Bicentenary Boy
by Mike RotheryPublish: Sep 10, 2018Supernatural Suspense Action & Adventure FantasyBook Overview
It is 1952 and mystery surrounds a patient in a Miami psychiatric ward who’s turned up naked at a voodoo burial rite claiming to come from the past. For psychologist Dani Corby, it’s a case of paranoid psychosis, but her judgement is challenged when she investigates the young man’s story. Under hypnosis the patient gives a vivid account of escape from his pirate captors into a terrifying world of myth and magic. The enigma deepens when a strange old woman hounds Dani with dire prophesies about her patient, and when the young man falls to a mysterious illness, she sets out on a career-blowing mission to save his life.The year is 1754 and young Joey Horne's medical education is interrupted when his father decides on a new life for the family in the American Colonies. But the migrant ship is intercepted by pirates after a storm sweeps her many miles off course. Joey is spared the ensuing carnage to be taken as a galley boy by irascible sea cook, John deVoet, but suffers violent and degrading cruelty at the hands of the callous crew. Befriending the only other boy onboard, topman Spike Gummer, Joey begins to adapt to his dreary new life and learn survival strategies. The only other survivor from the migrant ship is Cheade, a dour and sinister priest whose evangelising sermons and religious rantings seem to have a strange and increasingly compelling influence over the simple-minded cutthroats. Joey witnesses more ransacking of ships over the following months, with shocking slaughter and destruction, but when the buccaneer Captain steers into a strange fogbank to escape the attentions of a French Privateer his murderous rampage comes to an ignominious end in a mutiny. Lost and short on provisions in a mysterious region where even the stars are unrecognizable, the ship anchors at an island to forage ashore for food and water, and Joey seizes his opportunity to escape. It is here he meets the feisty Zana, a girl with extraordinary gifts and who now, like Joey, has been left orphaned by the murderous crew in their pillaging of the island. Joey is outraged to learn the island’s entire adult indigent population have been wiped out, leaving Zana the sole guardian of the surviving children whose parents had sent them into hiding when the marauders landed. But Zana has other shocking revelations in store for her new companion, and as the truth unfolds, as the magic and mystery of this strange world is revealed, it dawns on Joey just how much peril his escape has put him in. Committed now to his hard-won freedom, he must trust his life to the hands of his new friend, share her destiny. And the most appalling truth of all; once entering this world of spirits there is no possibility of ever returning to one's own world.
