Cover

HE SAW—DID HE? YES—HE SAW A FIGURE OUT THERE—A HUMAN FIGURE DRAPED IN THE MIST …

… silhouetted by the moonlight, raven black, so black it seemed less a being than an absence of existence. It was tall. Its head was bent as if in prayer. Its profile was obscured either by a cowl or by flowing hair. And it was moving with slow and awful majesty among the churchyard stones.

Storm gaped. He felt woozy suddenly, paralyzed. It was real, he thought. He was really seeing it. He was seeing something anyway, a spectral something gliding through the mist, gliding steadily towards the fragment of the chapel wall.

“What is it?” said Sophia behind him. She had risen from the bed, and was standing beside it, one hand thrown out to one of the posts. Her face expressionless, her features cold, but there was a frightened, almost pleading look in her eyes.

He didn’t answer her. An hallucination, he thought. It must be an hallucination. But still it went on. And there, beside that ruined wall—before the small crypt where Storm himself had stood—there, as he stood watching, frozen and amazed, the jet absence seemed to sink at the same stately pace, sink lower and lower into the hard earth, until only the head remained about the surface.

And then that too—all, all of it—had vanished.…

Other Books by This Author

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

AS ANDREW KLAVAN

True Crime

Son of Man

Darling Clementine

Face of the Earth

Don’t Say a Word

The Animal Hour

Corruption

AS KEITH PETERSON

The Scarred Man

Rough Justice

The Rain

There Fell a Shadow

The Trapdoor

SCREENPLAY

A Shock to the System

Title Page

Copyright

Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036

You Do Something to Me, by Cole Porter. © 1929 (renewed) Warner Bros., Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1998 by Amalgamated Metaphor, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, New York.

The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

eISBN: 978-0-307-79122-1

Reprinted by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

v3.1

Dedication

This book is for my mother and father.

Epigraph

“Stay, Illusion!”
      —HAMLET

I

PROLOGUE:
BLACK
ANNIE