Imagine a day that goes along very peacefully when a sudden shock appears out of nowhere. After someone experiences this sudden shock, they suddenly begin to act more watchful and cautious of their surroundings after facing such a terrifying experience. When someone gets hurt or gets harmed by something, they normally make conscious decisions to stay away from whatever has harmed them. People experience fear of something, not only when they feel the effects of it, but also when other people feel the pain of something as well. Fear has effects of people who don’t experience it after they picture the feeling of pain that other people are going through. Ray Bradbury uses the experiences of different characters in his books to display the fears…show more content… Many of the short stories in this collection use spooky thoughts and feelings to mess with the characters mind and inspire fear. In the short story Trapdoor, an old lady named Clara Peck has lived in her house for a very long time. One fine day, she feels terrified when she goes upstairs and receives the huge surprise of an attic which she finds for the very first time. “She stopped dead, midstairs, to glare at the surprise, daring it to be true. ‘It can’t be! How could I have been so blind? Good grief, there’s an attic in my house!’ She had marched up and downstairs a thousand times on a thousand days and had never seen.” (17) When Clara recognizes something new in a house she has lived in for a long time, she freaks out because she doesn’t know what lies behind the trapdoor. She feels nervous about it because she thinks someone could appear from inside the attic. On top of this terrible scare, hearing lots of voices and thumping inside the attic really freaks her out to the point where she has trouble sleeping. When she calls an inspector to check out the attic, she feels even more terrified when he goes missing. In this case, she feels fear because she doesn’t know what has happened to him and doesn’t want to experience the same pain as the…show more content… In the short story Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned, a young man feels deep sorrow for his actions as a child and goes to the church to have his sins forgiven by Father Mellon. This young boy faces mental torture of feeling his sins and fears that something really bad will happen to him if he doesn’t get blessings and forgiveness. He decides to go really late at night to the church and finds the priest there. “ ‘Sixty years this week, when I was twelve,’ said the gray voice, “I Christmas-shopped with my grandmother in a small town back East. We walked both ways. In those days, who had a car? We walked, and coming home with the wrapped gifts, my grandma said something, I’ve long since forgotten what, and I got mad and ran ahead, away from her.” (185) The fact that this young boy has felt haunted for sixty years really shows the seriousness and effectiveness of Bradbury’s tone. When someone spends over half of their life worrying about a single mistake they made as a child, their fear keeps on growing and they can never enjoy a moment of their life properly without worrying about their consequences. Bradbury teaches readers an important lesson that they should think before they act not only because of the consequences, but also because of the guilt that will carry on for a very long time. This experience faced by the young boy has taught him to make better decisions and think before he