The Shadow On The Wall — L.P. Hartley

“It might have been someone she knew, but who can recognise a shadow?”

A decidedly strange story, so strange, it outdoes Robert Aickman, and is far more frightening than it seems at outset, indeed genuinely frightening in spite – or because – of the intrinsic absurdisms, as we follow Mildred Fanshawe, “a bachelor woman” and interior decorator to a stay-over-night house party, a house she had done some work in for a widow called Joanna. A house like a hollow E, whatever that means! Mildred, being famous for her neuroses, she is for some reason put into a room next to a single gentleman who makes the party into an 8. Mildred thus under his protection as it were in a separate wing of the E from the other guests, a wing with two rooms each with doors to the corridor and a shared lockable partition door. There is so much here of an oblique fish-gaping nature, and the more mundane muddy boots outside in the corridor, and snake-like blood coils, and that shadow on the wall while Mildred sits in the bath, and involving reconnaissances between rooms with or without a torch, and was there one man in the bed next door, or two? — and other disarming or disconcerting strangenesses galore, and I cannot really do justice to the tantalisingly inexplicable scare-power of this story as a whole.

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Context of this story: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/03/other-stories-by-l-p-hartley/