Storm stared at her. Then he laughed, a wild, high laugh. “To see if the dead can walk, babe,” he told her. “I want to see if the dead can walk.”

5

The editorial office of Bizarre! was on the second floor of Harper’s mansion in World’s End. The mansion was, for the most part, a pleasant Edwardian town house of white stone, with elegant, high-ceilinged rooms. But in the office, the character of the place was lost, buried under the magazine’s paraphernalia. The yellow-striped walls were almost totally obscured by old covers hung all around. And these were adorned with photographs of outlandish beings never before seen. Alien babies corkscrewed from insectile wombs, human reptiles breasted the banks of Brazilian rivers, translucent wraiths floated in ancestral halls, Momo, Morag, Mokele-Mbembe—even Mothman, in one fuzzy shot—were seen gaping, seething, prancing, escaping into the crannies and caches and swamps of their various habitats.

These grimacing visages presided over a broad square of a room cluttered with memorabilia equally odd. A fishbowl holding a pickled claw. A planter from which some stuffed thing stared. A vase in which a cactus unknown to botany now and then opened, drooling, at the approach of a fly. More prosaic furniture took up the spaces in between. A striped chaise longue by the wall of high sash windows. A computer workstation against a windowless wall. An antique draftsman’s table, a few tatty armchairs. Plus, finally, an immense fireplace, its marble mantel supported by a pair of grotesque telamons with hairy faces contorted into expressions of hellish torment. Which Harper found charming.

The magazine had gained in popularity of late—there was always a living to be made in the paranormal, as Harper had sometime remarked, if one could just hold on till the millennium. As a result, anyway, the journal had recently gained a publisher, full color on covers and some pages inside, a more regular monthly schedule, and a circulation soon predicted to rise to over a hundred thousand worldwide. In spite of this, the staff remained what it long had been: two people, Harper and her young factotum, Bernard. There were also several handfuls of eager stringers stationed everywhere around the world. And the occasional unpaid intern—currently Richard Storm.

Storm was brooding by the fireplace this rainy afternoon early in the new year. Harper was lolling on the chaise longue, chomping on her pipe, observing him.