O Terror

"Explosion at Munition Works in the Northern District: Many Fatalities." The working man told me about it, and added some dreadful details. Corpses so terribly maimed that coffins had been kept covered; faces mutilated as if by some gnawing animal. . . . I took a tram to the location of the disaster; a raw and hideous shed with a walled yard about it, and a shut gate. The roof was quite undamaged -- this had had been a strange accident. There had been an explosion of sufficient violence to kill work-people in the building, but the building itself showed no wounds or scars.

**The Terror** • (1916) • novella by Arthur Machen

**The Elixir of Life** • (1881) • short story by Richard Garnett