London, in the full weight of a June heatwave. The kind of golden, breathless afternoon that makes a fortunate woman feel especially fortunate.
And Hester Ward is fortunate. She knows it. A husband she adores, two children, a house that runs exactly as it should — she has never had cause to wish for anything else, and she is grateful for it, in the quiet, unshowy way of someone who has never really been tested.
Until something from very long ago reaches forward and taps her on the shoulder.
Something she had put away so completely she'd almost convinced herself it was never real. A half-remembered thing from childhood, stirring now in the middle of the night.
She stops sleeping. She starts watching the dark corners of rooms.
Her doctor is kind, practical, entirely unworried. Nerves, he tells her — the heat, nothing more. What she needs is rest, and quiet, and a change of scene. A little village on the East Anglian coast, away from London, away for a while even from her husband. Somewhere she can put it all behind her.
She goes because she means to get well.
E.F. Benson's The Face.
*Publication: "The Face" first appeared in Hutchinson's Magazine in February 1924, and was collected four years later in E.F. Benson's Spook Stories* (Hutchinson & Co., 1928).
*About the author: Edward Frederic Benson (1867–1940) was an English novelist best known for his comic Mapp and Lucia series, but across four decades he also wrote dozens of ghost stories — his own term for them was "spook stories" — placed regularly in magazines like Pearson's and The Illustrated London News*.
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