" He thought of his old tapes, the ones he'd had for years, the ones he'd used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn't owning up to them. "

― Rupert Thomson , The Five Gates of Hell