“I see the way you look,” Newman said to Callum. “The way you hold on to that terminus for dear life. Did one of them get to you, too? Is that how you got the sight? Several of us had experiences like that. We were always a little different, a little more intense. I had my accident when I was eighteen. I’d been given a secondhand motorbike as a gift for getting into Oxford. It was 1978. I was at home, in the New Forest. Lots of dirt lanes to ride on, nothing but ponies in the way. Best summer of my life. Exams done, future ahead of me. It was a perfectly clear evening, the sun still out around nine o’clock, height of June—and I was riding back home from visiting my girlfriend, coming down a stretch of the road I knew perfectly well. Then suddenly, something swung at me, knocking me off the bike. I went flying backward, the bike into a tree. And when I looked up, there was a boy standing over me, laughing. My father’s friends happened to be coming by on their way to the pub, found me and the crashed bike. I told them about the boy. I pointed at him. He was still laughing. They didn’t see him, and I was taken off to the hospital. The doctors assumed, quite reasonably, that I’d been on the bike when it hit the tree and had suffered a head injury.

“I started seeing people—people that no one else could see. I was involuntarily admitted to a mental hospital for observation for a month. You all know the feeling, I’m sure. You know you’re not insane, and yet the evidence that you are seems overwhelming.”

I could tell Callum was listening very carefully to all of this, shifting his gaze between Stephen and Newman.