Blood Passage by Michael J. McCann Page B

floor, the two of us, and played with his toys for a while. I used my PDA to record our conversation.”
    Hank got up and came around the table again so that he could see the screen over Josh’s shoulder.
    The video began to play. It was a little grainy, but Hank could plainly see the little boy sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by action figures, die-cast cars and other toys. There was a dark shadow on the left edge of the frame.
    “ That’s my knee,” Josh explained. “I put my PDA up on top of a dump truck. He didn’t really pay any attention to it. I think he considered it one of my toys and wasn’t interested in playing with it.”
    “ Now I’m going to drive home,” Taylor said, pushing a car across the carpet.
    “ Where have you been?” Josh asked.
    “ At work,” Taylor replied. “I work at a big school, like Daddy.”
    “ So do I,” Josh said, playing with another car. “It’s fun.”
    “ Yeah.” Taylor left his car behind a pile of books. “Now I’m at home.”
    “ Okay. Now what are you going to do?”
    “ Play, before supper time.” Taylor picked up an action figure and waved it around.
    Josh picked up another figure and pointed it at Taylor.
    “ Bang, bang. Gotcha.”
    Taylor stiffened, staring at Josh, and dropped his action figure. He said nothing for a moment, then slowly reached for a colored block. He took several blocks and started making a pile in front of his crossed legs.
    Josh picked up the action figure that Taylor had dropped and held it out, but Taylor ignored it.
    “ Come on, Taylor. Let’s play guns.”
    Taylor shook his head emphatically, adjusting the pile of blocks in front of him.
    “ Don’t you like playing guns, Taylor?”
    Taylor said nothing, looking down at his blocks.
    “ Do you have any toy guns, Taylor?”
    “ No.”
    “ How come? Are you afraid of guns?”
    Taylor said nothing for a few moments, playing with his blocks. Finally he murmured, “He hurt me. In the leg.”
    “ Who hurt you?”
    “ With his gun.”
    “ Who hurt you in the leg, Taylor?”
    “ That man.”
    “ Who, what man?”
    “ Shawn. He was a black man, like you, but he didn’t have no hair.”
    “ No hair?”
    “ Yeah.”
    “ Shawn hurt you?” Josh asked.
    “ Gary was yelling and Shawn kept hitting me with the gun and it went bang and hurt my leg and there was blood.”
    “ That’s terrible,” Josh said. “Where did this happen, Taylor?”
    Taylor did not reply. He stared down at his blocks, not moving.
    The video clip ended and Josh looked over his shoulder at Hank. “That was it. He didn’t want to talk about it any more.”
    Hank realized he’d been holding his breath. He sat down again and jotted in his notebook. “So that gives the two names coming from him, not just from the parent. Interesting. There seemed to be emotion behind it.”
    “ Yeah. Dr. Walsh has had a number of experiences with children who’ve been coached by someone in what to say,” Josh said. “She feels very strongly that Taylor’s statements are spontaneous.”
    “ I have to admit,” Hank said, still writing, “this is very strange stuff. You’ve seen children make these kinds of statements before?”
    “ Well, only the one time before personally. But I’ve watched a lot of video of other interviews as part of my dissertation research and a lot of it’s just like this. It can give you the chills. It’s like another person, an adult, speaking through the mouth of a child.” Josh laughed nervously. “Which is what it may actually be, another person speaking to us about their past life and their death.”
    Hank set aside his pen and looked at him. “It’s hard to swallow. I mean, rationally, there’s nothing in our modern culture to prepare us for this kind of concept. People want to believe in life after death, but the fact of the matter is that we live in a scientific age with a very mechanistic view of existence that prefers to explain phenomena in purely physical