This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. On a bitter winter night in the Sierra Nevada, in a lonely cabin above a played-out mining camp, Hiram Beeson sits before his fire and does not sleep. He has not slept properly in years.
Beneath the floorboards lies a Chinese labourer he buried himself, and Beeson committed one small impropriety at that burial: he cut off the dead man's queue and nailed it to the wall above the grave. Every night the ghost comes back for it. Every night Beeson watches, half mad with dread, waiting for the moment it comes loose.
Then a stranger walks in out of the snow, a large silent man with a bowie knife and no visible interest in Beeson's story, and takes a seat by the fire to see the night through.
Subtitled by its author "A Story That Is Untrue", this is Bierce at his most characteristic: a genuine ghost story told with a straight face and a cold, mocking grin.
