Samuel Thorn watched the darkening landscape flit past. The lights in the train had appeared brighter as the view outside grew gloomier, and Samuel was able to see the reflections of other passengers in the windows.

He liked this effect. It appealed to his theatrical nature. It was how phantoms could get represented on stage. Trick of the light. Pepper’s Ghost.

He could watch the passing fields, lit by the setting sun, and as it cross-faded with the lights in the train the image of the woman sitting on the opposite side of the carriage superimposed itself on the landscape. Hovering over it as if projected onto the sky.

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Following the success of You Too Can Fly, Dr. Frankburg felt he could dispense with the voice-over actor and narrate Conquer Panic himself. It would be much better if the listener knew that the words spoken were actually the doctor’s. It would lend the proceedings an air of authenticity.

If anything took the gloss off the success of You Too Can Fly, it was that on the cassette sleeve was the credit Read by Samuel Thorn. Quite small and hard to find as it was, buried away amongst Additional Thanks and under Recorded at Fine Sound Studios, but there all the same. Like a splinter under the nail.

Frankburg had received a letter from an American psychoanalyst saying how his tape had not only helped her through a long-haul flight to Australia, but she’d found it rather sexy too, and looked forward to meeting him in person at the Boston conference she’d discovered they were both to attend.

. . . I can go to conferences now, you see, now that I have your tape to get me through the flight. Yours in anticipation, Clara Redlake.

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When Clara Redlake had asked for a stamp to the UK, the post office clerk had tried to look down her top. Clara had interpreted this as a result of denied suckling rights as a child.

And lust.

She’d also felt pretty pleased.

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Dr. Frankburg had been called many things, but never sexy, not even by his ex-wife. He was too flattered to explain that the voice wasn’t his, but instead wrote back immediately saying he blamed his smooth voice on his Welsh roots and he too was looking forward to making her acquaintance.

He spent the weeks preceding the conference practicing his impression of Samuel Thorn and praying that she didn’t look too carefully at the credits.

His own voice was a pleasant Solihull Birmingham, and since Wales was only a hundred miles to the west, Frankburg assumed there must be a similar dialectic root.

Whether there was or not, it didn’t help him crack the accent, and despite trying to speak this way exclusively, alarming many patients and fellow professionals (“Are you eating a hot potato, Dr. Frankburg?”), he found if anything he was veering further and further away from the valleys.

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