Marie O'Regan - The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books)

Gairden said nothing. What was there to be said?

Rheese nodded, as though he had replied. “A heavy coffin,” he said. “Jamie was slight.”

“Sir.”

“You did the right thing, Inspector. Jamie was the only one she’d dance for, after all.” He turned and walked away, with slow, painful dignity.

Gairden followed, turning his collar up against the rain.

A velocipede stood at the gates. “Cab, sir?”

“No, thank you,” Gairden said, but laid his hand briefly on the side of the velocipede. The gleaming metal was as warm as flesh.

He turned away towards the station, and as he did so he thought he heard a run of notes, a sound like music played on instruments of silver, music to dance to, fading into the rain.

Biographies

Kim Lakin-Smithis the author of Tourniquet: Tales from the Renegade City (Immanion Press, 2007) and Cyber Circus (Newcon Press, 2011). Her fantasy and science-fiction short stories have appeared in Black Static , Interzone , Celebration , Myth-Understandings , Further Conflicts , Pandemonium: Stories of the Apocalypse , and other magazines and anthologies. Kim is a regular guest speaker at writing workshops and conventions.

Sarah Pinboroughis a horror, thriller and YA author who has had more than ten novels published. Her next release, The Chosen Seed (Gollancz, January 2012), is the last of The Dog-Faced Gods trilogy, which has now been optioned for a television series. Her third urban fantasy YA novel, The London Stone (Gollancz, June 2012), will be published under the name Sarah Silverwood and is the last of The Nowhere Chronicles. After this come Mayhem and Murder from Jo Fletcher Books at Quercus. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and she has a horror film, Cracked , currently in development. She has recently branched out into television writing and is currently writing for New Tricks on the BBC. Sarah was the 2009 winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, and has three times been shortlisted for Best Novel. She has also been shortlisted for a World Fantasy Award. Her novella The Language of Dying (PS Publishing) was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award and won the 2010 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

Kelley Armstrongis the New York Times -bestselling author of the Women of the Otherworld paranormal suspense series and Darkest Powers YA urban fantasy trilogy. She grew up in Ontario, Canada, where she still lives with her family. A former computer programmer, she’s now escaped her corporate cubicle and hopes never to return.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon(1835–1915) was the author of more than eighty novels. Today she is chiefly remembered for the furore which her best-selling potboiler Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) engendered, but M. E. Braddon (eventually Mrs Maxwell) wrote novels and plays; contributed essays, short stories, and poems to such high-circulation periodicals as Punch and The World ; and edited the two literary magazines most closely associated with the Sensation Novel, Temple Bar and Belgravia . In the 1860s, the decade that was the high-water mark of Sensation, M. E. Braddon wrote at least twenty novels, sometimes at the rate of three per year, while bearing six children of her own and raising them together with six step-children.

Caitlín R. Kiernanis the author of several novels, including Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree , and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir . She is a prolific short-fiction author – to date, over 200 short stories, novellas, and vignettes – most of which have been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder ; From Weird and Distant Shores ; To Charles Fort, With Love ; Alabaster ; A is for Alien ; and The Ammonite Violin & Others. Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan , Vol. 1, was released by Subterranean Press in October 2011, and her next collection, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart , will be released (also by Subterranean) in 2012. Kiernan is a four-time nominee for the World Fantasy Award, an honoree for the James Tiptree Jr Award, and has twice been nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award. Born in Ireland, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Mary Elinor Wilkins-Freeman(1852–1930) was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, the daughter of strict orthodox Congregationalists. She began writing stories and verse for children as a teenager, and her work quickly saw print. She wrote more than two dozen volumes of published short stories and novels. She is best known for two collections of stories, A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). In April 1926, Freeman became the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in Metuchen and was interred in Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.

Sarah Langanis the author of the novels The Keeper , The Missing , and Audrey’s Door . She is currently finishing her fourth book, Empty Houses . Her work has garnered three Bram Stoker Awards, an ALA Award, a New York Times Book Review editor’s pick, a PublishersWeekly favourite book of the year selection, and been optioned by The Weinstein Company for film. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and rabbit.

Elizabeth Massieis a Bram Stoker Award- and Scribe Award-winning author of horror novels, short horror fiction, media tie-ins, mainstream fiction, historical novels, poetry, and non-fiction. Most recent works include Homegrown (a mainstream novel from Crossroad Press), Playback: Light and Shadow (an e-novella from Random House, prequel to the 2012 horror film Playback ), and Sundown (a collection of horror shorts from Necon E-Books.) Massie lives in the Shenandoah Valley with illustrator Cortney Skinner. She is the founder of Hand to Hand Vision and Circle of Caring on Facebook. She likes snow and hates cheese.

Alex Bellwas born in 1986 in Hampshire. Her contemporary supernatural mysteries are published by Gollancz, and her YA comic fantasies are published by Headline. She has travelled widely, is a ferociously strict vegetarian and generally prefers cats to people.

Alison Littlewoodlives in West Yorkshire, England, where she hoards books, dreams and writes fiction – mainly in the dark fantasy and horror genres. Alison has contributed to Black Static , Dark Horizons , Not One of Us and the charity anthology Never Again . Her debut novel, A Cold Season , will be out early in 2012 from Jo Fletcher Books at Quercus. Visit her at www.alisonlittlewood.co.uk.

Nina Allan’s stories have appeared regularly in the magazines Black Static and Interzone , and have featured in the anthologies Catastrophia , House of Fear , Best Horror of the Year #2 and Year’s Best SF #28 . A first collection of her short fiction, A Thread of Truth , was published by Eibonvale Press in 2007, followed by the story cycle The Silver Wind in 2011. Twice shortlisted for the BFS and BSFA Award, Nina’s next book, Stardust , will be available from PS Publishing in autumn 2012. An exile from London, she lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex.

Lisa Tuttlemade her first professional sale forty years ago with the short story “Stranger in the House” – now the title story in Stranger in the House , Vol. 1 of her collected supernatural fiction, published by Ash-Tree Press. Perhaps best known for her short fiction, which includes the International Horror Guild Award-winning tale “Closet Dreams”, she is also the author of several novels, including The Pillow Friend , The Mysteries and The Silver Bough , as well as books for children and non-fiction works. Although born and raised in America, she has been a British resident for the past three decades, and currently lives with her family in Scotland.