Two Envelopes And A Phone

“There were influences of a wholly unsuspected kind already gathering round the poor vicar, William Wylder; as worlds first begin in thinnest vapour, and whirl themselves in time into consistency and form, so do these dark machinations, which at times gather round unsuspecting mortals as points of revolution, begin nebulously and intangibly, and grow in volume and in density, till a colossal system, with its inexorable tendencies and forces, crushes into eternal darkness the centre it has enveloped.”
― Sheridan Le Fanu, Wylder's Hand: Enriched edition. Unraveling Secrets in 19th-Century Ireland: A Gothic Tale of Deception and the Supernatural

“But now the streets were not like the streets she knew. They were so silent: and so empty. On the doorsteps, little groups of milk bottles huddled with their dirty white collars, waiting for the roundsman to collect them next morning and take them off to be washed and spruced up and sent out on duty again… In the areas, the dustbins spilled forth unsightly contents, relentless reminders of man’s mortality: now and again the air still gave a tiny sigh, and a whiff of decay was borne away upon the breeze. The plane trees rustled, whispering a message from the dustbins: ‘All is rottenness, all is death…’, the high street lamps cast shadows in angled walls that seemed as black and bottomless as eternity. A couple reeling home late from a party were swallowed up by a dark doorway: already the glow and the rapture were fading—tomorrow there would be sick headaches and queasy tummies… Beauty vanishes—beauty passes…Only the cats were heedless and unafraid, darting across the patchwork shadows of the streets on plush-cushioned, soundless paws. What threat had death and decay and nothingness?—to a sleek, suave gentleman with nine lives before him and every one packed with adventure that had nothing to do with death—on the contrary!”
― Christianna Brand, Death of Jezebel

“One looked at people in buses and trains, when their bodies were quiescent and their minds somewhere else, in a book or a newspaper, or behind them at the place they had left, or before them at the place they were going to, and they seemed harmless enough, and so they were while you were looking at them---but what hadn't those apparently tranquil bodies harboured? Souls that had been jealous and angry and afraid and envious, even murderous, and the bodies themselves had been passionate, intemperate, greedy, agonised. People you saw in the buses and trains weren't really themselves at all, only the quiescent ghosts of what they had been, and what they might still be again.”
― F. Tennyson Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow

“It was high time Ivor got moving. It wasn’t fair to be dead and yet to hang around like this, in every room, in every corner of the house….There ought to be something like a fly-spray, a fly-spray for ghosts, a ghost-spray….”
― Celia Fremlin, The Long Shadow