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The story in 10 parts

1. Key idea 1 · free to read

   A surgeon builds a gramophone for the dead

   And the Dead Spoke opens on Newsome Terrace, a London dead end where nothing seems to happen. In its last house lives Sir James Horton, a retired surgeon and physicist who avoids almost everyone. His housekeeper, Mrs. Gabriel, was once tried for murdering her husband and acquitted.

   On the night war is declared in August 1914, Horton shows his friend a frog's heart still beating nine hours after the frog was killed. He argues that the brain keeps a record of speech, like grooves cut in a gramophone disc. He needs only a very fine needle and a trumpet with immense magnifying power.

   During the war he carries home scraps of brain from wounded soldiers. One evening his friend hears a faint whisper from a steel horn, and then two bars of Tipperary, sung from the brain of a boy who died that day. Horton cannot see why anyone would call the work terrible. Then he adds a second battery, and wonders aloud about a whole head, or a whole body.

   Knowledge pursued without pity can cost more than its discoverer imagines.

2. 2

   Unexplained dread drives two very different tales

   The Outcast takes place in the small town of Tarleton, where a rich widow, Mrs. Acres, buys the Gate-house.

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3. 3

   A friendly spirit and a hungry shadow

   Machaon begins with a worry.

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4. 4

   Two tales of old grudges and a hidden story

   At the Farmhouse follows the painter John Aylsford on a stormy November evening.

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5. 5

   Footsteps in a rented house and a very polite ghost

   The Gardener begins when the narrator joins his friends Hugh and Margaret Grainger at a rented house for Christmas.

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6. 6

   A cheerful widow, and a man who stops the clock

   Mrs. Amworth is set in Maxley, a pretty Sussex village with a single street and a little Norman church.

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7. 7

   A dying man chooses his room

   Roderick's Story opens with a persuasion scene.

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8. 8

   The dead return because something is unfinished

   Across the twelve tales, the unseen world seems to work by a few steady rules.

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9. 9

   Science and belief keep arguing without a winner

   Many of Benson's heroes are men of science who follow evidence into places their colleagues will not go.

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10. 10

    A fireside voice makes the strange seem plain

    Benson tells almost every tale in the first person, through someone who sits in a club, by a fire, or at a hotel table and says what he saw.

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