Knock (1948) – Fredric Brown

There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…” Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn’t in the two sentences at all; it’s in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible. But it wasn’t horrible, really. The last man on Earth – or in the universe, for that matter – sat alone in a room. It was a rather peculiar room. He’d just noticed how peculiar it was and he’d been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusions didn’t horrify him, but it annoyed him. Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the time two days ago when Nathan University had ceased to exist, was not a man who horrifled easily. Not that Walter Phelan was a heroic figure, by any wild stretch of the imagination. He was slight of stature and…