It was the very image of Black Annie.

The resemblance seemed incredible to him. The painting showed night falling over blasted trees, the tortured branches drooping over broken stones, the trunks sinking into a deep brown gloom which seemed to rise from the rough earth to swallow them. And there, in that haunted setting, was the ruined chapel. A wedge of wall. A splintered reticulation of a window gaping on a barren sky. And under it, the cowled figure, profoundly somber, moving over the blighted winter ground. Black Annie.

True, there were two other figures in the background, two other cowled phantoms moving in tandem with the first. Maybe it wasn’t like the story exactly. Still, thought Storm, what were the odds against the two of them meeting over just such a scene?

“It isn’t incredible at all,” Sophia said to him curtly, as they walked back along New Bond Street together. It was full dark now. The bays and storefronts were lighted. Glittering jewels and mellow paintings showed behind the glass, warm against the night. Above them, the shop banners, sinking into shadow, made the street seem narrower, more homely than it was. And still, the pavement was crowded with shoppers and tourists, who jostled the two of them on either side. “German Romantic and English Gothic drank pretty freely from the same well, as it were. It was all a sort of reaction to the Enlightenment, all that logic and science and classicism. The German Romantics wanted to bring back a bit of the mystery and religion of the Middle Ages. That’s where the ruined abbeys and cathedrals come in: a nostalgia for the days of faith. Your ghost story—‘Black Annie,’ was it?—that came later, a sort of cheap, commercial version of the idea in which the spirit world is accepted as real, yah? What Rhinehart was trying to show was that the world as we see it is never a thing-in-itself but is always infused, a la Kant, with our own spiritual consciousness.”

“Uh-huh,” said Storm, whose own spiritual consciousness was infused with the V of creamy flesh beneath the hollow of her throat, and the scent of her on the cold air, and that brittle accent, which absolutely slew him. All the same, he couldn’t help noticing that this lecture of hers was rather brisk and distant, dismissive almost. As if she were waving him away. He wanted to ask her, What about the ghost of Belham Abbey, out by your father’s house? What about the fact you dropped your glass when I read the story? But he sensed that if he did, she would shut him out completely. So he only said, “I don’t know. That painting—it sure looked like Black Annie to me.”