‘I don’t want to do that,’ Glen replied quickly.
‘Then what the hell do you want? You haven’t stayed at my place for days.’
Glen dragged a hand down his face and nodded. ‘I know, I’m sorry, I’ve just been real busy, okay? Maybe I’ll come over tonight?’
Karina stared at him for a long moment.
‘Terrific,’ she replied as she walked out of the office. ‘You wait until I have people sleeping on my couch and then you want to come over.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ Glen almost shouted as he stormed after her. ‘You want to send me a written invitation next time?’
Karina didn’t reply as she stalked away through the station.
29
Professor Bowen gestured to the open page of the book on her desk as she spoke.
‘A wraith is a disembodied spirit,’ she explained, ‘a ghost, but not the kind that you’d ordinarily think of.’
‘There’s more than one type?’ Ethan asked.
Professor Bowen stepped away from her desk and gestured to the books lining her shelves in their hundreds.
‘People think of ghosts and hauntings in much the same way,’ she explained. ‘They imagine translucent figures drifting down the halls of old houses, or maybe spirits interfering with household objects and such-like. But the supposedly paranormal aspect of existence is one that has been documented for centuries and is only really just starting to enter the public conscience as a real and tangible aspect of what it is to be alive.’
‘Would a crisis-apparition have anything to do with what we’ve described?’ Lopez asked.
Professor Bowen seemed surprised. ‘You know about crisis-apparitions?’
‘A friend of ours worked on a government project back in the 1960s,’ Ethan explained. ‘He was charged with studying crisis-apparitions that were recorded during the First World War.’
Professor Bowen nodded. ‘There were hundreds of them and in many conflicts beforehand, but it was only during the beginning of the last century that reliable first-hand accounts were recorded in detail. But a crisis-apparition is usually a benign event, a loved one saying goodbye to a family member.’
Ethan glanced at Jarvis, who was listening intently but saying nothing. For once, it seemed, he was learning as they were.
‘So wouldn’t that consist of absolute proof that the soul, or spirit, or whatever, can exist outside of the body and brain?’ Ethan asked Professor Bowen.
‘It is evidence,’ she replied, ‘but not absolute proof. Science requires as proof something tangible, something that can be measured and quantified and replicated in a laboratory. A personal experience, even one that confirms knowledge of a loved one’s death when there is no way of receiving that information by normal means, can only be judged by science as being unexplained. To just say something happened is not an answer, as no meaningful conclusion can be drawn from the statement and, thus, science has nothing to say.’
‘But you think differently,’ Lopez said.
Professor Bowen smiled. ‘I think exactly the same. However, just because something remains unexplained does not mean that it cannot be provided with some evidence to support it. I’ve been researching things like out-of-body experiences, NDEs — that is, near-death experiences — such-like for over twenty-five years and I can tell you two things for sure: one, that I don’t know what it all means, and, two, it happens all the time and it’s real.’
Ethan leaned against the office wall. ‘The soul outlives the body?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ she cautioned. ‘Nobody knows. All of the world’s religions are founded on the belief that there is life after death. It doesn’t matter which god they purport to worship or what name they give to that afterlife, whether it’s Heaven or Nirvana or Paradise: all faiths are void if there is no afterlife. Because we can say that nobody knows for sure if there’s an afterlife, then the lie of all humanity’s religions is exposed. But that doesn’t mean that the afterlife doesn’t exist, only that man’s attempts so far to rationalize and justify their beliefs are utterly in vain.’
‘How does this tie in with the homicides?’ Jarvis asked.
Professor Bowen gestured to the image of the wraith in her book.
‘There are stories from medieval times of what were called at the time “vengeful spirits”. Supposedly the souls of those wronged in life, they would return from the dead to get revenge on their assailants. These spirits were renowned for immense strength and violence and formed the origin of poltergeist legends. But according to these old accounts, a poltergeist is nothing compared to a wraith.’
‘And these things would actively hunt down enemies from their former lives?’ Ethan asked.
‘Supposedly so,’ Professor Bowen replied. ‘The only detailed account we have of a wraith comes from the diary of a man named Henry Wilberforce, a British Army Officer who served in India during the uprising of 1857. The insurrection was called The Mutiny, when Indian soldiers subservient to the British Crown rebelled when they were ordered to bite the paper off their ammunition cartridges, which they believed were coated in tallow. The use of the fat went against their religious beliefs.’
‘The grease was made from tallow or lard,’ Ethan said, recalling the event from history books, ‘which derived from beef or pork respectively and, therefore, upset both Hindus and Muslims. The rebellion was eventually put down.’
‘Precisely,’ Bowen confirmed. ‘During the conflict, many British prisoners were captured and were held in a place called the Black Hole of Calcutta, a prison so small, hot and dangerous that in one night alone only twenty-three of its one hundred forty-six prisoners survived, the dead victims of starvation, dehydration and the trampling of other prisoners.’
‘Makes Cook County look like the Ritz,’ Lopez observed.
‘One of those survivors was Henry Wilberforce,’ Bowen explained. ‘Liberated by British troops, he went on to serve as a provincial governor. But immediately after the deaths in the Black Hole, he recorded that every single prison guard in the jail was murdered over the next few nights. Some were crushed to death, others torn limb from limb, others impaled at impossible heights and angles on trees and railings. Most people thought that the jail survivors were responsible, but all of them presented alibis and none could explain how the jailors had come to die in such extreme ways.’
‘You’re saying that somebody’s ghost killed them?’ Lopez asked.
‘Nobody knows for sure,’ Bowen admitted, ‘but the event was recorded by Wilberforce as an example of an extreme supernatural event because one person actually saw the ghost that did it.’
‘What did he say?’ Ethan asked.
‘Not much of any use,’ Bowen replied. ‘He died of shock soon after saying that they had seen the Devil himself lift a man off his feet and tear him physically in half. That victim was one of the jailors.’
‘Wait one,’ Lopez said. ‘So you believe in this kind of phenomena, but you don’t believe it at the same time?’
‘It’s not about belief, ’ Professor Bowen said, ‘it’s about evidence. You only have to search the Internet to find a thousand pages of claims of violent hauntings and terrible poltergeist activity. But a more patient search on each of the cases reveals that other people who lived in the same houses noted no such activity. The Haunting in Connecticut, the Amityville Horror, the Exorcist: all of them have been made famous through television and film, yet none of them have a shred of evidence to support the claims and considerable evidence showing them to be false. The house in the Amityville case has been occupied continuously since the family concerned in the book and film moved out, yet nobody has reported anything untoward as having happened within the property since. ’