
A rainy summer afternoon finds a young man traveling with his brother Tristan and Tristan's fiancée Alice across a wide, wind‑blown field. As thunder rolls overhead, they scramble for shelter beneath a solitary oak, exchanging banter that hints at both camaraderie and unease. The narrator hesitates, feeling an inexplicable repulsion toward the tree, while the storm hammers them with cold sheets of rain.
Suddenly a pulsating, multicolored sphere drifts into view, hovering just above the grass and casting eerie, shifting lights on the drenched faces around it. Tristan, drawn by curiosity, reaches out, only for the orb to explode in a blinding flash that sends a shockwave through the field. When the light fades, the three survivors find Tristan grotesquely immobilized—his body twisted and pinned upside‑down on a branch, as if the sky itself had turned him inside out.
Language
en
Duration
~44 minutes (42K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
Jul 12, 2009
Rights
Public domain in the USA.
Subjects
1891–1988
A civil engineer by profession and a restless independent thinker at heart, he wrote fiction and spiritual commentary with the same plainspoken, questioning voice. His work moves between imagination, philosophy, and a lifelong interest in Theosophy.
View all books
by Vinceslas-Eugène Dick

by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé

by Abraham Cahan

by Eliza Fowler Haywood

by Laure Conan

by Pauline E. (Pauline Elizabeth) Hopkins

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps