Anthony Horowitz - Nightrise

… read each other’s thoughts. Am I right?” Jamie didn’t answer so she went on, “And I guess what I saw back at the house was some sort of mind control.”

Jamie had finished the Sprite. He was holding the can in his hand and suddenly he closed his fingers, crumpling it. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I never talk about this stuff. Not with anyone. Except Scott.” He looked up at her and she saw that his eyes were filled with anger, challenging her to argue with him. “You don’t know what it’s like. You have no idea. And I’m not going to tell you.”

“All right. I’m sorry.” Alicia drank some beer straight out of the bottle. She thought for a moment. “Look, I know this is difficult for you. But we’re not going to get anywhere fighting each other. Maybe it would help if I told you my story. Right now I’m a complete stranger to you. But it wasn’t just a coincidence, my being in the theatre last night. I was there for a reason.”

“Something to do with that photograph. Daniel…”

Alicia put down the beer. “Exactly,” she said. “Daniel. That’s what this is all about.”

She leant forward, resting her elbows on the table. Then she began.

“The boy in the photograph, Daniel, is my son. Last week should have been his birthday. He turned eleven on 9 June. But I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know if he’s alive. He disappeared seven months ago and I’ve been looking for him ever since.

“You don’t need to know very much about me, Jamie. I’m thirty-two. I have a sister. My parents are from New Jersey. A year ago, I was living in Washington DC, working for Senator John Trelawny. Maybe you’ve heard of him. You should have. Right now he’s trying to become the next president of the United States and people say there’s a good chance he’s going to win. Anyway, I was with him for five years, sorting his mail, sorting his diary… that kind of thing. He’s a good man and I liked my job.

“The other thing I need to tell you is that I was married for a time. My husband got sick and died two years after Danny was born so I had to bring him up on my own. But in a way I was lucky. I had a little house round the corner from a really nice school. And I had a wonderful home help – Maria – who looked after Danny every afternoon until I got home.

She drew a breath.

“And then, towards the end of last year – it was the first week in November – I got a call from Maria. It was about six o’clock in the evening and I was working late. Anyway, she said that Danny hadn’t come home from school. She’d tried his cell phone but she wasn’t getting any answer and she didn’t know what to do. I remember telling her to call round some of his friends and to phone me if he hadn’t shown up by seven. Looking back, I can’t believe how calm I was. But Danny often went home with one or another of his friends – he was in a band and played drums. And he was rehearsing for a Christmas show. It never occurred to me that anything could be wrong.

“Well, Maria did call back at seven o’clock and Danny still hadn’t shown up and nobody had any idea where he was. It was dark by then and that was when I really began to worry. I called the police. The fact that I was connected to Senator Trelawny helped. They were round in about ten seconds and they put him straight onto the NCIC Missing Persons File. They also put out an Amber Alert, which meant that all the local businesses and shops had his description and his picture and it was like they were building a network of people who would look out for him. And I still thought he was going to show up. I could actually hear myself scolding him for being late!”

She stopped. There was a long pause.

“He never did show up,” she went on. “Nobody had seen anything. Nobody knew anything. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air. I searched all over the house, trying to find some clue as to where he might have gone. I drove out to all the places he used to hang out. I went on the TV and the radio. His picture was in store windows all over town and on the back of trucks too. But nothing…”

“I think Scott saw him,” Jamie muttered. “When you showed him the photograph.”

Alicia nodded. “I know.” She swallowed hard. “It’s the first news I’ve had of him since it happened.”

She forced herself to go on.

“Two weeks before Christmas, I made a decision. The police didn’t know where to look for him. Nobody knew where he was. But I wasn’t going to give up. So I resigned my job and set out to find him myself. There are plenty of 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 every 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 had disappeared had 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 any more – 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 called 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 winner five times in a row at a local racecourse. 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… one 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 had disappeared, everyone treated them very seriously. But the paranormal stuff was just forgotten. It wasn’t important. In fact it was hardly even mentioned.”