Nightrise

organizations that deal with missing children and I contacted them. I passed out leaflets. I trawled the Internet.
    Do you know how many children go missing each day? I began to put together names, faces, times, places. I noted all the cases that had been reported in the last year. I drew maps. I called the parents and spoke to them.
    "To my surprise, a picture began to take shape. At first it didn't make any sense and I thought maybe I was imagining things. But very quickly I realized that it was true. There was a sort of pattern. A series of coincidences. And that's what led me to you.
    "What I noticed was that in the past six months, a large number of the kids who've disappeared have been what you might call special.
    What do I mean by that? I'm talking about kids with special abilities. Jamie, I won't beat about the bush: These were kids with paranormal powers. I know it sounds crazy. You're not supposed to believe in these things anymore — not in the twenty-first century — but even so, there was a definite link…"
    Alicia got up and went over to the sofa. She opened a briefcase and took out a sheaf of documents. She spread one of them in front of Jamie. It had been taken from a local newspaper and showed a photograph of a rather intense-looking boy with cropped hair. The headline read: jack has a flash of the future.
    The story didn't take itself too seriously. Apparently, there was an eleven-year-old boy named Jack Pugh who lived on his father's farm in Kentucky. He'd had a dream and had warned his parents that a local church was going to catch fire. Twelve hours later, the church had been hit by lightning and had burned to the ground. Fortunately, nobody had been hurt.
    "Six weeks after the paper printed that story, Jack vanished," Alicia said. She took out a second sheet of paper.
    This time it was a girl. Her name was Indigo Cotton and her story had been reported in the Miami Herald.

    It seemed that she could bend spoons and stop watches just by looking at them. There had been a picture of her in the back of a paper, leaning against a grandfather clock. The clock had stopped at exactly midday. According to the story, she had been responsible.
    "She disappeared too," Alicia said. "Two months after the story ran."
    She added more pages to the pile. There was a boy who had managed to predict the winners five times in a row at a local racetrack. Another boy who, without moving, had fused all the lights in his school. A girl who talked to ghosts. An autistic boy who knew the names of everyone he met before he was introduced to them. Another pair of twins who seemed to live in each other's minds.
    "They all disappeared?" Jamie asked.
    "A dozen of them in just six months. That may not sound like a lot to you, Jamie, but I know how statistics work and I can tell you it's completely incredible. Of course, loads of other kids went missing too. But this was something quite different. It seemed clear to me that someone was deliberately targeting these kids."
    "So did you go to the police?"
    "No." Alicia sat down again. "Read the articles. None of them are serious. I mean…a kid who can bend spoons? Another who talks to dead people? 'TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE: GRAVE BUSINESS
    OF GIRL WHO GOSSIPS
    WITH GHOSTS.' Read it for yourself. Of course, once these children disappeared, everyone treated them very seriously. But the paranormal stuff was just forgotten. It wasn't important. In fact it was hardly even mentioned."
    Jamie thought about it for a moment. Then it suddenly occurred to him. "What about Daniel?" he asked.
    Alicia nodded. "There was a piece about him too," she said. "At the time, I didn't want it to appear and I was annoyed when it did. But the thing is, quite a few strange things happened with Danny too. He used to have these premonitions. They weren't dreams…they were just feelings. He once stopped me from going on a train. He was only six years old and he got quite hysterical about it. Like, he was throwing stuff around the room, and in the end I gave in. I couldn't leave him with Maria…not like that. So I didn't go. And you know what happened? A few days later I learned that there had been an incident on the train. Some guy out of his mind on drugs shot someone. If I'd been traveling that day, could it have been me? I don't know…
    "Then he did it again, only this time he did it at school. He warned a boy not to go home. That same afternoon, a bus skidded off the main road and went straight