• The Crown of Dust
    The humid air of the Congo Basin felt like a wet blanket draped over Captain Alistair Finch's shoulders. He wiped the grime from his brass monocle, staring at the impenetrable wall of emerald green that lay before him. Behind him, his small contingent of porters and a disgraced botanist named Dr. Aristhone were hacking through the undergrowth with a desperation that bordered on madness. Finch...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 29 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • The Last Signal from Arecibo
    **October 14th, 1893** The rain has not ceased for eleven days. It falls upon the slate roof of the observatory like a thousand small fingers, persistent and unrelenting. I write this by candlelight, my hands trembling not from cold but from what I have done. What I have dared. Three months ago, I was Dr. Elena Hubbard, unpaid assistant at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. My father, Professor...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 39 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • Blood and Magnolias
    Magnolia Hall did not so much stand on the land as lean against it, the way a dying person leans against a wall that will not hold them. The porch sagged on its left side, where the pillars had rotted from the inside out, swollen with moisture and then collapsed, leaving the veranda to tilt like a ship taking on water. The magnolia trees that gave the estate its name had grown wild and tangled,...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 45 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • The Starlight Project
    The signal came on a Tuesday in October, and Nathaniel Whitfield knew immediately that nothing would ever be the same. He was alone in the Harvard observatory, the kind of solitary vigil that astronomers loved to romanticize and anyone else would find unbearably lonely. The telescope's recording drum turned slowly, etching tiny deflections of light onto a roll of photographic paper. Nathaniel...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 48 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • The Rain of Silence
    ## Act I: The Outset Los Angeles in 1947 was a city of neon lies and wet pavement. Elias sat in the back of a dimly lit diner, the smell of burnt coffee and cheap tobacco clinging to his clothes. He was a man of twenty-two with the eyes of a centenarian, a witness to a crime that the city's elite had spent six months trying to erase. He held a small, leather notebook in his shaking hands—the...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 59 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • The House of Dust
    The Blackwood estate did not just sit on the land of the American South; it seemed to be sinking into it. The columns were cracked, the ivy had strangled the balconies, and the air always tasted of damp earth and old secrets. Colonel Silas Blackwood, the last of his line, lived in the center of this decay, a man who clung to the ghost of a Southern aristocracy that had died a century ago. Beau,...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 62 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • The Rust King
    (Act I: The Iron Grip) The town of Oakhaven did not breathe; it wheezed. The air was a thick soup of sulfur and oxidized iron, and the only thing that grew in the soil was resentment. Leo was a man of the assembly line, a cog in a machine that had stopped producing anything but misery. He lived in a trailer that smelled of damp cardboard and old grease, his days measured by the rhythmic thud of...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 48 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • The Fog of Sterling
    In the suffocating embrace of 1890s London, where the smog clung to the cobblestones like a burial shroud, Arthur Sterling lived in a gilded cage of his own making. He was the titan of the Sterling Textile Empire, a man whose wealth could buy the silence of Parliament, yet whose house was a tomb of echoing silence. For thirty years, Arthur had walked the corridors of his mansion, a ghost...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 15 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • THE ETERNAL REST
    The call came at 2 AM, the kind of hour when bad news always arrives. Lieutenant James Gold rolled out of his bunk at the Illinois State Military Reserve headquarters, grabbed his coat, and listened to the telephone on the wall. "Gold here." "James, it's Morton. You need to come to my office. Now." General Morton Chase—retired, now president of Illinois State University, but still carrying...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 43 Vue 0 Aperçu
  • The Phoenix Specimen
    The salon was in a townhouse on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, and it was exactly the kind of place Julian Ashworth had been born to inhabit. Crystal chandeliers cast light over marble floors. Women in silk dresses moved through rooms filled with paintings, sculptures, and the kind of furniture that cost more than most people earned in a lifetime. Men in tailcoat jackets discussed art,...
    0 Commentaires 0 Parts 62 Vue 0 Aperçu