History NightmareFuel / RayBradbury

* "Night Call Collect": An engineer named Emil Barton has spent the past 60 years in complete solitude on Mars after all the settlers returned to Earth on the eve of World War 3 in a vain attempt at stopping the war, leaving Barton stranded, with nothing except all the resources and technology of the empty Martian cities... and time. The story starts on his 80th birthday, when the phone suddenly rings... It's a recording of himself, 60 years in the past. Barton quickly began to go insane, both from the isolation and the fact that he was likely the last human alive. To pass the time "while awaiting rescue", Barton spent decades putting up new phone infrastructure all over Mars and programming recordings of himself to call him years in the future, growing increasingly unhinged as he did so. The calls the elderly Barton is getting (and none of which he remembers making anymore due to senility) in the story are increasingly callous and sadistic, especially one of the last which is just a cruel HopeSpot pretending to be a rescue ship from Earth. The story ends with Barton dying of old age, while two of the recordings begin talking to eachother.

* The short story "Literature/ThereWillComeSoftRains" describes the activities of an automated house, long since abandoned but still running on its programming. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that humanity was destroyed in a nuclear war at some point in the past (there is a reference to children's shadows burned into a wall). The house still runs, until it finally succumbs to decay at the end, but nobody will ever live there again. The title refers to a poem about how life will continue even after the end of humanity; the story basically says, "Not if we screw things up first". Haunting. (Incidentally the story can be read online [[http://www.gs.cidsnet.de/englisch-online/originals/soft_rains.htm here]]).

*** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LNHYz89sNc The Russian animated adaptation of the story makes it worse.]] The house, instead of seeming maternal and friendly, looks and sounds like it would kill you at any given second. The family's fate is more gruesome. Instead of having their silhouettes burned into the side of the house, they were burned to ash while sleeping in their beds. The robot (here depicted as a giant metallic snake with giant spikes) unknowingly dumps the family's ashes on the floor when it tries to wake them up. Not only that, but there's also [[DiesDifferentlyInAdaptation the fate of the house]]: instead of being destroyed by an out-of-control fire, the house ''blows up'' when the robot attempts to kill a bird that got inside... only to wind up ''destroying its own power core''.

* "Jack in the Box": A young child is raised by his mom in a giant mansion... [[PsychologicalHorror and is lead to believe their house is the entirety of the Universe, and he is in fact a God.]] He also grows up believing, again thanks to the mom, that the "original God" (his dad) was murdered by beasts once he left the "Universe". The implication of all of this, of course, is that the dad (for one reason or another) is no longer part of the family, and the mom took it ''so poorly'' she proceeded to psychologically abuse her son. What's worse is how the story ends: After discovering his mom has died on the floor, the boy decides to leave the "Universe", being overjoyed with having "died".

** If you were wondering why the water is like that, just before they finished the Aqueduct, [[FridgeHorror the North was torn by a devastating war.]]

%% In the After Dark series, there are PLENTY of scares. As well as the chilling stories, the black and white gruesome illustrations didn't help one bit!
** One of them involved a school-girl for a school project who learns about how Cod Liver can help halt aging, so she feeds it to her parents... And they start [[ArtisticLicenseBiology de-evolving to]] [[EvolutionaryLevels primates]], and then just when you think it was over... '''her baby sister''', who was fed cod earlier, starts to de-evolve too...

--->"See, baby? Something bright, something pretty..."
--->A scalpel.

* The short story "Literature/ThereWillComeSoftRains" describes the activities of an automated house, long since abandoned but still running on its programming. As the story progresses, it becomes clear [[spoiler: that humanity was destroyed in a nuclear war at some point in the past (there is a reference to children's shadows burned into a wall). The house still runs, until it finally succumbs to decay at the end, but nobody will ever live there again]]. The title refers to a poem about how life will continue even after the end of humanity; the story basically says, "Not if we screw things up first". Haunting. (Incidentally the story can be read online [[http://www.gs.cidsnet.de/englisch-online/originals/soft_rains.htm here]]).
** The most disturbing part of the whole story: [[spoiler: The only living thing you see during the whole story is the family's dog, returning home to die from radiation sickness and starvation]]. Every man, woman and child should be forced to read this story. Do that, and it's a safe bet that the only place we will be launching any nukes will be straight into the sun.
*** What about seeing [[spoiler: the silhouettes burnt into the wall of the house, showing just where the people were when the bomb went off? In particular, you get this set of silhouettes, showing a boy, a girl, both of them adorable, and the ball that they had been tossing between them.]]
*** Apparently this actually happened IRL in [[spoiler: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]]
*** The Russian animated adaptation of the story makes it worse. The house, instead of seeming maternal and friendly, looks and sounds like it would kill you at any given second. [[spoiler: The family's fate is more gruesome. Instead of having their silhouettes burned into the side of the house, they were burned to ash while sleeping in their beds. The robot unknowingly dumps the family's ashes on the floor when it tries to wake them up.]]
*** Not to mention the voice of the house... dear God, the voice...

* Lots of Ray Bradbury stories fall into this category, especially if they've been made into episode of ''Franchise/TheTwilightZone'': for example, "The Elevator", "The Burning Man"... For example, in one of the short stories in Creator/RayBradbury's ''Literature/TheMartianChronicles''-- ''Usher II''-- the guy [[spoiler: re-enacts various Edgar Allen Poe stories]].
* Also, his short story ''Usher II'', in which [[spoiler: all the guests at a party are executed in various gruesome ways (one is stuffed up a chimney by a gorilla) while their robot replicas watch on, thus assuring that none of the guests know what is happening until their own downfall.]]
* In the After Dark series, there are PLENTY of scares. As well as the chilling stories, the black and white gruesome illustrations didn't help one bit!
** One of them involved a school-girl for a school project who learns about how Cod Liver can help halt aging, so she feeds it to her parents... And they start [[ArtisticLicenseBiology de-evolving to]] [[EvolutionaryLevels primates]], and then just when you think it was over... [[spoiler: HER BABY SISTER who was fed cod earlier, starts to de-evolve too!]] AAAHHH!

* And "Skeleton", a story about a man who developed a phobia of his own skeleton, especially his ''teeth''. His freaking ''teeth''. [[spoiler: In the end, he visits a man who is implied to be some sort of inhuman monster and VOLUNTARILY has his skeleton SUCKED OUT OF HIM]]. His skeleton is then [[spoiler:eaten by the monster]].
-->"It was when the jellyfish ''called you by name''..."
* "The Small Assassin". It's a short story about a new father who believes his child is fully aware, fully mobile, and killing things; he tries to involve the doctors who treat him as if these are insane ramblings [[spoiler: despite mounting evidence that the father is actually right]]. Eventually the doctor starts to believe the father. The story ends on these immortal lines as the doctor goes looking for the infant:
--->'''Doctor''': See, baby? Something bright, something pretty...

* "The Veldt", where an animatronic playroom actually came to life and lions devoured the parents of two seemingly indifferent children. What makes the The Veldt all the more nightmarish is that [[spoiler:the children weren't even disturbed by their parents' deaths, and that they seemed to have been planning the whole death of their parents all this time. The screams they heard in the playroom turned out to be the screams of the simulated versions of the parents!]]
* "The City", a terrifying short story where an artificially created city captures a spaceship full of men, drags them underground, graphically disembowels them with razors, and rebuilds them as zombie robots. Worse, the story ends [[spoiler:[[InferredHolocaust with the astronauts carrying plague bombs on their voyage back to Earth]]]].
* "The Whole Town's Sleeping"; a story about a single woman walking home alone in a town terrorized by a murderer called 'The Lonely One'. As if reading through her hand-twistingly tense night-time trek home (''through a ravine''!) wasn't bad enough, she believes she hears someone following her. She arrives home safe and sound and chastises herself for being so silly as to believe she was being followed, [[spoiler:when she hears, in the dark living room behind her, someone clear his throat.]]

** He continues that story in ''Dandelion Wine'' where some nearby children watch the police pull a body from the house... then lament that [[spoiler:the woman had killed him with a nearby pair of scissors instead of letting him get away because it was just ''so much fun'' with a serial killer loose in the town.]] Thank you Bradbury, for making a happy ending just as disturbing as a bad one.
* "The Emissary". A bedridden boy's dog goes out each day to find things for him, and one day leads a young teacher to the house, who befriends him and becomes his tutor. But then [[spoiler: she dies unexpectedly, and his dog vanishes for several weeks. Then his dog returns very late one night, covered in deep, worm-ridden dirt, his paws bleeding from days of non-stop digging. And then there's a shadow at the bedroom door, a voice calls his name, and the story ends with "Martin had company".]]
* "Fever Dream" - BodyHorror meets AndIMustScream meets CassandraTruth.
* "Jack in the Box". Gorgeous, happy descriptions of... ohnothat'sso''wrong!'' And the little boy being overjoyed [[spoiler:[[ItMakesSenseInContext when he finds out he's "dead"]].]]

* [[http://englischlehrer.de/texts/aqueduct.php "The Aqueduct"]]: An extremely short story centering around the titular aqueduct which is supposed to deliver water from the North to the South... only the water that finally arrives isn't like regular water at all, but [[spoiler:thick and red...]]
** If you were wondering why the water is like that, [[spoiler:just before they finished the Aqueduct, the North was torn by a devastating war.]] That's where it's all coming from...
* In a very early and short Bradbury story done for ''Weird Tales'', the dead in a cemetery are communicating to each other via knocking on their caskets. Their topic of conversation? [[spoiler:"Mrs. Jones is having her baby today." And it ends with a thin wail rising from one of the caskets...]]
* "Night Call Collect": An engineer named Emil Barton has spent the past 60 years in complete solitude on Mars after all the settlers returned to Earth on the eve of World War 3 in a vain attempt at stopping the war, leaving Barton stranded, with nothing except all the resources and technology of the empty Martian cities... and time. The story starts on his 80th birthday, when the phone suddenly rings... [[spoiler: It's a recording of himself, 60 years in the past. Barton quickly began to go insane, both from the isolation and the fact that he was likely the last human alive. To pass the time "while awaiting rescue", Barton spent decades putting up new phone infrastructure all over Mars and programming recordings of himself to call him years in the future, growing increasingly unhinged as he did so. The calls the elderly Barton is getting (and none of which he remembers making anymore due to senility) in the story are increasingly callous and sadistic, especially one of the last which is just a cruel HopeSpot pretending to be a rescue ship from Earth. The story ends with Barton dying of old age, while two of the recordings begin talking to eachother.]]
* "The Man Upstairs": A boy discovers that the new tenant in his grandmothers apartment building is some sort of HumanoidAbomination, who acts adversely to anything made of silver, goes into a trance during the day from which nothing can wake him, and when seen through blue-tinted glass, his human form seems to melt away, revealing all manner of bizarre shapes inside him. [[spoiler: The boy ends up disembowling him during the day when the man can't move, removing his organs like his grandmother does when she guts chickens, revealing that the man wasn't even close to human when all his organs are brightly colored geometric shapes. AND HE'S STILL ALIVE AFTERWARDS! He doesn't die until the boy fills his chest cavity with silver coins.]] Apparently Bradbury based this story on his memories of watching his own grandmother gut chickens for dinner.
** The scene where the boy looks at the sleeping man through the blue glass, and his eye is open, staring at him, but ONLY when seen through the glass.

* Lots of Ray Bradbury stories fall into this category, especially if they've been made into episode of ''Franchise/TheTwilightZone'': for example, "The Elevator", "The Burning Man"... For example, in one of the short stories in Creator/RayBradbury's ''TheMartianChronicles''-- ''Usher II''-- the guy [[spoiler: re-enacts various Edgar Allen Poe stories]].

* ''The October Game'': A man kills his little daughter at her Halloween party. Then he turns out the lights and passes the body parts around, and meanwhile all the kids are trying to figure out what happened to the little girl and the mom is freaking out and screaming for no one to turn the lights back on. The last line is "... and then, some idiot turned on the lights." And what makes it worse is that the man ''hasn't'' gone crazy--his wife, who didn't give him the son he wanted and who adores their only daughter, doesn't love him. He kills the child as punishment for his wife... to take away the thing she loves best in the entire world.

* The short story "Literature/ThereWillComeSoftRains" describes the activities of an automated house, long since abandoned but still running on its programming. As the story progresses, it becomes clear [[spoiler: that humanity was destroyed in a nuclear war at some point in the past (there is a reference to children's shadows burned into a wall). The house still runs, until it finally succumbs to decay at the end, but nobody will ever live there again]]. The title refers to a poem about how life will continue even after the end of humanity; the story basically says, "Not if we screw things up first". Haunting. (Incidentally the story can be read online) [[http://www.gs.cidsnet.de/englisch-online/originals/soft_rains.htm here]].

* The short story "Literature/ThereWillComeSoftRains" describes the activities of an automated house, long since abandoned but still running on its programming. As the story progresses, it becomes clear [[spoiler: that humanity was destroyed in a nuclear war at some point in the past (there is a reference to children's shadows burned into a wall). The house still runs, until it finally succumbs to decay at the end, but nobody will ever live there again]]. The title refers to a poem about how life will continue even after the end of humanity; the story basically says, "Not if we screw things up first". Haunting. (Incidentally the story can be read online [[http://www.gs.cidsnet.de/englisch-online/originals/soft_rains.htm here]].

* Lots of Ray Bradbury stories fall into this category, esp if they've been made into ''Series/TwilightZone'' episodes, for example, "The Elevator", "The Burning Man"... For example, in one of the short stories in Creator/RayBradbury's ''TheMartianChronicles''-- ''Usher II''-- the guy [[spoiler: re-enacts various Edgar Allen Poe stories]].