Ottilie Harwood lived in one wing of Sedgwick Hall, and her widowed father lived in the other. She knew him mainly through traces: the scent of pipe smoke, a crumpled…
Horror
Baggage
No one—not her friends, business colleagues, or Wall Street rivals—ever guessed that the oversized briefcase that had become Thelia’s trademark was actually her husband. If she ever found herself in…
Peeky Eyes
Anya sat bolt upright in bed and sucked in air through clenched teeth. Her nightshirt clung to her skin and her hair was smeared wetly against her cheek. She gasped…
The Spectre of St. John’s Churchyard
Vacant heart and hand and eye,Easy live and quiet die. —Sir Walter Scott I. Providence, Rhode Island, 1848: The Hotel Bar The bar in Edgar Allan Poe’s hotel is a…
Sphincter and Sphinx
The new client was a hugely fat, fez-wearing mystery gink from the incest-and-incense-redolent East. He had beautiful hands, ripe with purple finger jewels. He seemed a little too happy to…
Stairway to Nowhere
1. It’s been fifty years since I first heard the Pipes of Eld. I was fifteen when the ancient-modern sound emerged: flutes, crude wood or shining silver, reed-pipes, recorders and…
Hunchback Assistant Tells All
1 My dear Mrs. Shelley — No, that won’t do — she’s neither “mine” nor dear — To Mary — No, that sounds like a dedication, when nothing of that…
Silent Josefa
I was just a kid from Saragossa, in Aragon. Christian Spain at its most honest and authentic. Bad soil, tough meat, sour wine, sparse firewood . . .
The Judgment of Cambyses
It was August 2075 in Brussels. A dying arts and antiquities dealer needed an heir – a suitable one, one that wouldn’t squander and ruin the business he had spent…
Six Vincents
“Now it says here that you used to eat your paints? Can this be true?” Graham Norton asks his guest with a hint of amused disgust as he shuffles through…