"Shrouds Have No Pockets" Nicholas Childerley, the suave Head of Silver at a prestigious London auction-house, is commissioned by an Edinburgh solicitor to travel to a remote Hebridean island where he is to evaluate the collection of Murdo McIver, deceased. As he works alone in the old castle, Childerley gains a deeper understanding of the misanthropic McIver: he made his fortune under suspicious circumstances, possibly killing-to acquire the rights in a Canadian silver mine. Now, it seems, he will not let death separate him from his treasure, and he returns from the grave to repel the unwelcome intruder. Events take a turn for the worse, when the expert's young wife and baby pay a surprise visit.

"The Jeweled Girl" A faded rock star lives the life of a country gentleman in a West Country house for which he pays a peppercorn rent. His teenage daughter comes to live with him after her mother's death, and it isn't long before she encounters The Jeweled Girl and uncovers the story of an angry, lost spirit and a curse that transfers to the new occupants of Fairgrieve Hall. "Compactus" A group of Cambridge students decide - as a dare - to stay on in the University Library after lock-up... with grim consequences. They have stepped into the night-time administration of Under-Librarian Drinkstone whose office occupies a corridor that doesn't exist in daylight. Here he negotiates with a select few who seek the right to fill in the pages of their own Book of Life, exacting a terrible price in the process. Escape from Drinkstone and his bibliomites is almost impossible, and for one young man the crushing jaws of the library's Compactus will prove unforgiving.

"Thomas Ripley Cannot Rest in Peace" An archaeologist uncovers a chieftain's grave in the steppes of Central Asia, prompting unwelcome memories of a haunted childhood. When his father became Bishop to the Fens, the young boy had moved to an ancient Cathedral Close where he meets one lost soul who will bring him face-to-face with his tormentor: Topcliffe, the Jesuit-hunter, whose religious fanaticism leads him to Thomas Ripley before leaving him to die in his own priest-hole. Three hundred years later, his victim still cannot find peace in his unsanctified tomb, and craves liberation.

"Second Sight" A blind Cambridge don has his sight restored through a double cornea transplant. But what appears at first to be a minor side-effect from the operation turns into something far more discomforting: Martin Ashwell is driven to learn more about the dead woman whose eyes were harvested to give him back his sight ... and in the process he is compelled to hunt down and confront her killer.

"Dark Fibres" At dawn of a new millennium, twelve strangers have gathered in an isolated bothie in the Scottish Highlands: they tell fire-side stories that start in light-hearted fashion, but grow ever more grave and frightening until those who feel themselves protected from the raging storm outside learn - through a message relayed down the "dark fibres" - that they are sheltering a man who sold his soul to the Devil three centuries before and whose time is up.

"Feeding the Dead" An elderly Professor of Oncology tells the story of his gap year in the 1960s spent among mountain-people, religious ascetics, Gurkha officers and hippies in the Kathmandu Valley. Here he confronts the competing values of East and West, ancient and modern, occult and science before arriving at a "fork in the road" - a moment of choice when he is called upon to save a friend's life by "feeding the dead". Reason has the chance to overcome superstition. But which path will young Stephen Drake take?