The first book I looked over was ESP and Telepathy Today, an outdated and sensationalist volume published by a company specializing in books on Bigfoot and UFOs. The paperback was packed with black-and-white photos and crude drawings that claimed to prove the existence and validity of telepathy, telekinesis and ESP. There were photos of people floating in the air with no visible supports (obviously airbrushed), a man with horned-rimmed glasses and a goatee straining to lift a person with the power of his mind, that sort of crap.

I actually found myself enjoying flipping through the junky, dog-eared book, just like when I was a kid. True or not, these books had a kind of charm about them that I still found fascinating. Cain seemed to have been especially interested in a section of the book showing a man bending spoons with mind power. The pages were marked and several photos circled, but nothing seemed overly important, so I closed the book and shoved it into my coat pocket.

Next was The Big Book of Spells. Most of it was clean except for a chapter on voodoo which Cain had highlighted and underlined almost completely. The text was very simple, obviously intended for young readers with overwritten, dramatic passages and outright silly chants purported to evoke the spirits. Cain had circled several of the spells in red.

Early in Monsters, Myths, and Folklore, Cain had marked off a two-page spread discussing the Egyptian god Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death. Anubis was often associated with the creation of the art of embalming and was sometimes called the conductor of the dead.

Most of the underlining seemed to revolve around gods of death, reanimation, and resurrection. When I came across the last marked page, the pieces began to fall into place. The passage described the Norse legend of the Yimir. On the edges of the text, Cain had scrawled the words “the first giant,” and had underlined “legend says that the clouds are made from the brains of the Yimir.” At the bottom of the page he had written incantations from the voodoo book. Next to some of the spells were page numbers.

I opened the spell book Cain referred to and turned to the indicated pages. The underlined section read “in voodoo, the brain is the seat of animate spirits.”

On a Post-it note stuck to the page, Cain linked the passages:

The brain is the seat of the animate, the soul of all spirits.

Clouds are made from the brains of the Yimir.

The Yimir was the first giant.

The mind is the soul.

The heart is life.

Never shall they cross.

Never will we die.

I had no idea what the hell this all meant, beyond the fact that it was pretty clear he’d been obsessed with witchcraft, voodoo, and resurrection. I began to rethink my earlier deductions about spontaneous phenomenon: there may be a source other than Cain, and he may have even created it, but Cain was dead, definitely dead. I had sat covered in his splattered remains. There was nothing left of him that could even be collected. That final fall we took together had reduced him to a pool of splattered, slimy slop.