A large languid eye which glittered feebly in the pale light
While looking for something else in a google image search, I came across the cover of The Last Bouquet: Twilight Tales by Marjorie Bowen. The name rang a bell, and looking her up, I recognized "The Crown Derby Plate," a ghost story that has always stayed with me. Project Gutenburg has (most of) the book, and the stories are amazing, and for the most part, amazingly bleak(1). The standouts include "The Hidden Ape," which is horrible without being necessarily supernatural; "Florence Flannery - An Ornament in Regency Paste," which starts as a Regency Gothic and unexpectedly acquires a Lovecraftian taint; and "The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes," which is... some kind of fragment of a fairy-tale where we have to fill in the first two acts; we only see the third act, which in the style of the Victorian pantomimes has transfigured the situation into some kind of Harlequinade because reality would never permit a happy ending.
(1) The last story in the collection, "Raw Material," is an exception to this: a tale of murder and haunting which doesn't go where you think it will.
(1) The last story in the collection, "Raw Material," is an exception to this: a tale of murder and haunting which doesn't go where you think it will.