He was, she thought, for all his American amiability, a man of mystery to some extent, of hidden depths at least. A producer, a highly successful producer of Hollywood films, some good ones, some she’d seen, many that were in her line, having to do with horror and the supernatural, ghosts, werewolves, the occasional latex demon or two. And yet, a month ago, he had apparently left this lucrative career behind. He had turned up all unknown in London. He had arrived at her door without introduction and volunteered to serve as an unpaid intern on her little magazine, Bizarre! He was tired of making movies about the paranormal, he told her. He wanted to work with her, to get at “the real thing.” And that was pretty much all he told her. But uncomplaining—and, again, unpaid—he took to bounding after her like some great red setter, joining her journalistic investigations into claims of haunting, witchcraft, vampirism, alien abductions, and the like. And the question of what he was really after—and why it was he remained, in some way, set apart—had begun to worry at her.

Her reverie was interrupted, however, as Bolt reentered through the archway.

“Well,” he growled nastily at Storm. “It was well read anyway, I’ll give you that.”

This was what had started the incident. The ghost story. About half an hour before. Bolt had been holding forth, pronouncing upon ghost stories in general: Christmas and December gatherings and ghost stories and so on. Storm had said that he had always loved the English variety. Loved them, he’d said—that’s what had done it—all that Yankee enthusiasm. It wasn’t that Bolt disliked Storm in particular, or Americans in general. But there was some vivacious something about both of them that was an insult to his cherished pessimism. Suddenly, anyway, after that, Bolt had felt that he had to play the expert. He’d shifted up a notch from pronouncing to pontificating. And when Storm had said that he thought the Oxford collection was sensational—Absolutely sensational! he’d said—it had just been too much for poor Bolt.

“Well, I suppose,” the journalist had said. “If you don’t mind the fact that they left out ‘Thurnley Abbey.’ I mean, I don’t expect it to be complete, but, after all, it is The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, which I think entails certain responsibilities. I mean, they left out ‘Thurnley Abbey’!”

“Yeah, ‘Thurnley Abbey,’ that was a good one,” said Storm. “I think they put that in the Victorian collection.”

“Pff!” said Frederick Bolt.

And Storm, mildly, changed the subject. “Hey, have you ever read ‘Black Annie,’ by Robert Hughes?”