I drained the orange squash and rolled the glass around on my trouser leg.
"I . . . I need to ask something," I said. "And . . . well, there’s no sort of easy way to . . . Are we talking aliens here, do you think?"
Both Lilly and Mrs O’Donnell looked at me seriously.
It was Lilly who spoke first.
"There’s no such thing as aliens," she said definitely.
"Wow, I had no idea that scientists had actually figured that out," I said. "Last I heard they were still keeping an open mind."
"You know what I mean. No little green men and silver spaceships."
"That’s not the only kind of alien life possible," I said. "Has anyone seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers?"
Mrs O’Donnell sighed.
"You do realize that was a film?" she said caustically. "Not a documentary. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t really about aliens. It was about Communism, and the remake was about the changing roles of men and women in modern society."
"I thought they were from outer space," I said grumpily. "In fact, I remember them saying that the pod things that took over people and changed them were aliens."
Mrs O’Donnell’s face told me that she thought I had missed the point that she was making.
"The differences in text and subtext aside," she said, "you’re thinking that alien pod creatures arrived in Millgrove during a village talent show, and took over everybody except the handful of people hypnotized by a boy magician?"
"Yeah, well you put it that way and it sounds kinda stupid," I said. "But pod people was only meant as an example from a science fiction movie. We are agreed that something weird happened, aren’t we? I mean, this isn’t everyday Millgrove, is it? People that we know are acting strangely. We recognize their faces, but no longer recognize them."
"We have no way of knowing what happened when we were in trances on that stage," Mrs O’Donnell said, "but surely it’s more likely that it’s US who are at fault, that we’re seeing things differently—"
"Have you managed to get any TV or radio signals?" I interrupted. "Managed to reach anyone by phone? Are you getting anything on your computer except those symbols we were looking at earlier?"
The look on her face answered my questions for me.
"Look," I said. "I’m a kid. I know that. But it doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of seeing what’s going on around me. We are in deep, deep trouble here, and if you want the absolute truth I really don’t know what to do about it. But I do know that hiding my head in the sand is the wrong thing to do."
I was getting frustrated and flustered.
I was even waving my arms in the air.
"I think that’s why Lilly and I ran here. To get an adult to help us work out a way to put all this right. To bring our parents back to us. To make things go back to the way they were. We need you, Kate."
It was the first time I’d called her, or even thought of her, by her first name.
"OK," she said, getting to her feet. "We’ll go and find Rodney Peterson and then we’ll head out of town. We’ll get help. We will find people who can figure this thing out."
"Thank you," I said.
She smiled.
"It’s fine, Kyle. Now let’s get going."
Chapter 22
We got into Kate’s car and the plan was simple. Stop off and check on Mr Peterson, and then get the heck out of Millgrove.
None of us was really surprised when it refused to start. The car didn’t make a sound. There was no ignition straining against a flat battery sound. Not a spark of life in the engine at all.
So we walked down the deserted streets, aware of just how strange it was that they were deserted. We knew that there were people inside those houses, but there were no signs nor sounds of life. It made me think of those ghost towns in Westerns. If a couple of spiky tumbleweeds had blown past, I don’t think they would have looked out of place.
No life.
Stillness.
It was as if the buildings were brooding, the village was dreaming, and we were just a solitary thought passing through its mind.
The village green was set up for the talent show, but it was deserted too. It looked strange and unsettling.
The stage was empty, and in front of it was chaos. Things that people had brought along with them—picnic food, blankets to sit on, handbags—had been left behind and lay on the grass.
People don’t leave their personal effects lying around like that. They take them with them when they leave. They cling to their possessions almost like a reflex.
Nor do they leave people lying on the stage after they have had some kind of mental breakdown.
But they had left Mr Peterson.
He was still in the same spot we had last seen him.
He was all alone, curled up in a tight ball of his own fear. I suddenly felt terrible that we hadn’t thought to go back for him sooner. But we’d had our reasons for forgetting him, I guess. Like the world suddenly turning strange and terrifying.
What was everybody else’s excuse?
We approached Mr Peterson and I could see his body trembling like a leaf. His lips moved as he formed soundless words. His eyes were squeezed shut.
"Mr Peterson?" I called.
If he heard me there was no visible sign.
"He’s in shock," Kate O’Donnell said.
"Why is he still like this?" Lilly asked.
"I think he saw something," I said. "I think he saw what happened."
"But he was hypnotized too."
"Everyone’s different. Maybe his trance was just a bit shallower than ours."
Lilly shrugged.
"How do we get him to tell us what he saw?" she said.
"Ask nicely?" I suggested.
"You are such a loser," she said, but with a smile.
"I know." I smiled back.
Kate knelt over Mr Peterson and put her hand gently on his shoulder. Initially he recoiled from her touch, but then his eyes opened and he looked at her face.
"It’s you," he said. "You came back."
"Of course I did, Rodney."
She reached down and found his hand, wrapped it in hers, holding it tight.
"And you’re still you," he said.
"Yep," she said. "At least I was last time I looked."
"They . . . they didn’t . . . get you."
"Who?" Kate asked him. "Who didn’t get me?"
"All of them," Mr Peterson said, suddenly seeming to come back to reality from the dark place he had been hiding in inside his own mind.
"You saw something," Kate said. "I… we . . . need to know what it was."
Mr Peterson looked up at her and there was warmth and compassion in his eyes, but there was also fear.
"Something happened to me," Mr Peterson was saying. "It was like they say in the Bible, where the scales fall from someone’s eyes, where they suddenly see the truth behind the visible. I saw the people in the crowd, all of them, and they had become . . . were becoming… something else. Something . . . impossible."
"What did you see?" That was from Lilly, and there was an urgency that made Mr Peterson turn to see us standing there for the first time.
"What did I see?" he said. "I don’t know how to describe it. I’m used to the way things look… here . . . in this world, you know? Everything here follows . . . I don’t know… visual rules, about form, perspective, and color. The things we see in this world . . . well, they look like they belong here."
He fought to make it clearer.
"I’ve never thought about it before: the way that everything that is from here looks like it belongs here. That even the most dissimilar things in our world—a puddle and an aircraft carrier; an apple and a wisp of smoke; a chicken and the London Gherkin; a road and a piece of sweetcorn—they all use these same visual rules.
"I know that now, but only because they—the ones who have been changed—don’t. The people here . . . they look different now. As if they . . . they don’t ob
ey the visual rules of Planet Earth. They have . . . other levels, layers, facets . . . I don’t know . . . description is hard when there’s nothing you have seen that looks anything like what you’re seeing."
"So, try."
"They still look like people. They are still people, I think. But, somehow, that’s a surface image, and what they are now extends way past the surface. Imagine you had a projector that could project a perfectly clear image on to water, but you could still see the water beneath. That’s kind of what I saw, I guess. A projection. A new image superimposed over each of the people of this village.
"Most of it I can’t even begin to describe. Colours I don’t recognize. Textures that make no sense. Constantly in motion, ever-changing, like shadows playing across them . . . and then there are the symbols—"
"Symbols?" Kate interjected. "What do you mean, “symbols”?"
Mr Peterson shook his head.
"A language, I guess," he said. "Moving across them, across their surfaces. Almost like hieroglyphics . . . with hooks and curls and spikes and eyes as letters. I . . . I think it is a language, but it doesn’t behave like our language. It’s not flat and on the page, instead it twists and spins, revealing new elements of each character . . . each word . . . every time it moves."
NOTE—"hieroglyphics"
An extremely ancient form of writing which Rodderick identifies as originating in Egypt. "Hieroglyphics, although antiquated by Kyle Straker’s age, were a rebus-like pictorial language that is similar in structure to our own computer code." Benson notes: "Like a precursor to Zapf Dingbats, hieroglyphics made visual images into a language." He then notes: "… if you transpose the word “hieroglyphics” into Zapf you get: ." Benson offers no explanation of just why we would want to do this, But then he is the man who translated the Bible into WingDings.
Kate looked aghast.
"We’ve seen it," she said.
"You’ve seen it? How? Where?"
"On my computer screen. It’s all the stupid thing will do . . . display these weird characters."
"Your computer?" Mr Peterson sat up straight. "But that means . . . it’s not just them . . . it’s… a program?"
"A computer program?" Kate said.
She turned to me.
"You said it was some kind of language," she said.
I nodded.
"But it didn’t look like any computer code I’ve ever seen…" she said. "So what does it mean?"
I felt cold.
Pieces started fitting together.
"What is it?" Kate asked, noticing my look.
I fought to put my intuition into words.
"I keep coming back to the idea of an alien invasion…"
Lilly made an exasperated sound that I tried to ignore.
Kate asked, "And exactly how would this be a sign of an invasion?"
"It depends how you interpret the word “invasion”," I said. "Perhaps this is exactly the way you would invade another planet. I mean, would an alien race really come down in shiny metal ships and try to take over through military might, knowing that we will fight back?
"Or, suppose the strategy was more subtle: infiltrating the planet with alien copies of humans, like the Body Snatchers. There’s a danger that the duplicates will be uncovered before there are enough of them to take over.
"Maybe there is another way, and we’re seeing it now."
"But how?" Lilly asked.
"What if this computer program we’re seeing is the invasion?" I said. "What if it’s their spaceships and their ray guns and their infiltration devices, all rolled into one?"
"I’m not following you," Lilly said.
I wasn’t sure I was following it myself.
"I’m just trying to put pieces together," I confessed. "It’s like I can almost see what’s happening here, but I can only catch glimpses of it out of the corner of my mind’s eye. There’s this vague idea that disappears every time I turn to look at it full on."
Lilly nodded, and it seemed that she was urging me on to think about it more.
"Try," she said.
So I did.
"It was the alien language. Which we could see changing and shifting in front of us. How it was lined up on Kate’s computer screen. I said it was like sentences. But maybe because I was seeing them on a computer screen it’s got me thinking about computers, and about how computers work. Lines and lines of instructions, a particular form of sentence, computer code. What if we’re seeing a programming language?"
"Programming what?" Lilly asked.
"That’s where I keep coming up blank," I said.
I realized that Mr Peterson was paying close attention to my words, and I saw him nodding.
"You got something?" I asked.
Mr Peterson shrugged.
"I’m a postman," he said, and I thought he had just descended back into madness, but then he went on to explain: "And over the last few years there have been a lot of changes in the kind of things we deliver. There are the obvious changes—a lot more parcels from eBay and Amazon; a great deal less of those envelopes containing holiday snaps now that most photography has gone digital.
"The one that seems sad, though, is that there are a lot fewer handwritten letters. People don’t send as many small, personal letters as they used to because they tend to stay in touch electronically. They have email, Facebook and Twitter. You don’t post a letter now, you click a mouse button and it’s delivered instantly."
"Is there a point to this story?" Kate asked impatiently.
"The point is that if you want to get in touch with a single person then you might send them a letter. An actual, physical, tangible piece of mail. But if you wanted to get in touch with everyone, instantly…"
"You’d do it digitally," Lilly finished.
Mr Peterson nodded.
"Electronically," he said. "With computers."
"A digital invasion?" I mused. "What would that even be?"
Mr Peterson shrugged.
"I don’t know," he said. "But mightn’t it look a little like today?"
"Hang on a moment," Kate said with horror. "Are we seriously still talking aliens here? I mean, come on, there has to be another, rational explanation."
"I’d love to hear it," Mr Peterson said.
"I just can’t believe that we’re suddenly in a world where “aliens” is the first place we’re looking for answers," she said incredulously. "Not “we’re still hypnotized and all of this is just imaginary”. Not “mass hysteria” or “sunspot activity”. Not “a virus” or “something in the water”. You know—the kind of answers that sound like they didn’t originate on Fringe or Doctor Who."
The only one of Kate O’Donnell’s explanations that held any water for me—that we were still in a trance and the whole thing was just a fantasy—was the very one that was impossible to prove or disprove. It was like the old question that the film The Matrix was based upon: how can you tell whether you’re just a brain in a jar, experiencing a sophisticated virtual-reality program that is flawless in its execution?
The answer is: you can’t. So it actually doesn’t make much sense entertaining it. If we woke up and found out the day had just been a weird dream, then that would be great, but we couldn’t bank on it.
And we certainly couldn’t close our minds to other answers in the hope that it was right, because we could…
NOTE
The thought here is never returned to. Kyle must have finished the thought on the blank part of tape. Ernest Merrivale sees the fact as proof that the tapes are all recorded one after the other, without breaks. He suggests that if there had been any break between each tape, Kyle would have rewound the tape to see what he had last said, and thus would have realized that the blank tape was cutting off his words. The error would never have been repeated.
Tape Three Side One
… going round and round in my head. My brain was making so much noise, but it was about time I started to put all of those thoughts to some good use.<
br />
I tried to think about everything I had seen since waking from the trance on the stage, to find something that would point the way for us to move forwards.
It was then that I remembered Mrs Birnie.
Proudly recording Danny’s act.
The video camera.
She had been filming it all.
So what had the video camera caught?
Chapter 23
Aware of the odd glances I was getting from the others, I rushed down on to the village green, hoping that Mrs Birnie had done what most everyone else had—left behind the thing that she was carrying.
It took a couple of minutes of looking around the area to find it, nestled in a discarded jumper. At first I thought that wishing too hard for the thing had made me imagine the flash of reflected sunlight, then I saw it again and headed straight to it.
It was one of the new type of Canon camcorders, a thin slice of metal that concealed some pretty cool tech specs. It was the kind that no longer even needed a tape, working from memory cards and an internal hard drive.
I held it in the air like I’d just won the FA Cup.
Lilly, Kate and Mr Peterson were all staring at me as if I had just lost my mind.
"Mrs Birnie was filming it," I shouted at them. "She was filming the whole thing!"
They just kept staring, and I realized 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 organized, and heading down the high street.
Heading towards the village green.
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