Search Results for: voices

In the royal palace of conquered Luscany, Princess Nette chafes at the bonds that confine her to a life of empty ceremony. Meanwhile, in a less salubrious quarter, Serin Guille’s father scents success in his search for the secret of immortality. Then a gypsy blade flashes at the ice fair. An imperial emissary lies bleeding by the frozen river, and the uneasy peace is shattered.

The Eschalan overlords will not rest until they have revenge. Serin saw it happen, saw the blow fall. Now she can never go home . . .

Jay Seward remembered a former life in a land of magic, gods, and goddesses…a time when he was Jason of Iolcus, sailing in the enchanted ship Argo to steal the Golden Fleece from the serpent-temples of Apollo. But one night the memories became startlingly real, as the Argo itself sailed out of the spectral mists and a hauntingly beautiful voice called: “Jason…come to me!” And suddenly he was on the deck of the Argo, sailing into danger and magic…

Millennia ago Starquin visited the Solar System. Because he is huge – some say bigger than the Solar System itself – he could not set foot on Earth personally. yet events here were beginning to interest him, and he wanted to observe more closely.


So he sent down extensions of himself, creatures fashioned after Earth’s dominant life-form. In one of Earth’s languages they became known as Dedos, or Fingers of Starquin. Disguised, they mingled with Mankind.


We know this now, here at the end of Earth’s time. The information is all held in Earth’s great computer, the Rainbow. The Rainbow will endure as long as Earth exists, watching, listening, recording and thinking. I am an extension of the Rainbow, just as the Dedos are extensions of Starquin. My name is Alan-Blue-Cloud.


It is possible you cannot see me but are aware of me only as a voice speaking to you from a desolate hillside, telling you tales from the Song of Earth. I can see you, the motley remains of the human race, however. You sit there with our clubs and you chew your roots, entranced and half-disbelieving as I sing the Song – and in our faces are signs of the work of your great geneticist, Mordecai N. Whirst. Catlike eyes here, broad muzzles there, all the genes of Earth’s life, expertly blended, each having its purpose. Strong people, adapted people, people who survived.


The story I will tell is about people who were not so strong. It is perhaps the most famous in the whole Song of Earth, and it tells of three simple human beings involved in a quest who unwittingly became involved in much greater events concerning the almighty Starquin himself. It is a story of heroism and love, and it ends in triumph – and it will remind the humans among you of the greatness that was once yours.

In the late 1930’s as the threat of war is building in Germany, twelve year old Julia arrives to spend the summer with her famous playwright father, only to find herself alone with Trudl, her Austrian stepmother. With Trudl preoccupied by the plight of her fellow countrymen in Europe, Julia retreats into the scary Gothic novels left behind by her older siblings, and becomes haunted by dreams of Joshua Harken, the notorious alchemist who built the 17th century house, and then disappeared, accused of murder. Even after she joins forces with local boy Tim Bellyap to investigate the stories of Joshua’s ghost, she is afraid to tell anybody about the terrifying voices coming unbidden from somewhere inside her chest…

In a compelling exploration of loneliness and adolescent insecurities, peopled by ghosts from the old house, this is the powerful story of Julia’s awakening from her nightmare world.

Also published as Voices, and set in Joan Aiken’s own supposedly haunted childhood home, Jeake’s House in Rye, Sussex, this Y.A. ghost story draws on some of her own childhood memories to create an unusual thriller.

“When reduced to its essence, Julia’s story may not be so very different from that of Aiken’s Wolves Chronicles heroine Dido Twite: each girl must cope with a distant, unreliable father and learn to survive in a world peopled with self-absorbed adults. It is the exploration of these issues, even more than the fine storytelling, which makes this novel so compelling” Publisher’s Weekly
“Joan Aiken is the godsend to children who are at the age when they read as if there were no tomorrow” Washington Post

“An entertaining read, for readers who like to read suspenseful ghost stories with a hint of real menace. The ghostly elements of this story are nicely mirrored by the historical menace of the times, as Julia ruminates on the dangers of Hitler, whom she sees as a sort of spider, spreading his web out over Europe” Goodreads reviewer

This final collection of Joan Aiken’s stories, taken from nearly sixty years of her writing career, is rooted in the classic fables and fairy tales familiar to us all, but which she has brought up to date by adding her own voice, and a touch of that mysterious added ingredient that makes you return to them again and again, at any age.

They range from fantastic fairy tales to science fiction, from a future where the sun no longer shines thanks to human folly, to one where all the best words are kept locked away in a forbidden forest . . . they take us to lands that could be from our own past, where we can call upon magical friends like the mysterious Miss Samphire, or long lost magic spells to save a castle from Viking attack. These are absolutely timeless tales, for as she said:


‘They come from nowhere, and they are aimed at nobody’s ear; or rather they are aimed at the ear of anybody who happens to pass by just at that moment’

“LAMB HOUSE is in Rye, an ancient town of East Sussex, England. It is very much a real place, even a famous one, yet The Haunting of Lamb House is as elusive to review as it must have been to write. It is safe to say that no one but Joan Aiken could have written it, not only because she was born in Rye and has the town in her bones as it were, but also because she has the power — shown in her other books — of evoking strange, often eerie events of the past and making other times, places and people vividly alive. This book goes further: She has taken the real history of Lamb House and interwoven happenings that are purely imaginary, working so skillfully that even those who have lived there can hardly tell which is which!”

So wrote novelist Rumer Godden, who also lived in Lamb House. She went on:

“For those who do not sense such things, The Haunting of Lamb House is a most skillful and intriguing interweaving of fact and fiction; to those who do, it is a memorable evocation. In either case it is a little masterpiece.”

Lamb House in Joan Aiken’s birth town of Rye in Sussex is said to be haunted. This is her story of what might have happened to cause the haunting: using the imagined diary of an earlier Mayor of Rye, Toby Lamb, whose father built the handsome Georgian house, and later episodes that might have occurred during the occupancy of two of its famous literary tenants – Henry James and E.F. Benson.

Joan Aiken was born in another haunted house owned by her father Conrad Aiken: Jeake’s House, just around the corner in Mermaid Street, Rye, which she also wrote about in Return to Harken House.

“Joan Aiken has written a clever book, kindling a whole world of feeling out of small macabre details, presenting to the senses a series of apprehensions of reality which seem to touch a completeness beyond themselves. An impressive achievement; I shivered as I admired” Robert Nye, The Guardian

“Joan Aiken’s artful web of truth and fancy is divided into three histories of haunting – the first employs Aiken’s considerable skill in a vivid evocative rendering of the old town of Rye when the house was built…followed by the twenty years of Henry James’ residence. The end is worth waiting for…where E.F.Benson encounters hideous apparitions and even an exorcism in the last enthralling twenty pages” Miranda Seymour, T.L.S.

“Aiken has conjured up a deliciously scary ghost story…her mastery of style serves her well in the creation of three separate voices. Those familiar with Henry James’s writing especially The Turn of The Screwwill derive special enjoyment from this novel, but there are shivers enough for any reader willing to acknowledge the possibility of ghosts and the reality of evil” U.S. Library Journal

“In three interlocking ghost stories this veteran British novelist places a fictional haunting within the history of a real house, and displays a masterly way with several contrasting narrative styles, sympathetically evoking some ghostly presences…the wayward spirit of the house and the growing number of literary presences which gradually take possession” Publisher’s Weekly

After Colin Reiver is acquitted of responsibility for killing a child in a car accident he sets out on a sea cruise in the hope that it might ease local feeling and the voice of his own conscience.

But when a few days after his departure Colin is found dead by the roadside, Miles Bredon, investigator for the Indescribable Insurance Company, must travel to Scotland to establish precisely when the death occurred. The body has disappeared and reappeared in the space of forty-eight hours and a large insurance premium is at stake.

Eleri ap Vaughan, Keith Vine’s best dealer, has turned to other drugs wholesalers for her supplies. Now she has to die. For the threat of invasion by rival syndicates cannot be ignored, particularly as an elegantly dressed spy from London, nicknamed Lovely Mover, is in the area. Eleri’s death must serve as a warning to others to stay loyal.

It’s at times like these that Vine’s new partner, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Harpur, will prove invaluable – for example, in sweeping the murder scene for incriminating evidence. Harpur, however, is playing a dangerous game, and he now finds himself in the precarious position of covering up a murder and investigating it.

‘There is nothing else quite like this series…all delivered in a ferociously poetic voice that is uniquely Bill James’ The Times

Every Sunday on Radio Ardennes, the Counsellor had his hour. His voice clear, expressive and sympathetic as it answered a selection of the queries that crowded his post-bag.

‘Just ask a question’ was his motto. But even he did not expect Wallace Whatgift to ask for his help in solving the mysterious disappearance of a young woman.

‘The Lying voices’ were the clocks that filled the room where Arnold Thaine was shot dead. They ticked in a hundred different rhythms but every single one was wrong. So the fact that a bullet had stopped one of them gave no clue to the time of his murder . . .

On the day of Thaine’s death, Justin Emery was visiting his old friend Grace DeLong, who had been to visit Thaine that morning. But who was the woman in the brown mackintosh who had entered Thaine’s study? Who were the other two visitors? And was anything to be learned from the broken clock?

The first woman wouldn’t even give her name. But the clear, feminine voice faltered considerably over the question of what Perry Mason’s charges would be for a day in court – a day doing nothing but listening.

The second woman gave a good deal more – but the question was, what did she expect to get? Dorla Balfour, lethally lovely and dangerously rich, forced a $1,000 retainer on Mason to deal with a case already tried and decided.

The offense involved appeared to be manslaughter, hit-and-run, but it soon became murder … with the corpse killed twice.

A young woman has a new position – but will she listen to the voice warning her not to cross the threshold of that sinister house…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club


Nora Deane, a young nurse, has been instructed to report to 12 Askew Avenue, Charlbury, to look after a new patient. As she steps from the station into an impenetrable blanket of fog, she is glad to accept the escort of a mysterious young man to the address.

Once alone in the darkness, she presses the bell and waits. She shivers. She wants to be inside, out of the dangers of the dark. Yet some inner voice persistently warns her not to cross the threshold of that sinister house . . .

A rich, curmudgeonly old husband, a beautiful young wife, a mysterious voice from the past – and murder…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

When murder hits the sleepy town of Hinton St Luke tongues start wagging. It’s what you might call a cosy domestic murder: a beautiful young wife; her much-older husband dying at just the right moment; a jealous nurse; a mysterious voice from the past and a set of anonymous letters.

But which one will lead directly to the killer’s front door?

An ordinary day – which turns to blackmail and murder.
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

What seemed like an ordinary phone call in the middle of the afternoon suddenly plunges its recipient, Simon Crete, into a plot of blackmail and murder.

‘Tell him it’s no use. I haven’t got it,’ the mystery woman’s voice cried desperately down the line. But who was she? And why was she ringing a man whom she had never seen?

Diplomatic corps man Piers Hunt watches the glittering lights of Broadway from his Hotel Astor room. The German girl’s mocking voice returns to his mind yet again: ‘More melodrama, Piers?’ Yes: this time it’s ‘more melodrama’, but with a vengeance.

In New York incognito, only Piers knows that his superior, Samuel Anstruther, has been murdered, possibly to get him out of the way of a plan to withdraw a police force that governs post-Second World War Germany. Rumours abound that the Germans might be allowed free reign once again.

Piers is a man of peace, but he may have to get his hands dirty if he doesn’t want to be murdered – before telling the world what Anstruther knew . . .

It began with the murder of a beautiful woman, the adulterous wife of a mild-mannered professor. Then a corrupt cop was gunned down in a phone booth.

After that, the killer who called himself Raptor moved through a list of players, playboys and mobsters from Palm Springs to Minnesota. With each hit came a phone call to San Francisco organised crime investigator Dante Stagnoro, and a disguised, taunting voice daring Stagnoro to stop him. Raptor is a killer like no other Stagnoro has ever pursued.

And the final truth of his death trip – a truth about man, nature and God – will not be revealed until the last victim is claimed.

A series of horrifying murders rips through a sanatorium – and only the patients can stop the killings.

‘Baffling crimes, brilliant writing’ SATURDAY REVIEW

‘Quentin is a craftsman of the first class’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

Peter Duluth turned to drink after his wife’s untimely death; now, two years later and desperate to dry out, he enters a sanitorium, hoping to turn his life around. But he doesn’t quite get the calm relaxation he expected. Strange, malevolent occurrences plague the hospital – and Peter hears his own voice crying out the warning ‘There will be murder.’

With a murderer is on the loose, and the staff every bit as erratic as the idiosyncratic patients, everyone is a suspect – including Peter, who is desperate to clear his name before the killer strikes again.

You have a view of the Pacific from your woodframe house out at Palos Verdes. You have the car with the Zen silence engineered in, and the cool drive up the coast to your studio office on the 23rd floor. You have the occasional blonde in your bed and more money than you want to spend. You have life pretty well taped. But you’ve spent the last twenty years learning to forget, learning to live without a drink in your hand. Twenty years taming the monsters. Then suddenly, the voices are back. But this time they’re for real, and your life is about to be blown apart.

From The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to the fantastic work of Robert Holdstock, one of modern fantasy’s most original and influential voices. Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, is regarded as the definitive treatment of the wildwood, and his Merlin Codex trilogy is one of the few truly original takes on the Arthurian legend. This omnibus contains two of his early SF novels: Earthwind and Where Time Winds Blow and a collection of his highly-acclaimed short fiction, In the Valley of the Statues.

From the vaults of the SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal introduction to one of the unique voices of British science fiction, John Middleton Murry, Jr, who wrote his best work under the pen name Richard Cowper.

The son of the famous critic John Middleton Murry, Cowper announced himself to the science fiction world in 1967 with BREAKTHROUGH, which found favour for a subtlety and richness of characterisation not seen in most contemporary SF. The idea of a transformed future England became his signature leitmotif and it is this theme that informs the Corlay tales contained in this omnibus. This is the complete Corlay sequence, featuring introductory novella ‘PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN’ and novels THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM OF KINSHIP and A TAPESTRY OF TIME.

THE ROAD TO CORLAY:
On the Eve of the Fourth Millennium a slowly-building civilization, struggling out of the rubble of the Drowning, was crushed beneath the sceptre of a powerful and repressive Church. But on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the sound of a magical pipe was heard, and the air was filled with songs of freedom and enlightenment. And on the Eve of the Fourth Millennium the Boy appeared, bringing the gift of sacrilege, a harbinger of the future, heralding the arrival of the White Bird of Dawning. It is the coming of a New Age. A glorious future bearing the presents of the past!

A DREAM OF KINSHIP:
They came to destroy! The treacherous Falcons, uniformed in the black leather tunics of the fanatic Secular Arm, descended on Corlay to burn and kill. Commanded by Lord Constant, ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, they were determined to crush the religious heresy of Kinship. But a new dream rose from the ashes… When four Kinsmen escaped the carnage of their beloved land, each helped to fulfill the miracle that had been foretold: the coming of the Child of the Bride of Time.

A TAPESTRY OF TIME:
Twenty years have passed since the martyrdom of the Boy-piper at York, twenty years in which his legacy, the movement of Kinship, has challenged the tyranny of the Church Militant in Britain’s seven island kingdoms. Now his namesake, Tom, bearing the Boy’s own pipes and perhaps himself imbued with the spirit of the White Bird, is wandering Europe in company with the girl, Witchet. But disaster overtakes them and Tom, in a furry of vengeance, breaks his vow of Kinship. A terrible path lies before him, one that transcends his own world. As he travels it, Tom must come to understand the true nature of the wild White Bird, of The Bride of Time and her Child, and of the Song the Star Born sang.

Is there a Destiny? Does Fate impose a limit? What Barrier stands between man and the creation of life?

Since the legendary failure of the ill-fated Frankenstein, man has tried time and time again to pass those limits. He has created androids, clumsy robots of flesh and blood. He has made men of metal and servants of plastic, with wheels for limbs and magnetic tapes for voices. Man has made things by cross breeding the animal kingdom and destroying Nature’s intentions…but man has never yet made man. Or has he?

Forbisher thought that he had the answer. It wasn’t a clumsy Synthetic. It wasn’t an Android, or a Robot, it was a real flesh and blood human being.

The beautiful woman in his arms was the product of a laboratory experiment, not the result of a natural biological process. But how could he prove it?

Catherine Wilder was a strange girl, lovely but lonely. Sir Henry Wilder, her father, was the kind of eccentric, medical researcher who preferred to work in complete isolation. Catherine withdrew deeper into herself as the oppressing loneliness of her father’s remote mansion weighed upon her mind.
When she first heard the voice she wondered whether the mansion was haunted, then she feared for her sanity. But it was neither madness nor the supernatural which threatened her.
Mezak appeared to her suddenly in the twilight of the mansion’s gloomy corridors. He was more romantic than her wildest dreams. Although some of his language was beyond her understanding at first, it gradually became possible for them to communicate. Mezak was from the future, the remote future, but Catherine slowly realised that she was in love with him! Her father’s strange research into super-freezing and suspended animation gave her only a remote chance of reaching him, but she was prepared to take that chance. As Catherine placed herself in the freezing chamber, numbness and darkness crept over her…. Would she ever open those beautiful eyes again?

Uma, a beautiful but frightened dancing girl, sells a strange bronze statuette of Nataraja, the dancing Siva, to Dr Chris Anderson, while he was visiting a bazaar in Pollachi, Southern India. He travels back to Kerala and puts the statuette on the bedside cabinet in his hotel room. His sleep is tortured by fantastic nightmares in which he seems hosts of ancient Indian gods and demons, in all their splendour and horror.

He wakes in terror to hear a faint voice whispering in the darkness. The bronze statuette is glowing with unearthly light and there is a smell if incense.

Can a human soul be imprisoned in bronze by the power of weird, unearthly dark magic?

Can Dr Chris Anderson release the psychic prisoner? Who is Uma, the mysterious dancing girl?

The anatomy of fear is the unknown. The essence of terror is contained in the phrase “What if?” Suppose the dead should return? Are there invisible phychic entities hovering on the fringe of the physical world? Can the power of evil manifest itself in tangible form and launch world shattering violence against humanity?

The most gripping fear lies within the human mind. Lana Davis was a normal, healthy, sane young woman to all outward appearances but the Unknown was laying siege to her mind. By day her work kept the worst of the Terror at bay, but at night it returned. Time passed and Fear grew greater…Fear was embodied in a mysterious effigy which stood beside her bed . . . Fear lurked in a weird voice on the telephone.

Lana Davis ran screaming into the night – unable to face Fear any longer. The stranger who found her apparently knew more about her problems than she did; Lana found herself involved in a macabre new environment where Fear had expelled reality leaving the stranger as the only link with the world she had once known. Dark supernatural powers contended with insanity for Lana’s very soul, as she hovered on the brink of unreality and annihilation.