Search Worlds Without End

Rudyard Kipling, celebrated author of The Jungle Book, the Just So Stories and other entertaining fictions, was also a master of the short story in which he was able to combine the strange and unnerving in order to draw the reader into the world of his own dark imaginings. This collection presents the best of these strange tales in which ghosts, monsters and inexplicable happenings abound.

From the exotic and magical locale of India, to the leafy suburbs of England and then to the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War, Kipling provides us with a chilling array of experiences and images which will linger long in the memory.

There is a timeless element to these tales which make them as relevant and as stimulating today as when they were first written.

Strange Tales includes:

• The Mark of the Beast
• The Return of Imray
• The Phantom Rickshaw
• The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
• 'They'
• In the Same Boat
• The Dog Hervey
• The House Surgeon
• The Wish House
• A Matter of Fact
• 'Swept and Garnished'
• Mary Postgate
• A Madonna of the Trenches
• 'At the End of the Passage'
• The Bisara of Pooree
• The Lost Legion
• The Dream of Duncan Parrenness
• The Tomb of His Ancestors
• By Word of Mouth
• My Own True Ghost Story

Susan MacDonald is desperate. Unless she makes a breakthrough soon, Ashford, the millionaire businessman financing her project, will shut it down and disband her research team. She knows she's close - that she's on the verge of proving her theory of Retrocausality, which will enable her to harness quantum mechanics to produce a revolutionary new form of instantaneous communication - but results are proving frustratingly elusive.

The last thing Susan needs is a team of ghost hunters moving into her base of operations, Ashford Hall - a building with a troubled past. Nor does she need the odd sounds - snatches of random conversation and even music - that are hampering her experiments; but does this interference represent the presence of 'ghosts' as some claim, deliberate sabotage as suggested by others, or is there an even more sinister explanation?

Historical fiction meets science fiction and the paranormal in this gripping novella set in the Lake District. Cynthia lives in a lakeside parish in Cumbria, where none suspect her blemished past. Then a ghostly scar-faced boy starts to appear to her and strange lights manifest over Blaswater. What of the astromomer Mr Sales, who comes to study the lights but disappears, presumed drowned, only to be found wandering naked days later with a fanciful tale of being 'hopped' into the sky and held within a brass-walled room? What of married mother of two Eliza, who sets Cynthia's heart so aflutter?

Lost in Venice in the aftermath of the war, Cherenkov just wants to put his head down somewhere and sleep, but her copper hair snares his eye. Beguiled and weary, he allows himself to be led through a quirky little shop through which lies a vast and hidden land where her family rule in ornate splendour, where his revolver is a marvel and his motives are questioned. Confusion and wonder abound as Cherenkov and his seductress embark on a pilgrimage in a small sailing boat across sargasso seas, in search of the Old Man who dwells on a floating island where time follows its own rules.

Cherenkov returns to the outside world, only to discover how badly he has come adrift in time: money is carried within plastic cards and information comes from a screen. Bereft, he is drawn back to voyage on the hidden sea, and to seek the mystery that lies at its centre which may be the only thing that can give him the answers he craves.

The Land of Somewhere Safe: where things go when you think, "I must put this somewhere safe," and then can never find them again.

The Scruffians: irreverent foul-mouthed street urchins, older than their years, waifs who have been Fixed by the Stamp, frozen so that they are immortal, providing perpetual slave labour. But now the waifs have nicked the Stamp and burned down the Institute that housed it, preventing any more of their number being Fixed and exploited.

Peter and Lilly: two school kids orphaned by Nazi bombs, who find themselves thrown together by circumstance and evacuated from London during the Blitz. Sent far further north than intended, all the way to the Isle of Skye, they are taken in by Clan Chief Lady Morag MacGuffin of Dunstravaigin Castle. With them are the four Bastable children - a jolly queer bunch - who prove to be far more than they seem.

The Reverend Blackstone: no real reverend at all, but an occultish Nazi spy determined to get his hands on the priceless Stamp, even if he has to raise hisself a demon to do so...