I used my left hand to close the window behind me.
I reckoned that I had just passed the point of no return.
Another deep breath, and I shuffled, bit by bit, to the ledge closest to the tree.
One meter. Easy on the ground.
The tree was an aging beech with rust-colored leaves. It had branches pointing upwards from a thick, gnarled trunk that someone, many years ago, had stopped from growing too high by sawing it off about three meters from the ground. It made a platform for me to aim at, if I could make it through the screen of branches that surrounded it.
One meter.
I held on to the gutter concrete with my right hand and shuffled my feet around so I was facing the middle of the tree, swallowed a ball of spit that felt about the size of a clementine, gritted my teeth, bent my knees, and then jumped.
CHAPTER 18
My legs threw me forwards, and suddenly I was rootless, at the mercy of scientific forces like mass and velocity, resistance and gravity. It was terrifying and exhilarating. I threw myself at the tree and opened my arms to catch it.
I hit a tall, upright branch full face, crashing into it, hard. It made me dizzy—the pain I ignored for now—and I felt myself starting to fall.
I thrashed my arms and clawed for purchases, feeling the hardness of the wood slipping from my grasp. Leaves and smaller branches whipped at my face as I started to tumble downwards. The moment stretched out in perfect slow motion.
I’m dead, I thought calmly, far more calmly than I would have expected under the circumstances.
I think it was that calmness that saved my life.
It allowed me to give survival one more go.
I made a last, deliberate grab for a branch and it felt as if my arms were being torn from their sockets. My head was thrown backwards, and my back arched at a painful angle. Twigs slapped my face and I could taste leaves in my mouth.
But I held on, sweating and trembling, hugging the branch to my chest. My legs fought for even safer purchase and found it.
A few breaths to calm myself, and to get my heart beating at a more normal rate, then I inched myself down the branch, towards the trunk. Evolution was all well and good, but a monkey would have done a far better job of this than me.
In time, I reached the sawed-off “platform” I had seen from my window and tried to lower myself onto it. The angle that the branch met the platform was difficult, but I adjusted my position on the branch and pretty much slid onto it. It was a small area, but wide enough for me to catch my breath and prepare for the next phase of my descent.
I was crouching there, braced on all sides by branches, when suddenly the front door opened and Dr. Campbell stepped out onto the path, off to my left and only a short distance below me. I felt certain that he would see me, but there was no way to conceal myself further, so I waited with a leaden feeling in my stomach.
Dr. Campbell was speaking to one or both of my parents, who remained inside the house. His voice was loud enough for me to hear everything.
“Make sure he stays where he is,” he said grimly. “I’m sorry, but it is clear that he is one of the zero-point-four. There is nothing that can be done for him. He will have to be dealt with.”
My mother uttered a strange, strangled sound.
“I will return soon,” the doctor said, ignoring her. “Drug him if you have to.”
He turned and walked away from the house and his route brought him even closer to my hiding place. I drew myself up as if making myself fractionally smaller would stop him from spotting me if he decided to look my way.
But he didn’t look my way, and I watched him go, heard the front door of my house close. It sounded loud and hollow like the door of a tomb.
I was one of the 0.4.
That was what Dr. Campbell had said: 0.4.
What on earth did that mean?
I waited a few seconds, slipped through the cover of branches, and shimmied down the trunk of the old beech tree.
I had thought that I was scared before.
He will have to be dealt with, the doctor had said, and a chill had passed down my spine.
Did it mean that I was going to be killed? It had certainly sounded that way to me.
There is nothing that can be done for him.
He is one of the zero-point-four. Drug him if you have to.
What in the hell was going on?
I set off for Lilly’s house to find out.
I had to know if what I was …
EDITOR’S NOTE
It is at this point in the tapes that there is an interruption to the recording. A thud, some sounds of movement, and then an indistinguishable background voice.
Although much debate has raged about this section of the tapes, the consensus is that Kyle Straker has just been joined by another person. Later in the recordings it even becomes clear who this person is, but for now the voice is distant and muted and—even with sophisticated technological enhancement—impossible to decipher.
Perhaps we would have discovered more about the other person here, but technology intervenes so quickly after this second voice—the side of the tape ends abruptly, seconds after Kyle addresses the newcomer.
… yeah, I know. I’m just in the middle of … I will … I just need to …
NOTE
Nathaniel Parker applies a version of Occam’s razor—that the correct answer is often the simplest—arguing that the tape only stopped before “… finish recording this.”
[silence]
CHAPTER 19
I felt like a criminal on the run, making my way through enemy territory. I was terrified of bumping into anyone, but there was no one around to bump into. The village, it seemed, was deserted. Like Mum and Dad, everyone had to be back at home.
Awaiting further instructions.
I couldn’t trust anyone.
Dr. Campbell had said that I was one of the 0.4, and that I would have to be dealt with. Did that make everyone else in the village, everyone I knew, part of the other group?
Zero-point-four—that was four-tenths. Four over ten. Two-fifths. Was that how few people like me still existed? Had the other 0.6 been changed somehow?
0.6.
Six-tenths.
More than half.
Was I now in the minority?
And how mad did that sound?
I didn’t know, not for certain, that there was anything going on here at all.
I was running scared through the village because … because of what?
Okay, something had happened in Millgrove; something that had affected everyone in the village except for four people who were hypnotized at the time.
Okay, there was no one on the streets of the village, even though it was a Saturday afternoon and there were always people on the streets.
Okay, my parents were acting oddly.
And, okay, the doctor had said a few things that had sounded sinister to me.
But maybe Dr. Campbell was right. Maybe I was suffering the aftereffects of hypnosis, and had experienced an inverted version of reality that had meant I had seen everyone else standing still when it was really me who was paralyzed.
Maybe the whole thing was just a fantasy.
Maybe none of it was real.
Maybe it was paranoia and nothing else.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.
A nightmare, the doctor had called it: Could it be nothing more than that? Could my mind be playing tricks on me?
And that made me think of Jerry Possett. Local guy. Old—in his seventies, I guess. Probably harmless, but something has gone wrong with his brain. He holds conversations with people who aren’t really there, often arguing with these imaginary people in an angry voice.
To Jerry, those people are really there. He sees them, hears them. But they don’t exist. And Jerry doesn’t seem to know that they don’t exist.
The point I’m making here is that our brains play tricks. They can make us see patterns where there are no patterns
, see faces in the grain of a wardrobe, castles in cloud formations, something psychologically revealing in an inkblot, can even make ordinarily sane people see UFOs over old man Naylor’s grain silos.
I don’t know enough about the way the brain works. In fact, I don’t have a clue how the brain works. Hundreds of thoughts flow through my brain from one hour to the next and not one of them is about how I’m thinking them.
So what if this was just my brain going off the rails?
Hallucinations.
Paranoia.
A mental breakdown caused by Danny’s act.
Meningitis.
Swine flu.
Marsh gas.
Maybe my brain just never wired up all that well to begin with and my whole life had been leading up to this moment, where the bad wiring sends sparks of insanity through my skull and makes me into a Jerry Possett, a nutcase to be avoided.
Maybe 0.4 was simply doctors’ jargon for he’s blown a fuse in his brain and we need to get him somewhere secure before he harms himself or others.
How was it even possible to know if your brain was malfunctioning, because the very thing you need to think it all through is the very thing that might be breaking down in the first place?
Was that some kind of paradox?
Was I mad?
I arrived at Lilly’s house and didn’t know what to do.
If her family was behaving anything like my family, they wouldn’t let her out; they would be finding excuses to stand by the door and make sure she stayed where she was.
Should I throw stones at her window to attract her attention?
That would be a whole lot easier if I knew which one was her room.
Did I really want to speak to her, anyway?
Did I want to discover that she had no memory of the things I remembered happening to us? Did I really want to find out that all this was happening because my mind was messed up?
I stood there, trying to find a path through it all.
And then the front door of Lilly’s house burst open and Lilly came hurtling out towards me.
CHAPTER 20
Lilly saw me standing there and her face registered both surprise and relief. She sprinted towards me and shouted, “RUN!” with such urgency that I did just that.
Turned around and ran.
Gave into a stampede instinct inherited from an earlier model of humanity, when saber-toothed tigers stalked the landscape.
I ran, hearing Lilly’s feet slapping the pavement just behind me, and it was as if all the tension of the day had suddenly been given an outlet in one mad burst of energy. I drove my legs as fast as they would carry me, away from Lilly’s house, without an idea in my head as to why we were running.
Nor where we were running to—it didn’t matter.
In those moments, with every thought, breath, and muscle focused on the physical act of running, I felt … free.
Someone shouted Lilly’s name from behind us, and Lilly’s footsteps sped up as a result. She gained ground on me, and then she was running next to me.
“Where are we going?” I shouted, feeling the words ripped from my lungs.
“I don’t know,” she shouted back. “I’ve just got to get away from … from them.”
I should have been terrified by her words, but instead they actually made me smile. If Lilly was feeling the same way, and her parents had suddenly turned weird, then I wasn’t crazy.
My mind was not broken.
I could get through this.
We could get through this.
I think I only realized where we were heading when I started recognizing details of the route from earlier. Some kind of instinct had nudged us towards a place we both thought could give us sanctuary from the madness that was hemming us in on all sides.
We stopped running as we passed the Cross house.
My lungs were burning and there was a fierce pain in my side. Bent over double, I gasped and wheezed and Lilly joined me, even placing a hand on my back.
“Thank you for coming to get me,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Thanks for the exercise.”
She half smiled.
“I’m sorry I got into that silly stuff earlier,” she said quietly. “You know, the Simon stuff?”
“It’s okay,” I said, finally unbending myself and standing up straight. “How is Simon?”
Lilly shook her head. “He’s gone,” she told me. “Just like all of them. I mean they’re there and everything, but they’re not. Not really.”
She stood up too.
“I must sound crazy,” she said.
“Not at all,” I said. “I know exactly what you mean. They have changed.”
We carried on towards Mrs. O’Donnell’s house.
“Has Dr. Campbell been round for a visit yet?” I asked her.
She nodded. “You too, huh? He told me that I had experienced a powerful hallucination, that it was all a dream I was having, but, like, awake. You?”
“Same story.” We were at Mrs. O’Donnell’s door now. “I overheard him telling my parents that I was one of the zero-point-four.”
Lilly looked at me oddly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“I haven’t got a clue,” I said. “I was hoping you’d have an idea.”
I lifted my knuckles to the front door, was just about to knock, and turned to Lilly.
“But I think you’re one of them too,” I said.
I knocked.
There were noises from within and we stood and waited for them to get closer. Mrs. O’Donnell, it appeared, was in no hurry to open her door. Lilly and I stood there, feeling horribly exposed, and I started thinking that any second two angry sets of parents were going to come around the corner.
Along with Dr. Campbell, no doubt.
Finally, Mrs. O’Donnell opened the door. She raised an eyebrow when she saw us, but ushered us inside without a word. She looked around before closing the front door, as if checking no one was following us.
“I wondered if you might come here,” she said, showing us through into the living room.
She was watching us oddly. There was a kind of resigned look, but it was mixed in with what might have been a little sternness at us invading her home again.
“Sorry to disturb—” I began, but the sudden seriousness on her face shut me up.
“Can either of you tell me what the hell is going on?” she demanded.
Lilly and I just shook our heads.
“Nothing good,” Lilly said. “My … My parents aren’t my parents anymore.”
“Mine neither,” I said.
Mrs. O’Donnell looked at us with a kind of weary acceptance.
“Sit down,” she said. “You’re both out of breath.”
“We ran here,” Lilly explained.
We sat down on one of the two sofas. Mrs. O’Donnell disappeared for a few moments and returned with a couple of glasses of orange squash. She handed them out and took a seat on the other sofa.
She asked me what had happened, so I sketched out the events since we had parted on the High Street. All of that seemed an awfully long time ago, even though my watch told me it was just less than an hour. Again my body and my watch disagreed. Time passed weirdly through the looking glass.
Mrs. O’Donnell heard me out, then shook her head and gave an exasperated tut.
“And this thing he called you … zero-point-four … you’re sure that’s what he said?”
I nodded.
“Well, what do you think that’s supposed to mean?” she asked.
I told her that I didn’t have a clue.
“Zero-point-four,” she mused. “Decimals. Pretty meaningless unless you know what they’re referring to.”
She turned to Lilly, and her face softened a little.
“And what’s been happening to you, my dear?”
Lilly sighed.
“It hasn’t gone a lot different from
Kyle’s afternoon,” she said. “Simon was, like, totally weird. I met up with him when everyone got moving again, and I thought he might be a little … I don’t know … disoriented by the … well, you know, whatever it is we’re calling all of this.”
She waved a hand in the air as if showing how hard this whole thing was to describe.
“Anyway, I started asking him about what had happened to him, you know, all the freezy stuff, and he looked at me like I was mad.”
She broke off and then she shook her head.
“No,” she said sadly. “Except he didn’t look at me like that. I think I could maybe have coped with that. This look was something else.” She paused as she tried to pin down her thoughts. “He looked at me like I was … dirt.”
I thought about how Dr. Campbell had looked at me.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I got angry with him. At first I thought that he just didn’t believe me, or something. But it wasn’t that. It was like he was … looking down on me. As if he knew something that I didn’t. So I got cross with him, and he just walked away. Just turned his back on me and walked. He didn’t look back.”
Her top lip was quivering and she had tears welling in her eyes.
I felt a sudden flare of anger at Simon for doing that to Lilly, and then a stabbing pang of guilt when I realized it actually hadn’t been a whole lot different from what I had done to her after visiting her parents’ house.
“So I thought: Fine. Be like that, ” she continued. “And I walked home—the whole thing rolling round and round inside my brain. And I was scared and angry and confused and angry again. And my parents were like, What’s up with you? and I didn’t even know where to start. And they looked like my parents, they sounded like my parents, but there was something … off about them, so I told them that we’ll talk later and I need to go to my room, and that’s when Dr. Campbell rings the doorbell.”
“Your parents didn’t call Dr. Campbell either?” I asked her.
“No,” she said, sounding a little baffled by the question. “They didn’t have time. I mean, I hadn’t even gone upstairs when he turned up, so how could they have called him? And then there’s the whole telephones-not-working thing.”
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