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…
Horror
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…
The Greatest Gift
The stockings were up, the tree was strung, and the night was aging quickly, when John saw Matty sit up in bed and stare wide-eyed at the ceiling. “He’s here,”…
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…
Nocturama
“I don’t see why you’re so upset,” she said, tapping the ash from her cigarette. They were sitting outside on the back porch. It was August, still warm in the…
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 . . .