The rest of the boys in the class cheered when Gray Townsend finally walked up with his bike.

“Nice of you to show up, Graham,” Mr Fletcher said, looking at Gray’s freshly slicked hair. “I can only assume the reason you’re so late is that you didn’t actually ride that bike of yours for fear of ruining that fancy hairdo. All right, does everyone have what they need? Let’s go.”

Hugo Fletcher had expressed privately to Jessa and her family that he was anxious about the prospect of taking his class on a trip to the museum, especially as he’d taken Mrs Reid’s tutor group the week prior and had trouble keeping track of everyone on the Tube (and Mrs Reid’s form didn’t even have a joker like Gray Townsend). But fortunately for Mr Fletcher, his students were either feeling extra-responsible or just too slumberous on a Saturday morning to get up to too much mischief.

The museum itself was beautiful. First opened in the 1600s, it was founded by the incredibly wealthy Forbes family, who had such an obsession with Italy that they hired an Italian architect to design the museum in the style of Italian Renaissance architecture. The other museums around London were mostly Victorian, or styled with the Greek Revival in mind, with Parthenon-style columns on their facades. In comparison, the National Parapsychological Museum stood apart not just as a unique museum, but as one of the most remarkable buildings in the whole of London, as its intricate white dome stood out majestically in the London skyline.

Inside, the museum functioned with its authentic mosaic flooring, and high ceilings that soared above, carefully painted with vibrant depictions of cherubs and open skies in a rich palate of colours and golden highlights.

Mr Fletcher handed out maps to everyone and prepped them for the day. “Everyone has a phone, correct?” he asked.

They all nodded.

“Great. If you haven’t already, please go to the email I sent this morning and add me as a direct contact. I know you want to explore the museum without a teacher hovering around you, but I do ask that you stay in groups of at least two. And contact me if you need anything. Understand?”

They nodded again.

“You are not to leave the museum under any circumstances. Got it?”

More nods.

“Can I get a ‘Yes, Mr Fletcher’?”

“Yes, Mr Fletcher,” they mumbled.

“Perfect. And you all have the worksheet attached to that e-mail. Enter the information as you go around the exhibits. Have fun. If you want to meet for lunch, I’ll be in the cafe at 1 pm. Otherwise, feel free to eat on your own schedule. I’m sure I’ll be fine… all alone… friendless… hopeless…” he pretended to look sad.

The class looked at him blankly.

“You may go.”

And with that, the students dispersed in different directions, leaving Hugo Fletcher standing by himself in the foyer, surrounded by tourists and families.

“All right, Team Maggie!” Maggie summoned Jessa and Flynn.

“I did not agree for that to be our team name,” Jessa mocked.

Maggie ignored her. “I think we should start in the Prehistory section, because, duh, it’s prehistory. Then we’ll move around according to time periods, first to the Ancient Egypt section, the Ancient Orient, Ancient Greece and Rome, through to the Middle Ages,” she continued without so much as a glance at the map. “Then we should probably go to the Parapsychology in Religion section, then to the Parafolklore exhibit, then to the Myth & Legend rooms, the Witchcraft Wing, then to Antiques and Curiosities, the Instruments and Medicinal Parapsychology special exhibit, and finally we’ll check out the Modern History department and the Art Gallery.”

“Been here before, have you, Mags?” Flynn retorted.

“I know you’re being sarcastic but actually, yes. My family has an annual museum pass so I come here a lot. Luckily for you.”

“Mmhmm. Lucky,” Jessa nudged Flynn with a giggle. “My parents brought me once as a kid.”

“Oh, did you like it? The museum was so magical to me as a child.”

“I cried the entire time.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “Come on, let’s go.”

Jessa, Maggie and Flynn stopped at every artefact and statue to read the information placards, and occasionally scanned the info-codes on their phones to watch the educational videos.

“This is actually quite fun,” Jessa admitted.

“It’s interesting to me how many of the items from these early periods were not even related to parapsychs,” Flynn wondered out loud to the girls. “A lot of this stuff is from a time before parapsychological abilities were understood, but you can see how the culture progressed.”

“That’s a very astute observation, Flynn,” Mr Fletcher’s voice said behind them. “It’s very important to appreciate the development of a humanity that would grow to embrace and advocate these abilities in a modern environment.”

“Mr Fletcher, do you want to walk around with us?” Flynn asked.

“Aw, thanks, Flynn,” the teacher replied. “But you don’t have to invite me to hang out with you.”

“I’d actually love to ask you some questions,” Maggie piped up.

Mr Fletcher smiled. “Well okay then, I’ll stick with you for a little while.”

Mr Fletcher and Flynn walked side by side through the rooms, with Maggie dashing between them and the windows of exhibits, determined to make her own extensive notes but desperate not to miss anything important the teacher might say.

“How many people do you think who were tried as witches, were actually parapsychs?” Maggie asked Mr Fletcher.

“It’s a good question, though I personally couldn’t estimate,” he replied. “There have been a good few studies into that, though. You should look them up later. The problem is that we don’t have many accurate sources from that time. Of course, we know now that witchcraft isn’t real, but in those days, there was a real fear that witches were Devil-worshippers and were threatening to Christianity. Back then, people were very easily scared.”

“But parapsychological abilities were known way before the Middle Ages, right?” Jessa inquired.

“That’s true, but times change, beliefs change, and sometimes that results in tragedy. Do you remember what put an end to people being tried as witches?”

“The Witchcraft Act!” Maggie said quickly.

“Oh hey, someone does pay attention in my lessons!” Mr Fletcher joshed.

As they walked around the airy spaces, their feet stepped slowly and mindlessly across the tiles and their gaze drifted over the artefacts behind polished windows. Jessa found herself quite engrossed in the detail of generations before her, of centuries past and lifetimes immortalised by the items on display.

She noticed a gold-rimmed hourglass and stopped to read the information card, and discovered it was believed to have been made in the 1300s. She briefly considered how such items come to be invented: how deliberate and ingenious it was to create such a simple and effective solution to a problem.

Jessa had been a very imaginative child. She loved to build things or dress up, always finding ways to create and connect with characters in her mind. As she developed into a teenager, she lost much of her inclination to feel like someone else, but still had a habit of getting lost in daydreams.

She’d once asked her mother a question. Do you ever imagine what it’d be like to be someone else?

You are a peculiar girl, her mother had replied.

It was a moment that had continued to stick in her mind, for reasons Jessa could never quite place.

Mr Fletcher walked off to check in with Annora and Tonia across the gallery, and Jessa, Maggie and Flynn made their way into the Antiques and Curiosities Burrow, a series of small, interconnected rooms full of weird and intriguing things previously owned by parapsychs from around the world.

There were globes and goblets, pipes and pictures, table lamps and taxidermy, and so many other items Jessa couldn’t even try to define. She scrunched up her face as they approached a glass cabinet full of skulls and body parts preserved in yellowing liquid. The case beside it was smaller and filled with the corpses of butterflies and moths, their papery wings pinned roughly to the back board. The next case was smaller still, filled with old coins that each had a hand-written note next to it, labelled with blotted ink on crumbly paper.

“Can you imagine the kind of person who would own this stuff?” Flynn marvelled. He read aloud the signs at the bottom of each of the cases. “Previously owned by Aleksander Saloman, 1857-1926, Norway. Donated to the Museum in 1994; Owned by Arthur Meek in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Donated to the Museum in 1975. It’s so weird to think how far this has all come just for us to look at it,” he said, making a quick sketch of a decorative cutlery set.

They’d been given a few question prompts to consider during their visit to the Museum, and one of them instructed the students to consider a topic for a personal project that they would be working on for the remainder of the semester.

“I think this is going to be my project,” he said. “Something about what people choose to own and what that says about us.”

“Excellent idea,” Maggie nodded. “I’m going to do my report on medical parapsychology. I’ll make sure to get some good pictures in that exhibit. What’s your project going to be, Jessa?”

“I’m not sure, yet,” Jessa said, still looking around wistfully.

After lunch, Jessa, Maggie and Flynn spent (or “wasted,” according to Maggie) a little time in the Hands-On History Hall, which, despite being clearly designed for children, was occupied by many of their high school peers. Gray and Eli seemed to be a particular source of nuisance.

“Clang!” “Clunk!” “Kapow!” they narrated their battle with tiny plastic weapons, much to the glee of onlooking children and to the annoyance of parents who stood nearby with furrowed brows and folded arms.

“Gentlemen, please! These are toys for the kiddies! Please! You have to stop!” an irritated museum employee yelled over the laughs and sounds of flimsy toy swords thwacking against each other. Gray and Eli cackled in fits of ridiculous giggles while the poor museum worker pleaded with them to settle down.

Jessa and her friends slunk out of the room, embarrassed by their classmates. They went straight to the special exhibit gallery where Maggie fawned over the range of medical instruments used throughout the development of parapsychological medicine. “Look at this!” “Oh, wow!” “My goodness!”

“How long have you been interested in medicine, Mags?” Jessa enquired.

“Forever, I think,” Maggie replied. “I got a toy doctor’s kit for Christmas one year and it was my favourite thing. I used to play vet hospital with my stuffed animals. Did you ever watch the show Animal Doctors? There was a communicari vet on that, and I thought she was the coolest. That’s when I made up my mind that I wanted to work in animal healing.”

She held up her phone to scan info-codes and voraciously tapped to download all the links from popups that said things like “further information” and “more about this.”

The exhibit guided them through the gruesomest trials and tribulations of medical history, with Roman speculums and forceps and vague pointed devices and unwieldy rusted knives. There were instruments used for things like cutting out patients’ tonsils and sawing through skulls. There was even a large, ungainly clamp for holding patients in place while the most ghastly procedures took place.

“These instruments were used in the earliest days of parapsychological investigation,” Maggie read to Flynn and Jessa from the information card. “These tuning forks were originally used for musical training but were discovered to be useful in measuring brainwaves during parapsychological activity. And these are vision-restricting goggles. They were first used for eye tests but then developed into apparatus in telekinesis research.” She turned to add a footnote of her own, “I read in a textbook once that they used goggles to direct a test subject’s vision. It helped to increase their telekinetic concentration. Eventually, they were able to increase telekinetic strength by training the subject to interact with objects that were placed outside of their restricted field of vision. Those techniques are still used today sometimes.”

When Maggie decided she’d recorded enough details from the medical exhibit, they made their way down the corridor into the newest part of the building, the Modern History wing. They slowed on the walk to read all the literary quotes painted in calligraphic fonts onto the fresh whitewash walls.

Jessa’s eye caught one phrase in particular:

Our history is written, but our story is still being told…

She copied the phrase into her notebook, unthinkingly replacing the dotdotdot of irresolution with a full-stop.

They entered the Modern History gallery and Jessa’s eyes adjusted to the dim light that hung all around, allowing the spotlights on the exhibits to punctuate the room.

Then she stopped.

“Wait,” she said.

She felt something.

What is that?

Her heart quaked. Her chest felt cavernous. Her fingers and hands tingled. Her skin shuddered with the caustic chill of sweat.

What’s happening?

Her eyes darted from person to person. Nobody else looked uneasy.

Am I the only one who feels this?

Somewhere deep inside herself, she felt dread.

“Jessa, you okay?” She barely heard Flynn’s voice over the piercing ring in her ears.

Her eyebrows scrunched her face into a deep frown and something pulled her attention into a far corner of the room.

What the something was, she didn’t know. But it wanted her to move. She needed to move.

Flynn’s hand on her arm snapped her back into the present.

“Jessa.” He squeezed his fingers into the flesh of her forearm.

“I have to look over here…” she trailed off toward the corner.

What is it?

What’s here?

Questions to no-one.

Her skin turned cold and prickly, her breath became short and her eyes strained to look for something. For anything that made it all make sense.

The title placard for the display read:

“TROUBLED MINDS; TROUBLED TIMES.”

It was credited as a quote from a newspaper. Around the display was a selection of other newspaper clippings and front pages reporting the actions of a cult from the 1980s.

Deja vu.

“Have you heard anything about this before?” she asked her friends.

“I don’t think so,” Flynn replied slowly.

“Vaguely,” Maggie added. “It happened when we were babies, I think, or maybe before we were born. I don’t know. Why?”

“I don’t know either,” Jessa said. She shook her head slightly. “I have this feeling...”

“What kind of feeling?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know what happened. I came in here and just felt really strange. Something made me come over here.”

“What do you mean?”

“It pulled me.”

“What pulled you?”

“The feeling.”

Maggie and Flynn glanced at each other.

Jessa continued searching the exhibit.

“Silas Lynch,” she read. “Born in the early 60s to a parapsych mother and a lateral father, who raised him in a small village in Bedfordshire… Remarkably strong parapsych from a young age… gifted child…

…Disturbed.”

“It says he lost his immediate family at the age of seven, in a freak accident that burned their house to the ground,” Maggie reported.

“The young boy was fortunate to escape the wreck alive, but with burn damage to most of his body that would leave him covered in scars for the rest of his life,” Flynn read. “Ouch.”

“Witnesses said Lynch became increasingly introverted and barely spoke,” Maggie continued. “He started speaking to himself in Latin. In interactions with others, he would often refer to the ‘purity’ of parapsychological evolution.”

Jessa, too, searched the display case for information.

“…Rest of his childhood in an orphanage… ran away at fourteen…

…Disappeared.

Showed up in the 80s and formed an activist group…”

“Wow,” said Maggie. “It says he tried to establish the idea that parapsychs should be treated as superior to laterals. Supposedly he was responsible for the sacrificial killing of twenty parapsychs, believing he could absorb their power. What a psycho.”

Jessa kept looking for clues. It was all there but she couldn’t make sense of it. “His own cult members tied him up, locked him in a coffin, then burned him alive,” she said.

“Yikes,” Maggie said.

“Apparently, he thought there was some government conspiracy against parapsychs.”

“Jess,” Flynn said gently, “look at me.”

She ignored him and looked closer at an item in the case. It was a book of fairytales, held in a stand that grasped the middle pages open for display. Across the pages were dozens of versions of the same scribbled symbol, some large, some small, but all violently etched into the paper by the hand of a disturbed child. Jessa thought it looked like a teepee; a triangle with two long sides that slightly crossed over each other at the top, leaving the bottom end wide and empty.

She touched her hand to the display cabinet and her sweat-soaked fingertips slid on the glass.

Oh no.

“I’m gonna be sick,” her stomach lurched and her mouth watered with the taste of acid. She gagged, trying to hold back.

“Let’s get her outside.” Maggie and Flynn grabbed Jessa and burst through the nearest fire exit.

She leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees.

“Just take deep breaths,” Maggie soothed.

Jessa formed a tight circle with her lips and slowly sucked the cool air in and out.

“What just happened?” Flynn said.

“I don’t know. I just got this really weird feeling—”

“Well, look who came to the party,” a familiar voice interrupted. Jessa looked round to see Cecily Graves leaning against the wall with a cigarette perched neatly between her fingers.

Eli and Gray stood nearby, distracted by a music video playing on a phone. Amelia Waters and Devi Kapoor hovered awkwardly, each holding their own less-smoked cigarettes.

“This is none of your business, Cecily,” Maggie tried to wave their attention away.

Cecily stepped closer. “That’s funny, because my business is anything I want it to be. And guess what, you dumb bitch? This is my business, now.” She pushed Maggie with her free hand.

“Hey!” Jessa yelled. She quickly felt Flynn holding the back of her shirt.

“What’s your problem, Sweat Patches? Ever heard of a thing called antiperspirant?”

Amelia and Devi cackled. Eli and Gray looked on.

Cecily snatched Maggie’s notebook from her hand. “Oh, perfect!” she sneered sarcastically. “Maggie, can I borrow your notes? I would just love to catch up on all the details from this super cool museum.” She flapped the notebook open. “Wait, silly me. No, I wouldn’t. Because I have a fucking life.” She ripped out leaves from the notebook and let them fall to the ground.

“Cecily, cut it out,” Eli stepped forward and picked up the sheets.

Cecily rolled her eyes. “Relax, Eli, I’m just having some fun.” She took a big puff from the lip-glossed end of her cigarette and blew the smoke into Jessa’s face. “We’re all friends, here, aren’t we?”

“Whatever, Cecily,” Flynn motioned to his friends to walk away.

“What’s wrong, Flynn, am I scaring you?”

“No, you’re boring me.”

Cecily fumed.

They waited to see if she had any response.

“Come on, let’s go back inside,” Jessa began to turn around.

“I don’t think so,” Cecily said. “You don’t get to walk away from me. You think you can just leave when I’m talking to you? That’s very disrespectful, Jessamine.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jessa said without even looking back.

She and her friends reached the fire exit door that Flynn had propped open with his backpack. They were just about to enter when they were stopped by Cecily’s awful shriek from behind them.

Before Jessa even had the chance to turn around, she felt a piercing burn on the side of her arm. Recoiling in pain and surprise, it took a second to register the secondary sensation of Cecily’s hand gripping her, pushing the burn deeper into her skin. Eli and Gray quickly rushed to pull Cecily away from Jessa, and the mangled cigarette butt fell to the ground.

Jessa brushed away the ash from her reddened skin.

#

“You have to tell Mr Fletcher,” Maggie urged Jessa on the walk home.

It had been a tense ride back from the museum to school, made worse by the fact that Cecily had made a point of standing right behind Flynn on the Tube so she could whisper insults to him for the entire journey.

“I don’t care about ratting on Cecily,” Jessa dismissed Maggie’s concern.

“She could get expelled for what she did to you,” Flynn added.

“It doesn’t even hurt that much,” Jessa lied.

“That’s beside the point. Causing you physical harm on a school trip is terrible,” Maggie stated. “And we didn’t even get to talk about what happened before that. Are you all right? After that thing in the museum, I mean? What on earth happened? Did you have an anxiety attack?”

“I don’t know.”

“It was scary,” Maggie said.

“My heart was racing and my hands and feet went tingly like they were falling asleep.”

“That sounds a lot like anxiety, Jess,” Flynn nodded.

“But the other part wasn’t frightening.”

“What other part?”

“I don’t know how to describe it.”

“At the museum you said it pulled you.”

“The feeling,” she nodded. “It was like when you know the answer to a question on a quiz show but you don’t know how you know it. You don’t ever remember knowing it but somehow your brain presented it to you at the right moment. It felt like that, only it didn’t feel like it came from my brain, it came from an organ way deep inside me, one that takes up my whole body.”

“There’s no such organ, Jessa,” said Maggie.

“Not a literal one. It was something else.”

Maggie’s face dove down toward her smartphone, a veritable cornucopia of information. Maggie wasn’t one for texting much, nor did she have a notable social media presence. But she was more than happy to indulge herself in technology in the name of research.

“Hmm. This is interesting,” she mused as the three of them approached Jessa’s house. “It could just be anxiety. But your description fits this phenomenon called Acute Intuition Syndrome.”

“What’s that?” Jessa opened the door and let them in.

“Seems it’s quite rare, and especially rare in young people, though not unheard of. I’ll email you the link. And you should probably tell your parents.”

“No, I don’t want them to know.”

“Well, tell Mr Fletcher, then.”

“Why do I have to tell anyone?”

“Because it’s the smart thing to do,” said Maggie.

Jessa looked to Flynn.

“You probably should tell someone,” he nodded. “Just in case.”

“All right,” she sighed, “just in case.”