“Lecky,” Storm muttered sullenly. “Lecky-shmecky. You’re the same way.” He flashed a hand at her, at all the monsterly covers on the wall. “I mean, no offense or anything, but I’ve been here two months now. And everything we do, it turns out to be a phony. We go hunting for the Beast of Dartmoor, it’s just an old mountain lion from some shut-down nature park. We get a video of an alien autopsy, you prove it’s a guy slicing up a Ken doll with tinfoil on its head. Christ, three independent experts confirmed psychic activity in that basement in Chipping Norton, you go down there with a shovel and dig up a couple of humping badgers. You’re as bad as anyone.”

“Me? Never. Alieni nil a me humanum puto. Ha-ha.” But somehow the pun seemed to be lost on him.

“I mean, look at all these covers here,” he said. “All these pictures, all these articles you publish. Is it all nonsense? Haven’t you ever seen anything really mysterious? Don’t you believe in anything?”

“I have seen a great deal, and I believe nothing,” said Harper Albright gravely. “Nothing at all, you understand. It’s almost a lost art, but I’m a mistress of it.”

“Well, then, what do you do it for?”

“History, Richard. History,” she announced grandly. “My life has led me to it.” The meerschaum skull glowed red as she drew in two puffed cheeks’ worth of smoke. Then the smoke flooded out in a coiling rush as she said, “Your trouble, young Richard, is that you confuse these fictional ghost stories you so admire with the genuine article. The English ghost story of fiction had its heyday between 1850 and 1930, a period very much like this one, in that the prodigious leaps made by scientists such as Darwin and Freud promoted materialism and naturalism and shook the foundations of religious belief. The Sea of Faith was receding with its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, and so spirits rose up in the popular magazines specifically to ask the question, ‘Man of the worldly mind, do you believe in me or not?’ Ah, but history, Richard, history—that is the province of your true phantom. You’ve heard of history even in Hollywood, surely. People writing with quill pens, wearing bodices and so on …”

“Two Gloucestershire boys were hospitalized for shock last week after they mistook a local constable for a ghost,” said Bernard.

“Ha-ha,” said Harper. “Cute.”

Storm threw up his hands and turned back to the fire.

“The boys had entered the grounds of Belham Abbey on a dare to look for the Grey Lady, who is said to haunt the abbey’s ruins, carrying a murdered child in her arms. The boys were terrified when the specter of PC Tim Bayliss rose up to chase them off instead. The none-too-ghostly plod had been summoned by Sir Michael Endering, the owner of the neighboring house, who requested—”