvaging the Gothic imagination from a deeply stagnant mire of clichéd melodrama, over-rehearsed motifs, and unreservedly bad writing, he is also the father of two genres that, in essence, did not exist before he put pen to paper: the detective story (chiefly) and what we refer to today as the ‘psychological’ horror story. His use of Gothic devices, though, insured that the mode did not entirely disassemble: rather, it took on new shapes and meanings—new colors: without Poe, there would be no Stoker and no Lovecraft, no Turn of the Screw or Picture of Dorian Gray; it can even be argued that, without Poe, there would be no Melville or Conrad—no Heart of Darkness, no Moby-Dick. Our literary debt to this one central figure is so incredible that, a century and a half after his death, he remains one of the most widely-read and influential of all American authors, both here and abroad (particularly in France, where he was the father of Baudelaire, and hence the Decadence). This is no small feat for a man whose common leitmotifs include premature burial, decomposition (of both body and mind), mourning, insanity, and a general disavowal of the more common Romantic applications of allegory and moral. Much of his reputation in his own day relied as much upon his poetry, numerous satires, humor pieces, and scathing critical reviews as upon his ‘tales of the grotesque and arabesque,’ but I will limit this review to the latter.How does one who has been touched by the influence of another properly, objectively, offer an opinion on this other’s work? She doesn’t—she responds with reaction, not the critical eye. To that end, the work of Poe which has most prefigured and cast its crimson shadow upon my own is his remarkable ‘Masque of the Red Death.’ An early example (perhaps the first example) of Decadent literature, the familiar comeuppance of ‘happy and dauntless and sagacious’ Prince Prospero at the hands of the dreadful plague he had sought to avoid through reclusion can be viewed as a sort of A Rebours in miniature. Those seeking an allegory or final moral in this profoundly symbolic piece will find none: it is a fable, but it owes very little to Aesop. In common with Poe’s other out-right horror-work (‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and the remarkably gruesome ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’), ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is more an examination of the limits of the psyche: and these limits, in ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ are examined, chiefly, through a reader’s inability to refrain from attaching any ultimate ‘meaning’ to the story presented. To this end, Poe demonstrates what is, perhaps, the totality of his vision: that ambiguity itself can become a theme in literature, particularly when this ambiguity mirrors its own content (as in ‘The Assignation,’ ‘Silence,’ ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ or the mingled horror/humor of ‘King Pest,’ which Poe claims contains an ‘allegory,’ but which, of course, contains none at all). For Poe, symbolism can exist outside of allegory—this was what Baudelaire and the Decadents responded to most intensely: a scent can have a color, a sound a feeling. Poe invented this system of correspondences, even as he distanced himself from the idea of ‘correspondence.’At the other end of the spectrum, Poe’s detective stories—he deemed them tales of ‘ratiocination’—remain among his most immediately influential: without Poe, as in so many other cases, there would be no Arthur Conan Doyle, and hence no Sherlock Holmes; nor would there be an Agatha Christie or Hercule Poirot. Poe initiated the movement, featuring his ingenious C. Auguste Dupin, with the widely-read ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ alongside its sequel, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Poe tried his hand at other tales of this nature, as in ‘The Gold Bug,’ but his creation of the central detective character—with all his justified arrogance, clarity of vision, and near-inhuman skill—was to have the greatest impact of all Poe’s literary inventions. Poe was famously haunted by the recurring theme of ‘the death of the beautiful woman.’ His characters, though, so often taken to a particularly poisoned state of mourning, behave in dramatically different ways: the narrator of ‘Morella,’ with his near-hatred for the lost ‘love,’ stands in striking contrast to that of ‘Ligeia,’ whose intensely unhinged state (the product of both opium and sorrow) is responsible for an ending that can be viewed as either dream or reality, depending on the reader’s interpretation. In further contrast is the narrator of the horrifying ‘Berenice,’ whose obsession eventually centers upon one, solely physical, feature of his cataleptic lover, with gruesome results. Catalepsy is a recurring motif in Poe’s work, but premature burial itself was less a particular obsession of Poe’s than a general, widespread paranoia of Victorian audiences as a whole. Poe helped to crystallize the idea: our notion of premature burial is, today, less based on actual incident and more on the trappings of Poe’s fictional musings: chiefly, this is due to the fevered detail of ‘The Premature Burial,’ but the motif is also present in ‘Berenice,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ and others. Alongside his theme of mourning, this preoccupation with the macabre remains one of the strongest links between the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the subject of Death as an abstraction.Remarks on Poe’s poetry, essays, and only novel (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) will demand further entries in this journal. By way of conclusion, some personal reflection: Edgar Allan Poe was the first author I discovered as a child: a collection titled The Poe Reader was both my first exposure to his work and the first adult book I ever owned, purchased at the tender age of nine. My immediate obsessions centered on ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and his enchanting poem ‘Ulalume,’ and to this day they, more or less, remain there. As I grew older, I discovered the more famous pieces and some strange odds-and-ends, like his treatise on interior design, ‘The Philosophy of Furniture.’ Further exploration yielded the gorgeous, otherworldly pen-and-ink drawings of Harry Clarke, some of which are interspersed throughout this review (note: see the illustrated review at threalmoftheunreal.blogspot.com). More than any other author I have encountered, with the exception of Gustav Meyrink, Poe has impacted my thought processes, particular obsessions, and even the direction of my life: for without Poe I would never have been led to the literature of the Gothic or the Decadent, and my academic life would never have taken shape under the influence of those two movements. More importantly: without Poe, I would not write.In the end, it seems, Poe—the precursor of so many others—is both the father of my muses and the muse himself.
    • 4/5
      Gothic, gloomy and prolix, the Germanic feel enhanced by the excess of sentiment and the fascination with now-dated scientific speculations: crazed phantasms, Mesmerism, galvanising corpses. Some mystery and suspense, as with the proto-Holmesian solving of the Rue Morgue killings, but mainly just the grotesque: torment and torture, feelingly portrayed in ghastly gorgeous detail, not least that bizarrely widespread19th century phobia of being entombed alive. A touch sadistic, but not sordidly so, determinedly secular, good stories.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Edgar Allan Poe has long been my favourite writer. I love his gloomy descriptions of old houses and sinister people, his weird macabre stories, his literary landscapes and the bizarre world he imaginatively creates. My favourite stories are the Fall of the House of Usher, an elaborate haunted house tale, the Tell-Tale Heart, where we get an inside look at the mind of a murderer and the Masque of the Red Death, where we meet the diabolical Prince Prospero and his palace of distinctly coloured chambers.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      There's a reason why Poe is regarded as one of the best writers of American Literature--and indeed literature in general. The man was a genius, practically inventing the current mystery, horror, and short story forms. Therefore, I have to give this book five stars. There are simply too many great stories packed into one book, from "The Fall of the House of Usher" to "The Tell-Tale Heart" to "The Masque of the Red Death."For me this wasn't the type of book I could sit down with and read from cover to cover. Like a fine cut of meat, I had to take my time in chewing and digesting at times. And even Poe drags on with his stories sometimes, so it's good to have a break now and again. My copy was the Easton Press leather bound edition, complete with multiple illustrations which really added a lot of atmosphere to the book. The leather binding, paper stock, and typeface lent the book a wonderful feel. The tactile experience of reading it was nearly as enjoyable as the mental. It was a wonderful book from a wonderful publisher, and I couldn't give it a higher recommendation.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Indeholder "Introduction", "The Gold Bug", "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", "MS. found in a Bottle", "A Descent into the Maelström", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", "The Purloined Letter", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Premature Burial", "The Black Cat", "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Oval Portrait", "The Oblong Box", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "Ligeia", "Loss of Breath", "Shadow - A Parable", "Silence - A Fable", "The Man of the Crowd", "Some Words with a Mummy"."Introduction" handler om ???"The Gold Bug" handler om ???"The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" handler om ???"MS. found in a Bottle" handler om ???"A Descent into the Maelström" handler om ???"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" handler om ???"The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" handler om ???"The Purloined Letter" handler om ???"The Fall of the House of Usher" handler om ???"The Pit and the Pendulum" handler om ???"The Premature Burial" handler om ???"The Black Cat" handler om ???"The Masque of the Red Death" handler om ???"The Cask of Amontillado" handler om ???"The Oval Portrait" handler om ???"The Oblong Box" handler om ???"The Tell-Tale Heart" handler om ???"Ligeia" handler om ???"Loss of Breath" handler om ???"Shadow - A Parable" handler om ???"Silence - A Fable" handler om ???"The Man of the Crowd" handler om ???"Some Words with a Mummy" handler om ???
    • 5/5
      This book had 5 short stories. My favorite story was 'William Willson' He, but his name was not William Willson, met a same name man at school. Both of them are alike and William1 was afraid of William2. Wiliiam1 quited school and went to a lot of places. But Wiliiam2 was almost always near William1. At last William1 tried to kill William2. Another stories were　also exciting for me to read so I read this early.

    Book preview

    Tales of Mystery & Imagination - Edgar Allan Poe

    The Tell-Tale Heart

    Nervous! I had been terribly nervous and still am. But why did they say I am mad? The disease had made my senses sharp. My hearing was extremely sharp. I heard everything in the world. I heard many things under the ground, so could I be mad? Listen! See how calm I am? Let me tell you the story!

    I do not know when I first had the idea. When I did, it worried me day and night. I had no reason to dislike the old man. I loved him! He had never hurt me. I did not want his gold. I think it was his cruel eye. Yes! It was the film across his light blue eye. When he looked at me, my blood ran cold with fear. At last, I decided to murder the old man. I would be free of that eye forever.

    You think I am mad! Madmen know nothing! A madman could never have been so clever. Or so careful. You should have seen how carefully I planned his death. I pretended to be very kind to the old man.

    Every night at midnight, I silently opened his bedroom door. When the opening was wide enough, I placed a flashlight in the room. At first I did not turn the flashlight on, and no light showed. I watched the old man through the opening in the door for an hour. How clever I was not to wake him! When I could see him on the bed, I turned on the flashlight. I shined the weak light on the eye. I did this for a week. Every night, the eye was shut. It was not the old man that troubled me. It was his cruel eye. While it was shut, I had no wish to kill him.

    Every morning, I asked him if he had slept well. It would take a very clever old man to know he was being watched each night!

    On the eighth night, I opened the door with particular care. I had never felt so strong, or believed as much that my plan would be successful. I laughed quietly to myself. The old man had no idea what I was doing.

    He moved suddenly in bed. It was completely dark. He could not see me slowly opening the door. My thumb knocked the clasp on the flashlight. The old man cried out, Who’s there?

    I did not reply. I knew he was listening for the sounds that frighten us at night. I have done this many times myself. After a while, I heard him groan in alarm. I knew how frightened he felt. I felt sorry for him! He was sitting up, trying to remain calm, but his fear was increasing. He sensed me in the room. He sensed his approaching death!

    I turned on the flashlight carefully. The old man did not see me, or hear me. A narrow stream of light shined on his wide-open eye. I grew angry as I looked at the horrible film that covered the eye.

    As I said before, I am not mad. It is just that my senses are extremely sharp. Just then, I heard a deep, soft sound like a ticking watch. It was the beating of the old man’s heart! The sound of his heart beating made me angrier. I kept very still. I shined the light on the eye. The terrible beating of his heart grew louder every minute. The old man must have been terrified.

    Remember, I told you I was nervous. I still am. In the middle of the night, the strange beating of the old man’s heart made me lose control. The beating continued to grow louder. What if the heart burst?

    A new fear struck me. What if a neighbor heard the beating? The awful noise had to be stopped! The old man had to die!

    With a loud shout I turned on the light. I ran into the room. The old man screamed! I threw him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him.

    I laughed! For a few minutes, the heart kept beating. I became calm. The sound would not be heard through the wall. At last, the beating stopped. I examined the body. The heart was still. He was dead! That cruel eye would never look at me again!

    You will not think I am mad when I tell you how I hid the old man. I worked quickly and quietly. I cut the head, arms, and legs off the body. I placed the head and body parts under the wooden floorboards. Not even his horrible eye could have noticed anything wrong. There were no marks. I was too clever to leave any drops of blood.

    It was nearly morning when I finished. There was a knock at the door. I felt quite confident. What could frighten me now? Three policemen politely introduced themselves. A neighbor had heard a scream during the night. I explained that I had screamed during a bad dream.

    I invited the policemen to search the house. They examined the old man’s bedroom, but found nothing. I asked the police to sit and rest. I was sure my clever crime would never be discovered. I even placed my chair exactly over the body under the floor. The police were satisfied. I was calm.

    As I sat with the policemen, I developed a headache and began to feel ill. I heard a ringing sound in my ears. The policemen still sat and talked. They appeared undisturbed by the ringing noise. The ringing increased. I talked quickly to shut out the noise. The noise became louder. I realized it was not in my ears.

    My face became white with fear. I talked faster and faster, but the noise grew even louder. It was a deep, soft sound like a ticking watch! I spoke more quickly and urgently, as I tried to cover the noise. Why would the police not leave?

    I walked backward and forward. I waved my arms. The noise was becoming louder and louder. What could I do? I shouted wildly. I hit the floor with my chair. But the

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