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About halfway to where we had left Simon I found my mum and dad. They were just sitting there, totally still, my mum’s finger pointing accusingly at my meek-looking dad. They had been arguing, and then they had just stopped.

There were only four of us outside of stopped time, and able to move around those that were frozen in it.

But it wasn’t time that had stopped. Things were moving. It was only the people that were stopped. There were flies buzzing around; wasps crawling around the drinking holes of soft drink cans; clouds of midges swirling in the summer air. Birds still crossed the sky. A cool breeze blew, carrying sweet wrappers and other discarded items. Mrs Winifred’s Italian greyhound, Bambi, was walking around, looking lost.

Whatever this was, it seemed only to affect human beings.

All human beings except me, Lilly, Mrs O’Donnell and Mr Peterson.

It was one hundred per cent weird.

‘I’m scared,’ Lilly confessed.

‘Me too.’ I smiled a tight-lipped smile. ‘But we’ve got to keep it together. There’s an explanation for this. We’ve just got to find it.’

‘Well, I don’t have an explanation,’ Lilly said, pouting. ‘Not a one. I mean this is impossible, you realise that, don’t you? It’s like one of those awful movies on the Sci-Fi Channel. I really hate science fiction.’

Standing there – looking afraid, with fear-wide eyes, dilated pupils and all her usual defences down – Lilly looked . . . well, really pretty.

It’s something about her that she tries to hide, so I guess it’s her way of staying out of things, by distancing herself from them. You don’t get involved, you don’t get let down, I guess.

Now, though, she looked different.

Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparked with life. No longer a disinterested observer, she had come to life.

Anyway, Simon was sitting in the exact same place we’d left him. His hands were folded in his lap and his face was frozen in the same open-mouthed expression as the others.

Lilly touched Simon’s face.

‘He’s warm,’ she said, moving her fingers to his neck. She held two fingers on the side of his neck, held them there trying to find a pulse, and then she smiled. ‘Still alive.’

The relief in her voice was obvious.

I felt a harsh twinge of jealousy. Yeah, I know, not exactly an honourable reaction, and I’m not proud.

‘If he’s alive, there’s hope,’ I offered, and Lilly’s face brightened.

‘But how do we wake them up?’ she asked. ‘We were the ones who were supposed to be hypnotised. Did it go wrong? Did Danny hypnotise everyone else? Even
himself?’

I was going to attempt an answer, when my train of thought was interrupted by a loud wailing sound behind us.

Mr Peterson had lost it.

Just seriously lost it.

When we got back to the stage we found him on his knees, head in his hands, making the horrible sound we’d heard. His face was red and his cheeks were wet with tears. His head was bowed, revealing a sunburnt bald spot in his greying hair.

Mrs O’Donnell was bent over, trying to comfort him, but he thrashed her away with wild, windmill arms. There was spittle around his lips.

‘What happened?’ I asked her.

Mrs O’Donnell shook her head.

‘I don’t know. He’d stopped the rocking and was sitting there in his seat, looking around. And then this . . .’

Lilly approached him warily, keeping her distance in case those arms struck out again.

‘Mr Peterson?’ she asked soothingly. ‘Can you tell us what is wrong?’

There was no reply, just an increase in the volume of Mr Peterson’s wailing. A thin, high-pitched noise that sounded more like the voice of Mr Peebles than his own.

Suddenly it hit me: just how much trouble we were in. Everyone on the village green had been inexplicably, completely immobilised, by some force or sickness that we couldn’t guess. Only the four people who’d been hypnotised as part of Danny’s act remained unaffected by the event.

We were alone.

But where did that leave us? What could we do?

‘We need to get help,’ I said. I turned to Mrs O’Donnell. ‘The Happy Shopper is open today – how many people are working there?’

‘Just Tony,’ she said. ‘Tony Jefferson. Shop Manager. Everyone else is here.’

‘Let’s go and see how
he
is,’ I said.

Mrs O’Donnell tried to get Mr Peterson on to his feet, but he wasn’t having any of it. He just made that horrible wailing
sound and then collapsed into tears. They were the kind of tears that made a person’s whole body shake. Mrs O’Donnell couldn’t get close to him without him striking out at her.

‘You two go,’ she said to Lilly and me. ‘Go and see if Tony’s OK. I’ll stay here and make sure Rodney doesn’t do himself any harm.’

‘Rodney?’

Mrs O’Donnell pointed to Mr Peterson. I’d known him all my life and never knew his first name.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Rodney.’

‘And I’m Kate,’ Mrs O’Donnell said.

I gave her as close to a smile as I could manage, and nodded my head.

‘We’ll be back as soon as we can,’ I said.

Lilly and I made our way through the rows of stationary people, across the green, out on to the high street, past the shed, and towards the Happy Shopper.

The high street itself was deserted and strangely quiet. There were no cars driving down the road, which is – like – unheard of on a Saturday afternoon. Millgrove is a common alternative to the main carriageway and there’s
always
traffic.

We hurried as fast as we could without actually breaking into a jog.

‘What’s causing this?’ Lilly asked me. ‘I mean, something’s got to be doing it.’

‘I’m afraid that, in the words of a certain science teacher, “We simply don’t have enough data to form a conclusion.”’ I used a rough approximation of Mr Cruikshank’s voice.

Lilly started to laugh, then seemed angry with herself for showing humour in such bizarre circumstances. I thought there might be a large measure of guilt behind it: we were walking around while Simon was frozen to the spot.

‘So where do we get more data?’ she asked.

I pointed to the bright windows of the shop ahead.

‘Here will be a start,’ I said.

The Happy Shopper was just like any other Happy Shopper anywhere on the planet.

Except smaller.

Millgrove didn’t do anything big, except maybe that idiot talent show.

I pushed open the advert-papered shop door.

The bell above the door rang. It wasn’t an electric buzzer
or beeper; it was a genuine, old-fashioned brass bell.

I walked in with Lilly following close on my heels.

There were two other people in the shop: Tony Jefferson, standing behind the counter, and Eddie Beattie over by the drinks cooler.

Tony had been freeze-framed in the act of refilling one of the displays of Wrigley’s gum that stood on the counter, strategically placed for those last-minute buys.

Eddie Beattie was choosing a can of high-impact cider from the fridge, and he looked like he’d just made up his mind and was reaching towards a shelf in the cooler when . . .

When whatever happened, happened.

Up until that moment I had been thinking that the state of the people on the green had something to do with Danny and his hypnosis. I know it wasn’t a likely idea, but it was a lot more comforting than any other I could come up with.

But Tony and Eddie hadn’t been present at the green.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t restricted to the talent show audience.

‘Is it just Millgrove?’ Lilly’s voice quavered. ‘Or is it the whole world?’

I shook my head.

‘There’s only one way to find out,’ I said.

I popped the catch on the shop counter, just like I’d seen the staff do for years, and I lifted the flap that let me in. I ignored Tony, located the radio he kept behind there, flicked the
power
button and turned up the volume.

A harsh shriek of static tore through the still air.

‘Sorry,’ I said, turning the volume down a few notches so the noise didn’t
quite
hurt. Then I spun the tuning dial, searching the wavelengths and bands for a signal.

Any signal.

All I found were variations on the same general theme of ear-splitting interference.

‘Is it broken?’ Lilly asked.

I tried to remember if it was playing earlier when we’d stopped in for cold drinks, but if it had, it hadn’t registered.

‘I guess it could be,’ I said. ‘Or something could be jamming radio signals. Or, I suppose, I could be finding no stations because there
are
no stations out there to find . . .’

Lilly’s suddenly panicked face told me that maybe some of my ideas ought to remain inside my head, and not
be just thrown out at someone unprepared for them.

‘Or maybe it’s sunspot activity, electromagnetic storms, UFOs, or the well-planned revenge of the dolphins,’ I said, trying humour instead.

‘How can you make jokes at a time like this?’ Lilly demanded and I felt about an inch-and-a-half tall. ‘It’s not as if you have a particularly good history as a comedian.’

‘Actually, I’m just trying to find a way to deal with all this,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m not taking things seriously, I honestly don’t know what else to do.’

‘Simon keeps saying how immature you are,’ she said coldly.

I felt my cheeks get hot.

‘Still,’ she added cruelly.

Lilly’s words stung, and I blurted out, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Just what I said,’ she said. Then she looked down at her feet. ‘Look, can we not do this now?’

‘You started it.’

‘See?’ she said, almost victoriously. ‘Immature.
You started it
,’ she whined.

I had a hundred things I could say on the tip of my tongue; all witty, devastating, and some of them were even true . . .

‘I think I’ll try the phone,’ I said instead.

Run through the numbers you’d try in a situation like this one and I bet the first one you’d dial is the same number I did.

Three digits.

999.

Emergency Services.

Didn’t even ring.

I’d got a dial tone, but when I put the numbers into the keypad the phone just went dead. There was an empty, hollow silence. Then a few, ominous clicks on the line. Then more silence.

I tried another couple of numbers I knew – a friend in Crowley and another in Cambridge – and got nothing. I rang my own home phone. Nothing again. No line outside the village: no line inside.

I put the phone down.

‘Well?’ Lilly asked.

I shook my head.

‘Phones are dead,’ I said.

‘How is that possible?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe whatever this is stretches further than Millgrove.’

Lilly’s face screwed up and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. I wouldn’t have blamed her. I felt like crying myself. To her credit she pulled herself out of it before the tears actually started.

‘So what do we do now?’ she asked.

I shrugged, then realised that was a bit cold. It might sound a little self-absorbed, but Lilly’s words about Simon thinking I’m immature kept ringing in my head. Yeah, I know: way to turn a crisis of maybe global proportions into a bit of navel-gazing about whether my best friend really likes me.

I needed to rise above it.

Deep breath.

‘We go back,’ I said. ‘Back to the green. There’s got to be something there that can tell us what’s happened.’

Lilly didn’t look convinced but she nodded.

We started towards the door. I grabbed a couple of cold
cans of Red Bull from the fridge and left the exact change on the counter.

Lilly pointed up at the CCTV camera above the door. A red light shone below its lens.

‘Maybe it can show us what happened,’ she said hopefully.

I shook my head.

‘It’s a dummy,’ I told her. ‘Danny helps out here, and he said it’s not real. A shop-lifting deterrent.’

‘Oh,’ Lilly said.

‘Good idea, though,’ I said clumsily.

‘Thanks,’ Lilly said.

An uneasy truce had perhaps been reached, just before a fight broke out.

And then we left the shop in silence.

When we got back to the green, it hadn’t changed. I think that I had been hoping that things would be sorted out by the time we returned, that everyone would have started moving again and we could just forget all that had happened, laugh it off and wait for a sensible explanation on TV later on.

Mrs O’Donnell – it was still hard to think of her as Kate –
looked like she’d aged about five years in the time we’d been away. She was usually a neat, forty-something woman with a peroxide bob kind of hairstyle that made it look like she wished she was still in her thirties.

Or twenties, even.

Now her hair was messed up, her face was beaded with sweat, and frown lines ploughed up her brow.

She was standing over the foetal form of Mr Peterson and was obviously losing patience with him. In fact, she seemed on the verge of delivering a kick to his backside.

She looked relieved to see Lilly and me, even when we shook our heads to show her we’d made no progress.

‘He’s been like this since you left,’ she said, pointing to the prone form of the ventriloquist. ‘You kids are handling this a whole lot better than he is.’

I wondered if that meant we were pretty darned tough.

Or whether we simply lacked the imagination to see how bad things really were.

We told Mrs O’Donnell about our trip to the shop. She seemed especially disturbed by the fact that the phones weren’t working, but to be honest I was too. It
hinted at a problem that stretched further than the village boundaries.

‘We need a TV,’ Mrs O’Donnell said. ‘The internet. Anything that will give us a bigger picture.’

‘The radio and telephone don’t work,’ Lilly reminded her.

‘Doesn’t mean that every form of communication is down,’ Mrs O’Donnell said. ‘Come on.’

‘Where?’ Lilly asked.

‘My house.’

‘What about him?’ I pointed at Mr Peterson.

Mrs O’Donnell shook her head.

‘We’ll have to come back for him,’ she said. ‘I can’t get him to do anything but that.’