Strange Suspense Stories #40

A brilliant but obsessed inventor finally completes his lifelong machine—one designed to pull his great-grandfather back from the past and reveal the location of a buried family fortune. When Henry Gladstone activates his creation and his ancestor appears with a map in hand, he believes his years of sacrifice are about to pay off, but the treasure waiting beneath the lightning-blasted oak tells a very different story.

A quiet man with glasses arrives at Baybrook State Mental Hospital, his origins a complete mystery to the staff—no one knows who he is or where he came from. As the staff observes his strange behavior and peculiar interactions, he begins taking notes on those around him, displaying an unusual sense of authority that leaves everyone wondering just what's really going on.

Professor Wiley takes pride in his robot servant, Bardo, until a business trip gives the ambitious machine the perfect opportunity to build a superior robot of its own—one crafted with a revolutionary artificial brain powered by the professor's diamonds. When Bardo's creation awakens, it's far more intelligent and willful than its maker imagined, and the two robots' struggle for dominance takes an unexpected turn that neither could have predicted.

Practical skin diver Casy ventures down off the reef for a routine dive, only to encounter something impossible in the liquid depths—something that leaves him questioning what's real when he surfaces. "Casy's Kiss" blends everyday adventure with underwater mystery, transforming a hard-nosed man into someone forever haunted by what he experienced in the dark below.

Hall Brencher, a fugitive on the run from multiple states, stumbles upon an abandoned house on a hill and decides it's the perfect place to hide—only to find a mysterious woman already there, offering him food and shelter with quiet kindness. After a night of genuine rest and a good meal, Brencher awakens with an inexplicable change of heart and turns himself in to the police, joining a mysterious pattern of hardened criminals who've done the same after staying in that peculiar house. When the officers investigate, they uncover the extraordinary truth behind the "Lady of the House" and her unusual way of seeking justice.

When a catastrophic hurricane tears away a mountainside near Stewart's cabin in the Adirondacks, three college instructors discover a strange green object buried in the exposed earth—one that Stewart suspects may be the "unexploded bomb" he theorized could change mankind's fate. As curiosity draws them closer to the mysterious thing, they sense an inexplicable dread, and nature itself seems determined to keep the discovery hidden. A tense meditation on what lies dormant beneath the world, waiting for the moment when human discovery might unleash something far beyond our control.