The Terrible Old Man by H.P. Lovecraft, read by Mike Bennett.

It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Jo Zannock and Manuel Silver to call on the terrible old man.

This old man dwells all alone in a very ancient house on Water Street near the sea and is

reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble, which forms a situation very attractive to men

of the profession of Mez's Ricci, Zannock and Silver, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery.

The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the terrible old man which

generally keep him safe from the attention of gentleman like Mr. Reachie and his colleagues,

despite the almost certain fact that he hides a fortune of indefinite magnitude,

somewhere about his musty and venerable abode.

He is, in truth, a very strange person, believed to have been a captain of East India clipper ships

in his day, so old that no one can remember when he was young, and

so Tacitan that few know his real name.

Among the gnarled trees in the front yard of his aged and neglected place, he maintains a strange

collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted, so that they resemble the idols in some obscure

eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of the small boys who love to

taunt the terrible old man about his long white hair and beard or to

break the small pained windows of his dwelling with wicked missiles.

But there are other things which frighten the older and more curious

folk who sometimes steal up to the house to peer in through the dusty panes.

These folks say that on a table in a bare room on the ground

floor are many peculiar bottles. In each a small piece of lead suspended pendulum

wise from a string and they say that the terrible old man talks to these bottles addressing them by such names as Jack, Scarface,

...