Mason Winfield

Author:
Author, teacher, storyteller, and supernatural historian Mason Winfield studied English and Classics at Denison University, earned a master’s degree in British literature at Boston College, and studied poetry and fiction at SUNY Buffalo with professor emeritus and MacArthur grant recipient Irving Feldman. He has written or edited fourteen books, including the regional sensation “Shadows of the Western Door” (1997) and “Iroquois Supernatural,” co-authored with Michael Bastine, on the traditions of the Six Longhouse Nations (Inner Traditions International/Bear & Company, 2011). Several of his surveys of upstate folklore and paranormal tradition may be found at the website of Western New York Wares: www.buffalobooks.com. He may be reached at www.masonwinfield.com.

An anatomically perfect human jaw fashioned of diamond-hard quartz crystal is uncovered at an Ohio burial mound and sold on the underground antiquities market. Shortly after, three pothunters are found dead.

A mysterious new drug suspected of South American origin surfaces in Buffalo, NY. Its unprecedented psycho-tropic effects include the momentary activation of ESP. 

Blind, speechless, emaciated street people start appearing in many parts of the world. An urban legend-cycle forms around them, and the name of a murderous old cult, “the Whistlers” attaches to them.

An archaeological team at a Mayan site reports finding a bizarre artifact and vanishes. 

An upstate schoolteacher’s book of New York legends and folklore foreshadows these developments and more. 

   These are the threads – plus his affair with a maddening woman – that draw narrator Ward Courier into the international adventure of occultism, terror, Native American tradition and onrushing prophecy that is Mason Winfield’s anticipated new novel THE WHISTLERS. By the time the picture of THE WHISTLERS becomes clear, we are ready to believe in a sinister conspiracy that could predate Atlantis and even hail from another world.

The Whistlers

NARRATIVE of WARD COURIER/CONFERENCE with TED BENNETT, Continued


"I thought it was fictional," I said, my tone rising. "I still don't know that most of it wasn't."


Bennett recovered his cool. "Your understanding of developments seemed relevant enough that we wondered about the level of your own involvement."


I shook my head unhappily. 'Back to that,' I thought.


"'The Inventor's Tale,' features a mysterious object buried dead-center in that tower. That didn't make any impression on you? "


"You think that was a plan on my part?" I said. "You think I'd hide something I knew was relevant?"


"A story about that tower in which a couple of mystery-objects may have been deposited dead-center. Dead-center?"


"Dead-center is where you'd put any single power-object," I said, "at any sacred/ritual site. No other place would be likely! The story is fiction, do you get it? That bit about the artifact was my own devising."


Chapter 156: Some Real Medicine, Part 156