The List Of Seven Read Free Page B

the Foxes, an ordinary Hydesville, New York, family. The sounds continued to manifest for months whenever their two adolescent daughters gathered in the same room. In the following years, the Fox sisters capitalized the resultant national hysteria into a thriving cottage industry: books, public seances, lecture tours, hobnobbing with celebrated faces of the day. It wasn't until the end of her life that Margaret Fox confessed the enterprise had been nothing more than an increasingly sophisticated series of parlor tricks, by which time it was far too late to still a vox populi starved for authentic experience of the supernormal: Science's assertion of primacy over the rusting tenets of Christian worship had created a seedbed that Spiritualism took root in like wild nightshade.
    The Movement's stated objective: Confirm the existence of realms of being beyond the physical, by direct communication with the spirit world through mediums—also known as sensitives—individuals attuned to the higher frequencies of noncorporeal life. Having discovered and developed this ability, the medium invariably struck up a "relationship" with a spirit guide, who served as interlocutor of a cosmic lost and found: Since most of the medium's supplicants were survivors of some recent death, they aspired to little more than reassurance that their dearly departed had arrived intact on the far side of the Styx. It was the spirit guide's task to authenticate the contact by retrieving proof from Aunt Minnie or Brother Bill, usually in the form of some hermetically private anecdote shared exclusively by both bereaved and lamented.
    In response to these simple inquiries, information flowed from the spirit through rapping, a series of knocks on tables. More accomplished mediums entered a trance during which the spirit guide "borrowed" the host's vocal cords, assuming the voice of the loved one with startling accuracy. A few manifested an infinitely rarer talent: producing large volumes of milky, malleable vapor from their skin, mouth, or nose, a substance with all the appearance but none of the properties of smoke: It did not disperse or react to atmospheric conditions, behaving rather as a three-dimensional tabula rasa able to assume the shape of any idea or entity. It was one thing to
    hear Aunt Minnie knock on the table, quite another to see her take shape before one's eyes in a cloud of clotted, autonomous fog. This strange stuff was called ectoplasm. It was photographed on countless occasions. No adequate debunking for it emerged.
    Beyond the hordes of the grieving and confused, two other, smaller subsets consistently sought out the services of the mediumistically inclined. Motivated by similar impulses— albeit with diametrically opposed ends in mind—they divided along an obvious line of demarcation; seekers of light and worshipers of darkness. Doyle, for example, was driven by a conviction that if one could pierce the appropriate sphere of knowledge, the eternal mysteries of health and disease would fall within our reach. He researched the exhaustively documented case of one Andrew Jackson Davis, an illiterate American born in 1826, who while still an adolescent discovered an ability to diagnose illness through the use of his spirit eyes, perceiving the human body as transparent and the now visible organs as centers of light and color, the hues and gradations of which corresponded to their well-being or lack thereof. In this talent, thought Doyle, one could glimpse the once and future genius of medicine.
    Worshipers of darkness, on the other hand, were striving to unlock the secrets of the ages for their own exclusive benefit, as in: Imagine the pioneers of electromagnetism deciding to keep that discovery to themselves. Regrettably, as Doyle was about to discover, this group was considerably more unified than their opposite number, and they had traveled a good deal closer to achieving their objective.
    On this same night, at that same moment, less