Other One, The

The Other One begins like a simple assignment: a young bank clerk is sent to deliver gold to a wealthy hermit living deep in the hills of West Virginia. But the lonely stone house, the locked cellar, and the unsettling behavior of its owner hint at something far stranger beneath the surface. What follows is a chilling confession, a vanished man, and a wine cask with a secret that no one — not even the bank that trusted him — was prepared to face. Blending mystery, gothic suspense, and a twist that still lands more than a century later, A. H. Gibson’s story delivers the kind of eerie, slow-building tension that early pulp fiction did best. There are no aliens or machines here — just greed, identity, betrayal, and a revenge plot that literally refuses to die. Very little is known about author A. H. Gibson, whose work appeared in The Black Cat magazine in the late 1800s, a publication famous for strange, psychological, and macabre tales long before science fiction standardized its tropes. Writers like Gibson lived in the twilight zone between ghost stories and proto science fiction, experimenting with dark morality tales, uncanny realism, and stories built on shocking final turns. Gibson never became a household name, but The Other One shows exactly why forgotten authors from the pulp era deserve rediscovery: they weren’t just writing entertainment — they were inventing the blueprint for modern genre twists and stories where nothing is ever what it seems.