The Sealed Shelf, Volume 1

A black stone stands in forty fathoms of open water, where the chart shows only sea. A master clockmaker vanishes from a bolted room and leaves behind a clock that keeps the time of a century to come. In a house where every other glass has been smashed, one mirror shows the room ten minutes late.

Silas Vance is a surveyor who takes a reading, takes it again, and writes down what the instrument did. He is tired, exact and polite to everyone, and he never tells you what to feel. In The Sealed Shelf, five files from the Vance & Hollow archive are opened one at a time, each told in the first person, each sealed in red wax and shelved when it is done.

The stories run from 1871 to 1891 and range from the Bristol Channel and the port of Saint-Malo to a Yorkshire moor, a Welsh valley and an Alpine pass. Two are told through documents: a French inspectors journal and the reports of a railway inspector. Each ends on a figure that does not close.

Quiet, precise and cold in the way of a good winter read, this is a collection for readers who enjoy Victorian-era mystery, gothic short fiction and slow-burn uncanny tales, and who like to be trusted to count along. About 23,700 words. A key to the clues, to be read after the last story, closes the book. No monsters, no jump scares, no gore.