“I myself believe the severing of the jugular to be decidedly orgasmic,” she said sweetly. Her voice was high and tremulous and creaky. “But the other ladies fell out over the use of teeth, you see. Margaret was very disagreeable and insisted they were entirely phallic, while Joan—who is getting on and can no longer hear quite as well as she used to—was shouting terribly loudly that their phallic qualities were a mere screen to protect the vulgar mind from the obviously vaginal threat of the fanged mouth.” She chuckled happily. “I do so love discussing theories, don’t you? Pointless hostility is such a wonderful stimulant, I find.”

“Yes, yes, charming, charming,” Harper muttered—but her mind was elsewhere. The tea in her blue willow cup was untouched, the biscuit on her plate untasted. She had been alternately tamping and lighting the tobacco in her meerschaum skull for the last ten minutes, but she hadn’t actually smoked the pipe at all. She was perched on the edge of an ancient pink sewing chair, a black Manx glued around one of her veiny ankles. Her eyes were darting nervously, continuously about the small parlor.

It was a room filled with books, shelves of books, stacks of books, clogging the fireplace, overflowing from the mantelpiece. And with the bay window covered by heavy green drapes, and the round tea table and its mismatched cushioned chairs virtually filling whatever floor space was left, Harper was beginning to feel closed in, clammy, claustrophobic. Because she kept hitting on little occurrences, dangerous little events. The miniature mantelpiece clock, for instance, was stopped at 3:31. A disordered pile of library books among the tea things were all from the section on the supernatural, all bearing the index numbers 133. A little bust of Constantine stood in one corner of the floor beside a sleeping Persian. And why on earth Constantine? Harper couldn’t help wondering. And she couldn’t help noticing that its inscription read, In Hoc Signo Vinces, part of the vision that the emperor saw in 312 A.D., and that caused him to take the cross a year later.

“But you wanted to talk about Monty,” said Rose Ponsonby. “Get off of there, you naughty things,” she added, as a tiger and a tortoiseshell leapt up on the table and butted heads over the teapot. “He’s upstairs, you know—Monty—but I doubt he’ll come down. He hasn’t, I’m afraid, since Julia Fitzroy-Leeman-St. John insulted him last autumn. She asked him why he hasn’t been more malevolent since he died—because the revenants in his own stories were always such horrid pills, you know. As if dear Monty could be malevolent if he tried.” She cooed this, stroking a Maltese curled up in her lap. “The truth is Julia has always been jealous of his fondness for me.”