Gifts of the Night #3

The penultimate chapter of this Vertigo mature-readers series finds a dark-haired woman in a white garment pressing herself against an arched doorway, her expression taut with unease as she looks away from the unsettling tableau behind her. Through that doorway, bathed in amber light, a crouching demonic figure looms over a seated woman while smaller creatures lurk at the floor and a ghostly owl-like shape hovers near a bookshelf above. John Bolton's painted artwork gives the whole image a rich, candlelit dread — the kind of atmosphere that made Vertigo's 1999 lineup so compelling — while Paul Chadwick's story builds toward its conclusion in this third of four issues.