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  • The Mirror at the End of Reason
    The first patient told Dr. William Hart that the sky was watching him. This was not, in itself, unusual. Patients told psychiatrists all manner of strange things. They told them their neighbours were spies. They told them the radio was sending them coded messages. They told them God had spoken to them in the shower. The sky watching was almost quaint in its simplicity. But this patient was not...
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  • The Anvil of Pi
    Act One: The Discovery The rain in Derbyshire had a way of getting into your bones that no wool sweater could keep out. Thomas Whitmore knew this better than most. At fifty-two, his joints ached with the damp, and the doctor had suggested London. London, where the fog was so thick you could spread it on bread. But Thomas had refused. There was work to be done here, in the dales, in the old铅...
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  • Dr. William Hartwell first noticed the spots on the back of his left hand in March.
    They were small, no bigger than a pinhead, and grey, and they looked like they had been carved into his skin rather than grown there. He had first dismissed them as a rash, which they were not. He had then dismissed them as a fungal infection, which they might have been. He had finally dismissed them by not dismissing them at all, because they were growing, and they were hard, and when he...
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  • The Luminous Circuit
    I The auditorium at the American Medical Association's annual meeting in Washington was full to capacity, and the overflow crowd stood in the aisles and pressed against the back walls like sardines in a tin. Thomas Blackwell stood at the podium and looked out at three thousand faces—surgeons and researchers and politicians and journalists—and felt the same cold certainty he felt every time he...
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  • Title: The Ivory Mutation
    The cliffs of Arkham were jagged teeth biting into a bruised purple sky. Alistair lived in the shadow of the Miskatonic Library, a man obsessed with the "Symphony of the Spheres." He had found a manuscript, written in a language that seemed to shift and breathe on the page, which taught him how to "absorb" the fundamental laws of nature. At first, the power was a gift. Alistair could make the...
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  • The Patient from Below
    Chapter I: The Braking The letter arrived on a Friday, which in Vienna is the day when everyone pretends the weekend is going to save them from things they should have dealt with on Monday. It was typed on government stationery, in a font that was designed to look friendly but achieved only the effect of a smile that does not reach the eyes. The letter informed me that the Weiss Institute for...
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  • THE MIRROR IN THE BASEMENT
    ACT I: THE WINDOWLESS ROOM Lord Alistair Finch-Worthingham inherited Blackwood Park on a Tuesday in November, which seemed appropriate: Tuesdays were the kind of days on which serious things happened—inheritances, deaths, the slow realization that one's life has been a performance for an audience that stopped watching years ago. The house was exactly as one might expect a country house named...
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  • The Monster in the Attic
    The fog rolled in off the Thames like a shroud, thick and yellow, swallowing the gas lamps one by one as Thomas Harlow walked through the narrow streets of Whitechapel. His boots splashed through puddles of rain and something else he did not care to identify. At seventeen, he had already learned not to ask questions about the filth of London's East End. Questions led to answers, and answers led...
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  • The Architecture of Absence
    (Minimalist Realism Style) The apartment in Lower East Side was a white box, devoid of art, memories, or warmth. Arthur lived there for three hundred years. He didn't age. He didn't sleep. He simply existed. He had been a clerk in the Department of Records, a man who spent his days filing the deaths of others. In 1954, he had stumbled upon a biological anomaly—a sequence of proteins that, if...
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  • The Observatory of Lost Stars
    The telescope had not moved for three nights. Arthur Windsor pressed his eye to the brass eyepiece until the cold metal warmed against his skin, until the world beyond the glass became the only world that mattered. The signals had begun six weeks ago. At first he thought them instrument error—a vibration in the mounting, a flaw in the lens, the fatigue of a man who had spent too many hours...
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  • The Ledger of a Ghost
    (Act I: The Glass Tower) From the 42nd floor of the Sterling-Hedge Tower, the people of New York looked like ants, and their lives felt like statistics. Marcus was the apex predator of this concrete jungle, a man who could move billions with a single keystroke. He was the "Invisible Hand," the man who decided which companies lived and which died. He lived in a world of tailored suits and silent...
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  • The Signal Operator
    **Queens, New York** The coffee machine in the break room was broken again. I kicked it once—hard, but not hard enough to damage it, just hard enough to express my opinion—and it worked for maybe ten more minutes before giving up entirely. That was fine. I didn't really want coffee. I wanted to go home and sleep for a week. It was 6:47 AM on a Tuesday in March 2015. I was working the night...
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