Uncle Pete’s sleeping on the sofa downstairs and Mormor is in Mam’s room. The TV went off a while ago. Now everything’s quiet. And I’m wide awake.

Then my phone pings with an incoming text message. It’s from Susan.

I was not sure whether to send you this, but here goes.

There is a link to tap on, and when I do it opens a picture. It is a scan of an old newspaper article.

Edinburgh Evening News

Mystery death of ‘Mystic’s’ son

2 March 1988. The death of a teenager at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh has left doctors ‘baffled’.

Uri McKinley, 13, was admitted to the unit on February 23. He had fallen into a ‘spontaneous deep coma’ and doctors were unable to wake him.

His condition rapidly declined and he died peacefully two days ago. Doctors have been unable to pinpoint a cause of death and the matter has been referred to the Scottish legal authorities.

Uri was the only son of entertainer and self-styled ‘Mystic of the Highlands’ Kenneth McKinley and his wife Jeanette.

Mr McKinley toured Scotland in the sixties and seventies, but retired from public life a few years ago.

If I had had any remaining doubts about the seriousness of Seb’s situation, that short article has removed them all.

The more I think about being wide awake, the more it scares me. I have to get back into that dream. Seb is in real danger. He could die, like Kenneth McKinley’s son.

It’s down to me. Everything is down to me.

Chapter 71

I look at the clock on my phone. It’s now past three a.m. and I still haven’t slept.

I lie first on one side, then the other, then on my back, then on my front. Mam says she sometimes reads if she can’t sleep, but that would involve turning the light on, which would mean accepting my wakefulness, so I’m definitely not doing that.

Twenty minutes later, I’ve switched the light on. Lying on Seb’s bed is Kobi the Cave Boy.

Just looking at the pictures gives me butterflies. The empty, sandy landscape on the first page is a bit like looking at an old holiday photograph. And the words too are so familiar.

In the shadows of the cave, the fire flickers red,

And Kobi lies down with a rock beneath his head,

And pulls the fur blanket until it tickles his nose

While outside the cave mouth, the cold wind blows.

Kobi feels sleepy and his eyelids close.

Slowly, slowly, like Kobi’s fur blanket, the book sinks down and touches my nose and I don’t even notice.

And then I’m awake again. Dammit! What was that noise? A thump! behind me.

There is it again. Thump!

I look at my phone again: 03.42. Just then a message from Susan flashes up on the screen.

Are you awake?

Thump!