Christopher's Mansion — W.E.D. Ross

Lovely young Vera Wells was looking forward to a summer at the old New England mansion of her childhood. But her joy was clouded by the arrival of her strong-willed and imperious aunt, famous novelist Marcia Windsor, along with Marcia's disreputable younger husband and her dangerously beautiful secretary. Further complicating the situation was handsome, charming Gary Wilbur, who made no secret of his attraction toward Vera, but refused to divulge the dark secret of his past. In a house that legend called cursed, Vera was drawn into a whirlpool of passion, deceit and growing terror. For she was marked as victim in a deadly masquerade where nothing was quite what it seemed, and evil might well be wearing the smiling face of love.


When Vera Wells, the adopted child of Roger and Jane, returned for the summer to the Boston mansion that had been her home, the portrait still hung in the living room. Vera was a college graduate now, but somehow the old oil of Master Christopher, a fanatical witch-hunter in the days of the Salem trials, still smoldered with evil and filled the house -- and her -- with fear.

Her fear was childish, she knew, for a painting, no matter what legend may say, has no power to harm, but events that summer seemed to prove otherwise…

It was after the arrival of her aunt, Marcia Windsor, a blind writer of historical novels, her bon vivant ex-actor husband, and Marcia's pretty secretary, that strange things began to happen. And when Vera, in a walk on the beach, met a young artist painting a face that resembled Master Christopher's, she was filled with unexplainable premonitions.

Still, she did not expect to see a phantom figure, caped in black, emerge suddenly from the deep shadows of the attic.

Mr. Ross has given his readers a modern tale of doubt and fear that draws upon the dark days of an earlier time when Puritan madness swept the countryside in pursuit of witches to burn.

Hero: Gary Wilbur
Heroine: Vera Wells