Conspiracy of Silence Read online

  “You really liked that kid, didn’t you?” Marge asked me as she snuggled up to me.

  I winced a little—my shoulder was still tender—but I liked her softness and warmth next to me.

  “Yeah, sure, I liked her,” I said. “Who wouldn’t? But she’s just a kid.”

  “A big, shapely, well-dressed, and wealthy kid,” Marge said with a smile.

  “And I’m sure she’ll find a nice husband among the bluebloods of New Jersey.”

  “Not your type?” she kept needling.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I replied blandly. “Any dame with curves like that is my type. But”—looking right in her face—“you got curves too, and something else besides.”

  “What?” Marge asked, wide-eyed. She couldn’t imagine she had anything over the fetching Lizbeth.

  “You’ve developed a tolerance for a guy named Joe Scintilla,” I said, wrapping her in my arms as tightly as my bum shoulder would allow.

  As I said, I ain’t no monk.

  And she ain’t no nun.

  About the Author

  S. T. Joshi is a widely published critic and editor. He is the author of such critical studies as The Weird Tale (1990), H. P. Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), and The Modern Weird Tale (2001). For Penguin Classics, he has prepared three annotated editions of Lovecraft’s tales, as well as editions of the works of Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, and M. R. James, and the anthology American Supernatural Tales (2007). His exhaustive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996), won the British Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. He is coeditor of Ambrose Bierce’s Collected Short Fiction (2006; 3 vols.), and has edited several editions of the work of H. L. Mencken. He is coeditor of Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia (2005; 3 vols.) and the editor of Documents of American Prejudice (1999), Atheism: A Reader (2000), In Her Place: A Documentary History of Prejudice against Women (2006), Icons of Horror and the Supernatural (2006; 2 vols.), The Agnostic Reader (2007), and other volumes. Among his writings on politics and religion are God’s Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003) and The Angry Right (2006). He has compiled bibliographies of H. P. Lovecraft (1981; rev. 2009), Ambrose Bierce (1999), Gore Vidal (2007), H. L. Mencken (2009), and other authors. He lives with his numerous cats in Seattle, Washington.