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 wondere
d 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.
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