There was a shallow lip along the wall of the tunnel that Callum stood on so I could get closer to the man. As I did, the air got palpably colder and more sour. The man’s eyes were milky. He had no pupils. His expression was impossibly sad.

Callum took the flashlight from my hand and replaced it with his cell phone. He had the same old model as Boo.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” he said. “Press down on the numbers one and nine. Press hard, and keep pressing.”

“What?”

“Just do it. Go on. You have to be within a foot or so.”

I positioned my fingers on the one and nine and was about to press when Callum reached over and moved my arms forward, so that my hands and the phone accidentally went right through the man’s rib cage. I just felt the slightest sensation as I broke through him, like I’d put my fist through an inflated paper bag. This made me flinch for a second, but the man hardly seemed to notice that I had inserted myself into his chest cavity.

“Good,” Callum said. “Now press, both at once, hard!”

I tightened my grip, digging my nails into the number pad. I immediately felt a change in the air around us—there was a very slight but steadily growing warmth, and my hands began to shake.

“Keep holding,” Callum said. “It vibrates a little. Just keep pressing.”

The man looked down at himself, at my hands clasped in a prayerlike position in his chest, shaking, holding the phone with all my might. A second or two later, there was a bright blip, like a lightbulb going out—except it was a huge lightbulb, the size of a person. There was no noise, but there was a light rush of air and a weird, sweet smell that I can only describe as burning flowers and hair.

And he was gone.

Chapter 28

28

WE WERE IN A SMALL SQUARE OUTSIDE OF A CHURCH. The vicar was opening the door for the morning service and was unhappy to find me quietly being sick into a crisp pile of fallen leaves. It felt bizarrely good, vomiting in this clean, blowy air. It meant I was alive and not in the tunnel. It meant that smell was out of my nostrils.

“Feel better?” Callum asked when I stood up.

“What did I just do?”

“You took care of the problem.”

“Yeah, but what did I do? Did I just kill someone?”

“You can’t kill a dead person,” Callum said. “Makes no sense.”

I made my way over to a stone bench and collapsed onto it, turning my face up to get as much of the dampness as I could.

“But I just did something. He . . . exploded. Or something. What happened to him?”

“We have no idea,” Callum said. “They just go away. You wanted to know. Now you know.”