one of my favourite short stories of all times is The Beast in the Jungle by henry james.

i believe the quotation below sums up the story perfectly.  james has a distinct way of depicting the complexity of human nature.  this particular fear and mystery james describes below is very close to my heart.

    "Well, it was very simple.  You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you."

    "Do you call that very simple?"  John Marcher asked.

    She thought a moment.  "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke, to understand it."

    "You do understand it?" he eagerly asked.

    "Again she kept her kind eyes on him.  "You still have the belief?"

    "Oh!"  he exclaimed helplessly.  There was too much to say.

    "Whatever it's to be, she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet come."

    He shook his head in complete surrender now.  "It hasn't yet come.  Only, you know, it isn't anyting I'm to do, to achieve in the world to be distinguished or admired for.  I'm not such an ass as that.  it would be much better, no doubt, if I were."

    "It's to be something you're merely to suffer?

    "Well, say to wait for--to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everythig, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves."

    She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery.  "Isn't what you describe perhaps but the expectation---or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people--of falling in love?"