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‘Let me try,’ I said.

She nodded.

I crouched down over the man. His eyes were squeezed as tight shut as eyes can be. His lips moved rapidly, but no sounds came from between them.

‘Mr Peterson?’ I said. ‘Can you hear me?’

If he could, he was making no visible signs.

‘Mr Peterson?’ I touched his shoulder as I spoke and
suddenly he let out a scream of terror. His eyes shot open like the eyes of a china doll. They met mine and for an instant he appeared perfectly sane and rational.

‘Are you all right, Mr Peterson?’ I said.

His eyes were wide, but he looked like he was back with us.

‘Everything . . . it’s all changed,’ he said, so quietly I had to move my ear closer to his lips to hear.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him.

His voice got louder, stronger.

‘They’re gone,’ he said. ‘Changed. All of them. You hear me? I . . . I SEE THEM!’

His words sent a physical chill down my spine.

‘See what?’ I demanded. ‘What can you see?’

‘All of them.’ His eyes were stretched even wider now, and his voice was little more than a rasping whisper as he said, ‘
They are to us as we are to apes
.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked desperately.

Mr Peterson looked confused, as if I was missing some obvious point and he wasn’t sure how to explain it in easier terms.

‘It means that . . . we are the only . . . the only ones left . . . four . . . four against all . . .’

His voice trailed off and suddenly his face lost its urgent intensity, going slack, almost sleepy.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Tell me what you mean.’

Tears streamed down his face and he gave me the weakest of smiles.

‘I . . . I . . . I’ve
groken ny gicycle,
’ he said in Mr Peebles’ voice, a falsetto voice of utter insanity. ‘I
get
you don’t really care
oo-at’s
wrong with ne.’

And then he started laughing, laughing in that awful, high-pitched way that he reserved for his ugly-headed ventriloquist’s dummy.

I got up, feeling very cold and very scared. We all backed away from that terrible sound and left the green.

Mrs O’Donnell’s house was on Carlyle Road, an old terrace that ran behind the high street. It’s one of those narrow streets that mean people have to park half on and half off the kerbs.

We were midway up the road when Mrs O’Donnell stopped. A beautifully clipped hedge bordered a tiny concrete garden and I thought we had arrived at her house, but she pointed through an open front door where two young children – a boy and a girl – had been in the process of coming out, perhaps on their way to the green, before being struck down by the . . .
event.

The girl was waiting by the front door; the boy was stuck, mid-stride, in the hallway.

‘Annie and Nicholas Cross,’ Mrs O’Donnell said, and I thought I could see tears in her eyes. ‘I babysit for them now and then. She’s six and he’s eight. They’re nice kids. What
could have done this to them? To everyone?’

I wondered why she was asking us.

But what
could
have done it?

And then I made one of those unlikely connections the human brain is so good at making – joined together a couple of pieces of information that really didn’t belong together.

Today’s events and something that happened a couple of years ago.

There were some local kids near Naylor’s farm, on the outer reaches of the village, who swore blind that they saw lights in the sky over one of old man Naylor’s grain silos. Bright, moving lights that didn’t behave like ordinary aircraft.

To start with there was a certain amount of sneering and laughing, but they were absolutely certain, and a report made it into the local weekly paper.

Although why alien craft always appear over grain silos and open fields rather than over towns and cities has always bothered me. If there really were aliens flying their spaceships above places in the middle of nowhere . . . well, maybe they aren’t all that smart, you know?

Anyway, I suddenly started wondering whether it might
be connected. I’d joked about UFOs earlier to Lilly – went down like a lead battleship, too – but what other alternatives were there?

A chemical accident.

A biological plague.

A fracture in the fabric of time.

Were they any more likely?

I thought about the mad things that Mr Peterson had said. Things I had ignored because . . . well, because they
were
so mad. But had he seen something that our eyes hadn’t?

Had we been
invaded
and didn’t even know it?

I shook my head to clear the stupid thought. What kind of alien invasion would cause people to stand still, for goodness sake? I mean, how was that an invasion exactly?

I was filling the gaps in what I knew, and painting them ET green.

Surely that was a sign of madness, too.

Mrs O’Donnell’s house was tidy and neat, just like the woman herself. Actually, being honest about my first impression, it was way more than tidy: as if its contents had just come out of protective coverings. There was a heavy
smell of furniture polish and artificial flowers. I guessed she spent a lot of her free time cleaning.

The walls were pastel pink with paintings of flowers and horses hanging on them. The books that graced her neat shelves were all of the chick-lit variety. I realised that Mrs O’Donnell had, at no point, expressed concern for a
Mr
O’Donnell, and her house reflected his absence from her thoughts.

The TV was small and old-school, and it wasn’t even hooked up to a hi-fi. There was a DVD player and a cheap Freeview box. She switched on the TV and its screen came up blank. No static, just a blue screen. She flicked through the channels slowly with a remote, as if she wasn’t a hundred per cent certain how it worked. There were no stations, just the same, neutral, blue screen. She killed the TV and shook her head.

The living room led on through an arch into a dining area, with the corner made into a workstation. A very neat workstation: computer, keyboard, mouse. No piles of papers or stacks of disks.

She pushed the power button to boot up her iMac
and we waited for it to warm up.

It only took a few seconds of absolute silence for us to realise that something had gone wrong.

The usual Apple loading screen did not appear.

In its place were strings of characters that did not belong to any alphabet I have ever seen. Odd, hook-shaped characters; spiky circles that flexed and pulsed; characters that twisted together, seeming to revolve on the screen; characters that looked like they could be meant to represent human eyes; and a large number of short lines that bent at such weird angles they made me feel . . .
uncomfortable
viewing them.

It was like a language, I guess, but with letters that moved, constantly changing, evolving.

‘What is this . . .?’ Mrs O’Donnell asked, desperately pushing keys.

‘It looks like a virus,’ Lilly said, staring over Mrs O’Donnell’s shoulder.

‘I don’t think it’s a virus,’ I said. ‘Look at the way it’s set out. It looks like a document. I think that it’s text, just not in a language we can read.’

Lilly made a ‘hmph’ sound.

‘What?’ I asked her, perplexed.

‘You are
such
an idiot,’ she said.

‘What did I do?’ I protested.

‘I think that it’s text, just not in a language we can read.
’ She mimicked me with a cruel tone that made it sound a whole lot sillier than when I’d said it. ‘What’s that even supposed to mean? And how is it supposed to help us?’

I suppose that it’s time to throw some light on this . . .
oddness
. . . that was happening between Lilly and me.

Just to get it out of the way.

Now seems as good a time as any.

You see, I actually went out with Lilly for a few weeks.

This was quite a while before Simon did.

We were a couple of kids at school who fancied each other and ended up being girlfriend and boyfriend.

For a while.

I don’t really need to go into all the details. You . . . well, you know how it is. You spend a few break times together, you hold hands, you write their name in an exercise book or two, feel stupidly jealous if you see them talking to any other boy.
You laugh at each other’s jokes, and find yourself thinking about them when you’re not together.

I even went back to her house once.

Just once.

That was kind of the trouble, really.

I was invited round for ‘tea’ one evening.

Lilly’s family live in the old village store. From the road it’s pretty unremarkable: a flinted facade of the kind that’s common in Millgrove; a couple of bay windows that were probably display windows when the place was a shop; a nondescript front door.

I’d never given it a second look.

It looked like an ordinary house.

When I walked through the front door, trailing behind Lilly, I found myself in a room that was shop-sized. Literally. The whole ground floor of my house would have fitted in that one room.

It had a black-beamed ceiling and what looked like an acre of parquet flooring. There was a grand piano in there and it didn’t take up much of the available space. There were two vast but somehow elegant sofas that must have
cost thousands of pounds; there were oil paintings of horses and hounds on the walls that were . . . well, real paintings, not prints.

I’d never seen anything like it. Not in real life. And I realised two things: Lilly’s parents were far wealthier than she had ever let on, and I could never invite her back to my house.

I pictured showing Lilly into the front room of my house: a tiny room with no art on the walls, no piano, a little old TV and a tatty three-piece suite.

I imagined how bad, how ashamed, that would make me feel.

And then I met her parents.

Lilly’s mother prepared the food on a huge, enamelled Aga. We sat on wooden pews around an ancient table, and Lilly’s parents made conversation that was bright, witty and very, very clever. They talked about music, literature and art; they made instant jokes and witty asides, and they made me feel so uncultured and stupid that I squirmed in my seat every time they spoke to me.

I pictured taking Lilly back to meet my folks.

Discussions about rubbish television.

Chris and his endless chatter about football.

I felt ashamed at the very thought of it.

I started avoiding her soon after.

I invented phoney reasons and engineered even phonier arguments.

I stood her up. Twice.

Time passed, she got the message, and she broke up with me.

Then, while I was playing at being dad, I neglected Simon. I was too busy. Or thought I was. And in that time he and Lilly became friends.

Then more than friends.

And I hated my parents for not being like Lilly’s parents.

I hated my mum for not having an Aga.

I hated my dad for leaving us.

I hated them both for letting my best friend get the girl I had been too embarrassed to have for myself.

I never told Lilly why I acted the way I did. She must have thought I was the world’s biggest jerk.

At least she hadn’t seen the truth.

Now, next to her at Mrs O’Donnell’s house, I realised that sniping at me was partly her way of dealing with things. Just as mine was making jokes and Mr Peterson’s was to cut himself off from it all, to deny its existence.

If her comments also meant she was paying me back for being such an idiot to her, then I reckoned I deserved it.

‘I’m only saying that the groupings of symbols could be words,’ I said calmly. ‘Maybe we just don’t understand the language they’re written in.’

There was a moment of silence and, in the space between sounds, I thought I heard something. Something outside and probably distant, but as I listened harder it seemed to be getting closer.

It was a weird, disquieting sound, a bit like distant thunder, but somehow more
electrical
sounding.

Synthetic thunder?

What was I thinking?

‘It makes no difference,’ Mrs O’Donnell said bleakly. If she had heard the sound, she didn’t show it. ‘The television can’t pick up a signal. The computer displays these weird symbols. The phones are down. So are the radios.’

She turned the computer off in disgust and turned around to face us.

‘We’re on our own for now,’ she said.

In the silence that followed I realised that the odd sound I had heard had stopped.

Had it just been a symptom of my already overstretched imagination?

Or was there really something out there?

Something that roared like counterfeit thunder?

That was moving towards us, silently now?

I shuddered and looked to Mrs O’Donnell for some kind of reassurance.

The fear in her eyes told me there was none there to be found.

I guess I have always believed that grown-ups have all the answers.

They behave as if they do.

Looking at Mrs O’Donnell’s face I suddenly realised something. It’s not true. Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids.

Mrs O’Donnell was scared and she didn’t know what to do. Everything that she knew and thought had been or –