Earthbound : A gripping crime thriller full of twists and supernatural suspense by Fynn Perry (audio ebook reader .TXT) 📕

to vomit as he had had experienced when the spirit of the old man had shown him the crater to the back of his head. “Why are you showing me this?” he cried, but Nikki ignored his words and obvious discomfort.

“These one-off events created the largest death tolls in history, but none of them exceeded eight percent of the world’s population at the time.” As she said this, John thought he heard a note of disappointment in her voice.

“More often than not,” she continued, “one person became famous for bringing about these acts of evil.” As she said this, John was inundated with images of the architects of the inhuman practices he had just seen, including the instantly recognizable faces of Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden. “They influenced armies of loyal followers to do their work for them. Those are only the ones that made headlines, but there are many people like them that remain as yet undiscovered, carrying out their work diligently in secret, in preparation for the next great event.” John noted a sharper, more sinister edge to her normally soft voice. “What they all have in common, John, was that they didn’t attain that level of wickedness on their own... they were all…of course… possessed.”

“I don’t understand…Possessed...? Why? …By what...?” John’s voice trailed off. He felt the sensation of a shiver pass over him as he remembered what she had told him during their last meeting: To be truly evil takes more than one evil soul in a body. When she had said those words, he hadn’t thought to consider, perhaps from the shock of the discovery, that his stumbling upon one such combination of evil spirit and evil mortal––the serial killer in the van with the body in pieces––could be just the tip of the iceberg. He was now beginning to appreciate the scale of possessions that were happening in the world and the depravity they caused. It was far larger than he could have ever imagined. But what he found more disturbing was that Nikki was apparently telling him all of this in the context of some sort of a game which she had yet to explain. He turned his head to look at her, half shocked, half uncomprehending.

Before he could say anything, Nikki started to speak again, seeming to sense his increasing unease and dawning realization that something far more insidious was afoot in the new world he had entered. “But those stars of mass murder and evil didn’t get possessed by a malevolent spirit by accident, John. Neither was their rise to power the result of an unfortunate series of events, as the history books would have you believe. It was all meticulously planned and stage-managed.”

“Planned and managed by who...? You? …I mean you and the rest of the Voids?” John asked jerkily, fearful of the answer.

“Yes!” Nikki said proudly. “Isn’t it amazing? Every one of those events you saw was scripted in advance. They were written by Voids with a talent to conceive elaborate, sweeping narratives capable of provoking the worst of mortal humanity’s behavior using such catalysts as political and religious unrest to spread hate and spark wars, encourage war crimes, oppressive regimes, slavery, and acts of terrorism.

John found her enthusiasm unnerving. “Scripted? As if to be played out like a movie?” he queried, dazed and still nauseous from the relentless scenes of brutality being shown in front of him.

“Yes, but writing a narrative is of course only half the story. The other half is enacting it, and that’s where I and many other scouts on Earth like me, come in. We look for earthbound spirits willing to possess the mortals that have been unwittingly cast into the narratives––those mortals who have their own propensity for evil, but not enough of it to be driven by themselves to carry out the acts required of them in the narratives. We match them with like-minded earthbound spirits who are keen to continue their malevolence on Earth in a new body, and by doing so significantly multiply their host’s capacity to undertake the most heinous and immoral of acts.” She paused for effect. “Those spirits are the ‘Players’”—she signaled with air quotes—“of The Game, John, influencing and guiding their unsuspecting hosts to play out their roles in line with the narrative.”

Nikki now appeared to be waiting for a reaction from him, as if expecting him to be impressed, but all he could do was look at her, confounded.

Seemingly disappointed at his lack of zeal, she carried on regardless. “It’s quite an art to find the right spirit for each mortal and we make sure they are incentivized. They know that failure to realize their roles in a narrative will result in their immediate and permanent removal from Earth.” She gave a sigh, suggesting regret, before continuing. “But finding the spirit to possess the mortal that will get top billing in the halls of infamy is not in my remit; I look for spirits who can possess and manipulate the smaller people– the supporting cast who act as enablers for the host of the ‘Star Player’ to rise to power: the corrupt politicians, the militias, and the people who simply turn a blind eye to the evil growing in their midst. Their decisions and the consequences of their decisions are all needed to make these remarkable events happen.”

As John tried to process this last point, the tapestry of images before him, which had been showing historic acts of brutality, now changed. Seared now with vivid color and the wretched sound of human suffering, the images looked more recent.

“Happening right now,” Nikki informed him helpfully, her tone disturbingly upbeat.

This time he watched the horrific events with terrible new understanding. The hideous study in human manipulation that Nikki had just described to him, which he now knew as ‘The Game,’ was in play right before his eyes.

Abruptly, the flow of information and images before him stopped. He and Nikki were still in the