In the dark of night, one light still yet burns.

Frightened fingers tremble as brittle pages turn.

Fireside Mystery Theatre presents the Midnight Reading,

a summer series of dramatic recitations of dark masterpieces in miniature by the masters of the macabre.

Good evening. I'm Ali Silva.

Walter de la Mare. Just the very sound of this British author's beautiful name sounds like music.

And it is his real name, not a nom de plume as I originally suspected.

As Shakespeare famously mused, what's in a name? Well, the name Walter de la Mere has come to represent

a unique world of childish fantasy and whimsy on the one hand,

and an often cryptic nether region of darkness populated by foreboding phantoms and nefarious

nymphs on the other. Our story for tonight, the riddle, is where these two sides of de la Mere come to converge at a sect that by its finish will leave the listener in a creeping state of puzzlement and unease.

Here to read the riddle for us is Mary Murphy.

When we find the farmament for to be a lot,

and down there and never haltsy,

Injah, Lord California voices,

Injah's mighty loss can never be growing,

and so much a story on his red house. So these seven children, Anne and Matilda,

James, William and Henry, Harriet and Orthea, came to live with their grandmother.

The house in which their grandmother had lived since her childhood was

built in the time of the Georges. It was not a pretty house, but roomy, substantial, and

square, and an elm tree outstretched its branches almost to the windows. When the children were come out of the cab,

five sitting inside and two beside the driver,

...