THREE DAYS AFTER HE WAS MURDERED, RICHARD PRATT BEGAN TO FEEL MUCH BETTER...
A seemingly random act of violence propels Professor Richard Pratt into The Hereafter. It is a strange, muted, netherworld of the dead-a world in which he is forced to bear...
George Drouillard never had a son. At least, not while he was alive.
Of course, Tuilla's children had called him "father," but by the time he was adopted by the Goshute, they were already late into their teens. They never saw him as the father he really wanted to be: nurturing, caring, and affectionate. And although he had loved Tuilla's children dearly, they were never really his own.
But little Sutton Deary was different.
Drouillard did not think it mattered in the least that he had not sired Sutton. Or that he had not found him until August of 1969, when the boy was already five years old. Sutton was his son, and he doted on the boy the way any loving father would dote over his first-born.
He knew the boy was his from the moment he first possessed him.
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Drouillard had learned the Fourth Gift slowly, over more than a century. And by the time he discovered the Deary family, he had already used it on a dozen men and women. Possession was strange and intoxicating, but the Wanderer had also found it disconcerting to be in the minds of twentieth-century humans, whose lives and concerns were so different from the world he had known. It wasn't until he found the sweet and innocent mind of Sutton Deary that he realized the Fourth Gift could be a blessing.
In little Sutton Deary, Drouillard had found a soul perfectly pure and perfectly kind—and when he entered the boy he was not met with fear and panic, as he had been in every mind he had possessed up to then. Instead, the little boy was just curious, relinquishing control of his limbs and his voice without a single bit of struggle. There was no need to push him deep in the well and lock him there, the way Drouillard had with those who had come before. Instead, they sat face to face in the boy's mind, looking into each other's eyes, in curiosity and wonder of each other.
Perhaps that trust and innocence came from the fact that the boy was so young. If he had been even a few years older he might have learned distrust and fear. That was a simple answer, but somehow, Drouillard knew it was not the entire story. No, there was just simply something inherently good about the boy. Little Sutton Deary could not imagine a soul consumed with hatred—the way that Drouillard's soul had been for a hundred years—and thus he only saw the sparks of humanity that had not yet been extinguished from the Wanderer's heart.
Possessing the boy soothed a century of Drouillard's hatred, and in the days that followed the old ghost once again felt love, and peace, and happiness.
In the century since his death, the old ghost had forgotten much of his past. The life he had once lived was, by that time, little more than jumbled images of horses and desert sand. He remembered he had lived a long life, and died a very old man. He could see his age in the wrinkles of his hands, and the blue veins in his legs. But other than the name George Drouillard, he remembered little—and for most of the past century, he had not even bothered to try. His rage had shown him the doorway to possession, and he had used it to ease his way into Sutton's innocent mind.
