The Exile Who Stayed Inside the Canon You are reciting Heine in a language that was never entirely his, and you do not know it

The Familiar Made Monstrous You are winding the key of a small automaton — a gift, perhaps, or something inherited, found in a drawer you

The Familiar That Turns Against You You stand in the doorway of a house you have lived in, and something is immediately, inexplicably wrong. The

The Dead Do Not Stay Silent You are standing in a room that smells of antiseptic and something older, something beneath the chemical, and the

The Séance as Social Mirror The candles have burned low enough that the faces across the table from you are more shadow than flesh, and

Before the Veil Was Lifted You are standing at the edge of something that has no clean name. The bog stretches before you in the

The Cry Before Death You are half asleep when it reaches you — not through the window, not through the walls, but through something older

The Séance Room as Laboratory You are sitting in a room that smells of beeswax candles and something older, something the wallpaper has absorbed over

The Dead Who Will Not Leave You are standing in a doorway you have crossed a thousand times when something stops you — not a

The Night You Heard Something That Was Not There You are alone in the house when you hear it — not a creak from the

The Man Behind the Codification You are sitting across a table that has just moved without being touched, and the man watching it from the

The Boy Who Wrote the Forbidden You are nineteen years old, stationed in a foreign city on your government’s business, surrounded by the diplomatic machinery