She reached the corner. The light was with her, but she paused, uncertain. Across the street, the market ended. The crowd thinned. Litter blew along the pavement, between whitewashed walls, past lampposts, under traffic signals, off down the avenue into the piebald sky. To her left, a man was selling sports caps. To her right, an Englishwoman dressed like a gypsy fortuneteller sat sullenly behind a table of used books. A tinker with a baby carriage held her hand out to the passersby.

Harper, for comfort, worked her fingers over the ears of the dragon head. The anxiety was seething now all through her. She felt like an empty sack full of racketing nerves.

And a voice spoke in her ear: “Oh, hey, look here. Look at this.”

Without thinking, she glanced over, towards the speaker, to her right. There was just a boy there, in his late teens. A pale, pimply face pocked with red spots under a wisp of beard. A dull-eyed girl beside him, her arm in his, her nose and eyes and lips so full of studs and rings she seemed to be held together by them.

The boy had lifted a book from the table. Was holding it up to her.

“Look at this. Do we have this one?”

Harper did look. And as the lad rotated the book in his hand to study it, she saw the cover of The Fourteenth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. The book Storm had read from at Bolt’s Christmas party.

Harper stood and gazed at it. She felt a slow change begin to take place inside her. Her nerves continued racketing around, but now, instead of eating at her, they began to fuel her, to energize her. Anxiety was changing to excitement. She had found what she was looking for.

A little place off the Edgware Road, she thought.

The hunt was on.

6

“Do you know who I am?”

The voice came down into the sarcophagus like a tendril of smoke. It mingled like a smell with the smell of vomit and urine and sweat and fear. It coiled around Bernard’s body where he lay with the tears still streaming down his cheeks, with his nose still running, with the agonizing pulse still beating in his head. He was aware now that there was blood at the pulsing spot, a stain half-dried, half-sticky where the sap had caught him. He was feeling woozy again and weak and sick. And the voice in the utter blackness came to him as with the cool of the open air, with the light of day. That first passion he had felt at the sound of it still coursed through him.

“Yes,” he said, his own voice trembling. He cleared his throat. “Yes. I know who you are.”

“Good. It’s about time we became acquainted with one another.”