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…
Rainshadow
I was never one of those people who hates the rain. Some people—most, I suppose—see the gray clouds rolling in like fluffy waves and feel the first few drops tap…
The Traffic Cone
Leo ran his pawnshop out of a brick storefront he rented in a strip mall just outside of town. It had a Cut-Rate Vacuum on one side and on the…
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,”…