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Danny went down the line of four and welcomed us on stage and then got us to sit on four chairs, Lilly, then me, then Mrs O’Donnell, with Mr Peterson at the end.

I felt awkward, and not just because this was the same stage I’d died on as a comedian, but simply because I was next to Lilly. There’s . . . oh, it’s complicated . . . an odd
dynamic . . . er . . . look, I’ll leave this for now because I’m talking about Danny.

‘I want you to answer me truthfully,’ he said to us, but it was clear that the performance was for the sake of the gathered crowd. ‘It’s very important that the answers you give are absolutely honest. Can you do that?’

We sort of nodded and mumbled, unsure as to what Danny wanted.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Have I prepared any of you for this moment? Have I coached you or in any way influenced you?’

Shakes of heads and muttered ‘no’s.

‘OK. Thank you.’

He turned to the audience.

‘Now, what I’m going to attempt today is no less than the hypnosis of our subjects here.’ The statement caused a small buzz of excitement among the crowd. ‘While I haven’t had the time to put our courageous volunteers into a deep hypnotic trance, I am going to try to relax them to the point where they can carry out a few . . . er . . . tasks for me, just to show that they are indeed in a suggestible state.’

He smiled, suddenly seeming miles away from the gawky, socially useless kid I’d lived next door to all my life.

‘Give me a couple of minutes, can you?’ he asked the audience, then spun on his heel, came back to where we were sitting, and squatted in front of us.

‘I want you to relax.’ His voice was quiet, mellow, soothing. ‘I want you to close your eyes and study the darkness you find there.’

OK
, I thought,
I’ll play along.

I closed my eyes.

‘Concentrate on my voice,’ Danny said. ‘Let it be your guide. You must not open your eyes until I tell you. If you understand me, nod your heads now.’

I nodded. Already my head felt heavy. It stayed nodded down.

‘Good.’ Danny’s voice was even more soothing. ‘There is so much weight inside your heads, too many thoughts. We need to let go of them. I want you to imagine that the darkness you are seeing now is the screen of a television set. All dark. Dark. Dark and empty.

‘Now, imagine a ball of light in the centre of the screen.
It’s bright.
Too
bright. It’s a circle of light that is really, really bright at its centre, but gets hazy towards the edges.
See
the ball of light.
See
the hazy edges.
See
the darkness that surrounds it. Imagine it precisely, and hold it in your mind. You
must
see it. You must see it clearly. You
can
see it. I know you can.’

As he spoke, the image he wanted me to see settled into my mind. I saw it in perfect detail, could even see the hazy edges, and it
was
too bright.

Uncomfortably so.

‘Now
concentrate.
Concentrate and let your body relax. Let your fingers relax, one by one. Notice that when you relax those fingers, the ball of light becomes dimmer. You are turning down the light, just by relaxing your fingers. Relax them some more. Turn the brightness down some more.’

I let my fingers relax. The light lost some of its brightness.

‘Now I want you to start to relax your hands, let them become weightless. Watch the light dimming as you do it. Feel the relaxation spread to your arms, making them weightless. The light dims some more. It’s all hazy now,
that light, and as you relax it gets hazier. Let your body relax, let your mind become soothed by the light as it fades, relax your arms, your shoulders, your neck. Let your mind grow as dark as the screen, as the light fades, as your body relaxes. Let go of all the thoughts that are weighing you down.’

I felt my mind do just that, letting go of all the baggage, all the chatter.

As the light faded out into perfect darkness I realised that Danny’s voice was fading out with it.

It didn’t seem odd, in fact I welcomed the darkness.

Soon there was nothing else.

Just darkness.

And peace.

Peace, perfect peace.

I’d never realised that my head was so darned noisy, that thoughts and images and sounds are ringing around it constantly. You don’t think of your head as being a particularly chaotic place to live.

I wasn’t asleep, I knew that, but I must have been in a state pretty close to sleep.

I could still hear things
outside
my head, but I couldn’t focus on them.

There’s a difference between hearing something and listening to it.

It’s kind of hard to say much more about the experience – soon I wasn’t thinking, or seeing, or hearing: I wasn’t anything really.

As it turned out, however, it didn’t last long and . . .

. . .
orgotten that tapes need turning over? How did they ever get to be a dominant technology? You don’t turn a CD over – why would you split an album up into two halves?

It’s funny, all the ordinary stuff – the last of my ordinary stuff – all of it fitting on to one side of a cassette.

The next thing I remember . . .

The next thing I remember is that I woke up.

Suddenly.

Pulled out of a state of peace and calm, I opened my eyes and for a few seconds I couldn’t process anything and just sat there, waiting for my brain to start working properly again.

The world was a sickening, Technicolor blur. I could see rows of blurry pink balloons that were, perhaps, faces. I could sense people around me, could hear sounds and feel people close to me, but it took a while for me to put everything together.

Then my vision kicked back in. The pink balls I had seen were the faces of the audience, staring up at me and the other people upon the stage.

I had a sudden feeling that something was different; that something had changed.

I looked around and saw that Lilly was opening her eyes. Her eyes looked . . . I don’t know, almost
supernaturally
blue as they locked on to mine, and this weird half-smile played across her lips. Then she broke eye contact, and her face kinda creased up with puzzlement.

I followed her eye line.

Danny was standing close by, watching us with a strange expression on
his
face.

It wasn’t a look of confusion.

It was more like shock.

He was standing totally still, hands clenched into tight fists at his sides. He seemed frozen to the spot.

Completely immobile.

‘What on earth is going on?’ someone asked, and I followed the sound back to my right-hand side.

Mrs O’Donnell was staring wide-eyed across the audience. Her pinched face looked alarmed. She was half-out of her seat as if she had been trying to stand, something had stopped her, and she hadn’t worked out what to do next.

And her face looked pale.

Very pale indeed.

‘What is it?’ I asked her. ‘What’s wrong?’

Instead of answering she just pointed out into the crowd and I noticed her hand was shaking. I followed her finger and realised I was shaking too.

I felt my mind fighting to explain it away.

And failing.

Everyone in the audience was statue-still, frozen in their place just like Danny was. But they weren’t just
still:
they were utterly motionless. And their faces were frozen in an expression exactly the same as Danny’s. You know when you freeze-frame a DVD and everything stops until you press ‘play’ again? It was a lot like that. I guess.

One of my dad’s favourite pictures is that weird one by Edvard Munch called
The Scream.
He’s got a print of it in his study, and we used to joke that it was the real thing, back when the original got stolen. The painting shows a figure – you can’t really tell if it’s a man or a woman – standing on a bridge, in front of a blood-red sky. A couple of figures are watching in the background, but they’re not important, the main focus is that figure in the foreground; hands on either side of its face, its mouth wide open.

I’ve looked at that picture more than a hundred times, hanging there over my dad’s desk, and I have tried to figure out what is going on in that figure’s head, to make it look so full of despair.

I still don’t know, but I saw it imprinted across the faces of everyone in Millgrove.

Everyone except four, anyway.

I – I haven’t got the words to describe how disturbing the sight was. Every one of those faces was gripped by some fear, or despair, that had literally frozen them to the spot. It was too unreal, too weird, and I turned away.

Mrs O’Donnell had sat back down, and was gazing around her in snaps and jerks.

I felt a pressure on my arm and realised that Lilly had just grabbed hold of it as her eyes raked the scene, trying to understand what she was seeing. It felt . . .
good
. . . to have her reach out for me in that moment.

As I said earlier, strange dynamic.

Mr Peterson’s face had turned ashen and he was just staring ahead with his eyes bulging out of his head.

And then I got it.

It was a joke.

Something that Danny had told them all to do when we woke up, just to mess with our heads.

It was part of the act.

I laughed.

‘Very funny, everyone,’ I said loudly. ‘You had us worried, there.’

No one moved. No one laughed. No one did anything but remain still.

I waited.

Nothing.

No joke, then.

So what was going on?

A weird kind of panic descended.

I mean, this was just plain freaky.

These were all people we knew; people we saw every day; people we had grown up with; said ‘hi’ to if we saw them on the street.

But they weren’t moving.

They weren’t moving at all.

I’m not sure I’ve done this . . .
stillness
. . . justice yet. I mean, this wasn’t people
pretending
to be still. You know, like when they play musical statues, or whatever, and they freeze, but not really.

The truth is, people can’t stay still for long. Not without a whole lot of practice. Not this amount of people. Not for this long. Human bodies aren’t built for inactivity. They sway. They smile. They move, even if it’s only a little. They giggle.

None of the audience was doing any of these things.

It was eerie and unnatural.

Mrs O’Donnell said, ‘I’ve had enough of this.’

She got to her feet, stomped over to Danny and pushed him, very gently. He didn’t offer any resistance. He moved, but in the way an inanimate object moves when pushed. He swayed slightly. Then stopped. His face didn’t change. Not a muscle of his body twitched.

Mrs O’Donnell snapped her fingers in front of his face. He didn’t react. He didn’t even blink, and I realised that I hadn’t seen any of the audience blink in all the time we had been awake.

I had a really bad feeling spreading through me, the kind that brings bumps of gooseflesh up on the skin of your arms. That makes the nape of your neck feel cold.

Mr Peterson was sitting, rocking backwards and forwards, while his lips moved in silent conversation with himself.

‘What’s wrong with
him?
’ Lilly asked.

I shrugged.

‘Shock, I guess,’ I said. ‘I sort of feel like sitting down and doing it myself.’

I pointed out over the audience.

‘The question we
ought
to be concentrating on is: what’s wrong with
them?
’

Lilly took my arm again, and her fingers fixed tight this time.

‘What about Simon?’ she whispered.

‘Let’s go see,’ I said, feeling disappointed.
How bad is that, by the way? To feel disappointed that she was concerned about my best friend?

I led her from the stage and on to the green below.

Among the crowd, the level of weirdness was raised by a factor of ten.

Or twenty.

Down there, the effect was even more astonishing.

It was as if everyone had been switched off in the middle of whatever it was they were doing. Like the stopped mechanical exhibits you’d see at closing time in a museum, turned off in mid-motion.

People held canned drinks in the air. Kids had their hands in packets of crisps. Old man Davis was frozen in the midst of scratching his nose. Annie Bishop and her boyfriend, Nigel Something-or-other, were in the middle of a kiss. Ned Carter
was looking up at the sky. Ursula Lincoln was coughing, with her hand up to her mouth.