Human.4

… orgotten that tapes need turning over? How did they ever get to be a dominant technology? You don’t turn a CD over—why would you split an album up into two halves?

It’s funny, all the ordinary stuff—the last of my ordinary stuff—all of it fitting on to one side of a cassette.

The next thing I remember…

Chapter 6

The next thing I remember is that I woke up.

Suddenly.

Pulled out of a state of peace and calm, I opened my eyes and for a few seconds I couldn’t process anything and just sat there, waiting for my brain to start working properly again.

The world was a sickening, Technicolor blur. I could see rows of blurry pink balloons that were, perhaps, faces. I could sense people around me, could hear sounds and feel people close to me, but it took a while for me to put everything together.

Then my vision kicked back in. The pink balls I had seen were the faces of the audience, staring up at me and the other people upon the stage.

I had a sudden feeling that something was different; that something had changed.

I looked around and saw that Lilly was opening her eyes. Her eyes looked . . . I don’t know, almost supernaturally blue as they locked on to mine, and this weird half-smile played across her lips. Then she broke eye contact, and her face kinda creased up with puzzlement.

I followed her eye line.

Danny was standing close by, watching us with a strange expression on his face.

It wasn’t a look of confusion.

It was more like shock.

He was standing totally still, hands clenched into tight fists at his sides. He seemed frozen to the spot.

Completely immobile.

"What on earth is going on?" someone asked, and I followed the sound back to my right-hand side.

Mrs O’Donnell was staring wide-eyed across the audience. Her pinched face looked alarmed. She was half-out of her seat as if she had been trying to stand, something had stopped her, and she hadn’t worked out what to do next.

And her face looked pale.

Very pale indeed.

"What is it?" I asked her. "What’s wrong?"

Instead of answering she just pointed out into the crowd and I noticed her hand was shaking. I followed her finger and realized I was shaking too.

I felt my mind fighting to explain it away.

And failing.

Everyone in the audience was statue-still, frozen in their place just like Danny was. But they weren’t just still: they were utterly motionless. And their faces were frozen in an expression exactly the same as Danny’s. You know when you freeze-frame a DVD and everything stops until you press "play" again? It was a lot like that. I guess.

One of my dad’s favorite pictures is that weird one by Edvard Munch called The Scream. He’s got a print of it in his study, and we used to joke that it was the real thing, back when the original got stolen. The painting shows a figure—you can’t really tell if it’s a man or a woman—standing on a bridge, in front of a blood-red sky. A couple of figures are watching in the background, but they’re not important, the main focus is that figure in the foreground; hands on either side of its face, its mouth wide open.

I’ve looked at that picture more than a hundred times, hanging there over my dad’s desk, and I have tried to figure out what is going on in that figure’s head, to make it look so full of despair.

I still don’t know, but I saw it imprinted across the faces of everyone in Millgrove.

Everyone except four, anyway.

I—I haven’t got the words to describe how disturbing the sight was. Every one of those faces was gripped by some fear, or despair, that had literally frozen them to the spot. It was too unreal, too weird, and I turned away.

Mrs O’Donnell had sat back down, and was gazing around her in snaps and jerks.

I felt a pressure on my arm and realized that Lilly had just grabbed hold of it as her eyes raked the scene, trying to understand what she was seeing. It felt… good . . . to have her reach out for me in that moment.

As I said earlier, strange dynamic.

Mr Peterson’s face had turned ashen and he was just staring ahead with his eyes bulging out of his head.

And then I got it.

It was a joke.

Something that Danny had told them all to do when we woke up, just to mess with our heads.

It was part of the act.

I laughed.

"Very funny, everyone," I said loudly. "You had us worried, there."

No one moved. No one laughed. No one did anything but remain still.

I waited.

Nothing.

No joke, then.

So what was going on?

Chapter 7

A weird kind of panic descended.

I mean, this was just plain freaky.

These were all people we knew; people we saw every day; people we had grown up with; said "hi" to if we saw them on the street.

But they weren’t moving.

They weren’t moving at all.

I’m not sure I’ve done this… stillness . . . justice yet. I mean, this wasn’t people pretending to be still. You know, like when they play musical statues, or whatever, and they freeze, but not really.

The truth is, people can’t stay still for long. Not without a whole lot of practice. Not this amount of people. Not for this long. Human bodies aren’t built for inactivity. They sway. They smile. They move, even if it’s only a little. They giggle.

None of the audience was doing any of these things.

It was eerie and unnatural.

Mrs O’Donnell said, "I’ve had enough of this."

She got to her feet, stomped over to Danny and pushed him, very gently. He didn’t offer any resistance. He moved, but in the way an inanimate object moves when pushed. He swayed slightly. Then stopped. His face didn’t change. Not a muscle of his body twitched.

Mrs O’Donnell snapped her fingers in front of his face. He didn’t react. He didn’t even blink, and I realized that I hadn’t seen any of the audience blink in all the time we had been awake.

I had a really bad feeling spreading through me, the kind that brings bumps of gooseflesh up on the skin of your arms. That makes the nape of your neck feel cold.

Mr Peterson was sitting, rocking backwards and forwards, while his lips moved in silent conversation with himself.

"What’s wrong with him?" Lilly asked.

I shrugged.

"Shock, I guess," I said. "I sort of feel like sitting down and doing it myself."

I pointed out over the audience.

"The question we ought to be concentrating on is: what’s wrong with them?"

Lilly took my arm again, and her fingers fixed tight this time.

"What about Simon?" she whispered.

"Let’s go see," I said, feeling disappointed. How bad is that, by the way? To feel disappointed that she was concerned about my best friend?

I led her from the stage and on to the green below.

Among the crowd, the level of weirdness was raised by a factor of ten.

Or twenty.

Down there, the effect was even more astonishing.

It was as if everyone had been switched off in the middle of whatever it was they were doing. Like the stopped mechanical exhibits you’d see at closing time in a museum, turned off in mid-motion.

People held canned drinks in the air. Kids had their hands in packets of crisps. Old man Davis was frozen in the midst of scratching his nose. Annie Bishop and her boyfriend, Nigel Something-or-other, were in the middle of a kiss. Ned Carter was looking up at the sky. Ursula Lincoln was coughing, with her hand up to her mouth.

About halfway to where we had left Simon I found my mum and dad. They were just sitting there, totally still, my mum’s finger pointing accusingly at my meek-looking dad. They had been arguing, and then they had just stopped.

There were only four of us outside of stopped time, and able to move around those that were frozen in it.

But it wasn’t time that had stopped. Things were moving. It was only the people that were stopped. There were flies buzzing around; wasps crawling around the drinking holes of soft drink cans; clouds of midges swirling in the summer air. Birds still crossed the sky. A cool breeze blew, carrying sweet wrappers and other discarded items. Mrs Winifred’s Italian greyhound, Bambi, was walking around, looking lost.

Whatever this was, it seemed only to affect human beings.

All human beings except me, Lilly, Mrs O’Donnell and Mr Peterson.

It was one hundred per cent weird.

"I’m scared," Lilly confessed.

"Me too." I smiled a tight-lipped smile. "But we’ve got to keep it together. There’s an explanation for this. We’ve just got to find it."

"Well, I don’t have an explanation," Lilly said, pouting. "Not a one. I mean this is impossible, you realize that, don’t you? It’s like one of those awful movies on the Sci-Fi Channel. I really hate science fiction."

Standing there—looking afraid, with fear-wide eyes, dilated pupils and all her usual defenses down—Lilly looked . . . well, really pretty.

It’s something about her that she tries to hide, so I guess it’s her way of staying out of things, by distancing herself from them. You don’t get involved, you don’t get let down, I guess.

Now, though, she looked different.

Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparked with life. No longer a disinterested observer, she had come to life.

Anyway, Simon was sitting in the exact same place we’d left him. His hands were folded in his lap and his face was frozen in the same open-mouthed expression as the others.

Lilly touched Simon’s face.

"He’s warm," she said, moving her fingers to his neck. She held two fingers on the side of his neck, held them there trying to find a pulse, and then she smiled. "Still alive."

The relief in her voice was obvious.

I felt a harsh twinge of jealousy. Yeah, I know, not exactly an honorable reaction, and I’m not proud.

"If he’s alive, there’s hope," I offered, and Lilly’s face brightened.

"But how do we wake them up?" she asked. "We were the ones who were supposed to be hypnotized . Did it go wrong? Did Danny hypnotize everyone else? Even himself?"

I was going to attempt an answer, when my train of thought was interrupted by a loud wailing sound behind us.

Chapter 8

Mr Peterson had lost it.

Just seriously lost it.

When we got back to the stage we found him on his knees, head in his hands, making the horrible sound we’d heard. His face was red and his cheeks were wet with tears. His head was bowed, revealing a sunburnt bald spot in his graying hair.

Mrs O’Donnell was bent over, trying to comfort him, but he thrashed her away with wild, windmill arms. There was spittle around his lips.

"What happened?" I asked her.

Mrs O’Donnell shook her head.

"I don’t know. He’d stopped the rocking and was sitting there in his seat, looking around. And then this…"

Lilly approached him warily, keeping her distance in case those arms struck out again.

"Mr Peterson?" she asked soothingly. "Can you tell us what is wrong?"

There was no reply, just an increase in the volume of Mr Peterson’s wailing. A thin, high-pitched noise that sounded more like the voice of Mr Peebles than his own.

Suddenly it hit me: just how much trouble we were in. Everyone on the village green had been inexplicably, completely immobilized, by some force or sickness that we couldn’t guess. Only the four people who’d been hypnotized as part of Danny’s act remained unaffected by the event.

We were alone.

But where did that leave us? What could we do?

"We need to get help," I said. I turned to Mrs O’Donnell. "The Happy Shopper is open today—how many people are working there?"

"Just Tony," she said. "Tony Jefferson. Shop Manager. Everyone else is here."

"Let’s go and see how he is," I said.

Mrs O’Donnell tried to get Mr Peterson on to his feet, but he wasn’t having any of it. He just made that horrible wailing sound and then collapsed into tears. They were the kind of tears that made a person’s whole body shake. Mrs O’Donnell couldn’t get close to him without him striking out at her.

"You two go," she said to Lilly and me. "Go and see if Tony’s OK. I’ll stay here and make sure Rodney doesn’t do himself any harm."

"Rodney?"

Mrs O’Donnell pointed to Mr Peterson. I’d known him all my life and never knew his first name.

"Oh," I said. "Rodney."

"And I’m Kate," Mrs O’Donnell said.

I gave her as close to a smile as I could manage, and nodded my head.

"We’ll be back as soon as we can," I said.

Lilly and I made our way through the rows of stationary people, across the green, out on to the high street, past the shed, and towards the Happy Shopper.

The high street itself was deserted and strangely quiet. There were no cars driving down the road, which is—like—unheard of on a Saturday afternoon. Millgrove is a common alternative to the main carriageway and there’s always traffic.

We hurried as fast as we could without actually breaking into a jog.

"What’s causing this?" Lilly asked me. "I mean, something’s got to be doing it."

"I’m afraid that, in the words of a certain science teacher, “We simply don’t have enough data to form a conclusion.”" I used a rough approximation of Mr Cruikshank’s voice.

Lilly started to laugh, then seemed angry with herself for showing humor in such bizarre circumstances. I thought there might be a large measure of guilt behind it: we were walking around while Simon was frozen to the spot.

"So where do we get more data?" she asked.

I pointed to the bright windows of the shop ahead.

"Here will be a start," I said.

The Happy Shopper was just like any other Happy Shopper anywhere on the planet.

Except smaller.

Millgrove didn’t do anything big, except maybe that idiot talent show.

I pushed open the advert-papered shop door.

The bell above the door rang. It wasn’t an electric buzzer or beeper; it was a genuine, old-fashioned brass bell.

I walked in with Lilly following close on my heels.

There were two other people in the shop: Tony Jefferson, standing behind the counter, and Eddie Beattie over by the drinks cooler.

Tony had been freeze-framed in the act of refilling one of the displays of Wrigley’s gum that stood on the counter, strategically placed for those last-minute buys.

Eddie Beattie was choosing a can of high-impact cider from the fridge, and he looked like he’d just made up his mind and was reaching towards a shelf in the cooler when…

When whatever happened, happened.

Up until that moment I had been thinking that the state of the people on the green had something to do with Danny and his hypnosis. I know it wasn’t a likely idea, but it was a lot more comforting than any other I could come up with.

But Tony and Eddie hadn’t been present at the green.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t restricted to the talent show audience.

"Is it just Millgrove?" Lilly’s voice quavered. "Or is it the whole world?"

I shook my head.

"There’s only one way to find out," I said.

I popped the catch on the shop counter, just like I’d seen the staff do for years, and I lifted the flap that let me in. I ignored Tony, located the radio he kept behind there, flicked the power button and turned up the volume.

A harsh shriek of static tore through the still air.

"Sorry," I said, turning the volume down a few notches so the noise didn’t quite hurt. Then I spun the tuning dial, searching the wavelengths and bands for a signal.

Any signal.

All I found were variations on the same general theme of ear-splitting interference.

"Is it broken?" Lilly asked.

I tried to remember if it was playing earlier when we’d stopped in for cold drinks, but if it had, it hadn’t registered.

"I guess it could be," I said. "Or something could be jamming radio signals. Or, I suppose, I could be finding no stations because there are no stations out there to find…"

Lilly’s suddenly panicked face told me that maybe some of my ideas ought to remain inside my head, and not be just thrown out at someone unprepared for them.

"Or maybe it’s sunspot activity, electromagnetic storms, UFOs, or the well-planned revenge of the dolphins," I said, trying humor instead.

"How can you make jokes at a time like this?" Lilly demanded and I felt about an inch-and-a-half tall. "It’s not as if you have a particularly good history as a comedian."

"Actually, I’m just trying to find a way to deal with all this," I said. "I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m not taking things seriously, I honestly don’t know what else to do."

"Simon keeps saying how immature you are," she said coldly.

I felt my cheeks get hot.

"Still," she added cruelly.

Lilly’s words stung, and I blurted out, "What are you talking about?"

"Just what I said," she said. Then she looked down at her feet. "Look, can we not do this now?"

"You started it."

"See?" she said, almost victoriously. "Immature. You started it," she whined.

I had a hundred things I could say on the tip of my tongue; all witty, devastating, and some of them were even true…

"I think I’ll try the phone," I said instead.

Chapter 9

Run through the numbers you’d try in a situation like this one and I bet the first one you’d dial is the same number I did.

Three digits.

999.

Emergency Services.

Didn’t even ring.

I’d got a dial tone, but when I put the numbers into the keypad the phone just went dead. There was an empty, hollow silence. Then a few, ominous clicks on the line. Then more silence.

I tried another couple of numbers I knew—a friend in Crowley and another in Cambridge—and got nothing. I rang my own home phone. Nothing again. No line outside the village: no line inside.

I put the phone down.

"Well?" Lilly asked.

I shook my head.

"Phones are dead," I said.

"How is that possible?"

"I don’t know. Maybe whatever this is stretches further than Millgrove."

Lilly’s face screwed up and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. I wouldn’t have blamed her. I felt like crying myself. To her credit she pulled herself out of it before the tears actually started.

"So what do we do now?" she asked.

I shrugged, then realized that was a bit cold. It might sound a little self-absorbed, but Lilly’s words about Simon thinking I’m immature kept ringing in my head. Yeah, I know: way to turn a crisis of maybe global proportions into a bit of navel-gazing about whether my best friend really likes me.

I needed to rise above it.

Deep breath.

"We go back," I said. "Back to the green. There’s got to be something there that can tell us what’s happened."

Lilly didn’t look convinced but she nodded.

We started towards the door. I grabbed a couple of cold cans of Red Bull from the fridge and left the exact change on the counter.

Lilly pointed up at the CCTV camera above the door. A red light shone below its lens.

"Maybe it can show us what happened," she said hopefully.

I shook my head.

"It’s a dummy," I told her. "Danny helps out here, and he said it’s not real. A shop-lifting deterrent."

"Oh," Lilly said.

"Good idea, though," I said clumsily.

"Thanks," Lilly said.

An uneasy truce had perhaps been reached, just before a fight broke out.

And then we left the shop in silence.

When we got back to the green, it hadn’t changed. I think that I had been hoping that things would be sorted out by the time we returned, that everyone would have started moving again and we could just forget all that had happened, laugh it off and wait for a sensible explanation on TV later on.

Mrs O’Donnell—it was still hard to think of her as Kate—looked like she’d aged about five years in the time we’d been away. She was usually a neat, forty-something woman with a peroxide bob kind of hairstyle that made it look like she wished she was still in her thirties.

Or twenties, even.

Now her hair was messed up, her face was beaded with sweat, and frown lines plowed up her brow.

She was standing over the fetal form of Mr Peterson and was obviously losing patience with him. In fact, she seemed on the verge of delivering a kick to his backside.

She looked relieved to see Lilly and me, even when we shook our heads to show her we’d made no progress.

"He’s been like this since you left," she said, pointing to the prone form of the ventriloquist. "You kids are handling this a whole lot better than he is."

I wondered if that meant we were pretty darned tough.

Or whether we simply lacked the imagination to see how bad things really were.

We told Mrs O’Donnell about our trip to the shop. She seemed especially disturbed by the fact that the phones weren’t working, but to be honest I was too. It hinted at a problem that stretched further than the village boundaries.

"We need a TV," Mrs O’Donnell said. "The Internet. Anything that will give us a bigger picture."

"The radio and telephone don’t work," Lilly reminded her.

"Doesn’t mean that every form of communication is down," Mrs O’Donnell said. "Come on."

"Where?" Lilly asked.

"My house."

"What about him?" I pointed at Mr Peterson.

Mrs O’Donnell shook her head.

"We’ll have to come back for him," she said. "I can’t get him to do anything but that."

"Let me try," I said.

She nodded.

I crouched down over the man. His eyes were squeezed as tight shut as eyes can be. His lips moved rapidly, but no sounds came from between them.

"Mr Peterson?" I said. "Can you hear me?"

If he could, he was making no visible signs.

"Mr Peterson?" I touched his shoulder as I spoke and suddenly he let out a scream of terror. His eyes shot open like the eyes of a china doll. They met mine and for an instant he appeared perfectly sane and rational.

"Are you all right, Mr Peterson?" I said.

His eyes were wide, but he looked like he was back with us.

"Everything . . . it’s all changed," he said, so quietly I had to move my ear closer to his lips to hear.

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

His voice got louder, stronger.

"They’re gone," he said. "Changed. All of them. You hear me? I . . . I SEE THEM!"

His words sent a physical chill down my spine.

"See what?" I demanded. "What can you see?"

"All of them." His eyes were stretched even wider now, and his voice was little more than a rasping whisper as he said, "They are to us as we are to apes."

"What does that mean?" I asked desperately.

Mr Peterson looked confused, as if I was missing some obvious point and he wasn’t sure how to explain it in easier terms.

"It means that . . . we are the only . . . the only ones left . . . four . . . four against all…"

His voice trailed off and suddenly his face lost its urgent intensity, going slack, almost sleepy.

"I don’t understand," I said. "Tell me what you mean."

Tears streamed down his face and he gave me the weakest of smiles.

"I . . . I . . . I’ve groken ny gicycle," he said in Mr Peebles" voice, a falsetto voice of utter insanity. "I get you don’t really care ooh-at’s wrong with ne."

And then he started laughing, laughing in that awful, high-pitched way that he reserved for his ugly-headed ventriloquist’s dummy.

I got up, feeling very cold and very scared. We all backed away from that terrible sound and left the green.

Chapter 10

Mrs O’Donnell’s house was on Carlyle Road, an old terrace that ran behind the high street. It’s one of those narrow streets that mean people have to park half on and half off the curbs.

We were midway up the road when Mrs O’Donnell stopped. A beautifully clipped hedge bordered a tiny concrete garden and I thought we had arrived at her house, but she pointed through an open front door where two young children—a boy and a girl—had been in the process of coming out, perhaps on their way to the green, before being struck down by the… event.

The girl was waiting by the front door; the boy was stuck, mid-stride, in the hallway.

"Annie and Nicholas Cross," Mrs O’Donnell said, and I thought I could see tears in her eyes. "I babysit for them now and then. She’s six and he’s eight. They’re nice kids. What could have done this to them? To everyone?"

I wondered why she was asking us.

But what could have done it?

And then I made one of those unlikely connections the human brain is so good at making—joined together a couple of pieces of information that really didn’t belong together.

Today’s events and something that happened a couple of years ago.

There were some local kids near Naylor’s farm, on the outer reaches of the village, who swore blind that they saw lights in the sky over one of old man Naylor’s grain silos. Bright, moving lights that didn’t behave like ordinary aircraft.

To start with there was a certain amount of sneering and laughing, but they were absolutely certain, and a report made it into the local weekly paper.

Although why alien craft always appear over grain silos and open fields rather than over towns and cities has always bothered me. If there really were aliens flying their spaceships above places in the middle of nowhere . . . well, maybe they aren’t all that smart, you know?

Anyway, I suddenly started wondering whether it might be connected. I’d joked about UFOs earlier to Lilly—went down like a lead battleship, too—but what other alternatives were there?

A chemical accident.

A biological plague.

A fracture in the fabric of time.

Were they any more likely?

I thought about the mad things that Mr Peterson had said. Things I had ignored because . . . well, because they were so mad. But had he seen something that our eyes hadn’t?

Had we been invaded and didn’t even know it?

I shook my head to clear the stupid thought. What kind of alien invasion would cause people to stand still, for goodness sake? I mean, how was that an invasion exactly?

I was filling the gaps in what I knew, and painting them ET green.

Surely that was a sign of madness, too.

Mrs O’Donnell’s house was tidy and neat, just like the woman herself. Actually, being honest about my first impression, it was way more than tidy: as if its contents had just come out of protective coverings. There was a heavy smell of furniture polish and artificial flowers. I guessed she spent a lot of her free time cleaning.

The walls were pastel pink with paintings of flowers and horses hanging on them. The books that graced her neat shelves were all of the chick-lit variety. I realized that Mrs O’Donnell had, at no point, expressed concern for a Mr O’Donnell, and her house reflected his absence from her thoughts.

The TV was small and old-school, and it wasn’t even hooked up to a hi-fi. There was a DVD player and a cheap Freeview box. She switched on the TV and its screen came up blank. No static, just a blue screen. She flicked through the channels slowly with a remote, as if she wasn’t a hundred per cent certain how it worked. There were no stations, just the same, neutral, blue screen. She killed the TV and shook her head.

The living room led on through an arch into a dining area, with the corner made into a workstation. A very neat workstation: computer, keyboard, mouse. No piles of papers or stacks of disks.

She pushed the power button to boot up her iMac and we waited for it to warm up.

It only took a few seconds of absolute silence for us to realize that something had gone wrong.

The usual Apple loading screen did not appear.

In its place were strings of characters that did not belong to any alphabet I have ever seen. Odd, hook-shaped characters; spiky circles that flexed and pulsed; characters that twisted together, seeming to revolve on the screen; characters that looked like they could be meant to represent human eyes; and a large number of short lines that bent at such weird angles they made me feel… uncomfortable viewing them.

It was like a language, I guess, but with letters that moved, constantly changing, evolving.

"What is this…?" Mrs O’Donnell asked, desperately pushing keys.

"It looks like a virus," Lilly said, staring over Mrs O’Donnell’s shoulder.

"I don’t think it’s a virus," I said. "Look at the way it’s set out. It looks like a document. I think that it’s text, just not in a language we can read."

Lilly made a "hmph" sound.

"What?" I asked her, perplexed.

"You are such an idiot," she said.

"What did I do?" I protested.

"I think that it’s text, just not in a language we can read." She mimicked me with a cruel tone that made it sound a whole lot sillier than when I’d said it. "What’s that even supposed to mean? And how is it supposed to help us?"

I suppose that it’s time to throw some light on this… oddness . . . that was happening between Lilly and me.

Just to get it out of the way.

Now seems as good a time as any.

You see, I actually went out with Lilly for a few weeks.

This was quite a while before Simon did.

We were a couple of kids at school who fancied each other and ended up being girlfriend and boyfriend.

For a while.

I don’t really need to go into all the details. You . . . well, you know how it is. You spend a few break times together, you hold hands, you write their name in an exercise book or two, feel stupidly jealous if you see them talking to any other boy. You laugh at each other’s jokes, and find yourself thinking about them when you’re not together.

I even went back to her house once.

Just once.

That was kind of the trouble, really.

I was invited round for "tea" one evening.

Lilly’s family live in the old village store. From the road it’s pretty unremarkable: a flinted facade of the kind that’s common in Millgrove; a couple of bay windows that were probably display windows when the place was a shop; a nondescript front door.

I’d never given it a second look.

It looked like an ordinary house.

When I walked through the front door, trailing behind Lilly, I found myself in a room that was shop-sized. Literally. The whole ground floor of my house would have fitted in that one room.

It had a black-beamed ceiling and what looked like an acre of parquet flooring. There was a grand piano in there and it didn’t take up much of the available space. There were two vast but somehow elegant sofas that must have cost thousands of pounds; there were oil paintings of horses and hounds on the walls that were . . . well, real paintings, not prints.

I’d never seen anything like it. Not in real life. And I realized two things:

1. Lilly’s parents were far wealthier than she had ever let on, and

2. I could never invite her back to my house.

I pictured showing Lilly into the front room of my house: a tiny room with no art on the walls, no piano, a little old TV and a tatty three-piece suite.

I imagined how bad, how ashamed, that would make me feel.

And then I met her parents.

Lilly’s mother prepared the food on a huge, enameled Aga. We sat on wooden pews around an ancient table, and Lilly’s parents made conversation that was bright, witty and very, very clever. They talked about music, literature and art; they made instant jokes and witty asides, and they made me feel so uncultured and stupid that I squirmed in my seat every time they spoke to me.

I pictured taking Lilly back to meet my folks.

Discussions about rubbish television.

Chris and his endless chatter about football.

I felt ashamed at the very thought of it.

I started avoiding her soon after.

I invented phoney reasons and engineered even phonier arguments.

I stood her up. Twice.

Time passed, she got the message, and she broke up with me.

Then, while I was playing at being dad, I neglected Simon. I was too busy. Or thought I was. And in that time he and Lilly became friends.

Then more than friends.

And I hated my parents for not being like Lilly’s parents.

I hated my mum for not having an Aga.

I hated my dad for leaving us.

I hated them both for letting my best friend get the girl I had been too embarrassed to have for myself.

I never told Lilly why I acted the way I did. She must have thought I was the world’s biggest jerk.

At least she hadn’t seen the truth.

Now, next to her at Mrs O’Donnell’s house, I realized that sniping at me was partly her way of dealing with things. Just as mine was making jokes and Mr Peterson’s was to cut himself off from it all, to deny its existence.

If her comments also meant she was paying me back for being such an idiot to her, then I reckoned I deserved it.

"I’m only saying that the groupings of symbols could be words," I said calmly. "Maybe we just don’t understand the language they’re written in."

There was a moment of silence and, in the space between sounds, I thought I heard something. Something outside and probably distant, but as I listened harder it seemed to be getting closer.

It was a weird, disquieting sound, a bit like distant thunder, but somehow more electrical sounding.

Synthetic thunder?

What was I thinking?

"It makes no difference," Mrs O’Donnell said bleakly. If she had heard the sound, she didn’t show it. "The television can’t pick up a signal. The computer displays these weird symbols. The phones are down. So are the radios."

She turned the computer off in disgust and turned around to face us.

"We’re on our own for now," she said.

In the silence that followed I realized that the odd sound I had heard had stopped.

Had it just been a symptom of my already overstretched imagination?

Or was there really something out there?

Something that roared like counterfeit thunder?

That was moving towards us, silently now?

I shuddered and looked to Mrs O’Donnell for some kind of reassurance.

The fear in her eyes told me there was none there to be found.

Chapter 11

I guess I have always believed that grown-ups have all the answers.

They behave as if they do.

Looking at Mrs O’Donnell’s face I suddenly realized something. It’s not true. Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids.

Mrs O’Donnell was scared and she didn’t know what to do. Everything that she knew and thought had been—