Julian Mercer's hands were never still. Not when he was a boy watching his grandfather Reginald's brass instruments catch the afternoon sun at their Mayfair workshop, not when he was a young man translating Horological Society papers at his desk on Great Russell Street, and certainly not now, at thirty-four, standing before a cabinet that contained the last thing his brother Thomas had ever...
Julian Mercer did not believe in ghosts. Not until the ghost of his sister Eleanor appeared on the fogged glass of his Bloomsbury flat's west-facing window, leaving a handprint that was neither condensation nor smudge but a precise, deliberate signature of five fingers and a palm pressed against something on the other side of the glass.
It was 3:47 AM on a Tuesday in November—the kind of hour...
In a narrow house off Great Russell Street, where the British Museum's limestone walls threw back the grey London light like a question asked in a language everyone understood but no one answered, Julian Mercer kept his compasses.
Not the sort of compass that points north. That would have been ordinary, and Julian had long ago grown suspicious of anything ordinary. His compasses were brass and...
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