The House Surgeon by Rudyard Kipling

The House Surgeon by Rudyard Kipling
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A bright, modern house in the south of England. No history of violence. No death on the premises. And yet something lives in it — not a ghost, not a presence you could name, but a weight that settles over everyone who stays there. A grief that belongs to no one in the house. A judgement passed somewhere else, by someone else, for reasons the walls should know nothing about. The question is not what haunts the house. The question is what was done to the dead.

"The House Surgeon" was first published in *Harper's Magazine* in September 1909 and collected in *Actions and Reactions* later that year.

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, and remains one of the most widely read English writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.