Quests of Simon Ark — Edward D. Hoch

When ancient evil emerges, it can only be stopped by a two-thousand-year-old sleuthTen years ago, Douglas Zadig emerged from the mist on an English moor, his clothes tattered, his speech slurred, and his mind completely blank. Since then, he has reinvented himself as an expert on good and evil, publishing book after book of a philosophy that is entirely lifted from the ancient writings of Zoroaster. Zadig comes to Maine on the lecture circuit, and in the frigid northern winter, just as suddenly as he first appeared, he is killed.The case fascinates Simon Ark, a two-thousand-year-old Coptic priest on a ceaseless quest to hunt out the world’s ultimate evil. In “The Man from Nowhere” and the other stories in this volume, Ark flits from murder to murder, seeking supernatural explanations for the crimes. But as he knows all too well, no mystical force can compete with the evil inside the souls of men.