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It’s by far the most shocking thing to happen on a London campus in decades. A lecturer shot dead – in apparent imitation of the Reeva Steenkamp case a few years before – through the door of a toilet stall in the Humanities building. The questions are myriad. Too many to answer in the short window the press affords the story before the customary slide into seasonal oblivion. The victim is Laura Cameron, Professor of Philosophy, and Esther’s dear friend and colleague. A mother of two, and almost as renowned for her eccentric, bohemian style as for her books on metaethics and moral responsibility. With her heron’s-nest hair, held high in an improbable construction, Laura was unmistakeable walking into a conference hall, or on TV. A public academic, and the youngest woman to be made professor at the University of London, Laura was brilliant, risky, unconventional. A force of nature, the newspapers predictably say. All the qualities, Esther reflects in the dark, time-arrested days of January that follow, that she lacks.

Read the opening pages of Time Being, the new novel by Jude Cook.

Paul, with his good Christian name, wanted to mark his white damask caparisons and liturgical sandals and his cloaks, particularly the one depicting the Tree of Jesse, with a bold and original monogram, one that would immediately and resoundingly promulgate his high and uncontaminated standing in the world to everyone with seeing eyes, and so the boy, whose name he could not be bothered to learn, was brought to him. It was the boy, the baker’s son, who’d designed Manuel’s monogram. Where the boy might have learned this skill never crossed Paul’s patrician mind. He was too enraged to hear others, especially Mechthild—Mechthild with her circlet of verbena and those wildly wide-set, goat-blue eyes that drove him near mad—praise Manuel’s monogram. Manuel’s nobility was not a hereditary condition. He had no longstanding coat of arms. He was merely a knight—a knight!—and Paul loathed him. He ordered that a peacock be skinned without plucking, roasted, and brought to table in its natural envelope. In its beak, a sponge soaked in spirits of wine was kindled, and Paul made his vow: Lo, though it be in defiance of the Peace and Truce of God, he would have Manuel beheaded. Yet before the sword smote the worm’s head, Paul would see to it that Manuel looked upon his monogram and knew it to be the superior of the two.

A short story by Young Rader.

The Valley of Kings, 1922. Obstinate and impatient, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon descended with their excavation crew into darkness.

“If they go down in that spirit, I give them six weeks to live,” joked reporter Arthur Weigall.

Carter—the self-made man, the scrappy adventurer—broke into the outer chamber, which released a plaintive gust. He clambered inside, the first soul in three thousand years to breathe that air. He paused before the sealed door which bore a foreboding inscription: You people who enter this tomb make evil against me, may snakes be against you in water and on land.

An awed hush fell over the scene. By candlelight, Carter hacked a hole into the pitch-black tomb. As he reached his torch into the darkness, his eyes adjusting to the light, what he saw shook him to his core—

A short story (in variations) by Jonny Aldridge.

Being a regular guy — that is, being downtrodden by the capitalist system as opposed to merely heterosexual and (possibly) patriarchal too — Hugh spent the best part of Christmas Eve alone at the Space, inputting the last lot of scientific data (which was not data science, or even rocket science, but still just as boring). At eight PM he was finally ready to log-off and head back through the dark but still partly leafy streets. Despite the Berlin Senate’s demands that the Hypothetical Ramessesium be immediately removed, the city still bore numerous traces of it: broken logos buzzing round the dirtier corners and continuing to remind everyone that yes, Lex Ramesses really was the master of their universe, while also revealing — or partially hinting at — the other, possible corners of it that he would one day rule as well.

Read an extract from The Ultraviolet Catastrophe by Susan Finlay.

No one knows why anyone else is here. The Swiss consul, for starters, is searching for his ex-daughter. The country, he says, is remote; others say that eventually, her mien spectral, she may well return. Some give instructions: For proper aftercare, boil your ear in salt water for fifteen minutes, twice a day. If excess itching occurs, drown a gibbous. If you are struck by the need to vomit, or find yourself coughing uncontrollably, it is far more polite to excuse yourself than attempt to quell in front of your party—gaping with fear, alarm, eyes eyebrowless—the tempest in your solar plexus. Two reminisce suggestively about the taking of the jewels; gloved, by night with torch and spear.

A short story by Shea Hellenthorpe.

When I became a ghost, I kept going but the world went slack. The living drifted like continents. Sneezes bloomed slower than the corpse flower at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, which is where the blood clot got me. I quickly gave up on all that edification and headed south to Port St. Joe to see about killing my husband Swett.

At first, I passed time floating through cars, tapping French fries out of passengers’ gaping fish-mouths. Outside Nashville, I drifted into a hooptie in the eons-long process of crumpling into a semi. The driver’s ghost, newly released, took one look at me and fled.

A short story by Meghan Williams.

Things got sticky this week, Stephen told her, when the man he called the Russian went into the bathroom for private ablutions and the glass eye he took out to wash slipped through his fingers and rolled into the toilet stall. The first thing anyone heard was the unlockable bathroom door swinging open with unusual force. Then the surge of limbs pumping and a sense of their pluming wake as the panicked one-eyed man charged fast to the nurses’ station, holding the eye aloft between two fingers like a bon bon.

Excuse me. This requires antiseptic rinse. Excuse me, said the Russian.

Stephen was watching from where he always stood, near the nurses, flush against the wall.

The nurse made a gesture at the man with her chin, up and out and then back down to her phone call, to register the red fleshy backdrop where an eye should have been, the surprisingly large white globe and glassy brown iris pointed her way.

A short story by Mary Byrne.