The Monkey's Paw

Three wishes. That's the bargain the monkey's paw offers: any desire granted, but at a cost that makes salvation indistinguishable from damnation. W.W. Jacobs builds this tale with the slow, suffocating dread of a nightmare you cannot wake from. A family receives the paw from an old friend who obtained it in India, where fakirs laid charms on such things for reasons better left unexplored. They laugh at the superstition at first. Then they wish for two hundred pounds, and their son is killed in a factory accident, and the company sends them exactly two hundred pounds as compensation. The second wish brings their boy back - but what arrives at the door in the darkness is not quite right, and the horror of what the third wish must undo hangs over every sentence until the final, devastating silence. Jacobs understood that the most terrifying thing is not what we see, but what we are forced to imagine. A hundred years later, this story still makes you hesitate before you ask for anything at all.