The Judge met with the man a fair few times and then proceeded to getting to know him and then paid him a visit where he was invited into his house. The Englishman informs the Judge that he has travelled around quite a lot to many places including parts of Africa and America.
The Judge asks him about what he has hunted, he informs him that he has done some ‘Man-hunting’. He then started to talk of weapons, showing the Judge his various makes of weapons.
The Judge then goes into the man’s Parlour where against a black and red velvet material he notices a hand on a plinth. No ordinary hand this is though, it is blackened and the bones are showing, there are signs of old blood. He asks what the hand is, and the Englishman explains of how the hand belongs to his worst enemy, it is still after him he says.
Occasionally the man would lash out at the hand in an attempt to destroy it, he kept three revolvers in the room near the hand and always locked all the doors when he went to bed.
One morning, in her line of work the maid went to open the windows and found Sir John dead. The body had lacerations to the neck that looked as if they had been made by iron spikes. The hand had gone and the chain had been ripped clean off, there was no explanation that the Judge could provide.
In The Red Room, it starts off with a man, in the first person, explaining how he doesn’t believe in ghosts. The people around him are described in great detail, but we still don’t know who they are.
He says he has lived twenty eight years and has never seen a ghost. The old woman says "A many things to see and sorrow for"; this is an attempt to heighten tension and suspense, creating the startings of an atmosphere. The man then retires to The Red Room after more tension is twisted into the plot, he goes to the room, lights a fire, it is blown out, and He is knocked out and thrown down the stairs. He says ghosts exist afterwards.
In The Signalman, it starts with a man shouting down to a railway signalman, "Halloa! Below there!” he goes down to meet the signalman and gets to know him. In the following weeks he starts to really get to know him well, the signalman divulges a secret.
The signalman reveals to us that he has seen a ghost, standing at the end of the tunnel, by the danger light, shouting for help. He says he has seen him many times and there have been some strange happenings.
He says one time a lady died on the train right by the danger light, where the ghost had appeared, this all seemed strange to him and he called it supernatural.
Later in the story near the end, the signalman goes up to the danger light and that is the last we hear of him. Soon afterwards the man who is the main character goes to see the signal man and learns he has been killed, "I said, 'Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake, clear the way!'", this is what the driver of the train that killed the signalman said, it is also the greeting the man said to the signalman on their first meeting.
In all these stories the main way of scaring the reader is tension and suspense. Nowadays this probably would not be considered to be scary but some of these themes have been spread to modern times in films and books.
Tension in The Hand is created by a mysterious character and death, much like in The Signalman, where the man kind of predicted his death without knowing it.
In The Red Room, tension is created by the meticulous detail given of the characters, the room and the atmosphere.
All these books use pain or death to create horror, this is old style horror and I like it.
