Showing results by narrator "Mike Vendetti" in All Categories

They were married, but they hated and couldn't stand each other. Why not a divorce? Not that easy when there is a lot of money involved. Perhaps they could work things out on a trip to the Swiss Alps.

Did he drown? Is he dreaming? Did he almost drown? Only Lord Dunsany, aka Edward Plunkett, the eighteenth baron of Dunsany, knows for sure.

Mr. Abney, the owner of Aswarby, a tall, square, red-brick mansion built in the reign of Anne, proved himself to be a very evil man. No one knew more of the religious beliefs of the later pagans than did the owner of Aswarby. He performed hideous experiments on such persons as could conveniently be removed without occasioning a gap in society. The final "victim" - to employ a word repugnant in the highest degree to his feelings - must be his cousin, Stephen Elliott, a 12-year-old orphan.

The caveman. Dominant. Fighting for his woman, and dragging her off by the hair. Master of these caves. The cavewoman, submissive, waiting to be dragged off by her caveman. In the real world, not quite how it is, but we can always speculate.

Read by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti, this short story written in 1850 by Charles Dickens is beautiful in its simplicity. A boy grows to a man with the memory of him and his now dead sister gazing upon the evening star, imagining it as a gate to heaven.

This short story by O. Henry depicts the plight of a homeless person, Soapy, living in New York at the turn of the last century. A park bench is fine during the summer, but winter comes and Soapy needs a winter home. God willing to pay the price of philanthropy, Soapy determines to spend the winter months in jail. Now the problem is how to be arrested.

A short story by Edgar Allen Poe about a mesmerist who puts a man, M. Valdemar, in a hypnotic state at the moment of death. M. Valdimar remains in the state for seven months. When the mesmerist removes M. Valdemar from this state, it resembles opening the door of a freezer that has been unplugged for months, the turkey inside.

Do you believe in ghosts? You might reconsider if you don't after listening to this story of a man haunted by a longtime enemy.

"Abolish Language," said the vizier, "And man will return to primal simplicity and happiness."

The story of aging George Stransom, who is obsessed with observing the anniversary of his fiancée Mary Antrim's death, a fact that leads him to expand his commemorative pantheon to include all the other departed friends who live on in his memory. As in life, if we live long enough, the departed outnumber the living. When Stransom becomes the last of the living, who will light a candle for him?

Lois, a beautiful 19-year-old young woman travels to Baltimore to meet Harold, her love interest, as they consider a breakup. We never meet Harold; instead, the short story becomes more about Catholicism and the priesthood, as Lois first spends an afternoon with Keith, her 36-year-old brother, a seminarian in a Jesuit monastery. Lois and Keith have not seen one another for 16 years, so it is an extremely interesting reunion.

A young engineer loves his steam locomotive, Number Eighty-Seven. It is new and being broken in; it is just coming to life when a highwayman robs the gold being carried in one of her cars. When he recklessly attempts to use Number Eighty-Seven in his escape, the locomotive becomes almost human.

Metempsychosis, the supposed transmigration and death of the soul of a human being or animal into a new body of the same or a different species is the key to this short story by Edgar Allen Poe, narrated by award-winning narrator Mike Vendetti. "Metzegerstein", the title of this short story by Edgar Allen Poe, is the name family name of a family that has carried on a long standing feud with the Berlifitzing family bitter rivals somewhere in Eastern Europe.

A very short story by Ambrose Bierce, that as Bierce is so prone to do ends with quite a surprise.

It is the turn of the last century, and Alaska is a mysterious wilderness. At the suggestion of several hundred thousand ladies desiring to revel and possibly riot in the saturnalia of equal franchise, the unnamed lakes in that vast and little known region in Alaska bounded by the Ylanqui River and the Thunder Mountains were now being inexorably named after women.

Robert Hugh Benson, a Catholic priest wrote this short story of the taking the life of a songbird, and the vision that accompanied it.

Here is a very short, a very slight sort of tale which may yet manage to hold either a very big ghost or a very potent allegory. Lord Dunsany penned this sometime about the period of the First World War. Yet in what period of history, from the most ancient past up to very present, has not something of the spectre of Andelsprutz been perceptible to those with a sense of history. For those, this story will prove a "thought-piece" as well as a compelling fantasy.

Forbidden love in name baronial estate. An evil man dies with an evil smile upon his face believing his evil secret is going with him to the grave. And there it remains until the lovers creep into the crypt shortly after the stroke of midnight. An erie tale certain to creep you out and keep you in suspense.

What a coincidence. The mummies wake up once a millennium, and who should stumble into the pyramid but our hero? This is a fun little story about a British ne'er-do-well who has found possible wealth and prosperity by becoming engaged to the rather plain - and plain is a nice word for it - daughter of a new English nobleman. But wait. He wanders into the pyramid when the mummies have their 24 hours of life once a millennium, and he falls madly in love with the Pharaoh's daughter, who is some 6,000 years old.

A master hustler and bank robber befriends a starving gentleman on Market Street in San Francisco. He engages the man, who hasn't eaten for three days, in a game of dice over a bottle of absinthe. The starving man plays amazingly well as he warms his empty stomach with the liquor - so well in fact that the last hand has $148,000 on the table.