Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 34 (click to see context) from:
** [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s slain victims, seemingly drawn to the potent psychic union of [[spoiler: her]] and Childes’s minds; form, from an ethereal mist, into the bodily [[OrganTheft states]] in which [[spoiler: Heckatty]] left them. They seem less disturbed by their variable states of mutilation than aggrieved at the OrganTheft entailed hereby. Albeit playfully, the spectral mutilated small boy makes a grab for his stolen heart - [[spoiler: and rips out one of his murderer’s eyes]].
to:
** [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s slain victims, seemingly drawn to the potent psychic union of [[spoiler: her]] and Childes’s minds; form, from an ethereal mist, into the bodily [[OrganTheft states]] in which [[spoiler: Heckatty]] left them. They seem less disturbed by their variable states of mutilation than aggrieved at the OrganTheft entailed hereby.thereby. Albeit playfully, the spectral mutilated small boy makes a grab for his stolen heart - [[spoiler: and rips out one of his murderer’s eyes]].
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 20 (click to see context) from:
* AxeCrazy: To feed MoonGoddess Hecate, or even just to torment Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] targets indiscriminately and sadistically.
to:
* AxeCrazy: AxCrazy: To feed MoonGoddess Hecate, or even just to torment Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] targets indiscriminately and sadistically.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
Changed line(s) 49 (click to see context) from:
* DreamingOfThingsToCome: On the way back from a school trip, during a seaside stop, Childes [[MoodWhiplash briefly]] [[DaylightHorror sees]] young Kelly’s ice cream-stained hand to be incongruously badly burnt. [[spoiler: She, and several others, later die in a fire]].
to:
* DreamingOfThingsToCome: On the way back from a school trip, during a seaside stop, Childes [[MoodWhiplash briefly]] [[DaylightHorror briefly sees]] young Kelly’s ice cream-stained hand to be incongruously badly burnt. [[spoiler: She, and several others, later die in a fire]].
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
Overprotective Dad has been disambiguated. Unclear context
Deleted line(s) 101 (click to see context) :
* OverprotectiveDad: Paul Sebire harasses Childes over his involvement with the police and supposed instability; and urges him away from Amy.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 116 (click to see context) from:
* {{Psychometry}}: On touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy's alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes’s hair to ripple. As well as his own, Childes feels a distant, barbarously warped mind.
to:
* {{Psychometry}}: On touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy's alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes’s Childes's hair to ripple. As well as his own, Childes He feels a distant, barbarously warped mind.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 116 (click to see context) from:
* {{Psychometry}}: On bodily touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy’s alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes’s hair to ripple. As well as his own, Childes feels a distant, barbarously warped mind.
to:
* {{Psychometry}}: On bodily touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy’s Overoy's alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes’s hair to ripple. As well as his own, Childes feels a distant, barbarously warped mind.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 36 (click to see context) from:
** [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] with the fire-slain [[spoiler: La Roche girls; Miss Piprelly and Matron Bates ]], who, while badly burnt, don’t seem burnt - [[spoiler: the spectral students even point and giggle at their murderer]].
to:
** [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] with the fire-slain [[spoiler: La Roche girls; Miss Piprelly and Matron Bates ]], who, while badly burnt, don’t seem burnt that bothered by it - [[spoiler: the spectral students even point and giggle at their murderer]].
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 116 (click to see context) from:
* {{Psychometry}}: On bodily touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy’s alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes’s hair to ripple. As well as his own, Childes feels surprise in a distant, barbarously warped mind.
to:
* {{Psychometry}}: On bodily touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy’s alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes’s hair to ripple. As well as his own, Childes feels surprise in a distant, barbarously warped mind.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 86 (click to see context) from:
* LifeSavingEncouragement: As fire rages through the school, Childes gently encourages, and leads down the fire escape, two terrified ten-year-olds. When Childes briefly comes to exhaustion and despair, Sandy briefly takes the role of encouragement-supplier.
to:
* LifeSavingEncouragement: As fire rages through the school, Childes gently encourages, and leads down the fire escape, two terrified ten-year-olds. When Childes briefly comes succumbs to exhaustion and despair, Sandy briefly takes the role of encouragement-supplier.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 9,10 (click to see context) from:
Remote witness of an elderly psychiatric patient’s cranial mutilation persuades Childes to call Detective Inspector Overoy, aided three years ago by Childes's visions. Investigation of the subsequently burnt psychiatric hospital; a small boy’s exhumed corpse, and an eviscerated prostitute indicates a killer who removes organs; partially eats them, and leaves, in each corpse, a moonstone.
to:
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 69 (click to see context) from:
* HumanSacrifice: Having eaten from victims’ organs, [[spoiler: Heckatty]], to bar the slain from reclaiming their souls, steals organs - an offering to the Moon Goddess Hecate.
to:
* HumanSacrifice: Having eaten from victims’ organs, [[spoiler: Heckatty]], to bar the slain from reclaiming their souls, steals some of their organs - an offering to the Moon Goddess Hecate.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 73 (click to see context) from:
* HoistByTheirOwnPetard:
to:
* HoistByTheirOwnPetard: [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s mind, when merged with Childes's, does indeed enhance each others' extrasensory sensitivity - which [[spoiler: summons the ghosts of Heckatty's victims. And they'd like their stolen organs back, please.]]
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 66 (click to see context) from:
* GodOfTheMoon: A moonstone left victims’ corpses rouses suspicion of a murderous cult. Detective Inspector Overoy reads of Hecate, [[GodOfTheDead overseer of the dead]] and patron of sorceresses. Like the moon itself, her character is said to vary. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] gold’s the moonstone, with its inner blue shimmer, to be Hecate’s earthly embodiment; and to her, [[HumanSacrifice offers murder victims’ souls]].
to:
* GodOfTheMoon: A moonstone left victims’ corpses rouses suspicion of a murderous cult. Detective Inspector Overoy reads of Hecate, [[GodOfTheDead overseer of the dead]] and patron of sorceresses. Like the moon itself, her character is said to vary. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] gold’s Heckatty]]'s the moonstone, with its inner blue shimmer, to be Hecate’s earthly embodiment; and to her, [[HumanSacrifice offers murder victims’ souls]].
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Deleted line(s) 54 (click to see context) :
* EvilOldFolks: When finally revealed, the killer has “immense
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 31 (click to see context) from:
* CallingCard: Childes’s glimpses of a shimmering whiteness, like the moon, seem to stem from oval, transparent, blue-tinged moonstones left in the bodies of [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s victims.
to:
* CallingCard: Childes’s glimpses of a shimmering whiteness, like the moon, seem to stem from In each newly found corpse is an oval, transparent, blue-tinged moonstones left in the bodies of [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s victims.moonstone.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 34 (click to see context) from:
** [[spoiler: Heckatty’s]] slain victims, seemingly drawn to the potent psychic union of [[spoiler: her]] and Childes’s minds; form, from an ethereal mist, into the bodily [[OrganTheft states]] in which [[spoiler: Heckatty]] left them. They seem less disturbed by their variable states of mutilation than aggrieved at the OrganTheft entailed hereby. Albeit playfully, the spectral mutilated small boy makes a grab for his stolen heart - [[spoiler: and rips out one of his murderer’s eyes]].
to:
** [[spoiler: Heckatty’s]] Heckatty]]'s slain victims, seemingly drawn to the potent psychic union of [[spoiler: her]] and Childes’s minds; form, from an ethereal mist, into the bodily [[OrganTheft states]] in which [[spoiler: Heckatty]] left them. They seem less disturbed by their variable states of mutilation than aggrieved at the OrganTheft entailed hereby. Albeit playfully, the spectral mutilated small boy makes a grab for his stolen heart - [[spoiler: and rips out one of his murderer’s eyes]].
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 15 (click to see context) from:
* AlwaysWithYou: In dream, Childes recalls, from childhood, a suppressed memory of seeing, in his bedroom, [[spoiler: the discarnate figure of his week-dead mother, who reassured him that love transcends the grave]].
to:
* AlwaysWithYou: In dream, Childes recalls, from childhood, a suppressed memory of seeing, in his bedroom, [[spoiler: the discarnate figure of his week-dead mother, who reassured him that love transcends the grave]].grave.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 146 (click to see context) from:
* YouAreTooLate: With fire raging through La Roche Ladies’ College, Childes finds, trapped on a stairwell, Kelly, Patricia, Adele, Caroline, Isobel, Sarah-Jane and Matron Kathryn Bates. Getting some [[BedsheetRope bedding]] from a dormitory, he rescues ten-year-old Sandy and Rachel. When he gets back, [[spoiler: the stairwell has collapsed into the inferno]].
to:
* YouAreTooLate: With fire raging through La Roche Ladies’ College, Childes finds, trapped on a stairwell, Kelly, Patricia, Adele, Caroline, Isobel, Sarah-Jane and Matron Kathryn Bates. Getting some [[BedsheetRope [[BedsheetLadder bedding]] from a dormitory, he rescues ten-year-old Sandy and Rachel. When he gets back, [[spoiler: the stairwell has collapsed into the inferno]].
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Added DiffLines:
[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/screenshot_2023_04_10_025103.png]]
A 1985 novel by Creator/JamesHerbert.
Three years after horrific visions helped him lead the police to a child-molesting SerialKiller, thirty-four-year-old divorced computer technician Jonathan Childes, in shelter from the public’s morbid curiosity, holds, on one of the Channel Islands, several peripatetic teaching jobs.
On an ocean swim with French teacher Amy Sebire, Childes is suddenly overwhelmed by a distant vision of a corpse’s evisceration. During a dinner party with Amy’s family, a vision of the exhumation of a small boy’s corpse causes Childes to collapse. While Amy’s father Paul Sebire is suspicious of Childes’s past police involvement, Amy protests that Childes helped solve the murders. While she urges Childes to seek some kind of help, he’s petrified that this may somehow advantage whatever depraved mind has reached his own.
Remote witness of an elderly psychiatric patient’s cranial mutilation persuades Childes to call Detective Inspector Overoy, aided three years ago by Childes's visions. Investigation of the subsequently burnt psychiatric hospital; a small boy’s exhumed corpse, and an eviscerated prostitute indicates a killer who removes organs; partially eats them, and leaves, in each corpse, a moonstone.
What’s more, the killer has psychically sensed Childes’s distant observation. A sudden overwhelming fear for seven-year-old daughter Gabby’s safety heralds the killer’s aim to have, with Childes, some sadistic fun…
!!This novel provides examples of:
*AlwaysWithYou: In dream, Childes recalls, from childhood, a suppressed memory of seeing, in his bedroom, [[spoiler: the discarnate figure of his week-dead mother, who reassured him that love transcends the grave]].
*AmicablyDivorced: Childes and ex-wife Fran.
*AssShove: By [[YourMindMakesItReal psychic simulation]], the killer, in attempt to burn Childes's internal organs, psychically projects into him the effects of a hand which turns to fire.
*AuraVision: On the school Open Day, Childes sees the similarly psychic Miss Piprelly radiate something like "a gentle many-hued flame."
*AwesomeUnderwaterWorld: Beneath the sea, Childes's examination of a feeding starfish is [[MoodWhiplash followed by]] [[MindRape a remote vision of bodily desecration]].
*AxeCrazy: To feed MoonGoddess Hecate, or even just to torment Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] targets indiscriminately and sadistically.
*BarredFromTheAfterlife: In offering to moon goddess Hecate, and to prevent their souls from reclaiming their bodies, [[spoiler: Hecatty]] steals some of their organs. [[spoiler: Joint with that of Childes, her mind allows her victims’ ghosts to tangibly manifest. On Heckatty’s death, seven-year-old victim Annabel's severed fingers are restored]].
*BattleaxeNurse: From the police list of staff and patients at the burnt down psychiatric hospital, Overoy finds [[spoiler: one of the nurses, a hugely strong woman who went by the name of Heckatty, to have helped restrain more violent patients; used, for murder, a bag of surgical instruments, and to have been obsessed with the moon goddess Hecate]].
*BeatThemAtTheirOwnGame:
** In search of the psychically acquainted killer, Childes [[{{Psychometry}} gazes into the corpse-concealed moonstone]]. By prolonged concentration, he establishes contact; with his strength, surprises the killer, and, in exchange for an end to the murder and torment, a direct confrontation.
** On the dam’s walkway, having received from [[spoiler: Heckatty]] psychically induced pain, he finds himself able to retaliate - although [[MadeOfIron to minimal effect]].
*BewareTheMindReader: On Childes's psychic witness of [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s desecration of a small boy's corpse, [[spoiler: she]] senses Childes's observation.
*BlackEyesOfEvil: Eventual moonlit confrontation on the reservoir dam’s walkway [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s eyes are ominously shaded.
*BoardingSchool: La Roche Ladies’ College.
*BroodingBoyGentleGirl: Amy and traumatised Childes.
*TheBrute: As well as a mass-murdering sadist, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] is very physically powerful.
*CallingCard: Childes’s glimpses of a shimmering whiteness, like the moon, seem to stem from oval, transparent, blue-tinged moonstones left in the bodies of [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s victims.
*TheCallKnowsWhereYouLive: The mass-murdering psychic sadist has access to a phone book - with intent to kidnap and murder Childes’s daughter Gabby. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] instead abducts and murders [[spoiler: young neighbour Annabel]].
*CameBackWrong:
** [[spoiler: Heckatty’s]] slain victims, seemingly drawn to the potent psychic union of [[spoiler: her]] and Childes’s minds; form, from an ethereal mist, into the bodily [[OrganTheft states]] in which [[spoiler: Heckatty]] left them. They seem less disturbed by their variable states of mutilation than aggrieved at the OrganTheft entailed hereby. Albeit playfully, the spectral mutilated small boy makes a grab for his stolen heart - [[spoiler: and rips out one of his murderer’s eyes]].
** [[AvertedTrope Averted]] with [[spoiler: seven-year-old Annabel, murdered in place of her friend Gabby]] - seemingly because, save for her severed fingers, [[spoiler: Heckatty seems to have neglected to steal any body parts]].
**[[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] with the fire-slain [[spoiler: La Roche girls; Miss Piprelly and Matron Bates ]], who, while badly burnt, don’t seem burnt - [[spoiler: the spectral students even point and giggle at their murderer]].
*TheCavalry: With [[spoiler: Heckatty]] about to push Childes over the reservoir dam’s walkway, their extrasensory minds, sharpened by brief psychic union, hear [[spoiler: the ghosts of Heckatty's victims]].
*CheerfulChild: Gabby.
*ChildrenAreInnocent: On the phone, Gabby, totally oblivious to Childes’s pang of sorrow, asks if he’ll visit soon.
*CommitmentIssues: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. On sudden realisation of the depth of their mutual feelings, Childes and Amy are both startled and excited.
*CoolTeacher: Childes considers himself neither teacher nor disciplinarian. Patient and easy-going, he's well-liked.
*CopKiller: In his car, a policeman keeps nightwatch over La Roche Ladies’ College. Childes finds him dead with his throat slashed.
*DatingWhatDaddyHates: Paul Sebire, who would prefer a son-in-law in his own line of work, makes little attempt to hide his aversion to Childes.
*DeathOfAChild:
** After an unnamed small boy’s funeral, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] dissects the corpse.
** Aiming to provoke Childes via kidnapping daughter Gabby, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] mistakenly takes, [[spoiler: and murders]] Gabby’s friend Annabel.
*DesecratingTheDead: As [[MindRape involuntarily psychically observed]] by Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] removes victims’ internal organs.
*{{Determinator}}: While terrified by a fire raging through La Roche Ladies’ college, Childes is desperate to find survivors.
*DreamingOfThingsToCome: On the way back from a school trip, during a seaside stop, Childes [[MoodWhiplash briefly]] [[DaylightHorror sees]] young Kelly’s ice cream-stained hand to be incongruously badly burnt. [[spoiler: She, and several others, later die in a fire]].
*EmergingFromTheShadows: Telepathically summoned to the reservoir dam’s walkway, Childes finally sees, lumbering into view, the killer.
*FriendOnTheForce: Detective Inspector Ken Overoy, during the rampage of a child-molesting serial killer, learned to take Childes’s insights seriously. Plagued by new horrific visions, Childes gets back in touch.
*FrenchJerk: [[AvertedTrope Averted]] with Paul Sebire’s young business associate Edouard Vigiers, who, at the Sebire’s dinner party, endorses Childes profession, and politely dissuades Sebire’s attempt to pressure Amy into showing Eduoard around the island.
*ElderAbuse: From a distant psychiatric hospital, Childes, from perpetrator [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s perspective, the top of an elderly man’s head sawn into.
*EvilOldFolks: When finally revealed, the killer has “immense
*EvilOldFolks: In the moonlight, Childes sees [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s hair to be curly, matted and silver.
*FantasyForbiddingFather: Childes’s father hated anything to do with mysticism or the supernatural; forbade mention of dead wife and young Jonathan Childes from her visiting grave, and [[spoiler: blamed the boys prediction thereof for her death]].
*FatBastard:
** [[AvertedTrope Averted]] with overweight young Isabel.
** [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] with [[spoiler: Heckatty]]; vast in bone structure as well as flesh.
*FingerInTheMail: Shortly after [[spoiler: Gabby’s friend Annabel]] is kidnapped, Childes, with a moonstone, is mailed [[GutPunch five tiny fingers and a thumb]]. Mercifully, the pathologist determines them to have been severed after the child’s death.
*{{Foreshadowing}}:
** Through his bedroom window, when Childes sees the distant school’s white walls to have caught the setting sun, he briefly thinks it’s caught fire. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] later [[spoiler: sets the school on fire]].
** After Childes collapses at dinner, Paul Sebire frets to daughter Amy that riding in a car with Childes during such an episode could be dangerous. Through [[spoiler: a telepathically stimulated throttling, Heckatty forces Childes into a car crash, from which Amy, in the passenger's seat, sustains facial cuts]].
*FriendToAllChildren: Following Gabby’s troubled birth, her dependency roused in Childes a renewed tenderness for all life.
*FundraiserCarnival: As summer nears, La Roche Ladies’ College hosts Open Day, which sees beverage stalls, prize giving, and general merriment.
*GroinAttack: PlayedForHorror - in their eventual confrontation, the killer [[YourMindMakesItReal psychically stimulates]] crushing Childes’s testicles.
*GodOfTheMoon: A moonstone left victims’ corpses rouses suspicion of a murderous cult. Detective Inspector Overoy reads of Hecate, [[GodOfTheDead overseer of the dead]] and patron of sorceresses. Like the moon itself, her character is said to vary. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] gold’s the moonstone, with its inner blue shimmer, to be Hecate’s earthly embodiment; and to her, [[HumanSacrifice offers murder victims’ souls]].
*GuttedLikeAFish: Childes suffers an extremely graphic [[MindRape remote insight]] into the removal of a corpse’s internal organs - and then learns a prostitute to have been thusly desecrated.
*HangingAround: During Open Day, [[spoiler: Heckatty]], stalks the not-quite-empty dormitories, and with a school tie, hangs [[spoiler: Jeannette]] over the stairs.
*HumanSacrifice: Having eaten from victims’ organs, [[spoiler: Heckatty]], to bar the slain from reclaiming their souls, steals organs - an offering to the Moon Goddess Hecate.
*HauntedTechnology: During a computer class, each monitor screen’s sudden display of the word "MOON" perplexes the students and horrifies Childes.
*HeroicFireRescue: Having seen from his cottage window La Roche Ladies’ college to be on fire, Childes drives over to find the building intact - until fire promptly erupts. While staff and students evacuate, Childes learns of a possibility of people trapped several floors up. While [[spoiler: Kelly, Patricia, Adele, Caroline, Isobel, Sarah-Jane and Matron Bates]] perish, Childes leads to safety ten-year-old Sandy and Rachel.
*HonestCorporateExecutive: Paul Sebire, chief executive of Jacarte International; while a bit pushy and overprotective, is an honest, if ruthless, businessman.
*HoistByTheirOwnPetard:
*HotTeacher:
** Young Jeannette takes a shine to Childes.
** French teacher Amy, in an attempt to look schoolmarmish, keeps her hair in a tight bun. Childes just finds it sexy.
*IJustWantToBeNormal: Having found himself suddenly attuned to the mind of a child-molesting serial killer, the public’s interest in Childes's publicised assistance of the police drove him to the seclusion of the Channel Islands. Attunement to the mind of another serial killer has him wracked with dread.
*InnocentBystander: Headmistress Miss Piprelly, with police stationed at the SerialKiller-targeted school, hears a nightly intrusion. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] overpowers her, [[spoiler: snaps her neck]], [[spoiler: soaks her in petrol]] and [[spoiler: fatally sets her on fire]].
*IntangibleTimeTravel: On recollection of a childhood encounter with his dead mother, Childes recalls glimpsing a second, unknown figure - and realises it to have been his own mentally projected self.
*ItIsDehumanizing: Having telepathically sensed the unknown killer’s depraved thoughts and monstrous actions, he can’t think of them as human.
*JacobMarleyApparel: On the dam’s walkway, in [[spoiler: school uniform as opposed to nightwear,]] appear the fire-slain [[spoiler: La Roche girls]].
*JerkassHasAPoint: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] - rather than an outright git, Paul Sebire is inordinately protective and possessive - although his fear for Amy’s safety when riding in a car with the psychically vulnerable Childes [[spoiler: proves well-founded]] when [[spoiler: Heckatty psychically forces Childes and Amy into a car crash]].
*JustInTime: On Open Day, Childes, from the school field, sees, in a school window, a face. He hurries up to the dormitories; finds, with a uniform tie, [[spoiler: Jeannette]] hung by her neck over the stairs, and, just in time, gets her down.
*KillingInSelfDefense: When [[spoiler: Heckatty]] dangles over the dam’s walkway, Childes psychically senses, in [[spoiler: her calm plea for assistance, an insatiable desire for more sadism]]. Spectral finger-severed victim Annabel [[spoiler: with a look, entreats Childes not to let Hecatty live. From the walkway’s wall, he starts to prise free Heckatty’s fingers]].
*LetMeAtHim: After Paul Sebire punches Childes, Inspector Geoff Robillard holds him back.
*LifeSavingEncouragement: As fire rages through the school, Childes gently encourages, and leads down the fire escape, two terrified ten-year-olds. When Childes briefly comes to exhaustion and despair, Sandy briefly takes the role of encouragement-supplier.
*LiteralCliffhanger:
** During their eventual confrontation on the reservoir dam’s walkway, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] forces Childes over its edge.
** Although Childes doesn’t quite register what happens, [[spoiler: Heckatty, seemingly driven by her advancing ghostly victims]], ends up in a similar position.
*LonelyAmongPeople: On Open Day, Jeannette, away from the heightened loneliness for her own parents threatened by her peers’ united families, sneaks back to her dormitory.
*{{Lunacy}}: Overoy notes the police in general to acknowledge, during full moon, generally increased crime rate. He ponders the moon’s effect on the tide - and perhaps the semi-liquid human brain.
*MagneticMedium: Shortly after her death, Childes’s mother was drawn to his extrasensory insights. [[spoiler: On young Annabel's death]], her friend Gabby receives a similar visit.
*MindRape:
** Having sensed Childes's involuntarily psychic observation, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] deliberately probes his mind with visions of [[spoiler: her]] crimes. Childes telepathically feels [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s “obscene glory,” and is terrified that he may be the crimes’ amnesiac perpetrator. [[spoiler: He most certainly is not]].
** During their moonlit confrontation on the dam’s walkway, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] forcibly imparts severely exacerbated images of Amy’s [[spoiler: car crash]] wounds; a fatal and [[EyeScream brutal]] version of Jeannette’s attempted hanging, and a vision of Gabby with open torso and exposed, animate organs.
*MirrorScare: Driving his car, Childes, in the rear-view mirror, suddenly sees [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s eyes.
*MoodWhiplash: At the Sebire’s dinner party, during George Duxbury’s risque story, Childes succumbs to a distant vision of the exhumation of a small boy’s corpse.
*MySignificanceSenseIsTingling: PlayedForHorror. Over breakfast with Amy, Childes is suddenly devastated by a definite persuasion of seven-year-old Gabby’s endangerment. A telephone call to Fran reveals Gabby’s friend Annabel to have vanished. He later irresistibly realises [[spoiler: Annabel to have died quickly]].
*MysteriousMist: With [[spoiler: Heckatty]] about to push Childes over the reservoir dam’s walkway, mutually heard telepathic voices precede a pale mist, which refines into distinct human shapes.
*OrganTheft: A small boy’s desecrated heart is seen to have bite marks - [[spoiler: Heckatty]], to absorb their vitality and to bar the slain from reclaiming their souls, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] eats of their organs.
*OverprotectiveDad: Paul Sebire harasses Childes over his involvement with the police and supposed instability; and urges him away from Amy.
*PanickyExpectantFather: PlayedForDrama - during daughter Gabby’s birth, her endangerment by a mucus blockage nearly made Childes collapse with fear.
*ParentalAbandonment: With her parents stationed in South Africa by her father’s engineering job, fourteen-year-old Jeannette misses them.
*ParentsInDistress: While Childes confronts [[spoiler: Heckatty]], seven-year-old daughter Gabby, hysterical over a dream in which her father, over a huge body of water, is attacked by a "monster lady". With Gabby having already shown signs of having inherited her father’s gift, Overroy hastens to the island’s reservoir.
*PoliceAreUseless: [[AvertedTrope Averted]]. Detective Inspector Ken Overoy, having, in search of a child molesting serial killer, learned to respect Childes’s extrasensory insights, eventually manages to identify the new killer.
*PolicePsychic: Childes.
*ProperlyParanoid: Alone in her quarters, a suddenly unnerved Miss Pipprelly, aware of her own psychic faculties, resolves to investigate. And smells petrol…
*PsychicChildren: Gabby starts to show signs of having inherited her father’s gift.
*PsychicLink: Having suppressed his extrasensory insight for much of his life, Childes, three years ago, found it involuntarily attuned to that of a child-molesting serial killer.
-->'''Childes:''' Psychics say our minds are like radio receivers, tuning into other wavelengths all the time, picking up different frequencies: well, maybe he was transmitting on a particular frequency that only I could receive, the excitement he felt at the kill boosting the output, making it powerful enough to reach me.
*PsychicPowers:
** As a boy, Jonathan Childes, pending others’ mishap, had occasional precognitive realisations - including his mother’s untimely death. [[spoiler: Blamed by his father for somehow causing it]], Childes guiltily suppressed his extrasensory insight - which, in adulthood, awoke in response to a succession of murders. Three years since helping the police find the killer, Childes is once more disturbed by brutal visions.
** Headmistress Estelle Piprelly, also prone to precognitive insights, wonders about Childes.
** A [[spoiler: psychiatric hospital nurse]], known only as [[spoiler: Heckatty]], on sensing Childes’s reaching mind, taunts him with horrific visions and, eventually, telepathically induced pain.
*PsychicStrangle: In Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] eventually manages to telepathically induce the physical effects of bodily assault - including strangulation, by which [[spoiler: she]] forces him to crash his car.
*{{Psychometry}}: On bodily touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy’s alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes’s hair to ripple. As well as his own, Childes feels surprise in a distant, barbarously warped mind.
*RageBreakingPoint: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. After [[spoiler: Childes and Amy’s car crash]], Paul Sebire’s paranoid bluster climaxes in an accusation of Childes to have been behind the attempted hanging of [[spoiler: young Jeannette]]. While sorely galled, Childes [[TranquilFury calmly dismisses]] Sebire’s raving. PlayedStraight when Sebire then punches him.
*ReasonableAuthorityFigure:
** Detective Inspector Overoy, having been helped by Childes on a previous murder case, works hard to spare him any more intrusive publicity.
** In the hospital following [[spoiler: Childes and Amy’s car crash]], Dr Poulain tries to calm the raging Paul Sebire.
*ResignedToTheCall: While Childes dreads some terrible consequence of pursuing his psychic insight, [[MindRape enforced remote exposure]] to [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s sawing off the top of an elderly mental patient’s head pressures Childes to get back in touch with the police.
*RobbingTheDead: To bar the Hecate-sacrificed victims from reclaiming their souls, [[spoiler: Hecatty]] steals certain body parts.
*RooftopConfrontation: Having made psychic contact with the killer, Childes is summoned, high above the island’s reservoir, to the adjacent dam’s walkway, to finally meet the killer.
*ScarsAreForever: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] - from [[spoiler: Childes’s psychokinetically enforced car crash, Amy]] retains small but permanent scars, repairable by minor plastic surgery.
*SceneryGorn: [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s incineration of La Roche Ladies' College is brutally believable.
*SeeingThroughAnothersEyes: Through [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s perspective, Childes senses [[spoiler: her]] crimes.
*SecretRelationship: At work, Childes and Amy keep things strictly formal - although their gossip-happy charges remain suspicious.
*ShatteringTheIllusion: When [[spoiler: Heckatty]] [[YourMindMakesItReal psychically simulates]] in Childes a burning of his internal organs, the pain distracts from fear, which breaks the spell.
*ShrinkingViolet: Fourteen-year-old Jeannette has a timidity Childes finds both disarming and faintly exasperating.
*ShoutOut: Gabby’s letters to Childes come in envelopes engraved with the cartoon figure of [[Franchise/{{Peanuts}} Snoopy]].
*TheSneakyGuy: Paul Sebire, vaguely familiar with Childes’s name, has Island Police Committee member Victor Platneur discreetly check to see if Childes has been involved with police - and learns him to have been under suspicion for murder. While Amy protests that Childes helped solve the crimes, Sebire remains wary.
*StartingANewLife: From the public’s morbid interest in his psychic assistance of the police, Childes fled to an unnamed one of the Channel Islands. Three years on, he rents a detached cottage, and works as a peripatetic computer science teacher.
*SternTeacher: Headmistress Estelle Piprelly, to staff as well as students.
*SympatheticAdulterer: With [[spoiler: neighbouring young Annabel murdered in place of their targeted daughter]], Childes spends the night at Fran’s. That night, a traumatised Fran seeks, from Childes, intimate comfort.
*TouchTelepathy: Via telephone - when Childes, with the killer, makes direct psychic contact, a [[spoiler: car crash]]-recovering Amy, through the phone lines, feels Childes’s [[TranquilFury contained fury]]. Childes’s [[CompellingVoice urge]] for Amy to get some sleep then makes her feel irresistibly tired.
*TraumaticSuperpowerAwakening:
** In childhood, before their guilt-induced suppression, Childes’s psychic insights were rudimentary. In adulthood, involuntary attunement to a murderous child molestor awakened them.
** When young Annabel [[MissingChild goes missing]], Gabby, late that night, is disturbed by a waking vision of her friend, looking sad. The encounter rekindles Childes’s own encounter, aged seven, with [[spoiler: his week-dead mother]].
*TrueCraftsman: Childes’s digital flair is sometimes considered intuitive.
*UnhappyMedium: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. Childes’s psychic insight causes him a lot of stress, but this is mainly because of its revival from dormancy by involuntary attuning to two deeply depraved minds.
*VampiricDraining: [[spoiler: Heckatty]], to “taste their souls,” eats from victims’ organs.
*VengefulGhost: Seemingly drawn to Childes’s and [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s psychic union, the mutilated slain, from an ethereal mist, around their killer, increasingly solidify. The murdered small boy, in pursuit of his stolen heart, [[spoiler: rips out one of his murderer’s eyes]].
*VillainsWantMercy: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. [[spoiler: Dangling over the dam’s walkway, Heckatty asks Childes for help - but her]] plea lacks entreaty. Furthermore, still psychically attuned to Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty, whilst hanging onto the walkway for dear life, with one eye missing, continues to telepathically torment Childes with horrifying images - the plea for help is made in mockery]].
*WiseBeyondTheirYears: At twenty-three, Amy is said to have a “quiet maturity.”
*YouAreTooLate: With fire raging through La Roche Ladies’ College, Childes finds, trapped on a stairwell, Kelly, Patricia, Adele, Caroline, Isobel, Sarah-Jane and Matron Kathryn Bates. Getting some [[BedsheetRope bedding]] from a dormitory, he rescues ten-year-old Sandy and Rachel. When he gets back, [[spoiler: the stairwell has collapsed into the inferno]].
*YourMindMakesItReal: In Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] psychically stimulates bodily pain. While its effects are tangibly manifest, it may, by recognition of its arbitrary imposition, be denied.
A 1985 novel by Creator/JamesHerbert.
Three years after horrific visions helped him lead the police to a child-molesting SerialKiller, thirty-four-year-old divorced computer technician Jonathan Childes, in shelter from the public’s morbid curiosity, holds, on one of the Channel Islands, several peripatetic teaching jobs.
On an ocean swim with French teacher Amy Sebire, Childes is suddenly overwhelmed by a distant vision of a corpse’s evisceration. During a dinner party with Amy’s family, a vision of the exhumation of a small boy’s corpse causes Childes to collapse. While Amy’s father Paul Sebire is suspicious of Childes’s past police involvement, Amy protests that Childes helped solve the murders. While she urges Childes to seek some kind of help, he’s petrified that this may somehow advantage whatever depraved mind has reached his own.
Remote witness of an elderly psychiatric patient’s cranial mutilation persuades Childes to call Detective Inspector Overoy, aided three years ago by Childes's visions. Investigation of the subsequently burnt psychiatric hospital; a small boy’s exhumed corpse, and an eviscerated prostitute indicates a killer who removes organs; partially eats them, and leaves, in each corpse, a moonstone.
What’s more, the killer has psychically sensed Childes’s distant observation. A sudden overwhelming fear for seven-year-old daughter Gabby’s safety heralds the killer’s aim to have, with Childes, some sadistic fun…
!!This novel provides examples of:
*AlwaysWithYou: In dream, Childes recalls, from childhood, a suppressed memory of seeing, in his bedroom, [[spoiler: the discarnate figure of his week-dead mother, who reassured him that love transcends the grave]].
*AmicablyDivorced: Childes and ex-wife Fran.
*AssShove: By [[YourMindMakesItReal psychic simulation]], the killer, in attempt to burn Childes's internal organs, psychically projects into him the effects of a hand which turns to fire.
*AuraVision: On the school Open Day, Childes sees the similarly psychic Miss Piprelly radiate something like "a gentle many-hued flame."
*AwesomeUnderwaterWorld: Beneath the sea, Childes's examination of a feeding starfish is [[MoodWhiplash followed by]] [[MindRape a remote vision of bodily desecration]].
*AxeCrazy: To feed MoonGoddess Hecate, or even just to torment Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] targets indiscriminately and sadistically.
*BarredFromTheAfterlife: In offering to moon goddess Hecate, and to prevent their souls from reclaiming their bodies, [[spoiler: Hecatty]] steals some of their organs. [[spoiler: Joint with that of Childes, her mind allows her victims’ ghosts to tangibly manifest. On Heckatty’s death, seven-year-old victim Annabel's severed fingers are restored]].
*BattleaxeNurse: From the police list of staff and patients at the burnt down psychiatric hospital, Overoy finds [[spoiler: one of the nurses, a hugely strong woman who went by the name of Heckatty, to have helped restrain more violent patients; used, for murder, a bag of surgical instruments, and to have been obsessed with the moon goddess Hecate]].
*BeatThemAtTheirOwnGame:
** In search of the psychically acquainted killer, Childes [[{{Psychometry}} gazes into the corpse-concealed moonstone]]. By prolonged concentration, he establishes contact; with his strength, surprises the killer, and, in exchange for an end to the murder and torment, a direct confrontation.
** On the dam’s walkway, having received from [[spoiler: Heckatty]] psychically induced pain, he finds himself able to retaliate - although [[MadeOfIron to minimal effect]].
*BewareTheMindReader: On Childes's psychic witness of [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s desecration of a small boy's corpse, [[spoiler: she]] senses Childes's observation.
*BlackEyesOfEvil: Eventual moonlit confrontation on the reservoir dam’s walkway [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s eyes are ominously shaded.
*BoardingSchool: La Roche Ladies’ College.
*BroodingBoyGentleGirl: Amy and traumatised Childes.
*TheBrute: As well as a mass-murdering sadist, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] is very physically powerful.
*CallingCard: Childes’s glimpses of a shimmering whiteness, like the moon, seem to stem from oval, transparent, blue-tinged moonstones left in the bodies of [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s victims.
*TheCallKnowsWhereYouLive: The mass-murdering psychic sadist has access to a phone book - with intent to kidnap and murder Childes’s daughter Gabby. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] instead abducts and murders [[spoiler: young neighbour Annabel]].
*CameBackWrong:
** [[spoiler: Heckatty’s]] slain victims, seemingly drawn to the potent psychic union of [[spoiler: her]] and Childes’s minds; form, from an ethereal mist, into the bodily [[OrganTheft states]] in which [[spoiler: Heckatty]] left them. They seem less disturbed by their variable states of mutilation than aggrieved at the OrganTheft entailed hereby. Albeit playfully, the spectral mutilated small boy makes a grab for his stolen heart - [[spoiler: and rips out one of his murderer’s eyes]].
** [[AvertedTrope Averted]] with [[spoiler: seven-year-old Annabel, murdered in place of her friend Gabby]] - seemingly because, save for her severed fingers, [[spoiler: Heckatty seems to have neglected to steal any body parts]].
**[[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] with the fire-slain [[spoiler: La Roche girls; Miss Piprelly and Matron Bates ]], who, while badly burnt, don’t seem burnt - [[spoiler: the spectral students even point and giggle at their murderer]].
*TheCavalry: With [[spoiler: Heckatty]] about to push Childes over the reservoir dam’s walkway, their extrasensory minds, sharpened by brief psychic union, hear [[spoiler: the ghosts of Heckatty's victims]].
*CheerfulChild: Gabby.
*ChildrenAreInnocent: On the phone, Gabby, totally oblivious to Childes’s pang of sorrow, asks if he’ll visit soon.
*CommitmentIssues: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. On sudden realisation of the depth of their mutual feelings, Childes and Amy are both startled and excited.
*CoolTeacher: Childes considers himself neither teacher nor disciplinarian. Patient and easy-going, he's well-liked.
*CopKiller: In his car, a policeman keeps nightwatch over La Roche Ladies’ College. Childes finds him dead with his throat slashed.
*DatingWhatDaddyHates: Paul Sebire, who would prefer a son-in-law in his own line of work, makes little attempt to hide his aversion to Childes.
*DeathOfAChild:
** After an unnamed small boy’s funeral, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] dissects the corpse.
** Aiming to provoke Childes via kidnapping daughter Gabby, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] mistakenly takes, [[spoiler: and murders]] Gabby’s friend Annabel.
*DesecratingTheDead: As [[MindRape involuntarily psychically observed]] by Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] removes victims’ internal organs.
*{{Determinator}}: While terrified by a fire raging through La Roche Ladies’ college, Childes is desperate to find survivors.
*DreamingOfThingsToCome: On the way back from a school trip, during a seaside stop, Childes [[MoodWhiplash briefly]] [[DaylightHorror sees]] young Kelly’s ice cream-stained hand to be incongruously badly burnt. [[spoiler: She, and several others, later die in a fire]].
*EmergingFromTheShadows: Telepathically summoned to the reservoir dam’s walkway, Childes finally sees, lumbering into view, the killer.
*FriendOnTheForce: Detective Inspector Ken Overoy, during the rampage of a child-molesting serial killer, learned to take Childes’s insights seriously. Plagued by new horrific visions, Childes gets back in touch.
*FrenchJerk: [[AvertedTrope Averted]] with Paul Sebire’s young business associate Edouard Vigiers, who, at the Sebire’s dinner party, endorses Childes profession, and politely dissuades Sebire’s attempt to pressure Amy into showing Eduoard around the island.
*ElderAbuse: From a distant psychiatric hospital, Childes, from perpetrator [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s perspective, the top of an elderly man’s head sawn into.
*EvilOldFolks: When finally revealed, the killer has “immense
*EvilOldFolks: In the moonlight, Childes sees [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s hair to be curly, matted and silver.
*FantasyForbiddingFather: Childes’s father hated anything to do with mysticism or the supernatural; forbade mention of dead wife and young Jonathan Childes from her visiting grave, and [[spoiler: blamed the boys prediction thereof for her death]].
*FatBastard:
** [[AvertedTrope Averted]] with overweight young Isabel.
** [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] with [[spoiler: Heckatty]]; vast in bone structure as well as flesh.
*FingerInTheMail: Shortly after [[spoiler: Gabby’s friend Annabel]] is kidnapped, Childes, with a moonstone, is mailed [[GutPunch five tiny fingers and a thumb]]. Mercifully, the pathologist determines them to have been severed after the child’s death.
*{{Foreshadowing}}:
** Through his bedroom window, when Childes sees the distant school’s white walls to have caught the setting sun, he briefly thinks it’s caught fire. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] later [[spoiler: sets the school on fire]].
** After Childes collapses at dinner, Paul Sebire frets to daughter Amy that riding in a car with Childes during such an episode could be dangerous. Through [[spoiler: a telepathically stimulated throttling, Heckatty forces Childes into a car crash, from which Amy, in the passenger's seat, sustains facial cuts]].
*FriendToAllChildren: Following Gabby’s troubled birth, her dependency roused in Childes a renewed tenderness for all life.
*FundraiserCarnival: As summer nears, La Roche Ladies’ College hosts Open Day, which sees beverage stalls, prize giving, and general merriment.
*GroinAttack: PlayedForHorror - in their eventual confrontation, the killer [[YourMindMakesItReal psychically stimulates]] crushing Childes’s testicles.
*GodOfTheMoon: A moonstone left victims’ corpses rouses suspicion of a murderous cult. Detective Inspector Overoy reads of Hecate, [[GodOfTheDead overseer of the dead]] and patron of sorceresses. Like the moon itself, her character is said to vary. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] gold’s the moonstone, with its inner blue shimmer, to be Hecate’s earthly embodiment; and to her, [[HumanSacrifice offers murder victims’ souls]].
*GuttedLikeAFish: Childes suffers an extremely graphic [[MindRape remote insight]] into the removal of a corpse’s internal organs - and then learns a prostitute to have been thusly desecrated.
*HangingAround: During Open Day, [[spoiler: Heckatty]], stalks the not-quite-empty dormitories, and with a school tie, hangs [[spoiler: Jeannette]] over the stairs.
*HumanSacrifice: Having eaten from victims’ organs, [[spoiler: Heckatty]], to bar the slain from reclaiming their souls, steals organs - an offering to the Moon Goddess Hecate.
*HauntedTechnology: During a computer class, each monitor screen’s sudden display of the word "MOON" perplexes the students and horrifies Childes.
*HeroicFireRescue: Having seen from his cottage window La Roche Ladies’ college to be on fire, Childes drives over to find the building intact - until fire promptly erupts. While staff and students evacuate, Childes learns of a possibility of people trapped several floors up. While [[spoiler: Kelly, Patricia, Adele, Caroline, Isobel, Sarah-Jane and Matron Bates]] perish, Childes leads to safety ten-year-old Sandy and Rachel.
*HonestCorporateExecutive: Paul Sebire, chief executive of Jacarte International; while a bit pushy and overprotective, is an honest, if ruthless, businessman.
*HoistByTheirOwnPetard:
*HotTeacher:
** Young Jeannette takes a shine to Childes.
** French teacher Amy, in an attempt to look schoolmarmish, keeps her hair in a tight bun. Childes just finds it sexy.
*IJustWantToBeNormal: Having found himself suddenly attuned to the mind of a child-molesting serial killer, the public’s interest in Childes's publicised assistance of the police drove him to the seclusion of the Channel Islands. Attunement to the mind of another serial killer has him wracked with dread.
*InnocentBystander: Headmistress Miss Piprelly, with police stationed at the SerialKiller-targeted school, hears a nightly intrusion. [[spoiler: Heckatty]] overpowers her, [[spoiler: snaps her neck]], [[spoiler: soaks her in petrol]] and [[spoiler: fatally sets her on fire]].
*IntangibleTimeTravel: On recollection of a childhood encounter with his dead mother, Childes recalls glimpsing a second, unknown figure - and realises it to have been his own mentally projected self.
*ItIsDehumanizing: Having telepathically sensed the unknown killer’s depraved thoughts and monstrous actions, he can’t think of them as human.
*JacobMarleyApparel: On the dam’s walkway, in [[spoiler: school uniform as opposed to nightwear,]] appear the fire-slain [[spoiler: La Roche girls]].
*JerkassHasAPoint: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] - rather than an outright git, Paul Sebire is inordinately protective and possessive - although his fear for Amy’s safety when riding in a car with the psychically vulnerable Childes [[spoiler: proves well-founded]] when [[spoiler: Heckatty psychically forces Childes and Amy into a car crash]].
*JustInTime: On Open Day, Childes, from the school field, sees, in a school window, a face. He hurries up to the dormitories; finds, with a uniform tie, [[spoiler: Jeannette]] hung by her neck over the stairs, and, just in time, gets her down.
*KillingInSelfDefense: When [[spoiler: Heckatty]] dangles over the dam’s walkway, Childes psychically senses, in [[spoiler: her calm plea for assistance, an insatiable desire for more sadism]]. Spectral finger-severed victim Annabel [[spoiler: with a look, entreats Childes not to let Hecatty live. From the walkway’s wall, he starts to prise free Heckatty’s fingers]].
*LetMeAtHim: After Paul Sebire punches Childes, Inspector Geoff Robillard holds him back.
*LifeSavingEncouragement: As fire rages through the school, Childes gently encourages, and leads down the fire escape, two terrified ten-year-olds. When Childes briefly comes to exhaustion and despair, Sandy briefly takes the role of encouragement-supplier.
*LiteralCliffhanger:
** During their eventual confrontation on the reservoir dam’s walkway, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] forces Childes over its edge.
** Although Childes doesn’t quite register what happens, [[spoiler: Heckatty, seemingly driven by her advancing ghostly victims]], ends up in a similar position.
*LonelyAmongPeople: On Open Day, Jeannette, away from the heightened loneliness for her own parents threatened by her peers’ united families, sneaks back to her dormitory.
*{{Lunacy}}: Overoy notes the police in general to acknowledge, during full moon, generally increased crime rate. He ponders the moon’s effect on the tide - and perhaps the semi-liquid human brain.
*MagneticMedium: Shortly after her death, Childes’s mother was drawn to his extrasensory insights. [[spoiler: On young Annabel's death]], her friend Gabby receives a similar visit.
*MindRape:
** Having sensed Childes's involuntarily psychic observation, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] deliberately probes his mind with visions of [[spoiler: her]] crimes. Childes telepathically feels [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s “obscene glory,” and is terrified that he may be the crimes’ amnesiac perpetrator. [[spoiler: He most certainly is not]].
** During their moonlit confrontation on the dam’s walkway, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] forcibly imparts severely exacerbated images of Amy’s [[spoiler: car crash]] wounds; a fatal and [[EyeScream brutal]] version of Jeannette’s attempted hanging, and a vision of Gabby with open torso and exposed, animate organs.
*MirrorScare: Driving his car, Childes, in the rear-view mirror, suddenly sees [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s eyes.
*MoodWhiplash: At the Sebire’s dinner party, during George Duxbury’s risque story, Childes succumbs to a distant vision of the exhumation of a small boy’s corpse.
*MySignificanceSenseIsTingling: PlayedForHorror. Over breakfast with Amy, Childes is suddenly devastated by a definite persuasion of seven-year-old Gabby’s endangerment. A telephone call to Fran reveals Gabby’s friend Annabel to have vanished. He later irresistibly realises [[spoiler: Annabel to have died quickly]].
*MysteriousMist: With [[spoiler: Heckatty]] about to push Childes over the reservoir dam’s walkway, mutually heard telepathic voices precede a pale mist, which refines into distinct human shapes.
*OrganTheft: A small boy’s desecrated heart is seen to have bite marks - [[spoiler: Heckatty]], to absorb their vitality and to bar the slain from reclaiming their souls, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] eats of their organs.
*OverprotectiveDad: Paul Sebire harasses Childes over his involvement with the police and supposed instability; and urges him away from Amy.
*PanickyExpectantFather: PlayedForDrama - during daughter Gabby’s birth, her endangerment by a mucus blockage nearly made Childes collapse with fear.
*ParentalAbandonment: With her parents stationed in South Africa by her father’s engineering job, fourteen-year-old Jeannette misses them.
*ParentsInDistress: While Childes confronts [[spoiler: Heckatty]], seven-year-old daughter Gabby, hysterical over a dream in which her father, over a huge body of water, is attacked by a "monster lady". With Gabby having already shown signs of having inherited her father’s gift, Overroy hastens to the island’s reservoir.
*PoliceAreUseless: [[AvertedTrope Averted]]. Detective Inspector Ken Overoy, having, in search of a child molesting serial killer, learned to respect Childes’s extrasensory insights, eventually manages to identify the new killer.
*PolicePsychic: Childes.
*ProperlyParanoid: Alone in her quarters, a suddenly unnerved Miss Pipprelly, aware of her own psychic faculties, resolves to investigate. And smells petrol…
*PsychicChildren: Gabby starts to show signs of having inherited her father’s gift.
*PsychicLink: Having suppressed his extrasensory insight for much of his life, Childes, three years ago, found it involuntarily attuned to that of a child-molesting serial killer.
-->'''Childes:''' Psychics say our minds are like radio receivers, tuning into other wavelengths all the time, picking up different frequencies: well, maybe he was transmitting on a particular frequency that only I could receive, the excitement he felt at the kill boosting the output, making it powerful enough to reach me.
*PsychicPowers:
** As a boy, Jonathan Childes, pending others’ mishap, had occasional precognitive realisations - including his mother’s untimely death. [[spoiler: Blamed by his father for somehow causing it]], Childes guiltily suppressed his extrasensory insight - which, in adulthood, awoke in response to a succession of murders. Three years since helping the police find the killer, Childes is once more disturbed by brutal visions.
** Headmistress Estelle Piprelly, also prone to precognitive insights, wonders about Childes.
** A [[spoiler: psychiatric hospital nurse]], known only as [[spoiler: Heckatty]], on sensing Childes’s reaching mind, taunts him with horrific visions and, eventually, telepathically induced pain.
*PsychicStrangle: In Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] eventually manages to telepathically induce the physical effects of bodily assault - including strangulation, by which [[spoiler: she]] forces him to crash his car.
*{{Psychometry}}: On bodily touching a moonstone found in a murdered corpse, Childes sees, within the stone, a blue flash. To Detective Inspector Overoy’s alarm, a sudden tingling causes Childes’s hair to ripple. As well as his own, Childes feels surprise in a distant, barbarously warped mind.
*RageBreakingPoint: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. After [[spoiler: Childes and Amy’s car crash]], Paul Sebire’s paranoid bluster climaxes in an accusation of Childes to have been behind the attempted hanging of [[spoiler: young Jeannette]]. While sorely galled, Childes [[TranquilFury calmly dismisses]] Sebire’s raving. PlayedStraight when Sebire then punches him.
*ReasonableAuthorityFigure:
** Detective Inspector Overoy, having been helped by Childes on a previous murder case, works hard to spare him any more intrusive publicity.
** In the hospital following [[spoiler: Childes and Amy’s car crash]], Dr Poulain tries to calm the raging Paul Sebire.
*ResignedToTheCall: While Childes dreads some terrible consequence of pursuing his psychic insight, [[MindRape enforced remote exposure]] to [[spoiler: Heckatty]]'s sawing off the top of an elderly mental patient’s head pressures Childes to get back in touch with the police.
*RobbingTheDead: To bar the Hecate-sacrificed victims from reclaiming their souls, [[spoiler: Hecatty]] steals certain body parts.
*RooftopConfrontation: Having made psychic contact with the killer, Childes is summoned, high above the island’s reservoir, to the adjacent dam’s walkway, to finally meet the killer.
*ScarsAreForever: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] - from [[spoiler: Childes’s psychokinetically enforced car crash, Amy]] retains small but permanent scars, repairable by minor plastic surgery.
*SceneryGorn: [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s incineration of La Roche Ladies' College is brutally believable.
*SeeingThroughAnothersEyes: Through [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s perspective, Childes senses [[spoiler: her]] crimes.
*SecretRelationship: At work, Childes and Amy keep things strictly formal - although their gossip-happy charges remain suspicious.
*ShatteringTheIllusion: When [[spoiler: Heckatty]] [[YourMindMakesItReal psychically simulates]] in Childes a burning of his internal organs, the pain distracts from fear, which breaks the spell.
*ShrinkingViolet: Fourteen-year-old Jeannette has a timidity Childes finds both disarming and faintly exasperating.
*ShoutOut: Gabby’s letters to Childes come in envelopes engraved with the cartoon figure of [[Franchise/{{Peanuts}} Snoopy]].
*TheSneakyGuy: Paul Sebire, vaguely familiar with Childes’s name, has Island Police Committee member Victor Platneur discreetly check to see if Childes has been involved with police - and learns him to have been under suspicion for murder. While Amy protests that Childes helped solve the crimes, Sebire remains wary.
*StartingANewLife: From the public’s morbid interest in his psychic assistance of the police, Childes fled to an unnamed one of the Channel Islands. Three years on, he rents a detached cottage, and works as a peripatetic computer science teacher.
*SternTeacher: Headmistress Estelle Piprelly, to staff as well as students.
*SympatheticAdulterer: With [[spoiler: neighbouring young Annabel murdered in place of their targeted daughter]], Childes spends the night at Fran’s. That night, a traumatised Fran seeks, from Childes, intimate comfort.
*TouchTelepathy: Via telephone - when Childes, with the killer, makes direct psychic contact, a [[spoiler: car crash]]-recovering Amy, through the phone lines, feels Childes’s [[TranquilFury contained fury]]. Childes’s [[CompellingVoice urge]] for Amy to get some sleep then makes her feel irresistibly tired.
*TraumaticSuperpowerAwakening:
** In childhood, before their guilt-induced suppression, Childes’s psychic insights were rudimentary. In adulthood, involuntary attunement to a murderous child molestor awakened them.
** When young Annabel [[MissingChild goes missing]], Gabby, late that night, is disturbed by a waking vision of her friend, looking sad. The encounter rekindles Childes’s own encounter, aged seven, with [[spoiler: his week-dead mother]].
*TrueCraftsman: Childes’s digital flair is sometimes considered intuitive.
*UnhappyMedium: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. Childes’s psychic insight causes him a lot of stress, but this is mainly because of its revival from dormancy by involuntary attuning to two deeply depraved minds.
*VampiricDraining: [[spoiler: Heckatty]], to “taste their souls,” eats from victims’ organs.
*VengefulGhost: Seemingly drawn to Childes’s and [[spoiler: Heckatty]]’s psychic union, the mutilated slain, from an ethereal mist, around their killer, increasingly solidify. The murdered small boy, in pursuit of his stolen heart, [[spoiler: rips out one of his murderer’s eyes]].
*VillainsWantMercy: [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]]. [[spoiler: Dangling over the dam’s walkway, Heckatty asks Childes for help - but her]] plea lacks entreaty. Furthermore, still psychically attuned to Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty, whilst hanging onto the walkway for dear life, with one eye missing, continues to telepathically torment Childes with horrifying images - the plea for help is made in mockery]].
*WiseBeyondTheirYears: At twenty-three, Amy is said to have a “quiet maturity.”
*YouAreTooLate: With fire raging through La Roche Ladies’ College, Childes finds, trapped on a stairwell, Kelly, Patricia, Adele, Caroline, Isobel, Sarah-Jane and Matron Kathryn Bates. Getting some [[BedsheetRope bedding]] from a dormitory, he rescues ten-year-old Sandy and Rachel. When he gets back, [[spoiler: the stairwell has collapsed into the inferno]].
*YourMindMakesItReal: In Childes, [[spoiler: Heckatty]] psychically stimulates bodily pain. While its effects are tangibly manifest, it may, by recognition of its arbitrary imposition, be denied.
