Superstition

by David Ambrose Narrated by Richard Ferrone

Overview

What do you do when reality as you know it seems to shift under your very feet? Brace yourself for a thrilling, chilling, supernatural roller coaster ride of a novel from one of England's best known suspense writers. As creative thought forms begin to take on a life of their own, the waking nightmare that evolves will have you shivering with delicious dread. It all begins when parapsychologist Sam Towne and journalist Joanna Cross decide to conduct an experiment to see if it's possible for a group to deliberately create a ghost. Or maybe it started with the psychics who cursed Joanna when she exposed their fraud in her last magazine article. Either way, soon the question is how to stop it! David Ambrose, who began his career as a screenwriter for Orson Welles, exhibits his flair for the dramatic in this contemporary ghost story. Narrator Richard Ferrone's sonorous voice draws you in and holds you spellbound as you consider the fragility of everything you think you know.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

For a scientific experiment in psychokinesis, university psychologist Sam Towne assembles a group of eight individuals who, using the power of their collective consciousness, create a "ghost" with whom they hope to communicate. With ace investigative journalist (and love interest) Joanna Cross on hand to bear witness, the scientific seances at Manhattan University succeed all too well: the entity the group conjures up not only communicates with them but also becomes integral to their lives--and deaths. British author Ambrose (The Man Who Turned into Himself) takes a poor paranormal premise and eventually overcomes it with a ripping good ending. Despite the publisher's play-up of the novel as supernatural suspense and horror, the book is almost science fictional as Ambrose ultimately speculates on a time-travel theory postulating that the past comes out of the present instead of the present emerging from the past. According to Ambrose's acknowledgments, the story is based on "an experiment that actually took place" in the early 1970s. Unfortunately, the author brings neither his almost comically dated fake psychic schemers nor parapsychology into the '90s. But his well-toned technique and winning characterizations carry patient readers along to the core of the story. The plot falters slightly as it falls into a "Don't-open-that-door!" groove and a lot of people suddenly and mysteriously drop dead. Once over the low hurdles, however, Ambrose plays an unflinching mastergame of reality manipulation right through to a chilling checkmate of an ending that is genuinely frightening. Film rights sold to Interscope for $1 million; foreign rights sold in Germany and Holland. (Oct.)

Kirkus Reviews

Still another hypnotic paranormal thriller from the Great Ambrose (Mother of God; The Man Who Turned Into Himself) that, once again, will drag you unfailingly into the small hours. No movie or book can be taken as evidential proof that a world of spirit exists parallel with ours. But paranormal investigators press on, peering into the invisible. In imitation of a real-life famous experiment conducted 20 years ago, when parapsychologists in Toronto claimed they'd invented a ghost named Philip, a team of Manhattanites decides here to invent its own ghost, or thought-form, by pooling their mental energies and focusing them on a fictitious English-speaking character named Adam Wyatt, whose life they write, placing it in the well-researched period of the French Revolution. As psychologist Sam Towne and his group of six volunteers (including a magazine reporter) go on meeting, they become so familiar with Adam that when he actually begins table-rapping, as presumably did Philip, they're naturally elated and begin asking him all sorts of questions. Many he can't answer because they can't answer the questions: He knows only what they know, being made of their thoughts. But, as it happens, he's also made of their darker natures, and the time comes when Adam himself begins to create an alien universe parallel with their own and starts sucking them into it by leading them to their deaths. As always, Ambrose misleads us toward one climax, only to substitute a hugely inventive, jaw-dropping, bittersweet alternate climax. Features a cast of warmly attractive adult characters and no human villain in sight.

JUN/JUL 00 - AudioFile

In this supernatural tale, Sam Towne, a parapsychologist, conducts an experiment to see if it's possible for a group of people, all volunteers, to create a ghost. Taking part is Joanna Cross, a journalist, who has just been "cursed" for exposing a couple of charlatans claiming to be psychics. The experiment turns into a nightmare as, one by one, each volunteer dies, until only Joanna and Sam are left. Ferrone maintains an appropriate, unique voice for each of the characters. He reads with a natural tempo and effectively conveys the suspense of this spooky story. S.S.R. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170500116
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	08/22/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Sam Towne was watching an upturned plastic pudding container crawl crablike back and forth across the smooth surface of the laboratory floor.

The technical name for the device was a tychoscope, derived from the Greek tukhe, meaning "chance," and skopion, meaning "to examine." The prototype had been invented by a Frenchman, Pierre Janin, in the late seventies. It rested on two wheels set parallel to each other and a fixed pivot leg, enabling it to move in a straight line either forward or backward, or rotate clockwise or counterclockwise.

All these movements were radio controlled by a random event generator (REG) in the next room. An REG was essentially no more than an electronic coin-tossing machine, its circuitry governed by some unpredictable physical process such as radioactive decay or thermal electron motion. A computer, programmed to sample this process at preset intervals, generated arbitrary series of numbers or movements accordingly.

The tychoscope's next move, in consequence, was always anybody's guess. Statistically there was a known probability that it would make any one of the possible moves open to it, just as a coin, every time it is tossed, has a 50/50 chance of coming down heads or tails. Over ten, a hundred, or a thousand tosses it will come down approximately half the time heads and half tails. That is the law of probability.

Yet what Sam and his assistant, Pete Daniels, were witnessing was a consistent and dramatic violation of that law. The little pudding-container robot was literally huddling in one corner of the floor. Each time the REG switched it to a new tack that looked liketaking it away, the next few switches would inexorably bring it back to the same area.

Sam and Pete exchanged a look, neither concealing his excitement from the other. Both knew that this was a historic moment: a repeatable demonstration, under laboratory conditions, of something utterly inexplicable.

"Okay, let's move the cage," Sam said.

There was an anxious twittering from the fifteen seven-day-old chicks as their world swung up into the air and came to rest two yards from where it had been. It took only a few moments for them to reorient themselves and begin calling for the featureless moving object that they had been conditioned to regard as "mom," and which was now farther away from them than they found comfortable.

Pete came back from the next room with a printout from the computer. He handed it to Sam in silence. The numbers spoke for themselves.

"That's almost three times," Sam said, doing a quick bit of mental arithmetic. "The goddamn thing spent three times longer hanging around the cage when the chicks were in it than when it was empty."

"In-fucking-credible."

"But true."

They both turned as the chirping of the little birds grew more agitated. The tychoscope was making a turn of almost three hundred and sixty degrees. Sam caught Pete's eye, each of them knowing the thought that had shot through the other's head, followed by a jolt of self-reproach at such a cockeyed notion. It was absurd to think, as they both instinctively though briefly had, in terms of the tychoscope actively searching for its brood. It was a mindless machine without even the pretensions to ratiocinative thought of the simplest computer program. Any kind of program was an ordered process, and the whole point of the process by which the little robot's movements were controlled was that it lacked all order.

The only possible force causing the machine to move as it had been moving for the past twenty minutes was the will of the tiny caged chicks to keep it near to them. Like most baby birds, they had adopted as their mother the first moving object they had come in contact with on hatching from the egg. After their birth they had spent one hour every day for six days in the presence of the robot as it meandered on its random path. Today was the first time they had been caged and therefore unable to follow the machine in their accustomed way.

So, instead, they were making it come to them.

An hour later Pete brought in another cage of chicks to replace the first. The only difference was that these chicks had never seen the tychoscope before and therefore had no attachment to it. To establish this Sam did a twenty-minute control run during which the robot, as the computer printout confirmed, followed its normal random path while the chicks in their cage paid it no attention.

"Okay, Pete, pull the blinds, will you?" Sam said as soon as he had satisfied himself about the result. The lab became pitch dark, and the twittering of the chicks grew agitated.

"See what I mean?" Sam said. "They hate the dark during waking hours. It throws them into a panic."

The noise that the chicks were making certainly bore him out. They subsided somewhat as a small flame leapt from Pete's lighter, which he touched to a candle. He attached the candle to a clip on top of the tychoscope, which had remained stationary on the far side of the floor since the end of the previous run.

When the candle was in place—the only source of illumination in the room—Sam pressed the switch on his remote. The tychoscope began to move.

The chicks clamored for the light to come to them ...

"I'll never eat one of those things again," Pete murmured as they analyzed the data after several runs. "The little buggers are magicians."

Sam smiled. "Then you'd better become a vegetarian," he said, "because anything more awake than a carrot could pull off what you just saw. And some people have theories about carrots."

"You want to run a test with a basket of vegetables?"

"Nah—people would think we were nuts."

"They already do."

"Yeah, well," Sam shrugged, "maybe we are."

Pete shot a covert glance in his boss's direction. Sometimes he didn't understand Sam. By rights he should have been ecstatic at the results they were getting, but a sudden despondency seemed to have settled on him, as though everything they were doing was a waste of time.

"What's up?" he asked. "You found a flaw in the procedure, or what?"

"There's no flaw." Sam's voice was flat.

"So why the long face?"

There was a flash of annoyance in Sam's look that warned the younger man to back off and not push the question further. But Pete wasn't in this job because he liked being told what to do or what to think. He respected Sam, liked him, and admired what he was doing; because of that he wanted to be taken into his confidence.

"Don't look at me like that," he said, aware of a slightly whining note of protest in his voice that he disliked. "If there's something on your mind, I'd like to know."

Sam sighed. It was a form of apology. "It's nothing to do with the experiment."

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is figuring out what, if anything, it all adds up to."

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