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could keep a close eye on my progress, and then, once they were satisfied that I was doing OK, I was moved to a bed in the general ward. Although Gram wasn’t with me all the time now, she still came to see me every day, and she always stayed for at least a couple of hours. I kept asking her about Lucy, but she refused to tell me anything else, insisting that I concentrate on getting better and getting plenty of rest.
    “Lucy’s being well looked after for now” was all she’d tell me. “And worrying about what happened to her isn’t going to do either of you any good. Once we get you settled in back home . . . well, we’ll talk about things then. All right?”
    It wasn’t all right, of course. I wanted to know everything now . But when Gram sets her mind on something, there’s no point arguing with her. So I just went along with it. I rested. I slept. I ate. I read countless stupid magazines. And I tried not to think about anything.
    Lucy.
    Me.
    The weirdness inside my head . . .
    Electric shocks.
    Bees, non-bees.
    Definitions.
    Newspapers.
    Billions of humming filaments . . .
    I really did try my best not to think about any of it, but it was almost impossible, because whenever anything came into my mind, things started happening. I kept seeing things inside my head — faintly flickering things that I didn’t understand, like the vaguest afterimages of transparent insects. And I could hear things, too — disembodied voices, scraps of conversations. And although these things were too fuzzy and fragmented for me to see or hear them with any real clarity, I sensed that they were related to whatever it was that I was thinking about. It was like that half-dreamy experience you get when you’re falling asleep with the TV on, and whatever’s on the TV at the time, it all gets mixed up in your half-asleep head with whatever you’re thinking or half-dreaming about . . . and you know that it’s not really coming from inside your head, but that’s how it feels.
    That’s how it felt.
    I’d be half-thinking about Lucy, and I’d start seeing bits of newspaper reports about her attack. I’d hear broken voices talking to each other about these newspaper reports, and sometimes those voices would be laughing. I’d see fragments of texts and emails which at first sight didn’t seem to have anything to do with Lucy at all, but there was always something in the back of my mind that somehow knew that there was a connection.
    And this kind of stuff didn’t just happen when I was thinking about Lucy either — it happened all the time. Whatever I was thinking about, my brain would start tingling, and I’d sense things inside me connecting, searching, reaching out . . .
    It was unbelievable.
    Incredible.
    Bewildering.
    Terrifying.
    And what’s more, whatever it was, it was changing all the time — becoming clearer, but at the same time more complex, as if it was somehow evolving . . . and that was pretty scary, too.
    But the odd thing was, as the days and nights passed by, I kind of got used to it, and by the time Dr. Kirby decided that it was OK for me to go home, it felt as if it had always been there. It was still pretty scary, and I still didn’t understand it — although the first faint flutterings of an impossible explanation were beginning to grow in my mind — but at least it didn’t terrify me anymore.
    It was just there.
    And it was still there when I walked out of the hospital with Gram, on a dull and rainy Tuesday morning, and we got into the back of a waiting taxi and began the short drive home.
    Of course, I knew that I should have mentioned all this weirdness to someone. I mean, Dr. Kirby had told me how important it was to let someone know immediately if I started experiencing anything unusual, and this was definitely something unusual. But . . . well, I just wanted to go home, I suppose. I’d had enough of hospitals, doctors, nurses . . . examinations, questions . . . sick people. And I knew that if