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I considered it just as much a part of my job to cheer them up, to get them hopeful for the future again.
    It was then that I learned to read palms. If I saw a soldier marinating in his megrims, I’d sit down on a stool beside the bed and take his hand without bothering to ask his permission. “Do you know a girl with auburn hair and a hearty laugh?” I’d ask. “No? Well, you will.”
    Then I’d leave him to think of all that I’d said, to trace her profile and conjure her laughter out of the darkness; and the next morning, more often than not, I’d find a whole new man. Over time I developed something of a reputation, and the men began seeking me out for a peek at their fortunes. In exchange, I made them take me out to a field near the medical tent for target practice. More than anything else, I wanted to learn how to shoot, and learn I did. We laughed and flirted in between taking aim at empty packs of cigarettes lined up along the fence posts.
    After the Armistice, while most of the other nurses were arranging for their passage back to New York (and cutting their hair short because their scalps were crawling with lice), Morven and I took the loo flue to London for a few days’ holiday before we returned home to Blackabbey.
    I KNEW THERE would be another war with Germany—we all knew it, the fact was plain as a tinker’s mistress—and I began preparing for a very different sort of work the next time around. It was a calling to which I could apply my gifts with greater efficacy, or so I hoped, and it was this ambition that eventually led me to Jonah.

Welcome to Harbinger House
    6.
But at evening she came all at once to the green lawn where the wretched little hut stood on its hens’ legs. The wall around the hut was made of human bones and on its top were skulls. There was a gate in the wall, whose hinges were the bones of human feet and whose locks were jaw-bones set with sharp teeth. The sight filled Vasilissa with horror …
—From “Vasilissa the Beautiful,” Russian Wonder Tales

    B ECAUSE THE house is haunted, Helena makes all her guests sign a waiver at check-in. The ghost is even older than we are; it seems he’s fascinated, still, with the concept of indoor plumbing. The toilets flush by themselves in the middle of the night, and when a guest gets out of bed to investigate, she spots no cat slipping through the open window, no other explanation for the water gurgling in the cistern. The ghost never shows himself, but before Helena instituted the waiver, the occasional guest would try to weasel out of paying for the night because of the phantom toilet-flushing.
    Of course, there are others who come here because of the so-called “toilet ghost.” Excited middle-aged men bring EVP recorders, infrared cameras, and other devices that beep frantically just before the flush, and Helena has been interviewed on cable television more times than I can recall. People find her delightfully peculiar for the way she speaks of our ghost with fondness, for her taste in art (on the foyer walls one finds medieval woodcuts of tubby monks making merry and bare-bottomed fiends discharging Satan’s deadliest weapon), and for her collection of marionette puppets scattered throughout the house.
    There is at least one marionette in every room apart from the baths. Each of the five lady puppets strung above the kitchen sink is dressed in a calico frock and sensible shoes, her hair—unnervingly lifelike—worn in a bob of brown frizz, her face kind in aspect. In the parlor four marionettes hang from the fireplace mantel; three are women and one is not. The lady puppets look like Gibson girls with their bouffants, swan-bill corsets, and pensive gazes, but their broad crimson mouths and spindly fingers lend them a more sinister air than their creator had perhaps intended. The man puppet, as if for comic relief, wears wire-rimmed spectacles and a pink cravat. Come December Helena tucks each of them into a red-striped