He slipped on a set of headphones,
Adjusted a dial or two,
Then introduced his radio show
And the members of his crew,
‘The Horror Tales of the Greats’ he read
Each week to the folk in town,
Just as the Moon was coming up
With the sun then truly down.

And the folk had huddled round speakers
To hear, in a thousand homes,
The tales of Edgar Allan Poe
In the speaker’s crackling tones,
And an eerie mist fell over the town
If they chanced to look outside,
As the ghosts of horror stories past
Rose up from the place they died.

Each tone was sent with a shiver
From the night’s Plutonian shore,
Just as that stately bird of old
Had repeated, ‘Nevermore!’
While the cats had yowled in the alleyways
When he read a tale of sin,
Of walling up the corpse of his wife
When the Black Cat did him in.

The Fall of the House of Usher,
The Masque of the Red Death,
The tales built up in the atmosphere
And made them short of breath,
The Cask of Amontillado,
The Pendulum and the Pit,
Whatever the horror, and most intense
There was always more of it.

The stars that shone in the evening sky
Had gone, though the sky was clear
As the Moon had dropped down, over a hill
While the airwaves dripped with fear,
And the walls back there, in the studio
Were seeming to seep a flood,
As the speaker droned in the microphone
The studio filled with blood.

And suddenly then, a different voice
Was heard all over the town,
Rattling through their radio’s
And shouting the reader down.
‘Shutter your windows and lock your doors
Put children under the bed,
Hide yourselves right under the stairs
Or you may well end up dead!’

‘The very air that you breathe has been
Long saturated with dread,
Has filled your lungs with the ripe unclean
That came from somebody’s head.
The ghostly voice on your radio
That has whispered blood and gore,
Will drown tonight in the studio
So there won’t be any more.’

And right behind that terrible voice
There was choking sounds and screams,
Enough to curdle the very blood
And to give them nightmare dreams,
Then after a long, chilled silence of
The type that terror sates,
A voice said, ‘that was the final of
The Horror Tales of the Greats.’

David Lewis Paget