A long underrated masterpiece of Kipling’s brilliant narration, They is a hauntingly beautiful tale of eternal love and loss. During a motor trip, the writer chances upon a country house which is visited by elusive and mysterious children, and meets the equally mysterious blind lady who lives there. Fascinated, enchanted, and yet somehow unsettled by the experience, he finds himself repeatedly drawn back to the house until finally the uncanny truth dawns.
“I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple. Gypsies I found on a common where … the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little further on I disturbed a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.”
They is one of the spookiest and most moving short stories ever written.
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