Heading towards us.
Chapter 24
It was like some kind of waking nightmare.
The entire village was marching towards us, silently.
I moved nearer to the stage and to the people there who were, I was certain, the only people I could trust; the only people I could rely on now.
We put up our hands and volunteered to be a part of Danny’s act, and from that moment on we were set along a different path from the rest of the people of Millgrove.
Call it "chance’, "fate", "karma" or "luck", the end result was the same.
We were screwed.
Royally screwed.
I counted the front row of people approaching and there was a straight line of twenty. With twenty behind them. And twenty behind them.
Keep repeating until you reach a thousand.
They came across the green towards us, perfectly synchronized.
I recognized every face. People I loved. People I just said "hi" to. People I didn’t like but still managed to smile at when I saw them. People I’d done odd jobs for to raise extra pocket money. People I had bought things from. People who had taught me. People I had played with.
I had an impulse to run, to turn and flee, just like Lilly and I had done earlier, but there was another part of me that was tired and scared and just wanted to know what was going on.
Then I wanted it to end.
If that meant aliens were going to take over my mind too, then actually, so be it.
I just couldn’t take it any more. Whatever the crowd wanted of me, I think I was probably prepared to give it to them.
In that moment I had given up.
The crowd was close now. Very close, moving towards us as a single entity, like flocking birds or marching army ants.
Still silent.
And in the front row was: my mother; my father; my brother; Doctor Campbell; Mr and Mrs Dartington; Simon; Mrs Carlton, the local busybody; Len Waites, the butcher; Eddie Crichton, who’d never got to hand out a prize at the talent show; Mr and Mrs Parnese, who had a stall selling mobile phone accessories on Cambridge Market; Laura Jones, who was a year below me at school; Peter Parker, who was a librarian, not Spider-Man; a red-faced man I knew by sight, but not by name; Barry and Dennis Geary, the nearest thing to bad boys you got in Millgrove; Karl Raines, the best footballer at our school; Ellie Whatsername, barmaid at the Blue Nun in Crowley; some bloke that is always hanging around her like a faithful puppy.
They stopped about three meters away from us.
Perfectly in sync.
Perfectly silent.
They were looking at us, and they were looking through us, at the same time. A thousand people in a block.
Lilly took hold of my hand and her palm was cold, her hand was shaking. I held it tight and drew strength from that simple gesture.
We stood there together, facing the crowd, waiting for them to make their move.
Chapter 25
Kate O’Donnell took a step forwards.
"What do you want from us?" she demanded.
There was no answer. The crowd just stood there. It was almost as if they had been frozen again.
"They’re not even blinking," Lilly whispered.
It was true.
They weren’t blinking. Or breathing, it seemed. They weren’t moving at all.
"WHAT DO YOU WANT?" Kate screamed this time. She looked red-faced and terrified.
Again, nothing.
The crowd seemed to be ignoring us.
They were just standing there.
Kate jumped from the stage and homed in on Doctor Campbell.
"All right, you idiot quack," she said spitefully. "Just tell me what the hell is going on!"
She put her face just centimeters from the doctor’s face and screamed, "TELL ME!"
She was so close that he must have felt her words on his face.
But he didn’t appear to flinch.
Kate let out a sound of frustration and sank to her knees, like all the air had been let out of her. I could hear her sobbing. I even felt like joining her. Lilly’s hand tightened its grip on mine, and her fingernails bit into my palm.
Then I heard it.
A low sound that could have been the thrum of an electrical power source, except it seemed to be coming from the crowd of people in front of us. I realized it had been building for a while, but that I had only just become aware of it. It was a deep throbbing sound I could feel throughout my body.
I was vibrating along with the noise.
I felt on the very brink of panic, and still the sound continued to develop; getting louder and deeper and making my body vibrate even more, like the heavy bass you get at a rock concert when the PA is really kicking.
Lilly let go of my hand and put her hands up to cover her ears.
"What is that?" she said loudly to compete with the sound that was rising up around us.
The crowd still didn’t move.
They just stood there.
"My god." Kate’s voice was quiet and full of fear. "Look."
She was still on her knees, and she was staring at Doctor Campbell in front of her. I looked over but couldn’t see what she meant.
"His hands!" she said. "Oh god, look at his hands!"
I thought she had lost her mind.
And then I looked at Doctor Campbell’s hands.
And then I thought maybe I had lost mine.
NOTE
Kyle pauses here and creates a silence that lasts almost a whole minute. Sounds of breathing can be discerned, but nothing else.
Bernadette Luce has written much about this pause. In "The Importance of What Isn’t There: Finding Truth in the Gaps" she hypothesises about the reason for this pause, deciding, after a particularly long discourse, that "(T)his is the moment where the power of silence overtakes the weakness of language. Kyle Straker, with his silence, tells us all we need to know about this part of the greater narrative. That it is beyond words, it transcends language, and the gap he leaves as he attempts to find a way to describe what happens next is a silent scream that we hear echoing through the rest of the tape. Gaps always provide a good environment for the manufacture of echoes."
The fact that Kyle then manages to describe what he saw when he looked at Doctor Campbell’s hands seems to be ignored by Luce.
Chapter 26
At first I thought it was a trick of the light.
With the sun starting its climb down from its high point in the sky towards a resting place on the horizon, it could have been the result of light and shadow across his skin.
But it was nothing to do with the light, and all to do with the physical appearance of the doctor’s hands. The skin of his hands was shifting, as if moved by ripples across its surface, or currents below. It was like the skin itself had suddenly become capable of moving, and it wasn’t using muscles to do it, it was doing it itself.
As I watched in horrified fascination, a sudden rush of tiny bumps spread across his skin like a rash. It looked a little like gooseflesh, and before long there were thousands of the bumps, covering his skin.
Each bump was crowned with a tiny black dot.
The doctor didn’t seem to notice, he just stood there, utterly still while the rash seemed to harden upon the surface of his skin and then, suddenly, began to disgorge thin, whip-like threads from each of the bumps. Skin-colored and minutely thin, these threads sprayed out of the dot at the center of each bump, like water under pressure, or pink silly string from a can. Each thread, or filament, was ten to fifteen centimeters long, and seemed able to support itself, standing out from his flesh like thin, hard fibers.
The filaments began to stretch, pulling themselves further from the bumps that housed them, adding twenty centimeters to their length with every second that passed.
The bass vibration deepened again in the air around us.
The filaments on the doctor’s left hand were reaching out towards the person next to him.
My dad.
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The fibers were moving towards my dad’s hand and I had an urge to swat at them, to keep them away from him, to stop them touching him.
Except I didn’t want them touching me.
And then it was too late.
The filaments seemed to sense their proximity to Dad’s hand and homed straight in on it, flailing at the back of his hand and then sticking to it. Where each filament touched, a bump appeared; identical to the bumps that had spread across the doctor’s own skin.
The pores of the bumps opened to accept the filaments, before sucking them inside and sealing themselves closed.
The doctor’s hand was now linked to my dad’s hand by hundreds of flesh-colored threads.
The bass sound ceased abruptly.
"What are they doing?" Lilly asked, with disgust in her voice.
"They’re mutating," Kate O’Donnell said.
I shook my head.
Things started coming together in my head.
Digital code. Data. Computer code as a means of invasion. Thin flesh-colored threads. Fiber-optic cables.
"Not mutating," I said. "Connecting."
Chapter 27
Three simple words.
"Not mutating. Connecting."
The keys that started unlocking the puzzle.
Of course it wasn’t until we reached the barn that it all came together . . . but now I’m doing what I have been avoiding: I’m getting ahead of myself.
It’s all starting to blur together, and the pieces are starting to bleed in over other pieces. I have to keep it together.
So you’ll know.
So you’ll understand.
Chapter 28
When things start moving, they can really start moving.
We were still reacting to the bizarre sight of the doctor and my dad connecting when suddenly everyone in the crowd was at it.
Filaments began spreading from person to person, to the right, to the left, behind and in front, connecting the crowd into a vast network, bound together by those unnatural fibers.
As a group we stepped back, edging away from the sight before us.
Doctor Campbell was blinking in a definite pattern of blinks—two quick, one slow, three very quick indeed, two slow, then a lot of fluttering blinks, then the whole pattern repeated again—and every member of the crowd did exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time. Connected by those terrible fleshy fibers, the crowd was now acting as one.
We turned and walked away from them.
I don’t know about the others, but I didn’t even look back.
***
No one followed.
We headed out of the village, along the high street. We were driven by an impulse to get as far away from the village green as we could, and it was a few minutes before any of us managed to speak.
So we carried on, along the road that led out to Crowley, and eventually on to Cambridge.
Finally, as pavement faded out into grass verge beneath our feet, Kate O’Donnell managed to speak.
"We’re nothing to them," she said helplessly. "Absolutely nothing."
"Then we’ll get help," Mr Peterson told her. "The police. The army. Someone."
"That’s if there’s anyone left," Lilly said. "What if it’s not just Millgrove? What if it’s Crowley? And Cambridge? And London? Paris? New York? What if it’s everybody? Who’s going to help us then?"
On either side of us spread the countryside, with fields and trees and hedges. It seemed too ordinary, too normal, for anything to be truly wrong.
Birds sang in the trees and swooped across the landscape.
Grasshoppers and crickets leapt from the grass as we passed.
It all looked so peaceful, so tranquil, so safe.
But the road was quieter than I had ever seen it, and that made the stillness seem artificial, sinister. There were no cars driving in from Crowley, or Cambridge, or from anywhere at all. Perhaps the thing we were fleeing was widespread.
But still we walked.
There was nothing else to do.
The sky was reddening on the horizon as the sun sank in the sky, setting the clouds on fire as it went, and we walked towards that horizon.
Chapter 29
Twin towers pulled me out of a downward mental spiral.
I saw them silhouetted against the bloodied sky and stopped dead in my tracks. Lots of things suddenly collided inside my head, adding up, making some weird kind of sense.
Old man Naylor’s grain silos.
A couple of hundred meters away.
Lilly stopped next to me and followed my gaze. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face, lined by the red of the setting sun.
"Isn’t that where…?" she asked, trailing off to avoid having to finish the sentence with the science fiction stuff she hated.
I nodded.
"UFO central," I said.
"But Robbie Knox and Sally Baker made that story up to get attention," Lilly said. She paused and then asked, "Didn’t they?"
I shrugged.
Yes, they probably did just make it up.
They said they saw bright lights hovering over one of the silos. Not helicopters. Not planes.
Everyone said that they weren’t the type to make up a story like that, but Simon and I had seen the way it had made them minor celebrities among their peers.
"What are you thinking?" Lilly asked. "That maybe the UFOs were the first phase of all this? That maybe there’s some link there?"
To tell the truth, I don’t know what I was thinking. It just made that weird kind of sense to me. It might be nothing more than a bizarre coincidence, but maybe "coincidence" was a name given to things by people who just haven’t spotted a connection yet.
Kate and Mr Peterson had joined us and were looking at the silos too.
"I’ve never liked those things," Kate said. "I’ve always thought they were incredibly ugly."
She had a point. Like concrete lighthouses without lights to burn or ships to warn, the silos were local landmarks that probably featured in most travel directions given to nonlocals. They were dull and grey and rose far above anything else.
"I think we should take a closer look," Lilly said.
It was kind of nice that she had faith in one of my hunches.
Kate O’Donnell shook her head.
"And why would we want to look at a couple of grain silos?" she asked, a sarcastic tone creeping into her voice. "Unless we’re saying that Kyle’s alien invasion is suddenly wheat-based?"
"Er . . . because it might be important." Lilly’s response was sarcastic too.
"It sounds more like a wild goose chase to me," Kate said crossly. "I say we keep walking, see how far this phenomenon extends."
Lilly pursed her lips, put her hands on her hips.
"And I say we go and check out a possible lead," she said, firmly.
"A lead?" Kate said. "What is this? An American cop show?"
"Look," I said, "why don’t you and Mr Peterson wait here? Lilly and I will go and check out the silos. It’s probably nothing, but…"
"But?"
"There might be an answer there," I finished. "Something other than grain."
Kate shook her head.
"We’ll give you fifteen minutes," she said. "Then Rodney and I are walking."
"Fair enough," I said, then turned to Lilly. "You up for this?"
"Of course," she said, and we set out towards the concrete towers.
Chapter 30
The sky was darkening, it seemed, with every step we took down the rutted track that led to Naylor’s farm. Empty fields stretched around us on each side and I suddenly felt very vulnerable and afraid.
There was probably nothing waiting at the end of this side-quest, but that wasn’t the point. At least we were doing something.
I think Lilly felt this sense of purpose too.
"Do you even believe in UFOs?" she asked me.
"Sure," I said. "It just means the flying object was unidentified. It doesn’t
necessarily mean there are aliens aboard."
She tutted.
"What?"
"I just wanted to know if you thought we were going to find anything, you know, weird, in those silos."
It seemed that as soon as Lilly’s words were out there was a sudden, uncanny glow from up ahead. It wasn’t even full dark yet, more like a murky twilight, but we could see a sickly light shining brighter than the air around it, a light that seemed… different . . . to any light I had seen before. It seemed grainy, somehow, as if it were made of particles in the air up ahead.
We stopped in our tracks and looked ahead.
Instinctively, I put a protective arm around Lilly’s shoulders. When I realized what I had done I was half-expecting her to throw me off, or to say something sarcastic, but she didn’t do either.
So I hugged her to me, wishing that things were different between us.
When we got out of this—if we got out of this—I would try to make things up to her.
I squeezed her shoulder and we walked towards the light.
Chapter 31
Light is supposed to be reassuring. You learn that when you’re very young. It defeats the bad things creeping around in your room.
Every parent knows the magic gesture that chases the monsters away.
Click.
Let there be light.
Here, though, light was kind of the problem.
It looked wrong and I suddenly remembered what Mr Peterson had said earlier, about things from this world looking like they belonged in this world; that they followed rules that allowed us to recognize them, allowed us to understand them.
It had sounded like mad ravings at the time, but now I knew exactly what he had been talking about.
The light we were walking into didn’t look as if it belonged here at all.
I had no idea how we should be approaching the silos, how much stealth we needed.
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