‘I’d like to come in on the Wednesday séances. Howard would probably be willing to change. There wouldn’t be any objection to that, would there?’ I said: ‘So it’s getting serious?’ He asked: ‘What is?’...

I was content to wait now. I waited, relaxed on small haunches, in the west corner, the one from which the mechanical airship used to set out on its jerky, wire-suspended flight towards the patient...

Britton said: ‘You two … You’re in both sets of séances. That’s where the twisting goes on. Anyone could see that.’ His tone was joking, but it was the weak, forced humour of someone making...

Olivia said uncertainly: ‘What’s happening?’ I said: ‘It’s quite simple, Livia. There’s a very little man in the middle of the trumpet blowing air two ways at once. He must be double-headed.’ The last record...

Olivia cried out. Her voice was nervous, but not convincing. She said: ‘What touched me? Someone touched me.’ Piers’s tittering laugh answered her. ‘We didn’t. I didn’t.’ She said, hopelessly: ‘Perhaps it was nothing.’ Something...

Piers put the record on the turn-table. He lifted the tone-arm back, clicking it into spinning motion. Holding the tone-arm between thumb and finger, he said: ‘It’s an S.P.R. thing. The record of a Direct...

Autumn brought little or no relief from the general buffeting of wetness and wind that had characterized the summer. Day after day was sunk in the salt ocean of nature’s unquenchable misery; the edges were...

He said: ‘I’d like you to drop in sometime, Joe – I’ve got something to show you. I’ll be in my room all day. That is, if you are leaving us this evening.’ The interrogative...

‘Tenn, I’m short again. Let me have some cash, will you?’ I had been a long time in Number 36; long enough to get used to having my privacy invaded at whim by whoever happened...

I ran into Rupert on my landing. He had a packet of manuscript under his arm and handed it to me. I took it automatically. ‘What’s this?’ ‘The cowboy story. I stayed up last night...