The Hum by Don McDonald — A Widower Follows a Sound Beneath His House

John is a physician, and he has a plan for his wife. Rest. Fresh air. No visitors who might excite her. Absolutely no writing.

He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.

As a boy he was teased for his tenderness. He kept birds, rabbits, a dog, a small monkey. And a cat, enormous and entirely black, who followed him from room to room and would have followed him into the street. Now he sits in a cell with a pen, determined to set the record down plainly. He is not mad, he tells us. He is not dreaming. Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale.

Dr. Nathan Cole measures water for a living. It's quiet work, gauges and spreadsheets, the slow arithmetic of things that don't change much. Then a reservoir gains four inches overnight with no rain, no inflow, no explanation, and gives them back by morning. Everyone blames the sensor. The sensor is fine. What follows is the worst thing a careful man can discover, which is that he's been measuring the right thing all along.

Everyone in town has a story about Luella Miller. She never seems to lift a hand, yet somehow, help is always at her side. And those who give it—well, they never quite look the same afterward. Some tales of horror are loud and bloody. This one is quiet, gentle… and suffocating. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman spins a ghostly puzzle where the most dangerous thing may be a smile too sweet to resist.