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Henry Harris, an army doctor at a garrison on Earth is puzzled by a case of a soldier who returns from the asteroid Y-3, and claims that he's a plant. When several more men return from Y-3, each thinking they're a plant, Harris travels to the asteroid to solve the puzzle. He soon finds out that the soldiers claim that a certain indigenous people on the asteroid called "Pipers", who live in the woods, made them realize that they're plants. Harris ventures into the woods and discovers that Pipers do not exist, they were merely invented by the soldiers to cope with the pressure of their jobs. The soldiers relaxed by simply turning into plants, or their minds thought so. Harris returns to earth and contemplates all the work that lies ahead of him. He unpacks his suitcases, which, rather than carrying clothes, contain soil from Y-3. Harris lays the soil on the ground, lies in it like a plant, and goes to sleep.

Little Chandler eagerly awaits a reunion with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher, who moved to London eight years ago. A married man and father who earned his nickname from his small and delicate deportment, Little Chandler whittles away the afternoon hours at his clerical job, constantly thinking about his approaching evening drink. Little Chandler wonders in amazement at Gallaher’s impressive career writing for English newspapers, though he never doubted that Gallaher would do well for himself. As Little Chandler leaves work and walks to the bar where the men agreed to meet, he contemplates Gallaher’s homecoming and success, then thinks of his own stunted writing aspirations and the possibilities of life abroad that remain out of his reach. Little Chandler used to love poetry, but he gave it up when he got married. As he walks he considers the far-fetched possibility of writing his own book of poems.

Charles Dexter Ward is a young man from a prominent Rhode Island family who has disappeared from a mental asylum. He had been incarcerated during a prolonged period of insanity, during which he exhibited minor and inexplicable physiological changes. His empty cell is found to be very dusty. The bulk of the story concerns the investigation conducted by the Wards' family doctor, Marinus Bicknell Willett, in an attempt to discover the reason for Ward's madness and physiological changes. Willett learns that Ward had spent the past several years attempting to discover the grave of his ill-reputed ancestor, Joseph Curwen. The doctor slowly begins to reveal the truth behind the legends surrounding Curwen, an eighteenth-century shipping entrepreneur and alleged alchemist, who was in reality a necromancer and mass murderer. A raid on Curwen's farm was remarkable for the shouted incantations, lights, explosions, and some not-quite-human figures shot down by the raiders. The raiders swore any witnesses to strict secrecy about what they saw and heard.  As Willett's investigations proceed, he finds that Charles had recovered Curwen's ashes, and through the use of magical formulae contained in documents found hidden in Curwen's home in Providence, was able to call forth Curwen from his "essential saltes" and resurrect him. Willett also finds that Curwen, who resembles Charles enough to pass for him, murdered and replaced his modern descendant and resumed his evil activities. Although Curwen convinces onlookers that he is Charles, his anachronistic mindset and behavior lead authorities to certify him insane and imprison him in an asylum.

In one sense, it is a mere truism to speak of the evocative power of words. The olden efficacy of subtly woven spells, of magic formulas and incantations, has long become a literary metaphor; though the terrible reality which once underlay and may still underlie such concepts has been forgotten. However, the necromancy of language is more than a metaphor to Sir Roderick Hagdon: the scars of fire on his ankles are things which no one could possibly regard as having their origin in a figure of speech.

Alternately titled, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall The moon, being the nearest to the earth of all the heavenly bodies, has always occupied the imagination of men.

And just one word about fresh air and exercise. Don't bother with either of them. Get your room full of good air, then shut up the windows and keep it. It will keep for years. Anyway, don't keep using your lungs all the time. Let them rest. As for exercise, if you have to take it, take it and put up with it. But as long as you have the price of a hack and can hire other people to play baseball for you and run races and do gymnastics when you sit in the shade and smoke and watch them—great heavens, what more do you want?

this wasn't like any other group Mrs. Bellowes had ever joined. In her fervor to light a path for her delicate, tottering feet, she had struck matches down dark alleys, and found her way to Hindu mystics who floated their flickering, starry eyelashes over crystal balls. She had walked on the meadow paths with ascetic Indian philosophers imported by daughters-in-spirit of Madame Blavatsky. She had made pilgrimages to California's stucco jungles to hunt the astrological seer in his natural habitat. She had even consented to signing away the rights to one of her homes in order to be taken into the shouting order of a temple of amazing evangelists who had promised her golden smoke, crystal fire, and the great soft hand of God coming to bear her home.

None of these people had ever shaken Mrs. Bellowes' faith, even when she saw them sirened away in a black wagon in the night, or discovered their pictures, bleak and unromantic, in the morning tabloids. The world had roughed them up and locked them away because they knew too much, that was all.

And then, two weeks ago, she had seen Mr. Thirkell's advertisement in New York City:

COME TO MARS!

"Round trip," Mrs. Bellowes had thought. "But who would come back after seeing Him?" And so she had bought a ticket and flown off to Mars

The war had sapped him, nerve and brain and soul. Through all the years that had passed since then the wound had kept open. But now, as he slid his car down the vast green bowl, he felt its spirit reach out to him; reach out to him and caress and quiet him, promising him healing. He seemed to drift like a falling leaf through the clustered woods; to be cradled by gentle hands of the trees.

He had stopped at the little gnome of an inn, and there he had lingered, day after day, week after week.

The trees had nursed him; soft whisperings of leaves, slow chant of the needled pines, had first deadened, then driven from him the re-echoing clamor of the war and its sorrow. The open wound of his spirit had closed under their green healing; had closed and become scar; and even the scar had been covered and buried, as the scars on Earth's breast are covered and buried beneath the falling leaves of Autumn. The trees had laid green healing hands on his eyes, banishing the pictures of war. He had sucked strength from the green breasts of the hills.

Yet as strength flowed back to him and mind and spirit healed, McKay had grown steadily aware that the place was troubled; that its tranquillity was not perfect; that there was ferment of fear within it.

It was as though the trees had waited until he himself had become whole before they made their own unrest known to him. Now they were trying to tell him something; there was a shrillness as of apprehension, of anger, in the whispering of the leaves, the needled chanting of the pines.

Curious Relic For Sale by Mark Twain  As per advertisement in the "Herald." A curious old relic indeed, as I had a good personal right to know. In a single instant of time, a long drawn panorama of sights and scenes in the Holy Land flashed through my memory--town and grove, desert, camp, and caravan clattering after each other and disappearing, leaping me with a little of the surprised and dizzy feeling which I have experienced at sundry times when a long express train has overtaken me at some quiet curve and gone whizzing, car by car, around the corner and out of sight. In that prolific instant I saw again all the country from the Sea of Galilee #MarkTwain #Audiobook #story

After a down-on-his-luck scholar takes a job as a live-in secretary, translator and general assistant to an elderly occultist, he begins to experience a sense of deep unease. Strange noises in the night disturb his sleep and the obvious state of fear in which his employer lives only enhance this feeling.  Soon, events cause the occultist to divulge the fact that he and his brother had been dark magicians before he killed his more-powerful twin, and that the noises are his sibling's dismembered body parts returning to drive the man insane with terror before murdering him. He further reveals that he brought the other man into his home in an effort to find a way to banish his brother's restless spirit.  The Return of the Sorcerer by Clark Ashton Smith