Vincent D’Agosta took another sip of his Bud and let his eyes wonder around the bar he’d ducked into on his way home. It was a cop hangout, decorated primarily with bullet-riddled silhouettes from various firing ranges. He wondered why they didn’t just hang bloody corpses on the walls. The bar also boasted framed (and only complimentary) NYPD headlines from the Times and the Post, some with pictures of bloody corpses. There were also photos of the city’s top cops, past and present, a motley collection of mostly balding, paunchy clones whose faces all seemed to resemble the one D’Agosta shaved every morning. He saw several uniformed cops and several more detectives, and a few women who may have been police groupies. The women sat in pairs, sipping drinks and eyeing the men in uniform like starving cannibals.

One particularly striking woman sat alone, two empty booths from his, sipping...   read more »

It’s strange in the house tonight, very quiet, and the candlelight is making phantoms on the walls that dance to some ethereal beat that only they can hear. The animals on the posters seem to slink closer, and the plants seem to be growing when I’m not looking. There’s an owl in the woods not too far away and he kept asking WHO? WHO? until Aloysius whispered in his sleep, “Xenaides, the blood demon.” As though it had heard him, the owl grew quiet. I grew quiet, too, fearful of waking him.

I am still recovering from the last session, when I lost more blood than he intended. We made love tonight, and when his mouth was on me, I could feel him wanting to bite, fighting to be gentle. He only hurt me when he came, and then just a little bit, but it’s growing near...the blood demon...   read more »

Mrs. Peabody smiled over my right shoulder and said, in her genteel old Mrs. Peabody voice, “Why, hello there.”

I didn’t bother to look around. Mrs. Peabody talked to someone over one of my shoulders almost every time I gave her medications. Thing was, there was never anyone there. Not in this dimension, anyway. I...   read more »

Viola walked up the path in the growing darkness, looking down at the small scrap of paper in her hand. She continued walking until a cottage became visible through the trees, its general appearance one of neglect and desertion. Undismayed, she tucked the paper into her pocket and turned down the overgrown track that led toward it.

She rapped on the door and waited. Nearly a minute passed before she heard the sound of someone on the other side.

The lock scraped and a dark patch appeared, opening into an interior even more gloomy than the dusk outside. “Why, Viola!” The man glanced past her into the darkness, then turned his attention back to her and smiled, swinging the door wide. A glint of red flickered in his good eye. “I see you received my note. Do come in; I hardly imagined you would respond...   read more »

The directions had been difficult to follow, but Pendergast knew he was at the right place. It was in the atmosphere; the lull of the crickets in the tall grasses, the sheen of the afternoon sun warming the still river, the Spanish moss hanging in the trees—even the smell of the woods and the river and something else, a heady vapor on the breeze unlike anything he’d ever smelled before. Something about it made his muscles tighten with trepidation.

He crossed the plank bridge over a tributary to the unpainted, tin-roofed shack, hyperaware of the silence after all the racket that it had taken him so long to grow accustomed to in New York City, where he’d lived for several years. With his steps on the plank bridge, even the crickets had quieted. The sky, reflected in the tea-colored river water, was a bright, beautiful blue. A few cottony clouds...   read more »