Ririro.com - Short Stories

"The Eyes Have It" is a short comic science fiction story in which a man reading a paperback on the bus becomes convinced he has uncovered a terrifying alien invasion. The evidence? Sentences like "his eyes roved about the room" and "she gave him her hand." With mounting dread and breathless logic, the narrator interprets every idiom and figure of speech as proof of creatures who casually detach t...

"The Diamond Necklace" follows Mathilde Loisel, a clerk's wife who aches for a life of wealth and elegance she was never born into. When an invitation to a grand ministerial ball arrives, she borrows a stunning diamond necklace from her wealthy friend Madame Forestier — only to lose it on the way home. Rather than confess, Mathilde and her husband secretly replace it with one costing thirty-six th...

"The Cats of Ulthar" is a short story set in the ancient village of Ulthar, where an old cotter and his wife have long preyed on their neighbors' cats in ways too sinister for villagers to confront. When a caravan of mysterious wanderers arrives from the South, a young orphan boy named Menes loses his only companion — a small black kitten. Heartbroken, he raises his arms to the sun and prays in an...

"The Hand" draws readers into a Corsican murder mystery as Judge Bermutier recounts his most disturbing unsolved case. When a reclusive Englishman, Sir John Rowell, is found strangled in his locked home, the only clue is a severed human finger clenched between his teeth — torn from the dried, chained hand mounted on his parlor wall. As Bermutier pieces together the dead man's final weeks of mounti...

"The Phantom Coach" is a short ghost story in which a young hunter loses his way on a frozen English moor and stumbles upon the home of a brilliant, embittered recluse who has spent decades in isolation after being ridiculed for his belief in the supernatural. Granted shelter for the night, the narrator is soon sent off alone into the darkness to catch the northbound mail coach. When the coach app...

"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas" is a free online ghost story in which antiquary Mr. Somerton deciphers a Renaissance cryptogram hidden in stained glass, convinced it reveals the location of a fortune buried by a 16th-century abbot. The clues lead him to a well deep within the ruins of Steinfeld Abbey — and to something that should never have been disturbed. What grips the reader is not the puzzle i...

"The Furnished Room" follows a desperate young man searching the boarding houses of New York's West Side for Eloise Vashner, the woman he loves. Renting a shabby room in a crumbling tenement, he is suddenly overwhelmed by the scent of mignonette — her scent — and tears the space apart for any trace of her. O. Henry builds quiet dread through decayed furnishings, ghostly impressions left by past te...

Canon Alberic's Scrap-book is a short ghost story following Dennistoun, an English scholar who travels to the ancient French town of St Bertrand de Comminges to study its cathedral. When the frightened local sacristan offers him a centuries-old folio crammed with priceless illuminated manuscripts, Dennistoun cannot resist — but the book carries a dark history tied to Canon Alberic de Mauléon, a 17...

"Count Magnus" draws readers into the dread that slowly overtakes Mr Wraxall, an English traveller researching the history of a Swedish manor house. His obsessive fascination with Count Magnus de la Gardie — a nobleman rumoured to have made a sinister "Black Pilgrimage" — leads him to visit the count's locked mausoleum one too many times. Each visit loosens another padlock on the copper sarcophagu...

"Number 13" follows Mr Anderson, an English scholar staying at a Viborg hotel while researching Denmark's Catholic past, who notices something unsettling: the hotel has no room thirteen on its register — yet the door keeps appearing in the corridor outside his own. As strange sounds bleed through the walls, his room inexplicably shrinks by night, and a ragged arm reaches out from behind a door tha...

"The Mezzotint" is a short ghost story in which Mr. Williams, curator of a university art museum, receives an unremarkable engraving of an English manor house — and notices, hours later, that a crawling figure has appeared where none existed before. Each time witnesses examine the picture, the figure has moved: crossing the lawn, entering the house, then departing clutching something small and lim...

"The Ash-Tree" is a short horror story set at Castringham Hall in Suffolk, where a condemned woman's dying words — "There will be guests at the Hall" — set a curse in motion that spans generations. When Sir Matthew Fell testifies against the witch Mrs Mothersole and she goes to the gallows cursing him, he is dead by the next full moon. Decades later, his grandson Sir Richard ignores old warnings a...

"Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You My Lad" follows Professor Parkins, a rigidly rational academic who travels to the Suffolk coast for a golfing holiday and stumbles upon an ancient bronze whistle buried among the ruins of a Templar preceptory. Dismissing all superstition, he blows it twice — and something answers. As strange disturbances plague his hotel room and a blind, linen-faced figure begin...

"Lost Hearts" draws readers into Aswarby Hall, where twelve-year-old orphan Stephen Elliott arrives to live with his reclusive cousin, Mr Abney, a scholar of ancient pagan rituals. Mr Abney's warmth seems genuine — until Stephen begins noticing strange scratch marks, unsettling dreams, and the ghostly figures of two children haunting the moonlit grounds. As the spring equinox draws near and Mr Abn...

"The Wind in the Rose-bush" follows Rebecca Flint, a sharp-eyed spinster who travels from Michigan to collect her niece Agnes from the girl's stepmother, Mrs. Dent — a woman whose warm appearance hides something cold and deliberate. Agnes is never quite home, always one excuse away, yet her presence seems to linger in unexplained ways: a rose-bush stirring on a still day, music from an empty room,...

"The Vacant Lot" is a free short story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman following the Townsend family, who relocate from their ancestral village to a suspiciously cheap Boston townhouse. From the very first Monday, their maid Cordelia glimpses something impossible in the empty lot next door — a shadow hanging laundry with no body attached. The disturbances escalate: phantom smells of cabbage, every mirr...

King Lear, Shakespeare's short story retelling, follows an aging king who divides his kingdom based on declarations of love — rewarding his two flattering daughters and casting out Cordelia, the only one who speaks plainly. What begins as wounded pride quickly unravels into betrayal, madness, and exile. Lear wanders a stormy heath, stripped of power and dignity, accompanied only by a jester and a...

"Luella Miller" is a Gothic short story set in a New England village where a hauntingly beautiful woman leaves a trail of exhausted, fading souls in her wake. Told through the sharp-tongued testimony of elderly Lydia Anderson, the story traces how Luella's husband Erastus, his sister Lily, and a succession of devoted caretakers each wither and die after entering her orbit — while Luella herself re...

Bartleby the Scrivener is a short story set in a Wall Street law office, where a mild-mannered employer hires a pale, eerily calm copyist named Bartleby. At first diligent to the point of obsession, Bartleby begins refusing every request with the same soft, immovable phrase: "I would prefer not to." As his refusals widen — no proofreading, no errands, no leaving — the narrator finds himself caught...

"The Devil and Tom Walker" is a short story set in colonial New England, where miserly Tom Walker stumbles upon the devil himself deep in a cursed swamp near Boston. Offered access to pirate treasure buried by Captain Kidd, Tom negotiates a Faustian bargain and becomes a ruthless moneylender — squeezing desperate debtors without mercy. As he grows old and fearful of what awaits him, Tom scrambles...

"The Shadows on the Wall" is a gothic short story in which three sisters — Caroline, Rebecca, and Emma — gather in the family home following the sudden death of their youngest brother Edward. As dread and unspoken accusation circulate among them, a shadow resembling Edward begins appearing each night on the study wall. Their brother Henry, a physician who argued violently with Edward the night bef...

"The Lady, or the Tiger?" is a short story built around one of literature's most agonising unanswered questions. In a semi-barbaric kingdom, a king dispenses justice through a brutal trial: the accused must choose between two doors — behind one waits a ravenous tiger, behind the other a bride. When the king's own daughter discovers her low-born lover has been condemned to the arena, she secretly l...

"The Minister's Black Veil" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which the Reverend Mr. Hooper arrives one Sunday wearing a mysterious black veil he refuses to remove — ever. His congregation recoils, friendships dissolve, and his betrothed Elizabeth pleads with him to explain, only to be met with cryptic words about secret sin and universal guilt. As Hooper ages into Father Hooper, the veil...

Macbeth, the short story retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy, begins on a desolate heath where two victorious generals encounter three witches whose prophecies ignite a deadly hunger for power. When Macbeth learns he is destined to be King of Scotland, his ruthlessly ambitious wife pushes him past the point of no return. Murder follows murder — a trusted king, a loyal friend, an innocent family — y...

A Modest Proposal is Jonathan Swift's devastating satirical essay, narrated by a coolly rational economist who presents a stomach-turning solution to Irish poverty: selling one-year-old infants as food for the wealthy. With each numbered "advantage" and calculated figure, the narrator's cheerful logic grows more monstrous — and Swift's fury at English colonial exploitation of Ireland grows impossi...