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The question baffled me.

‘Look,’ I said, taking her arm and trying to drag her away from the silo. ‘Just come with me . . .’

She didn’t let me finish.

‘NO!’ she said, and she said it very loudly.

So loudly it attracted the attention of the Naylors.

Time had completely run out.

The Naylors had spotted me now and were making
their way back towards us.

‘You want to be like them?’ I asked, a cruel note in my voice.

Annette’s tears came thick and fast now.

‘That’s all I ever wanted,’ she said, and turned on her heel. Before I could stop her she moved into the silo.

The moment she entered, the alphabet seemed to sense she was there.

I watched, terrified, as the characters started to twist and flex through the air towards her, the hooks extending to reach her with something that looked like hunger.

‘ANNETTE!’ I screamed, but she didn’t appear to hear me.

Instead, she threw her arms apart and made a cross shape of her body – like a sacrifice – and then the hooks and eyes and squiggles and lines closed in around her, superimposing their alien message over her. At first they fizzed and skated across her skin, and then they stopped moving and seemed to sink into her flesh.

There was a smile on her face as her body absorbed
the letters of that terrible language, and I think that scared me more than anything else I was seeing.

Her smile.

I turned and ran, back the way Lilly and I had come.

Lilly caught up with me before I made it back to the road. She wasn’t even out of breath.

‘Where’s Annette?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘She wouldn’t come,’ I said. ‘She actually
wanted
to become one of them.’

I thought Lilly would be angry that I couldn’t persuade Annette, but instead she just nodded.

‘I guess she finally found a way to fit in . . .’

I looked at her blankly.

‘A few years ago me and Annette were at camp together. Girl Guides, if you must know, but tell anyone else and you’re dead.

‘Anyway, long story short and all that, we kind of paired up while we were there. We were talking one night, out under the stars, and it was probably
because
we
weren’t really friends that she confided in me.

‘She told me about how she had never felt like she fitted in, that there was this huge weight of expectation that everyone put on her, but that no matter how hard she tried she always felt like an outsider, an impostor, a fake. She’d even thought about killing herself because she couldn’t bear the idea of going through life alone.

‘Nothing I said helped, and after camp she never spoke to me again. She showed me a part of herself that was secret, and it would have got in the way if I’d been the one to approach her.’

Lilly took a deep breath and continued.

‘You did your best, Kyle. You’re a nice guy, you know that?’

She gave me a smile, but I didn’t feel like a nice guy.

A nice guy would have found a way to save Annette.

‘So the silo can turn us into one of them?’ Lilly said. ‘Are you tempted?’

I shook my head.

‘Not even hardly,’ I said.

Lilly raised an eyebrow.

‘My parents were barely getting along,’ I explained. ‘Now
it’s like nothing ever happened to disturb their happiness.’

‘Is that so bad?’

‘Not if you like lies so much you want to live one,’ I snapped. ‘My dad ran off, and I don’t see why we should forget it. Forgive it? Sure, we could do that. But
forget?
Forget the sadness he caused? That would be plain wrong.’

‘You think that sadness is better than happiness?’

‘No. But it is important.’

‘Because we learn from it?’ Lilly asked.

I nodded.

‘The real question is do we tell the others?’ I said.

‘Tell them what?’

‘That they just have to go to Naylor’s farm and the nightmare’s over for them.’

‘There are few enough of us around as it is,’ Lilly said. ‘Why on earth would we want to tell them that?’

A secret then.

Shared between Lilly and me.

I liked that.

We walked down the road to meet the other two.

We joined up with the others and we told our lie.

Nothing happened, we said.

It almost made me want to retract the lie when Kate O’Donnell gave us a triumphant
I told you so look,
but Lilly and I had made our pact of silence, so we just fell into step with her and Mr Peterson and carried on down the road.

My stomach felt empty and hollow and I wished one of us had had the foresight to bring some kind of provisions along. It had been a long time since I had last eaten.

That made me think of the second can of Red Bull, and I put my hand in my pocket to pull it out. There was a dull, metallic sound as if the can had hit against something in my pocket, but I didn’t think about it at the time, because I was already greedily pulling the ring pull and taking a couple of sips. I handed the can to Lilly and she smiled, drank a bit, handed it back.

I offered the can to the adults – Mr Peterson took a drink, Kate just frowned at the can and shook her head – and we kept on walking.

It was Mr Peterson who heard it first.

I turned around and saw that he had stopped in the middle of the road behind us. He had his head cocked to the left and was cupping his ear with his hand. I motioned to Lilly and Kate and walked back to where he was standing.

‘You OK there, Mr P?’ I asked.

He looked exhausted, his face red and blotchy, dark shadows under his eyes, and his greying hair was sticking out at strange angles.

‘Can you hear it?’ He asked in a breathless voice and he sounded so earnest and . . . and
afraid,
I guess, and it contrasted with the silly cupped ear thing so that I almost burst out laughing.

Almost.

But then I heard it too.

Lilly and Kate had joined us but I hardly noticed them arrive.

I was listening to the sound.

That is if ‘sound’ is the right word for it. Because it seemed like it was made up of a lot of sounds: a high-pitched hiss like gas escaping at pressure from a ruptured pipe; an insectile
chitter
like a locust swarm; that deep, bass vibration we’d heard in the village; a high, keening wail.

It sounded distant.

But not that distant.

Certainly not distant enough.

And I realised that I had heard the sound before, back at Kate O’Donnell’s house, just before she shut her computer down.

‘What
is
that?’ Kate asked.

‘Nothing good,’ I said.

The noise drew closer.

I’m not exaggerating, my skin bristled with gooseflesh.

There was something about the sound that hit me at a primal level. A bit like how the sound of a Tyrannosaur would have affected a tiny mammal that stumbled into its killing grounds.

Closer, the sound was terrifying.

It sounded like something was out there in the half-light, getting closer and closer to us with every passing second. Something awful, something dangerous, something that we could not even
begin
to imagine the shape or size of.

We started walking, moving away from the sound. It was the only thing to do. Whatever was out there was coming after
us,
I was certain.

Lilly’s walking pace speeded up, and we all matched her speed.

Everyone’s face reflected their fear.

Fear of whatever was making that sound.

Getting closer with every second.

We ran.

A jog became a run became a sprint and still that sound was close on our heels.

My eyes were squeezed shut and I had stopped thinking of anything except that noise behind us.

Suddenly I realised: the noise was no longer
behind
us.

It was to the side of us.

Running parallel to the road, across the fields, shadowing us.

Running parallel to us.

Running to overtake us.

Except, of course, running isn’t the right word for it at all. Sure, I could hear it crashing through the undergrowth at great speed, but there were no footsteps. Just this weird
phasing
static that was more like some stereo-panning effect from a video game than an actual sound in the real world.

I opened my eyes and started scanning the hedges by the side of the road for a sign of the thing that was making such a terrible noise. I could see nothing there, and that made me even more terrified. I ran faster.

I’ve never been particularly athletic, but I think I could have run for the county if I’d matched the speed I was making then, spurred on by that inhuman sound.

I was even starting to feel that I might outrun it.

Suddenly Lilly screamed my name.

The scream pulled me back to the real world.

I turned my head to face forwards.

Just in time.

I killed the speed. Ground to a halt and stood there, gasping for air.

I realised that Lilly had just saved my life.

The thing that had been following us, then moving alongside us, had now overtaken us.

It was waiting there, directly in front of me.

Blocking my way forwards.

It’s not easy to describe it. In fact, the more I think about it, it’s probably easier to talk about what this thing
wasn’t,
than to struggle with what it was. I mean, I don’t think the thing was solid, and I’m reasonably sure that it didn’t have a form that the human eye could recognise. It didn’t look alive, but it didn’t look
not
-alive, either. It didn’t
look
natural,
but it didn’t look entirely
unnatural
.

Oh yeah, I’m making a good job of this.

Let me try again.

It seemed more like
something missing
from this world, than something added to it. It was as if there were a tear in the skin of our world, and it had revealed this terrible thing beneath it.

At the time I remember thinking about those pictures you see in anatomy books, when they show a person, and then the bones and muscles inside them.

You strip away the skin of this world, I thought, and this is what you find hiding underneath.

‘What in God’s name is it?’ Kate O’Donnell asked, and I saw her cross herself.

I shook my head.

It was too much.

This tear in the world had been following us, hunting us, and now it had us.

And we were too tired and too scared to do anything about it.

It moved closer, pushing against the surface of our
world and making the air seem to bulge as it did so. I stood there wondering what stuff this . . .
thing,
this tear, was made of, and I wondered what it would do to us when it reached us: whether it would hurt; whether it would dissolve us, melt us, or suck us through into its cold blackness until we were nothing.

There were tears streaming down my cheeks, and I could feel the cold breath of infinity roaring in my face.

‘Hey!’ someone shouted from somewhere behind me. ‘Are you going to just stand there and let that thing wipe you off the face of the planet?’

I turned around.

Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

By the side of the road, standing straight and tall, stood Danny. He nodded towards the tear in space and cocked his head to one side.

‘If you have any interest in surviving the next few seconds,’ he said, ‘then I suggest you toss over that video camera you picked up on the green.’

I thought,
Video camera? What is he talking about?

The air bulged again and the tear moved closer.

I thought,
How does he know I’m carrying his mum’s video camera?

Danny said, ‘Quickly. Throw it here.’

I reached down and fumbled the camera out of my pocket. Lights were flashing on its tiny casing.

It had switched itself on when the can of drink hit it.

It had been filming the inside of my pocket all that time.

‘Do it now,’ Danny advised and I threw it over to him. He caught it in one hand and switched it off.

Then he smiled and nodded towards the tear in space. It was already drawing back, moving away, as if its interest in us – the interest that had it screaming across the countryside – had suddenly ended.

‘Danny, what the –?’ I started, but Danny shut me up with a dismissive wave of his hand.

‘I guess you all have some questions,’ Danny said, and his face suddenly looked sad. ‘Follow me and I’ll try to answer them for you.’

Then the sad look was gone.

He turned and started walking into the field behind him, away from that terrible patch of moving darkness, away
from the road, away from Millgrove, away from Crowley.

After a few seconds, we followed.

We trudged across a field sun-baked into clay, following Danny Birnie in pursuit of answers. Danny had been there at the start of all this, and there was something
right
about his being here now.

I realised that I was afraid. Not of the terrible thing that had been seconds away from destroying us, but afraid of my friend.

Of Danny.

Of what he had become.

He walked quickly, neither slowing down nor turning to check that we were keeping up with him. Or if we were even following him, for that matter.

The sky was almost full dark now, with a summer-stuffed moon looming on the horizon, surrounded by wisps of cloud and tiny, icy chips of starlight.

For centuries humankind had stared up into a sky like that and wondered whether they were alone in the universe.

Now I thought we had our answer.

A dark, tall shape loomed out of the darkness ahead and
Danny led us towards it. Eventually the shape resolved itself out of the near dark, revealed itself to be an old, ramshackle barn on the edge of the field.

‘I guess here is as good as anywhere,’ Danny said.

He walked into the barn.

It was no longer Danny, I was certain of that. He was
one of them
. This could be a trap, an ambush, a massacre.