It was a soft answer, Harper Albright thought, meant to turn away wrath. But it had only made, things worse. Because it rapidly became clear that Bolt hadn’t read “Black Annie,” that he’d never even heard of it. Which meant it couldn’t possibly be worth considering. And he said so.

“Oh no, no, you’re wrong!” cried Storm. Rising from his chair, he went to the shelves. Strolled over, too familiarly, as if it were his flat instead of Bolt’s. He plucked out The Fourteenth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. “It’s in here. You oughta read it, it really is good.”

He held the book out to Bolt. Bolt scowled at it. “Fourteenth! They must’ve been pretty thin on the ground by then.” But Storm continued to proffer it. And Bolt’s lips curled wickedly. “Why don’t you read it?” he sneered. “Go on—Christmas by the fireside—a gathering—a ghost story—give us a reading, Storm.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Harper Albright had muttered. Bolt could be intolerable.

Later, though, she wondered whether he hadn’t perhaps fallen into the American’s trap. Storm took the book back to his chair and began to read “Black Annie” aloud—and Harper was immediately reminded that his father had been an actor; he had told her that. He proceeded to deliver a witty and yet genuinely spooky rendition of the piece. And by the time Quentin and Neville were making their candlelit way down the ominous, sombre and melancholy corridors of Ravenswood Grange, most of Bolt’s party guests were here in the drawing room and most of them were spellbound. At the last sentence, there were one or two people who actually gasped.

And the lovely Sophia Endering had dropped her glass.

“It was well read, certainly,” Bolt conceded now again. “And not without interest. Without originality, or irony or invention—or literate prose. But no one could say it was without interest.”

Storm only spread his hands and spoke with such sincerity that Harper Albright thought it would kill Bolt on the spot. “Ah, well, you know. I first read it when I was maybe ten years old. And it just hit me, like: Pow! The English Ghost Story. It got me started in a way. The first film I ever made, twenty years ago, I was, I don’t know, twenty-two. Spectre, it was called. I’d never even been to England. I wrote it, directed it, shot the whole thing in California. But I set it here, you know, in this total ‘Black Annie’ world I made up from the story. It just—I don’t know—it always stuck with me in this …”