Conventional wisdom, like most convention, is dead wrong.

No, there's nothing here as ordinary as the steps of invisible feet, or doors that open and shut by themselves. The ghosts of Glastonbury wait just beyond your peripheral vision, fingertips extended for the lightest of touches. Only a few souls are sensitive enough to feel that touch.

I was one of them.

The doctors told my parents I'd fried my brain and given up my ghost at the Glastonbury Festival. They were right, sort of. But it wasn't the sex, the drugs, the booze or the music, vibrations opening fissures in my gut like pile drivers in the ground. It was the place. It was the light. It was time itself, full to running over.

And now I'm a ghost, here in Glastonbury.

"So it's like automatic writing?" asked Magnus Anderson. "The whole Frederick Bligh Bond shtick, his digging directed by some medieval monk from the great beyond?"

Anderson was a big man. His broad shoulders strained at a military-style sweater and tousled red hair brushed a high forehead. A neatly-trimmed goatee framed a rectangle of white teeth. He might have posed as a Danish or Norse berserker in a period tableau, except he held an electronic notepad instead of a broad axe.

Jane Thorne clasped her tatty vinyl portfolio to her chest, all too aware she was small, enveloped by her anorak, her mouse-brown hair held back from her mouse-sharp face by a scattering of clips. She knew she looked older than her fifty years. She didn't care.

What mattered was that she'd been told to talk to The Paranormal Files and now Mr. Paranormal Files himself was looming over her, expecting her to do just that. She said, "It's not like automatic writing at all."

Anderson's coffee-brown eyes gazed not at her but at the ruined walls of Glastonbury Abbey, rising in stone scallops from green lawns now scattered with suitably symbolic fallen leaves. The chill breeze of autumn carried the damp earth and mildewed stone scent of a grave.

Jane tried to explain the unexplainable. "I suppose you could call Brittany my spirit guide, except I've never claimed to be a medium."

"Brittany?" He turned back to her. "So you've got some symbolic meaning going there? You know, Arthur, Avalon, the Matter of Britain?"

"I have no idea what she's about, nor where she came from. She is, she was, an American, a countrywoman of yours, an artist and musician who died of her excesses at the Festival several years ago. She was trying to find herself, I understand."

"A free spirit, huh?"

Jane stared.

"That's a joke." His smile spread into a grin and then contracted. "What's happening isn't funny. I get it. Sorry."

That it might be funny had never occurred to Jane. "I only know what she's, erm, told me. Although 'told' isn't the way of it, either." Her voice ran down. She looked at her shoes, scuffed canvas humped over clenched toes.

She felt rather than saw Anderson staring down at her from his commanding height, brows drawn, head cocked. Thinking, considering, evaluating, but not skeptical, even though skepticism was a necessary virtue, especially here in Glastonbury. Once she'd been a skeptic as well.

"So don't tell me. Show me." The stylus in his hand poised above the screen of his PDA like a tiny tongue eager to taste. Or to direct a bite.

"Very well. Here's a sample of my work." Jane opened the portfolio, and heavy sheets of vellum shifted restively in the wind. The black curves of the modified Carolingian minuscule lettering, the jewel-like colors of the diminutive paintings and decorated initials, contrasted with her small, stubby hands splashed with ink. She curled her fingers into her palm and protected her work with her fist.

"Nice." Anderson's stylus prodded a "P" filled with red and blue scales, its dangling tail a dragon's head. "'Preserve me, O God, for in you I put my trust.'"

"Psalm Sixteen. I'm working through them in order, one to one hundred and fifty. It will take more than a year, I expect."