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'Creepy,' said Fitz.'That sounds like what we want.'

Anji came over.'What do you mean by "creepy"?'

The girl chewed her gum thoughtfully. 'He's just, you know, weird. Takes it all seriously.'

Fitz passed Anji the pamphlet. The atmospheric black and purple printing made it hard to read. On the front was a photograph of a man who had compensated for his baldness with a stylish goatee, staring into the camera with what he clearly supposed to be a burning gaze. The text inside featured headings such as, Do You Dare Explore The Darkness? and mentioned that Jack Dupre, the man on the cover, had been a professional magician and was an 'internationally renowned scholar of the dark arts'.

Fitz grinned. 'I think this is our boy.'

'I guess so,' Anji said doubtfully.

The blue-haired girl rolled her eyes. 'Have fun.'

Laura Ridgepath was afraid she was going to get herself in serious trouble over the man who had just walked into her occult bookstore. The eyes, the profile, the long slightly curling hair - it was like seeing a Grail knight by Burne-Jones come to life. Or did she mean Rossetti? She got them confused.

'Which one had the dead girlfriend?' she said to the customer. 'Burne-Jones or Rossetti?'

He was unsurprised by the question. He didn't even look away from the shelves. 'You're probably thinking of Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddel. In an ecstasy of mourning, he buried his unpublished poems with her -'

'- and then later he had writer's block and had to dig her up and get them back.'

'It was a showy gesture anyway,' said the man. He was even English. That fit. 'All that noisy grief."Look at me! Look how upset I am!"'

'Oh, but I'm for grief,' she said. 'Everything is silly in the face of death, so why shouldn't people carry on?'

'You're right,' he conceded.' It's a matter of cultural style.' He smiled at her. She would have expected her heart to flip-flop, but it didn't. She sensed a remoteness in him. He was, she would later say to a friend, way back in there .Which was just as well, since the next thing he did was ask about the room she had to let, and having him in the near vicinity at night while her heart and other parts of her body throbbed just wouldn't have done.

Owl, the name of the bookstore, took up one side of a flat-fronted mid-nineteenth-century Creole cottage that Laura lived behind in a large refurbished outbuilding. It was cosy back there and, frankly, quieter. The Quarter could get a little boisterous on weekends. She explained this to the man as she showed him the room next to the shop.

'You're right on the sidewalk and you've just got these,' she said, indicating the pale-blue shutters pulled over the windows. 'Even with the glass, sound comes right through.'

'That won't be a problem.' The room ran from the front to the back of the house. He opened one of the rear windows and pushed aside the shutters to look into the brick-paved courtyard. It was dominated by a gigantic live oak. 'Beautiful tree.'

'They're the only evergreen oaks,' she said, automatically falling into tourist-question-answering mode. 'They live practically for ever.' He stood staring at it. 'I hold regular Wiccan services out there; I hope that won't bother you.'

'Not at all.'

'And occasional marriages or memorial services, but I don't have any scheduled.'

"That's fine.' He turned back into the room. His eyes moved over the simple furniture, pausing for an appreciative moment on the homemade bed quilt with its carefully wrought zodiacal symbols. He fished in his pocket and produced a bright-red flyer. 'Can you tell me anything about this?' It was an advertisement in Gothic script for a party that night at Death's Door. 'If I were to go, what would I be getting into?'

'Oh, that's Swan's place - big old Victorian house in Uptown. Downstairs is a gallery, and she and her husband - he's the artist -live upstairs. It's a Goth hangout.'

'I'm interested in meeting people who take