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a wooden box which she possessed and to sleep there.
    The protest against this petition was fierce. She was shocked, the old woman, he had no doubt. To whom did it occur to think of making him sleep in such heat inside a box which surely would be full of vermin!
    But such were the supplications of the ancient woman, and as the youth loved her so, he decided to accede to this caprice. The box was big, and although a little drawn in, it would not be all that bad. With great care, the bed was set up in the back. He placed himself inside, and the sad widow took a seat beside the furniture, dedicated to passing the night in vigil in order to close it if there were the least sign of danger.
    She calculated that it was midnight, as the very low moon began to light the room, when suddenly a little black shape, almost imperceptible, jumped over the lintel of the door which she had not closed due to the great heat. Antonia was shaken with anguish.
    There it was, then, the vengeful animal, squatting on its hind legs, as if meditating a plan. What evil the youth had done in laughing! That little lugubrious figure, immobile on the moonlit door, was growing extraordinarily, taking on monstrous proportions. But what if it was not more than one of those familiar toads which enter the house each night in search of insects? For a moment she breathed easy, sustained by this idea. Then the escuerzo suddenly gave a little jump, then another, in the direction of the box. Its intention was clear. It was not pressured, as if it were certain of its prey. Antonia watched her son with an indescribable expression of horror: sleeping, lost to dream, breathing slowly.
    Then, with an unquiet hand, without making any noise she let fall the cover. The animal was not deterred. It continued jumping. It was already at the foot of the box. It went around it deliberately, it stopped at one of the angles, and quickly, with an incredible leap for its small size, it planted itself on top of the cover.
    Antonia did not dare to make the least movement. All of her life was concentrated in her eyes. The moon now bathed the entire room. And behold what followed: the toad began to swell up by degrees; it grew, it grew in a prodigious manner, until it tripled its size. It remained so for a minute, during which the poor woman felt all the anguish of death pass through her heart. Then, it shrank itself, shrinking until it recovered its primitive form; it leaped to the ground, went through the door and crossing the patio it finally lost itself among the grass.
    Then Antonia dared to lift herself, trembling everywhere. With a violent gesture she opened wide the box. What she felt was so horrible that a few months later she died a victim of the fear that it produced.
    A mortal cold left the open box, and the youth was frozen and rigid under a sad light in which the moon shrouded that sepulchral victim, made stone now under an inexplicable bath of frost.

APARTMENT 205
    Mark Samuels
    Mark Samuels is an English writer of weird fiction in the tradition of Arthur Machen and H. P. Lovecraft. Many of his short stories map the outlines of a shadowy modern London hiding a dark and terrifying secret. Samuels’ first collection, The White Hands (2003) was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award.
    Pieter Slokker awoke from a dream in which he was trapped in a dark, windowless room. It was three o’clock in the morning, and it sounded as if someone was hammering at the door of his flat.
    Slokker had not lived long in Paris. He had moved from Bruges to this cramped apartment close to the Gare du Nord Station only a few months before, in order to finish his studies in medicine. He knew no one in the mouldering old building save the garrulous concierge, and had seldom even passed a fellow tenant as he made his way up and down the torturous spiral staircase which led to his rooms on the fourth floor.
    As he became more fully awake, Pieter felt a mounting sense of apprehension. The blows