The sunlight made both of us blink.

• +..reverb-drenched


• +..ambient


• +.. electro

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Dickens waved away the question and returned his attention to the gold watch now in his hands. “My dear Wilkie, I had the most astonishing dream last night.” “Oh?” I said sympathetically. I assumed I would be hearing his nightmares about the accident at Staplehurst. “It seemed almost as though I were reading a book that I had written in the future,” he said softly, still turning the watch over and over in his hands. The gold caught the light from the single lamp. “It was a terrible thing … all about a man who mesmerised himself so that he, or his other self created by these mesmeric suggestions, could carry out terrible deeds, unspeakable actions. Selfish, lustful, destructive things that the man — for some reason in the dream I wanted to call him Jasper — would never consciously do. And there was another … creature … involved somehow.” “Mesmerise himself,” I murmured. “That is not possible, is it? I defer to your longer involvement and training in the art of magnetic influence, my dear Charles.” “I have no idea. I have never heard of it being done, but that does not necessarily mean it is impossible.” He looked up. “Have you ever been mesmerised, Wilkie?” “No,” I said with a soft laugh. “Although a few have tried.” I did not feel it necessary to add that Professor John Elliotson, formerly of the University College Hospital and Dickens’s very own mentor and instructor in the art of mesmerism, had himself found it impossible to make me submit to the mesmeric influence. My will was simply too strong. “Let us try,” said Dickens, dangling the watch by its chain and beginning to swing it in a pendulum motion. ; Quercus. Drood: from the bestselling author of The Terror (pp. 27-28). Quercus. Kindle Edition.
Simmons, Dan