The self-assured American Howard Puce agrees to a foolish wager: he is to spend a night alone in a haunted room—without light, armed only with a candle and a pistol. His host, the blasé Sir Charles Hillier, and the young Kerr-Anderson promise him five hundred pounds if he makes it through till morning. What seems like easy money turns into a nightmare when the candle goes out and something in the darkness begins to breathe. Puce fires—and fires a second time. The next morning, he is a wreck of a man: the room is empty, his mind lost forever. Years later, the men meet again—and Puce learns the full truth of that night.
Arlen's elegantly sinister study of power and fear dramatises the fragile boundary between delusion and reality.