Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Bryan Irvine's "The Ghost Guard" begins inside Granite River Prison, where every guard respects Asa Shores and every convict fears him.

This LitLab miniature starts at the story heading in the March 1923 issue of Weird Tales and stops before "The Ghoul and the Corpse." Its plates follow the story's hard prison machinery: Old Tower Number Three, the night lookout, the telephone indicator, cell twenty-one, the hospital ward and the gate into darkness.

The edition keeps the violence restrained. Dread belongs to duty, silence, dust, lamplight and a song that seems to keep its post after death.