Human.4

by Mike A. Lancaster

  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 in 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 her name in an exercise book or two, feel stupidly jealous if you see her talking to any other boy. You laugh at each other’s jokes, and find yourself thinking about her 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 lives 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 fit 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 pianos; a little, old TV; and a tatty, three-piece suit.

  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 phony 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—

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  We have absolutely no way of knowing just how Side Two would have ended if the tape had not run out. Many papers and book chapters have set out to explore this interruption to the story, but they are all just guesses. They are not worth looking at here, because they cloud the issues rather than bring them into focus. When Graysmark argues that “(T)he largest truth of th
e Straker account lies in the silent spaces between tapes,” he allows himself to fall into what Nightingale calls “the fallacy of the gaps.” The meaning of the gaps cannot be known, measured, or estimated.

  KYLE STRAKER’S SECOND TAPE

  … my train of thought?

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Kyle never returns to his prior train of thought. Changing the tape seems to have completely wiped what he was going to say from his mind. It is difficult to judge the importance of this. Lahr and Pritchett, in their book Forgotten Words: The Untold Histories of the World, argue that Kyle Straker’s narrative is forever altered at the point where the second tape begins: “The story is reset, and the world revised. When Straker forgets his place in his own story, we lose something important, but it is something that we can never know…. We try to complete this part of the story, and we can only do that by importing our own experiences, prejudices, ideas. Kyle’s story becomes our own, but it also stops being his.”

  My throat is dry. Dry and scratchy. I think this is the most talking that I have ever done in my life. In one go, that is.

  Funny thing is, I don’t even know if anyone will ever listen to these tapes. I’m not even sure why I thought it was such a good idea to make them. I just wanted to leave a record, for the four of us, for any more people like us that are left, so that we will not be forgotten.

  I think that’s what we all want, in the end.

  To know that we left footprints when we passed by, however briefly.

  We want to be remembered.

  So remember us.

  Please.

  Remember us.

  CHAPTER 12

  Things never happen the way you think they are going to. Too many random factors between thought and action, I guess. My dad used to sum it up with this weird golf saying: there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.

  NOTE—“Golf”

  Two things here:

  1. Golf was a sport thought to be an early version of what we now call “Flagellum.” Golf, however, used an external, manufactured club to strike a “ball” towards a much closer target (hundreds of meters, rather than tens of kilometers) called a “hole,” which was traditionally marked by a flag.

  2. The proverb “many a slip …” is unlikely to have ever originated from the sport of golf, and is more likely to do with the way primitive humans used to drink by raising a drinking vessel (or cup) to the mouth (which used to feature “lips,” or movable organs that fringed the mouth and were used for assisting eating, for rudimentary sensing, and for speech formation). See Bathgate’s Vestiges of Barbarism—What Our Bodies Used to Be.

  We left Mrs. O’Donnell’s house in a flat depression. The idea was to go back to Mr. Peterson, check he was okay, then head out of the village on the Crowley Road to see how far the phenomenon stretched.

  Easy plan.

  We were halfway down the road when Mrs. O’Donnell stopped walking.

  “They’ve gone,” she said, and I realized she was at the house where the boy and girl had been standing, frozen in the act of coming out of their house.

  Had been.

  They weren’t there now.

  The hallway was empty.

  CHAPTER 13

  We hit the High Street at a run.

  Gone was the heaviness that had settled over our minds and bodies, now we felt light as clouds. If the Cross children were gone, then surely it was likely that they had moved themselves. If that was true, maybe everyone else was moving again.

  Suddenly, we stopped running. People were moving down the High Street.

  People.

  Were.

  Moving.

  In fact, it was a great number of people and they were walking as a crowd, away from the village green and heading for, I guessed, their houses.

  People.

  Moving.

  It was wonderful.

  And if they looked a little dazed—staring about themselves as if seeing an unfamiliar place—then that was probably to be expected after what had just happened to them.

  I wondered if they realized anything had happened at all, or whether they had just been switched back on, with no sense that time had even passed.

  Relief flooded through me, as if my world had suddenly been set back onto its proper axis. I saw Lilly’s face register her own internal relief. Tension replaced by excitement. And a hint of a smile.

  I knew that the smile was for Simon and I felt an eel of jealousy uncurl within my stomach.

  NOTE—“Eel of Jealousy”

  This is quite a bizarre phrase, because an eel was a snakelike fish of the type we now refer to as an Anguilliforme. How this related to jealousy is unknown, although Kenton argues for it being a kind of metaphor for the feeling the primitive emotion caused within the individual. LeGar, however, points to a fragment of a text called “Stargate SG-1,” which suggests that a parasitic creature of this type may have been present within certain individuals. It didn’t last.

  Whatever it was that had occurred was over now.

  The people of the village were making their way back home.

  I noticed my parents and brother in the crowd, then turned to Mrs. O’Donnell, who offered me a reassuring smile.

  I smiled back, nodded at Lilly, and made my way through the crowd to join them.

  CHAPTER 14

  There was the oddest of moments when my mum’s eyes met mine and she seemed to look straight through me, as if she didn’t recognize me, or was looking past me, in search of …

  In search of what?

  I couldn’t even finish the thought because suddenly her eyes flicked back to me. They saw me as if I had just materialized out of thin air. They locked on me then, and I saw recognition flood into her eyes. Her mouth turned up into a smile.

  “Kyle,” she said, and there was a softness to her voice that hadn’t been there for a while. The way she said my name before Dad went and broke her heart.

  I ran to her and she hugged me tight.

  “I was so scared,” I told her.

  “Scared, poppet?” she comforted me. “Now what on earth is there to be scared about?”

  Dad squeezed my arm.

  “There’s nothing to be scared about,” he whispered, and again it was a voice from the past. “We’re here.”

  I was crying then, with hot, fat tears rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t care how it looked, or whether people I went to school with were watching.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” I said.

  “We’re here,” Mum soothed. “And we’re not going anywhere.”

  “What’s all this about?” Dad asked, and his voice was concerned and open, instead of defensive.

  We made our way back home as part of the crowd, with the sun shining down upon us. I felt exhausted, utterly frazzled.

  Mum and I sat down in the front room as Dad rattled about in the kitchen making cups of tea.

  Then we sat there, my parents’ faces looking full of concern and compassion.

  Dad reached over and grabbed hold of Mum’s hand, something he hadn’t done since he came back to us—at least not without Mum bristling like a terrified cat.

  We sipped tea, and the madness faded away.

  “You were shaking when we found you,” Mum said. “I haven’t seen you so frightened since your father told you about the bogeyman and you thought he was under your bed.”

  “He was under my bed,” I said, and smiled.

  Dad laughed.

  “So what did happen?” he asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try us.”

  For a moment I didn’t want to tell them, I didn’t want to think about what had happened, what it all meant. It was all right now.

  But I had to tell them.

  I had to at least try to get some kind of explanation for the weirdness.

  Would they think I was mad? If they did, I had witnesses to prove what I was saying.

  So I took a deep breath and
started speaking.

  It all poured out in a mad gush, interrupted only by sobs and chokes.

  The whole story.

  My parents listened, almost without comment, occasionally asking questions when I wasn’t clear enough, or the story got a little confused in my head.

  When I was done, Dad looked puzzled.

  “Well, Kyle,” he said. “That’s just not the way we remember it.” His voice had an odd edge to it, as if there was something sharp and hard beneath the surface.

  I noticed he was still holding Mum’s hand as he spoke.

  He smiled.

  “We watched you go up onstage,” he said. “We saw Danny hypnotize you.” His smile deepened as if at a private joke. “Actually, he made you pretend that you were a man with no control over his limbs, trying to direct traffic in the center of rush-hour London—and yes, before you ask, we laughed a lot.”

  Mum and Dad exchanged a smile at the memory and my cheeks felt hot. I must have looked like a total idiot. In all honesty it was probably as embarrassing as my stand-up act. I had a memory flash of Dad with his phone camera and hoped he wasn’t about to get out photographic proof of my unconscious humiliation.

  Instead he went on.

  “Danny made Lilly Dartington think she was walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. He made our postman think he was called Mr. Peebles, and that he had a dummy called Rodney Peterson. He ended up doing his ventriloquism act again, but in reverse. And Kate, the woman from Happy Shopper, he had her auditioning for the Sydney Opera, but realizing she was naked halfway through her first aria.”

  Dad laughed.

  “He’s very good,” he said. “Danny, I mean.”

  “But what happened after?” I asked him.

  There was a blank look from my parents, which was kind of similar to the look my mum had given me when I met her on the High Street. A kind of look at me that seemed focused on something in the distance past me.