Book One: The Secrets of Brimstone Manor

Bill Blackthorne is a shy and nerdy young man with some very serious problems. He has no recollection of his past and can see horns and yellow eyes on people who appear perfectly normal to others. Bill’s earliest memory is waking up in gloomily gothic Brimstone Manor, where a strangely deranged middle-age woman called Beryl tells him she is his mother. He is enrolled into a secret society called the Apostles, who tell Bill he is very important – that he knows a great and profound secret, vital to their cause, which they intend to extract from his clouded memories with strong psychotropic drugs and ‘sixteen-volt electro-convulsive treatments’. Bill doesn’t like the sound of this at all.

He is desperate to escape the clutches of the smothering and subtly sinister Apostles, and when he befriends Arthur Small from the nearby village of Underwood, he knows he has met someone who will help him. Arthur goes off to study at the ancient university of Middenmere, but Bill is also taken there for his treatments and they bump into each other. They meet two very pretty but intense and dark girls, Lilith and Ophelia, who invite then to a very unusual party to do something very unusual to the boys...

The girls are secretly witch-freaks use the boys in a terrible way to dabble in powerful and ancient magic they don’t really understand. Their dabbling sets off a catastrophic chain of events that forces Bill to remember his very bizarre past and realise his amazing destiny. In a climatic end that threatens to destroy everything they hold dear, Bill and Arthur are thrown into a desperate race to save those they love.