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Along with Doctor 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 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 any more.’

‘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 the events since we had parted on the high street. All of that seemed an awfully long time ago, even though Mrs O’Donnell’s clock told me it was just less than an hour. Again, my body and a clock 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 . . .
nought-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.

‘Nought-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 to 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 . . . disorientated 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 Doctor 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 turn around.’

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 realised it actually wasn’t a whole lot different to what I had done to her after visiting her parents’ house.

‘So I think:
Fine. Be like that
,’ she continued. ‘And I walk home – the whole thing rolling round and round inside my brain. And I’m scared and angry and confused and angry again. And my parents are like:
What’s up with you?
And I don’t even know where to start. And they look like my parents, they sound like my parents, but there’s something . . .
off
about them, so I tell them that we’ll talk later and I need to go to my room, and that’s when Doctor Campbell rings the doorbell.’

‘Your parents didn’t call Doctor 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.’

Mrs O’Donnell leaned forwards in her seat.

‘Do you think
Simon
told him to come around 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 disorientated by the effect of their . . . of the trance, then, no, I don’t think your boyfriend would have told Doctor Campbell to come around 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
that were hypnotised,’ Mrs O’Donnell said. ‘It was us that were put into a trance. This could be just some weird altered version of reality caused by Danny’s act.’

That had been Doctor 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 total of
a thousand people
saw something that the other nine-hundred-and-ninety-six did not; whose version of the events would you believe first? Honestly, it wouldn’t be ours.’

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 hypnotised? Are seeing things differently to 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 maths 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 colour. 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, bemused.

‘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 nought-point-four,’ I said. ‘We are nought-point-four of a per cent.’

‘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 foetal 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 definitely.

‘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 realise 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 hypnotised 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 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 recognise their faces, but no longer recognise
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.

‘OK,’ 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 fine, Kyle. Now let’s get going.’

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 was 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 engine 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 with them when they leave. They cling to their possessions almost like 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.