In 1966, a mountain of coal waste slid down a hillside in Wales and buried a school, killing a hundred and forty four people, most of them children. In the days afterward, dozens of ordinary people came forward to say they had seen it coming, in dreams, before it happened. One of them was a psychiatrist, and he decided to find out if the future could be caught before it arrived.

His name was Doctor John Barker. Early in 1967, with a newspaper science editor named Peter Fairley, he opened something called the Premonitions Bureau. The idea was simple. Anyone who had a premonition, a dream, a vision, a feeling of dread, could telephone it in. Every one was written down, dated, and filed, so that if the thing they feared came true, there would be proof the warning had come first. Hundreds poured in. Most led nowhere. But two people were different.

A telephone operator named Alan Hencher and a piano teacher named Kathleen Middleton kept getting it right. Weeks before an airliner went down near Cyprus, Hencher phoned in an air disaster and named the number of the dead, and he was almost exact. Middleton foresaw a rail crash on the way into London, a shipwreck, and, chillingly, the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Again and again, their warnings were logged before the news broke. They were not guessing. Somehow, they seemed to know.

Then, in 1968, both of them began having the same premonition, and it terrified them. They told Barker that he was in danger. That his time was short. That he was going to die. And Barker was badly shaken, because he had written a whole book about people who died simply because they had been told they would.

He tried to reason it away. But on the eighteenth of August, 1968, John Barker collapsed at home from a sudden brain hemorrhage. He died days later, at just forty four. His two best seers had foretold the death of the man who collected the future, and set the time, and been right. The files are still there, dated, in his own hand.

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