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They just kept staring, and I realised that they weren’t looking at me at all.

They were looking
behind me.

I felt like a pantomime character who had suddenly been warned ‘BEHIND YOU!’ as I turned my head and stared back over my shoulder.

Then I just felt sick.

The whole village, it seemed, was moving in an unnaturally neat formation: utterly silent, perfectly organised, and heading down the high street.

Heading towards the village green.

Heading towards us.

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 synchronised.

I recognised 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 metres away from us.

Perfectly in synch.

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.

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 centimetres 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 realised 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.

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-coloured and minutely thin, these threads sprayed out of the dot at the centre of each bump, like water under pressure, or pink silly string from a can. Each thread, or filament, was ten to fifteen centimetres long, and seemed able to support itself, standing out from his flesh like thin, hard fibres.

The filaments began to stretch, pulling themselves further from the bumps that housed them, adding twenty centimetres 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.

The fibres 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-coloured 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-coloured threads. Fibre-optic cables.

‘Not mutating,’ I said. ‘Connecting.’

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.

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 fibres.

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 fibres, 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.

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 metres 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.