Mrs. O’Donnell leaned forwards in her seat. “Do you think Simon told him to come round and see you?”
Lilly looked genuinely shocked.
“Why would he …?” she started. “I mean … he wouldn’t … would he?”
Mrs. O’Donnell shrugged.
“I guess it all depends on what we’re saying happened to these people,” she said. “If we’re saying they were merely disoriented by the effect of their … of the trance, then, no, I don’t think your boyfriend would have told Dr. Campbell to come round to see you.”
Mrs. O’Donnell leaned back again.
“But I suspect neither of you is altogether satisfied with that as an explanation for the changes in personality that you noticed.”
“It wasn’t Simon,” Lilly said with such certainty that Mrs. O’Donnell raised an eyebrow of surprise. “And they weren’t my parents.”
“Well,” Mrs. O’Donnell said, “that’s certainly a big statement to be making, isn’t it?”
Lilly nodded. “It’s true,” she said.
“But it was us who were hypnotized,” Mrs. O’Donnell said. “It was us who were put into a trance. This could be just some weird altered version of reality caused by Danny’s act.”
That had been Dr. Campbell’s line, and it had a persuasive logic to it.
“But—” Lilly tried to interrupt but was silenced by a curt wave of Mrs. O’Donnell’s hand.
“All I’m saying is that we cannot discount the possibility that there are psychological reasons for all that is happening to us. There are only four of us who saw things one way, and everyone else saw things another. Four individuals out of … what—a thousand people? A total of four saw something that the other nine hundred and ninety-six did not; whose version of the events would you question first? Honestly, it wouldn’t be their version.”
I had stopped listening.
My mind had just slotted some details together, and I felt a shiver travel the length of my spine.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh no.”
Mrs. O’Donnell looked over at me. “What is it?” she asked.
Her voice seemed to travel miles to reach me through the sudden rush of panic I felt.
“Oh no. No no no no—” I said. “How many people did you say live in Millgrove?”
“It’s about a thousand,” she said. “Just under, I think.”
“And how many of us were hypnotized, and are seeing things differently from everyone else?”
“Four,” she said as if explaining something to a very dull child.
I didn’t care.
The numbers were too terrifying.
“So, what are we, you know, as a percentage of the village’s population?” I asked, feeling sick, hoping my math was wrong.
“Well, we would be four out of a thousand … which would make us … let me think … ” She stopped. “Oh,” she said coldly. Her face had lost some of its color. She looked at me. “That’s very good, Kyle,” she said. “We are in trouble, aren’t we?”
“Er, what are we talking about here?” Lilly asked, puzzled.
“What percentage of the village population do we represent?” I asked her.
She shook her head. She should have worked it out way sooner than me.
“The answer is zero-point-four,” I said. “We are zero-point-four of a percent.”
CHAPTER 21
“We have to find Rodney,” Mrs. O’Donnell said, and it took me a few seconds to work out who she was talking about. Even though we had been talking about the four of us, it seemed crazy that I could have forgotten about the fate of the fourth person.
Mr. Peterson.
Last seen in a fetal ball on the stage at the talent show.
Where we had left him.
“What happened to him?” I asked. “I mean, after everyone started moving again?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. O’Donnell said. “I was so relieved, I … I kind of forgot about him. I wandered down the High Street, sort of in a daze, but no one was talking. They were just filing past, completely silent. When I spoke to someone they responded, but it was like they would rather not be talking. As if there was something … new … going on in their heads. They no longer seemed to need to chatter away about nothing. It was eerie. Like … like a funeral, or something.”
I drained the orange squash and rolled the glass around on my trouser leg.
“I … I need to ask something,” I said. “And … well, there’s no sort of easy way to … Are we talking aliens here, do you think?”
Both Lilly and Mrs. O’Donnell looked at me seriously.
It was Lilly who spoke first.
“There’s no such thing as aliens,” she said definitively.
“Wow, I had no idea that scientists had actually figured that out,” I said. “Last I heard they were still keeping an open mind.”
“You know what I mean. No little green men and silver spaceships.”
“That’s not the only kind of alien life possible,” I said. “Has anyone seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers?”
Mrs. O’Donnell sighed.
“You do realize that was a film?” she said caustically. “Not a documentary. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t really about aliens. It was about communism, and the remake was about the changing roles of men and women in modern society.”
“I thought they were from outer space,” I said grumpily. “In fact, I remember them saying that the pod things that took over people and changed them were aliens.”
Mrs. O’Donnell’s face told me that she thought I had missed the point that she was making.
“The differences in text and subtext aside,” she said, “you’re thinking that alien pod creatures arrived in Millgrove during a village talent show, and took over everybody except the handful of people hypnotized by a boy magician?”
“Yeah, well, you put it that way and it sounds kinda stupid,” I said. “But pod people was only meant as an example, drawn from a science-fiction movie. We are agreed that something weird happened, aren’t we? I mean, this isn’t everyday Millgrove, is it? People that we know are acting strangely. We recognize their faces, but no longer them.”
“We have no way of knowing what happened when we were in trances on that stage,” Mrs. O’Donnell said, “but surely it’s more likely that it’s us who are at fault, that we’re seeing things differently—”
“Have you managed to get any TV or radio signals?” I interrupted. “Managed to reach anyone by phone? Are you getting anything on your computer except those symbols we were looking at earlier?”
The look on her face answered my questions for me.
“Look,” I said. “I’m a kid. I know that. But it doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of seeing what’s going on around me. We are in deep, deep trouble here, and if you want the absolute truth, I really don’t know what to do about it. But I do know that hiding my head in the sand is the wrong thing to do.”
I was getting frustrated and flustered.
I was even waving my arms in the air.
“I think that’s why Lilly and I ran here. To get an adult to help us work out a way to put all this right. To bring our parents back to us. To make things go back to the way they were. We need you, Kate.”
It was the first time I’d called her—or even thought of her—by her first name.
“Okay,” she said, getting to her feet. “We’ll go and find Rodney Peterson and then we’ll head out of town. We’ll get help. We will find people who can figure this thing out.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She smiled.
“It’s okay, Kyle. Now let’s get going.”
CHAPTER 22
We got into Kate’s car and the plan was simple. Stop off and check on Mr. Peterson, and then get the heck out of Millgrove.
None of us were really surprised when it refused to start. The car didn’t make a sound. There was no ignition-straining-against-a-flat-battery sound. Not a spark of life in the en
gine at all.
So we walked down the deserted streets, aware of just how strange it was that they were deserted. We knew that there were people inside those houses, but there were no signs nor sounds of life. It made me think of those ghost towns in Westerns. If a couple of spiky tumbleweeds had blown past, I don’t think they would have looked out of place.
No life.
Stillness.
It was as if the buildings were brooding, the village was dreaming, and we were just a solitary thought passing through its mind.
The village green was set up for the talent show, but it was deserted too. It looked strange and unsettling.
The stage was empty, and in front of it was chaos. Things that people had brought along with them—picnic food, blankets to sit on, handbags—had been left behind and lay on the grass.
People don’t leave their personal effects lying around like that. They take them when they leave. They cling to their possessions almost like it’s a reflex.
Nor do they leave people lying on the stage after they have had some kind of mental breakdown.
But they had left Mr. Peterson.
He was still in the same spot we had last seen him.
He was all alone, curled up in a tight ball of his own fear. I suddenly felt terrible that we hadn’t thought to go back for him sooner. But we’d had our reasons for forgetting him, I guess. Like the world suddenly turning strange and terrifying.
What was everybody else’s excuse?
We approached Mr. Peterson and I could see his body trembling like a leaf. His lips moved as he formed soundless words. His eyes were squeezed shut.
“Mr. Peterson?” I called.
If he heard me there was no visible sign.
“He’s in shock,” Kate O’Donnell said.
“Why is he still like this?” Lilly asked.
“I think he saw something,” I said. “I think he saw what happened.”
“But he was hypnotized too.”
“Everyone’s different. Maybe his trance was just a bit shallower than ours.”
Lilly shrugged.
“How do we get him to tell us what he saw?” she said.
“Ask nicely?” I suggested.
“You are such a loser,” she said, but with a smile.
“I know.” I smiled back.
Kate knelt over Mr. Peterson and put her hand gently on his shoulder. Initially he recoiled from her touch, but then his eyes opened and he looked at her face.
“It’s you,” he said. “You came back.”
“Of course I did, Rodney.”
She reached down and found his hand, wrapped it up in hers, holding it tight.
“And you’re still you,” he said.
“Yep,” she said. “At least I was last time I looked.”
“They … they didn’t … get you.”
“Who?” Kate asked him. “Who didn’t get me?”
“All of them,” Mr. Peterson said, suddenly seeming to come back to reality from the dark place inside his own mind where he had been hiding.
“You saw something,” Kate said. “I … We … need to know what it was.”
Mr. Peterson looked up at her and there was warmth and compassion in his eyes, but there was also fear.
“Something happened to me,” Mr. Peterson was saying. “It was like they say in the Bible, when the scales fall from someone’s eyes, when they suddenly see the truth behind the visible. I saw the people in the crowd, all of them, and they had become … were becoming … something else. Something … impossible.”
“What did you see?” That was from Lilly, and there was an urgency that made Mr. Peterson turn to see us standing there for the first time.
“What did I see?” he said. “I don’t know how to describe it. I’m used to the way things look … here … in this world, you know? Everything here follows … I don’t know … visual rules, about form, perspective, and color. The things we see on this world … well, they look like they belong here.”
He fought to make it clearer.
“I’ve never thought about it before: the way that everything that is from here looks like it belongs here. That even the most dissimilar things in our world—a puddle and an aircraft carrier; an apple and a wisp of smoke; a chicken and the London Gherkin; a road and an ear of sweet corn—they all conform to these same visual rules.
“I know that now, but only because they—the ones who have been changed—don’t. The people here … they look different now. As if they … they don’t obey the visual rules of planet Earth. They have … other levels, layers, facets … I don’t know … Description is hard when there’s nothing you have ever seen that looks anything like what you’re seeing.”
“So, try.”
“They still look like people. They are still people, I think. But, somehow, that’s a surface image, and what they are now extends way past the surface. Imagine you had a projector that could project a perfectly clear image onto water, but you could still see the water beneath. That’s kind of what I saw, I guess. A projection. A new image superimposed over each of the people of this village.
“Most of it I can’t even begin to describe. Colors I don’t recognize. Textures that make no sense. Constantly in motion, ever-changing, like shadows playing across them … and then there are the symbols—”
“Symbols?” Kate interjected. “What do you mean ‘symbols’?”
Mr. Peterson shook his head.
“A language, I guess,” he said. “Moving across them, across their surfaces. Almost like hieroglyphics … with hooks and curls and spikes and eyes as letters. I … I think it is a language, but it doesn’t behave like our language. It’s not flat and on the page; instead, it twists and spins, revealing new elements of each character … each word … every time it moves.”
NOTE—“Hieroglyphics”
An extremely ancient form of writing that Rodderick identifies as originating in Egypt: “Hieroglyphics, although antiquated by Kyle Straker’s age, were a rebus-like pictorial language that is similar in structure to our own computer code.” Benson notes: “Like a precursor to Zapf Dingbats, hieroglyphics made visual images into a language.” He then notes: “… if you translate the word ‘hieroglyphics’ into Zapf you get: hieroglyphics.” Just why we would want to do this, Benson offers no explanation. But then he is the man who translated the Bible into WingDings.
Kate looked aghast.
“We’ve seen it,” she said.
“You’ve seen it? How? Where?”
“On my computer screen. It’s all the stupid thing will do … display these weird characters.”
“Your computer?” Mr. Peterson sat up straight. “But that means … it’s not just them … it’s … a program?”
“A computer program?” Kate said.
She turned to me.
“You said it was some kind of language,” she said.
I nodded.
“But it didn’t look like any computer code I’ve ever seen …,” she said. “So what does it mean?”
I felt cold.
Pieces started fitting together.
“What is it?” Kate asked, noticing my look.
I fought to put my intuition into words.
“I keep coming back to the idea of an alien invasion….”
Lilly made an exasperated sound that I tried to ignore.
Kate asked, “And exactly how would this be a sign of an invasion?”
“It depends how you interpret the word invasion.” I said. “Perhaps this is exactly the way you would invade another planet. I mean, would an alien race really come down in shiny metal ships and try to take over through military might, knowing that we will fight back?
“Or, suppose the strategy was more subtle: infiltrating the planet with alien copies of humans, like the Body Snatchers. There’s a danger that the duplicates will be uncovered before there are enough of them to take over.
“Maybe there is another way, and we’re seeing it now.”
&n
bsp; “But how?” Lilly asked.
“What if this computer program we’re seeing is the invasion?” I said. “What if it’s their spaceships and their ray guns and their infiltration devices, all rolled into one?”
“I’m not following you,” Lilly said.
I wasn’t sure I was following it myself.
“I’m just trying to put pieces together,” I confessed. “It’s like I can almost see what’s happening here, but I can only catch glimpses of it out of the corner of my mind’s eye. There’s this vague idea that disappears every time I turn to look at it full on.”
Lilly nodded, and it seemed that she was urging me on to think about it more.
“Try,” she said.
So I did.
“It was the alien language. Which we could see changing and shifting in front of us. How it was lined up on Kate’s computer screen. I said it was like sentences. But maybe because I was seeing them on a computer screen it’s got me thinking about computers, and about how computers work. Lines and lines of instructions, a particular form of sentence, computer code. What if we’re seeing a programming language?”
“Programming what?” Lilly asked.
“That’s where I keep coming up blank,” I said.
I realized that Mr. Peterson was paying close attention to my words, and I saw him nodding.
“You got something?” I asked.
Mr. Peterson shrugged.
“I’m a postman,” he said, and I thought he had just descended back into madness, but then he went on to explain: “And over the last few years there have been a lot of changes in the kind of things we deliver. There are the obvious changes—a lot more parcels from eBay and Amazon; a great deal less of those envelopes containing holiday snaps now that most photography has gone digital.
“The one that seems sad, though, is that there are a lot fewer handwritten letters. People don’t send as many small, personal letters as they used to because they tend to stay in touch electronically. They have e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter. You don’t post a letter now, you click a mouse button and it’s delivered instantly.”
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