Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part Three
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Acknowledgements
Also by Alan Durant
Copyright
Also by Alan Durant and available in Definitions:
Blood
FLESH AND BONES
AN RHCB DIGITAL EBOOK 978 1 448 11912 7
Published in Great Britain by RHCB Digital,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
A Random House Group Company
This ebook edition published 2011
Copyright © Alan Durant, 2008
First Published in Great Britain
Definitions 2008
The right of Alan Durant to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Acknowledgements
This book took a long time to write (too long, some would say) but it would never have been completed at all if not for the invaluable assistance of a few people, whom I should like to thank here: my editor, Charlie Sheppard, for her faith, patience and amazing understanding; Kate, for her profound friendship and encouragement (and connections!); her uncle, Father Matthew, and the other monks of Ampleforth, whose hospitality and openness during my brief stay with them provided a key spark of inspiration; my oldest daughter, Amy, for her unflinching critical eye; and last, but by no means least, my wife, Jinny, for her constant love and support through thick and thin. I dedicate this book to each and every one of them with immense gratitude, warmth and appreciation.
Alan Durant
The Times, 13 June 1999
MEDIEVAL MYSTERY OF SKULL AND ‘SCRATCHCARD’
A yellowing piece of parchment found beneath the altar of a ruined monastic church could be the world’s earliest known scratchcard, archaeological experts believe.
The 10in by 8in document, whose authenticity is currently being researched with the help of the British Library, is considered to date from the late fifteenth century. It was discovered during excavations at Maundle Abbey near York.
The parchment, known as an incunabula, features three illuminated characters side by side, with a text promising the winner a spiritual reward. It is thought to be an indulgence sold by the Church to guilty Christians seeking forgiveness for their sins. Dr Malcolm Wagstaff, who is heading the excavation, says that the parchment may well be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The dig also uncovered a skull, which it is believed may be the last remains of the monastery’s founder, St Geronimus. If confirmed, this would be a very significant find for the Church. Dr Wagstaff said that while it was too soon to make any such claims, initial tests and research revealed that the skull dated back several centuries.
Dr Wagstaff told reporters that there was no evidence that the incunabula and the skull were connected, although, he added, this could not be ruled out. Tests continue.
THE SKULL MADE me feel sad, deeply sad. Staring into those cavities where eyes had once been, imagining the flesh that once covered the bare white bone . . . it brought a lump to my throat. Quite apart from anything else, a skull was a death’s head, and death made me think of Mum; this skull more than any other, ’cause it had been dug up from its five-hundred-year-old rest a year to the day after Mum died. A whole year had gone by and I was still a mess. But then how could you ever get over something as terrible as that? Could there be anything as terrible as that? It seemed to me that even if I was five hundred years old like that skull, I could never come to terms with Mum’s death.
I picked up the sheet of paper on which Dad had noted the main findings from the physical anthropologist’s report. It was headed ‘Brother Boniface’. How they must have laughed when someone had come up with that name. I could see why it had seemed appropriate: Boniface was a saint’s name, and what was a skull but a bony face? But I hated it. It wasn’t his name, was it? Nobody knew what his name had been. The one thing they knew for certain was that he wasn’t St Geronimus the Venerable. Dr Wagstaff’s enthusiasm for this theory had been misplaced – so Dad said. He didn’t have much time for Dr Wagstaff. The two of them had worked together before on another dig and they hadn’t exactly hit it off. Dad dismissed Wagstaff as a ‘sensationalist’, always trying to bend the facts to fit his theories.
So who was the person whose skull I was now staring into? A novice monk apparently. According to the report, he’d been in his mid-teens when he’d died: ‘Boniface was a male Caucasian of European ancestry and stood about 5’ 4” tall.’ The same height as me, which would have made him below average now, though in those days I reckoned it would probably have been quite tall. No one would have called him ‘short arse’ the way some of the kids at school did me. Not that I cared any more. What were a few taunts next to what I’d been through?
I stared once more into the hollow sightless eyes and again had that overwhelming feeling of sadness. I’d lost my mother, and so had he, I thought – well, actually, no, she’d abandoned him. We’d done a project on monastic life in RS and I knew that in medieval times parents put their sons into monasteries the way some parents these days pack their offspring off to boarding school. Only going into a monastery was for life; there was no going home for the holidays. It was final – final as death. How could any mother do that?
My eyes moved to the bigger cavity in the crown of the skull where the fatal blow had been struck before the head had been severed from the body. As yet, no one knew why. Had the boy suffered? Had he had time to know what was happening, to register the identity of his killer – or had death been instantaneous? Dad said that the experts inclined towards the latter theory. They’d finished all their tests, carbon dating and all the rest – they knew when he lived, how tall he’d been, how he’d died; now they’d passed the skull on to Dad to try to discover what he’d really looked like. That was Dad’s job: putting flesh on the bones – well, clay anyway.
Once again I gazed into the eyes. The eyes! I started, blinked, frowned. The skull was eyeless. But brown eyes had gazed back. It wasn’t possible, but it shook me all the same – not just the eyes, but for a second I’d heard a sound too, oddly muffled like someone talking to you when your head was under water. I turned to see if anyone had come into the room. I was alone.
That evening me and Dad and Dad’s brother, Uncle Jack, sitting having supper. Jack on his favourite subject: what I’d do if I won the lottery. Tonight he was going to buy himself a yacht – ‘A great gin palace,’ he said – and cruise around the world, visiting exotic places.
‘You’ve as much chance of that happening as Wagstaff has of making a sensible diagnosis,’ said Dad.
Jack raised his hands in a stop-right-there gesture; pursed his lips. ‘You may scoff,’ he said. ‘But I have faith. One day it’s going to happen, you’ll see. And then you’ll laugh on the other side of your face.’
‘Not me.’ Dad again. ‘I’d wish you luck, Jack, because that’s when you’d need it. You may need incredibly good fortune to win the thing; but not to let it ruin your life when you do – now that’s when you’d need all the luck in the world. Riches – and especially unearned riches – never brought anyone happiness. Winning the lottery has ruined more lives than it’s benefited, I’m certain of that.’
‘Ah, you scientists,’ Jack tutted. ‘You have no imagination – no soul.’ He turned to me. ‘Isn’t that right, Liam?’
I shrugged. ‘I reckon there are better things to put your faith in than the lottery.’
‘Oh yes, and what might they be?’
‘Well’ – a hesitation – ‘God.’
‘God? Now you are clutching at straws. Tell him, Will.’
Dad sighed. ‘I can’t say I find either helpful.’
‘I suppose you believe in science,’ Jack irked.
‘It seems as good a thing as any to put your faith in. At least it doesn’t promise what it can’t deliver.’ Dad pushed at a dollop of mash with his fork. ‘Take that skull I’m working on. What good did believing in God do him, poor beggar?’
I wasn’t having that. ‘You don’t know that. Maybe he was better off dying. Maybe he went to heaven and he’s looking down on us right now, shaking his head at what a mess we’ve made of things putting all our faith in science or the lottery.’
‘Hey, don’t knock the lottery,’ Jack sparked. ‘Anyway, didn’t I hear they found some kind of scratchcard in with that monk of yours?’
‘It was an incunabula, offering absolution from sins,’ said Dad. ‘And I think the reward it offered was to be collected after death.’
‘After death?’ Jack was aghast. ‘What’s the use in that?’
‘If you believed in hell and damnation, which most people did in those days, then getting rid of your sins was essential: you didn’t want to live for ever in the burning fires of hell. So you did everything you could to be absolved from your sins – go on a pilgrimage, buy an indulgence, give money to a church or monastery – so that when you died, you’d be rewarded with a place in heaven. And knowing this, the Church cashed in any way they could. Selling incunabula, or spiritual scratchcards, was just one wheeze they came up with.’
My hackles were up and I couldn’t let it pass. ‘You think science has got so much to be proud of? What’s it ever done for us except help create nuclear missiles and mutant tomatoes?’
Dad smiled wearily. ‘That’s ridiculously simplistic, Liam, and you know it. I’m going back to work.’
In bed that night I picked at the conversation – science, the lottery, the skull, God . . . I hadn’t always believed in God. It was only since Mum died that I’d gone down that route – and it had brought me some comfort where nothing else had been able to. I’d talked to friends, doctors, bereavement counsellors, listened to countless words of advice, sympathy and consolation, but nothing could break through the crust of despair that had grown over me. Certainly not Dad. Not that he’d really tried.
I’d gone into a church to annoy Dad as much as anything. I couldn’t bear the way he seemed so matter-of-fact about our tragedy. He just carried on working with his old bones as if nothing had changed. When I told him that one of the counsellors had suggested talking to a priest, Dad had dismissed it out of hand. ‘Pie in the sky,’ he’d called it. ‘A waste of time.’ So I, who hadn’t been thinking of following up the suggestion, did so the very next day.
The priest, Father Christopher, was very approachable. He invited me to a service. And I liked it. I liked being part of a . . . well, yes, a family. It made me feel wanted, supported. I found praying a release. I could say what I felt without having anyone opposite, pitying or judging or analysing. There was comfort too in the idea of an afterlife – that monk in heaven looking down . . .
The bones are false.
The words came out of the air. Or were they in my head? Had they insinuated themselves in one of those nano-seconds of unconsciousness when my eyes had closed and almost at once opened again. I sat up, knew myself to be wide awake, my room just as it always was, the sky outside dark, starless, a fuzzy glimmer at the window from the streetlights.
Foul deeds. Murder. The Black Art.
The same voice again, and this time a figure too, superimposed on my vision like one of those overhead projector overlays they were so fond of at school: a boy, about my own age, earnest brown eyes staring out from under the cowl of a black serge habit. A monk’s habit.
Brother Boniface.
THE VISIONS AND the voices became more and more frequent. I heard whispers of bones and murder, saw shadowy hooded figures – and the eyes, always the eyes, staring out at me, imploring me in. I was drawn to the skull compulsively. It no longer made me feel sad. Now it evoked in me a range of new feelings – fascination, elation, terror.
I watched Dad in his workshop with his ultrasound equipment, attempting to gauge the depth of the tissue there would have been on the living face of the skull. As Dad had explained a number of times, the results were only approximate – they gave you ‘average’ information and you couldn’t be sure your subject had been average. Some people had small heads, some – Neanderthals, for example – had large ones. But you got some basic guidelines – ‘Good enough for someone like Wagstaff, but not for a proper scientist.’ Dad preferred the anatomical method. This is where his real expertise came to the fore. He drew on his deep knowledge of the muscles, glands and fat pads that most affect the way people look to give life to the skull.
It wasn’t the first time I had watched Dad carry out this operation, but I’d never before been affected like this. I could barely watch as he painstakingly sculpted the defining anatomical structures onto the skull. I winced as if these structures were being applied to my own head: the zygomaticus muscle between the eyes, the parotid gland above the left eye, the orbicularis oris at the bridge of the nose . . . There were seven structures in all, and with each one, my hand went involuntarily to the corresponding area on my own face. I felt giddy, like I’d been given an anaesthetic and was in that mid state between consciousness and unconsciousness when light intensifies and sound muffles.
Brother Martin will be your keeper. He will make sure that you are well looked after and that you carry out the vows and duties you are bounden to.
Two figures in tunics whispering in the darkness.
You know too much, and knowledge is a dangerous, dangerous thing.
Murder. The Black Art.
‘Are you all right, Liam?’ A voice floating in the ether. Then Dad’s face coming into focus.
I blinked, squinted. ‘I feel sort of faint.’ My breathing was fast, desperate, as if I were drowning.
‘Slow down. Deep breaths.’ Dad’s voice again. And yet, no, not Dad’s.
And then another voice. The indulgences are worthless. The bones are false. There is no truth in them.
A cloister. A hooded figure. The sound of bells.
And then nothing.
‘Thomas, Thomas.’ He opened his eyes and his mother was sitting at the end of the bed. Her hair was down, flowing about her pale face in all its golden glory. He loved that. He loved her eyes too, gazing at him, smiling sadly – sapphire blue with a fleck of brown to one side of the dark pupils. He blinked in the dusty sunlight, his eyes and mind coming slowly into focus. He took in the burned tallow candle at his bedside, remembered what day it was.
‘Mother,’ he said simply. But his thoughts were far from simple. How could he bear to leave her? How could she bear to part from him?
‘You must bathe and dress, Thomas,’ she said. ‘I’ll have Robin fill the tub.’ She paused. ‘The Lord knows when you will next have such an opportunity.’ As she spoke these words, tears glistened in her eyes.
His pity for her overcame his own apprehension. ‘Why, Mother, don’t be sad,’ he said gaily. ‘That’s one of the benefits of becoming a monk.’
It was well known that monks did not believe in regular bathing, once a month or so being considered quite sufficient; to bathe more frequently was unholy self-indulgence. His own family bathed at least twice a week. His mother insisted upon it. Now all that was going to change. Everything was going to change. His old life was over. Today he was being taken into Maundle Abbey to begin his training as a novice monk.
When his mother left to supervise Robin, he lay back on his bolster and looked up at the curved roof-beams. He wondered for a moment what his new bedroom would be like. The monks slept in dormitories, he knew that. There would be none of the privacy he had been accustomed to at home these past months, since his older brother Giles had gone to live with a wealthy churchman to learn to be a gentleman. With Giles there had been no chance of privacy at all. He had a way of discovering any hiding place. He would lift every floorboard if he felt there was something to uncover, no matter how trivial it might be. He took after their father in that way. As the owner of a lucrative goldsmith’s shop, Father was always wary of theft, and was meticulous about security. He watched over his wares like a hawk. His craftsmen even wore special sheepskin aprons to catch the tiny gold chippings from their labour, so that nothing of any value was wasted. As the oldest son, Giles would take over their father’s business one day, and Thomas knew he would be suited to the task in a way that he himself would never have been. He was much more like his mother – trusting, haphazard, devout. His business would be to serve God, and he was prepared to do so, though he could not help but feel apprehension at taking this new step and leaving behind all he knew and loved.
Thomas examined his chamber for the last time. His eyes took in the wall-hangings, peacock blue with a pattern of yellow roses, the badge of his father’s family, and the dark oak chest, chipped and scarred with age, decorated with carvings of mythical beasts. His gaze settled on the objects on top of the chest: the off-white skulls of a fox and a ferret, complete with teeth, which had been his greatest treasures through his boyhood. His mother hated them. ‘Horrible old bones’, she called them, and he smiled now as he recalled it. They would give him nightmares, she said, and she couldn’t understand what he saw in them. Her incomprehension only deepened when he told her that he found the skulls strangely comforting – not in the way that so many people these days found succour in sacred bones and relics (there was nothing sacred about the animal skulls), but because they had a lifelike quality about them, even in death, that was reassuring. He didn’t find the fierce set of their teeth frightening. His imagination put flesh upon the bones and they became his friends. He hated the thought of leaving them now. He had little faith that they would be properly looked after.
The bones are false, the indulgences worthless. There is no truth in them. It is nothing but wicked deceit and greed.
They practise the Black Art.
‘Thomas, come!’ Mum’s voice calling.
But, no, how could it be? Mum was dead. Dead and buried.
I heard from the street the grating whine of the failing fan-belt like the shriek of an injured animal. I heard the wild crescendo of the accelerating engine, the squeal of tyres skidding, the thump and smash of metal and glass imploding as they crashed into thick, unyielding concrete. Then a terrible, ear-exploding scream.
I woke up; realized it was my own.
DAD TOOK ME to the doctor, told him how I’d seemed to lose consciousness. For several minutes he’d been unable to communicate with me, he said; then suddenly I’d come to with a piercing scream (‘a scream loud enough to wake the dead’ is how Uncle Jack had described it – with no trace of irony. If only, I’d thought. If only . . .). The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong. He talked of prescribing some kind of sedative but Dad would have none of it. I knew that Mum had taken Prozac and other stuff – and that Dad hadn’t agreed with it. He didn’t want his son to have anything to do with drugs and he told the doctor so.
‘He’s suffering from grief, that’s all,’ he said. ‘He’ll get over it in time, in his own way.’
He told the doctor what had happened: that Mum had died in a car crash, that her car had gone out of control and smashed into a concrete wall. The way he told it was so cool and matter-of-fact it was like he was telling the doctor the plot of a movie he’d seen. There wasn’t a tremor of emotion in his voice. I wondered sometimes whether he felt any sense of loss at all. As soon as the doctor left, he went back to work, and I lay in bed seething.
Uncle Jack came by later.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘OK.’ I shrugged. ‘Tired.’ Tired of carrying this grief around like an Olympic torch.
‘We were worried about you.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to cause all this fuss. I know how busy Dad is.’
‘Yeah. That skull. He’s obsessed with it.’
I thought about that. Was he obsessed with it? I was. ‘There’s something strange about that skull,’ I said at last.
‘How, strange?’ Uncle Jack raised an eyebrow mock-quizzically.
‘I don’t know. When I’m near it, staring at it, it seems to take a hold of me.’ I paused. ‘I hear things.’
‘Hear things!’ Uncle Jack’s voice teetered on laughter. ‘What things?’
I sighed. I wished I hadn’t said anything, but it was too late now. ‘Voices, whispering. And I see things too.’
‘Now you are starting to worry me.’
‘It sounds mad, I know,’ I conceded. ‘It’s all so confused. I saw Mum crashing her car. But before that I saw this boy, about my age, a young monk. He was in bed. His mother woke him. He was about to enter a monastery.’ It came in sections, as if I was recalling a dream. ‘But it’s like I was him, like I was living his life – or he was living it through me. I see his thoughts, his dreams even.’ I sighed again. I was starting to scare myself.
But for the first time Uncle Jack actually looked interested. He put down his newspaper – opened at the racing selections, of course. ‘Maybe you’ve got some sort of gift,’ he suggested quite seriously. ‘You know, second sight. It could be very significant.’
I laughed. ‘I can’t tell you this week’s winning lottery numbers or who’s going to win the Grand National, Uncle Jack, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
Uncle Jack raised a hand. ‘You can scoff,’ he said, ‘but there are people who have these paranormal abilities.’
Jack’s seriousness had the opposite effect on me. It made me smile and shy away from the possibilities he was suggesting. ‘Not me. I’m just your idiot nephew with an over-active imagination.’ But still, I thought when I was alone again, it was strange the effect that skull had on me.
The next day I felt stronger, more normal. I got up and had breakfast, then went to Dad’s workshop. There were photographs and sketches of the skull from many different viewpoints pinned up on a large board, in front of which Dad was now standing, contemplating his subject. The work had moved on to the next stage now – the clay sculpting. The skull rested on its plinth, still eyeless, but now fleshed with clay. I watched silently for a few moments, before giving a quiet cough. Dad turned and looked at me, but for some instants seemed unable to recognize his son. ‘Oh, hello, Liam,’ he uttered eventually.
I nodded at the skull. ‘I see you’re making progress.’
‘Yes. Just having a few difficulties with the ears.’ He sighed. ‘The problem is the bones don’t give you much of an indication like they do with the other features. I know where the centre of the ears should be located’ – he pointed with his pencil – ‘and that their angle would usually be in line with the angle of the jaw, but whether they were large or small or how the lobes hung, well, it’s just about impossible to say.’
I had to smile at Dad’s discomfort. How he hated imprecision or uncertainty. He had to know or at least explain everything absolutely.
A picture flashed in my mind. ‘He had quite small ears,’ I said without thinking. ‘A bit like mine.’
Dad frowned. ‘How on earth could you know that?’
‘Just a feeling. Intuition.’
Dad huffed. ‘Speculation more like. I have enough of that from that damn fool Wagstaff. Now he’s on about dark practices. His latest theory is that the boy was a victim of a ritualistic pagan sacrifice, which culminated in beheading.’
I have to admit I was intrigued. ‘Well, he could be right, couldn’t he?’
‘He could be, but he could equally well not be. That’s my point. It’s just speculation. Why not wait till we’ve got more evidence and then make an informed judgement. He just wants publicity.’ Dad turned back to his subject and considered it carefully. ‘You could be right about the ears, though,’ he said at last. ‘It would fit.’ He put his hands to the side of the skull as if measuring.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Oh, and by the way, I’m feeling much better, in case you’re interested . . .’ I might as well have saved my breath ’cause Dad was back at work and deaf to anything but the sound of his own musings.
I sat on a stool at the back of the room and watched him working. Had he always been like this – obsessed by his job, unemotional, uninterested in anything else? So lacking in feeling that he could dismiss his wife’s tragic, violent death with barely a glimmer of misery? I’d only ever seen him cry once, and then it was like a shutter had come down: he’d just withdrawn even further into his work, carried on with his sculpting and moulding. Even when Mum was alive, it had been me who’d tried to comfort her on those awful nights when I found her sobbing wretchedly in her room. I hadn’t really known what to do. I’d just put my arms around her, whispered, ‘It’s all right, Mum,’ desperately hoping it would be.
Suddenly she was there, her golden hair worn up beneath a simple black linen cap. She stepped forward and embraced him and he smelled the scent of violets.
‘Be good, Thomas. The Lord be with you.’ Her voice was quiet, hoarse with breaking emotion. She clung onto him as if she could not let him go, even though she knew she must. He clung to her too. How could he possibly let her go? How could he live without her?
‘Madam, we must leave. I have business to attend to.’ His father’s voice, uncomfortable, peremptory. If he could have avoided coming, he would have. He hated leaving his shop during business hours. Who could say what disaster might not befall it while he was away?
‘You leave him in the best of hands, madam, sir.’ Abbot Eidric gave a small nod to each and smiled reassuringly, in his hands a beautifully crafted gold plate encrusted with rubies, the goldsmith’s gift to the abbey on taking his son into service. The abbot’s eyes lighted on Thomas and were so full of grace and kindness that the new novice felt suddenly soothed and comforted. The abbot gestured to a tall monk at his side. ‘Brother Martin is the master of the novices . . .’
His heart has gone.
Foul deeds. Murder. Necromancy.
My temples throbbed. I closed my eyes, opened them. The skull stared back at me with its deep, hollow eyes. Imploring.
FOUL DEEDS. MURDER. Necromancy. The words nagged at me like flies on a hot summer’s day. What was going on? Where were these words coming from? And the visions? Were they just dreams? One moment I was in my own reality and then suddenly I’d slipped back in time to another. My English teachers had often remarked that I had a vivid imagination, but this was something else. And how could I imagine a word that I’d never even heard before? Necromancy. I didn’t have a clue what it meant, unless perhaps it had something to do with necrophilia. Uncle Jack had explained that word to me a while back when it came up on a TV crime programme (Uncle Jack loved crime programmes, especially ones to do with forensics, and the more lurid the better; Dad, predictably, despised them – too artistic, I suppose). Necrophilia was having sex with dead people. Uncle Jack hadn’t put it quite that crudely – but that’s what it came down to. It was time to do a little research.
I switched on my computer and watched it boot. I opened the internet connection, typed the word ‘necromancy’ in the search engine window and clicked. At once a list of sites appeared. Just the first ten – ten of 181,000! It was a popular subject all right. I called up the first site – an encyclopaedia – figuring a definition would be a good place to start. ‘Necromancy,’ I read, ‘is a special form of divination or prophecy by the evocation of the dead.’ Hmm, not exactly necrophilia then, though still to do with dead people. The word was derived from the Greek nekros, meaning dead, and manteia, divination. In the past it had sometimes also been referred to as nigromancy (from niger, meaning black), suggesting black magic or black art.
They practise the Black Art.
The words seemed to sound themselves out in the air around me, which had a sudden chill. I read on. ‘The practice of necromancy supposes belief in the survival of the soul after death, the possession of a superior knowledge by the disembodied spirit, and the possibility of communication between the living and the dead.’
I started as, through the words on the screen, a boy’s