Mystery stories

Summary: These stories are peopled by revenants, shades of their characters' remembered lives, lovers who died, friends who betrayed them or whom they betrayed, apparitions in dreams, visions and voices that speak unexpectedly out of the past. The mystery of personality keeps them vividly present even when they are long dead. These are absences that contain lives: an artist, Reuben Sachs, who painted an image of a hanged man and a few weeks later shot himself, leaving an irreparable, indelible impression on the mind of a young neighbour. A blind man, in dreams, relives the beauty of the city of Venice, which he visited many years before but could not see. An independent woman, a boldly adventurous young war reporter, is reduced to an ancient, bedridden body who on her hundredth birthday finds a faint voice to ask a young visitor if he has seen h︣er book', indicating the record of her life which lies nearby on a table. A man thinks back to the day he, as small boy, hid on a staircase and looked down.