The Monkey's Paw

On a wet night at the end of a half-empty road, an old couple and their grown son are entertaining a sergeant-major back from twenty-one years in India when he lets slip what he keeps in his pocket: a small dried talisman, spelled by a holy man to grant three wishes to three men and to prove that meddling with fate has a price. He has had his three. He will not say what they cost him.

They laugh, and wish anyway — modestly, for two hundred pounds to clear the house. The money comes. So does the rest of the bargain, in a shape nobody thought to specify. The story that set the pattern for every cursed-wish tale since.