This is true of all three of the Straker tapes.

Tape One Side Two

… 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.

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.’

‘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 -

NOTE

We have absolutely no way of knowing just how Side Two would have ended if the tape had not run out. Many papers and book chapters have set out to explore this interruption to the story, but they are all just guesses. They are not worth looking at here, because they cloud the issues rather than bringing them into focus. When Graysmark argues that ‘(T)he largest truth of the Straker account lies in the silent spaces between tapes’ he allows himself to fall into what Nightingale calls ‘the fallacy of the gaps’. The meaning of the gaps cannot be known, measured or estimated.

Tape Two Side One

… my train of thought?

NOTE

Kyle never returns to his prior train of thought. Changing the tape seems to have completely wiped what he was going to say from his mind. It is difficult to judge the importance of this. Lahr and Pritchett, in their book Forgotten Words: the Untold Histories of the World, argue that Kyle Straker’s narrative is forever altered at the point where the second tape begins: ‘The story is reset, and the world revised. When Straker forgets his place in his own story, we lose something important, but it is something that we can never know… We try to complete this part of the story, and we can only do that by importing our own experiences, prejudices, ideas. Kyle’s story becomes our own, but it also stops being his. ’

My throat is dry. Dry and scratchy. I think this is the most talking that I have ever done in my life. In one go, that is.

Funny thing is, I don’t even know if anyone will ever listen to these tapes. I’m not even sure why I thought it was such a good idea to make them. I just wanted to leave a record, for the four of us, for any more people like us that are left, so that we will not be forgotten.

I think that’s what we all want, in the end.

To know that we left footprints when we passed by, however briefly.

We want to be remembered.

So remember us.

Please.

Remember us.

Things never happen the way you think they are going to. Too many random factors between thought and action, I guess. My dad used to sum it up with this weird golfing saying: there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.

NOTE – ‘golfing’

Two things here:

Golfing was a sport, thought to be an early version of what we now call ‘flagellum’. Golf, however, used an external, manufactured club to strike a ‘ball’ towards a much closer target (hundreds of metres, rather than tens of kilometres) called a ‘hole’, which was traditionally marked by a flag.

2. The proverb ‘many a slip…’ is unlikely to have ever originated from the sport of golf, and is more likely to do with the way primitive humans used to drink by raising a drinking vessel (or cup) to the mouth (which used to feature ‘lips’, or movable organs that fringed the mouth and were used for assisting eating, for rudimentary sensing, and for speech formation). See Bathgate’s Vestiges of Barbarism: What Our Bodies Used to Be.

We left Mrs O’Donnell’s house in a flat depression. The idea was to go back to Mr Peterson, check he was OK, then head out of the village on the Crowley road to see how far the phenomenon stretched.

Easy plan.

We were halfway down the road when Mrs O’Donnell stopped walking.

‘They’ve gone,’ she said, and I realised she was at the house where the boy and girl had been standing, frozen in the act of coming out of their house.

Had been.

They weren’t there now.

The hallway was empty.

We hit the high street at a run.

Gone was the heaviness that had settled over our minds and bodies, now we felt light as clouds. If the Cross children were gone, then surely it was likely that they had moved themselves. If that was true, maybe everyone else was moving again.

Suddenly we stopped running. People were moving down the high street.

People.

Were.

Moving.

In fact, it was a great number of people and they were walking, as a crowd, away from the village green and heading for, I guessed, their houses.

People.

Moving.

It was wonderful.

And if they looked a little dazed – staring about as if seeing an unfamiliar place – then that was probably to be expected after what had just happened to them.

I wondered if they realised anything had happened at all, or whether they had just been switched back on, with no sense that time had even passed.

Relief flooded through me, as if my world had suddenly been set back on to its proper axis. I saw Lilly’s face register her own internal relief. Tension replaced by excitement and a hint of a smile.

I knew that the smile was for Simon and I felt an eel of jealousy uncurl within my stomach.

NOTE – ‘eel of jealousy’

This is quite a bizarre phrase, because an eel was a snakelike fish of the type we now refer to as an Anguilliforme. How this related to jealousy is unknown, although Kenton argues for it being a kind of metaphor for the feeling the primitive emotion caused within the individual. LeGar, however, points to a fragment of a text called Stargate SG-1 which suggests that a parasitic creature of this type may have been present within certain individuals.

It didn’t last.

Whatever it was that had occurred was over now.

The people of the village were making their way back home.

I noticed my parents and brother in the crowd, turned to Mrs O’Donnell and she offered me a reassuring smile.

I smiled back, nodded at Lilly, and made my way through the crowd to join them.

There was the oddest of moments when my mum’s eyes met mine and she seemed to look straight through me, as if she didn’t recognise me, or was looking past me, in search of…

In search of what?

I couldn’t even finish the thought because suddenly her eyes flicked back to me. They saw me as if I had just materialised out of thin air. They locked on me then, and I saw recognition flood into her eyes. Her mouth turned up into a smile.

‘Kyle,’ she said, and there was a softness to her voice that hadn’t been there for a while. The way she said my name before Dad went and broke her heart.

I ran to her and she hugged me tight.

‘I was so scared,’ I told her.

‘Scared, poppet?’ she comforted me. ‘Now what on earth is there to be scared about?’

Dad squeezed my arm.

‘There’s nothing to be scared about,’ he whispered, and again it was a voice from the past. ‘We’re here.’

I was crying then, with hot, fat tears rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t care how it looked, or whether people I went to school with were watching.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ I said.

‘We’re here,’ Mum soothed. ‘And we’re not going anywhere.’

‘What’s all this about?’ Dad asked, and his voice was concerned and open, instead of defensive.

We made our way back home as part of the crowd, with the sun shining down upon us. I felt exhausted, utterly frazzled.

Mum and I sat down in the front room as Dad rattled about in the kitchen making cups of tea.

Then we sat there, my parents’ faces looking full of compassion.

Dad reached over and grabbed hold of Mum’s hand, something he hadn’t done since he came back to us – at least not without Mum bristling like a terrified cat.

We sipped tea, and the madness faded away.

‘You were shaking when we found you,’ Mum said. ‘I haven’t seen you so frightened since your father told you about the bogeyman and you thought he was under your bed.’

‘He was under my bed,’ I said and smiled.

Dad laughed.

‘So what did happen?’ he asked.

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

‘Try us.’

For a moment I didn’t want to tell them, I didn’t want to think about what had happened, what it all meant. It was all right now.

But I had to tell them.

I had to at least try to get some kind of explanation for the weirdness.

Would they think I was mad? If they did I had witnesses to prove what I was saying.

So I took a deep breath and started speaking.

It all poured out in a mad gush, interrupted only by sobs and chokes.

The whole story.

My parents listened, almost without comment, occasionally asking questions where I wasn’t clear enough, or the story got a little confused in my head.

When I was done, Dad looked puzzled.

‘Well, Kyle,’ he said. ‘That’s just not the way we remember it, I’m afraid.’

His voice had an odd edge to it, as if there were something sharp and hard beneath the surface.

I noticed he was still holding Mum’s hand as he spoke.

He smiled.

‘We watched you go up on stage,’ he said. ‘We saw Danny hypnotise you.’ His smile deepened, as if at a private joke. ‘Actually, he made you pretend that you were a man with no control over his limbs, trying to direct traffic in the centre of rush hour London – and yes, before you ask, we laughed a lot.’

Mum and Dad exchanged a smile at the memory and my cheeks felt hot. I must have looked like a total idiot. In all honesty it was probably as embarrassing as my stand-up act. I had a memory flash of Dad with his phone camera and hoped he wasn’t about to get out photographic proof of my unconscious humiliation.

Instead he went on.

‘Danny made Lilly Dartington think she was walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. He made our postman think he was called Mr Peebles, and that he had a dummy called Rodney Peterson. He ended up doing his ventriloquism act again, but in reverse. And Kate, the woman from Happy Shopper, he had her auditioning for the Sydney Opera, but realising she was naked halfway through her first aria.’

Dad laughed.

‘He’s very good,’ he said. ‘Danny, I mean.’

‘But what happened after? ’ I asked him.

There was a blank look from my parents, which was kind of similar to the look my mum had given me when I met her on the high street. A kind of look at me that seemed focused on something past me in the distance.

‘Nothing,’ they said together.

In unison.

The word came from each of them at precisely the same time, with the same kind of intonation.

‘Nothing happened,’ Dad said, as if reading from a cue card.

‘Nothing at all,’ Mum said, as if reading from another cue card.

‘Danny woke you all up,’ Dad said. ‘And we all went home.’

They were acting very… weird , like they were slightly… I don’t know… out of synch with the world.

Or with my world.

If that makes sense.

Something had changed, but I couldn’t work out what. They looked like my parents, sounded like them, but something about them was off. I was getting a peculiar vibe off them.

And they hadn’t noticed the odd thing that Dad had just said.

Danny woke you all up. And we all went home.

I left it at that. My head hurt from all the input. I was coming down off adrenaline and had a sick feeling in my stomach that just wouldn’t go away. As if it was the air I was breathing that had somehow turned sour and was making me ill.

I gabbled something about feeling tired and needing to lie down.

My parents nodded and agreed.

I went to my room to think.

My room is small and poky and isn’t tidy.

Ever.

And quite often it smells of socks.

There are posters on the walls, a couple advertising films – Serenity and Blade Runner – a couple promoting bands – Pendulum and Kings of Leon – and then a storage system that uses the floor more than it does cupboards. My mum is always on at me to clean it and I usually argue that my room is just too small for me to keep all my stuff AND keep it tidy.

I ignored the mess.

I looked at my watch and saw that everything that had happened – from Danny calling us up on stage, right through to the present moment – had all fitted into just a little over an hour.

I didn’t believe it.

But my bedside clock confirmed it.

Time is such a weird thing. A physics teacher once tried to tell me that time is relative, not constant, but I still have no idea what that means in practical terms. I mean I tried to find out, but only managed to read about ten paragraphs of A Brief History of Time before my eyes started to bleed. I do know that boring hours last forever, and excitement makes time run like a film on fast forward.

It had felt like a fast-forward kind of day.

Lying on my bed, hands behind my head, I tried to think it all through.

However much my parents might say otherwise, something had happened.

But what?

What had happened to the four of us that were hypnotised?

And what had happened to the rest of the people who weren’t?

The last question was the one that I was obsessing over. It lay there behind my eyes, a trapdoor spider of a thought taking bites out of the relief I’d felt when everyone started moving again.

NOTE – ‘trapdoor spider’

Kyle seems to like the notion that his thoughts and feelings are akin to parasitic creatures inhabiting his body. The use of the trapdoor spider here seems to back up my belief that the ‘eels’ from earlier were purely figurative. Unless, of course, LeGar uncovers another partial text that suggests that spiders in heads have an historical precedent.

What had happened to them?

Mr Peterson thought he saw something, and it had made him curl up on the stage in utter terror. He had said that ‘they are to us as we are to apes’ – whatever that was supposed to mean – and he had been pointing to the people sitting, frozen all that time. He believed that something had happened to them , not to us .

He said that we were the last four left.

But what did that mean?

Did it mean anything at all?

I thought maybe it did.

Mum and Dad were getting on with each other. Not just getting on, though, they were behaving as if the cold war of the last few months hadn’t happened at all.

So what had happened to bring them together so suddenly?

So unnaturally?

What had changed?

What could have changed?

It wasn’t as if watching me behaving like a hypnotised numpty was going to make them forget their differences.

And then there was that odd thing that Dad had let slip when I told him what had happened. First had been that dismissive, Well, Kyle, that’s just not the way we remember it , and then that confusing account of the end of the talent show.

Danny woke you all up , Dad had said, and we all went home .

It didn’t fit.

Danny had been the sixth act.

There had been a whole lot more acts to come after Danny.

Danny woke you all up, and we all went home.

I could imagine some of the horrors that would have come after Danny: lame Karaoke; awful dance routines; someone playing the recorder; a kid with a new electric guitar who thought he was the next Jimi Hendrix.

Danny woke you all up, and we all went home.

Then there was the inevitable prize-giving that always took half an hour longer than it needed to.

Then a repeat of the winning act.

Polite applause.

The end.

Danny woke you all up, and we all went home.

The contest had been, at best, a quarter of the way to being over.

There was a whole lot more to enjoy.

Or endure.

They didn’t even stop to announce a winner.

Danny woke you all up, and we all went home.

Liar , I thought.

What had really happened?

Mr Peterson said: ‘It means that… we are the only… the only ones left… four… four against all…’

I realised then that this wasn’t over yet.

It wasn’t happy-ever-after . And it certainly wasn’t everything back to normal .

This, I realised, was just the beginning.

But the beginning of what?

I wasn’t going to get any answers from my parents, that much seemed certain. They either didn’t know what had happened, or weren’t saying.

The first explanation was scary because our parents are always supposed to have the answers to our questions.

The second explanation was worse still.

That they knew exactly what had happened and were keeping it from me.

But what reason could they have for lying to me?

The questions kept circling around in my head, and I would have given anything for them to stop. But they wouldn’t.

What had really happened to us all?

I couldn’t sort this out on my own.

I tried the TV I’ve got in my room, which meant hunting for the remote control in the chaos that covered the floor. I turned over books and comics, clothes and papers, finally finding it hiding under my pillow.

I stabbed the ‘on’ button with my thumb and the TV was all white.

Still no way of seeing what was going on in the rest of the world.

I found myself wishing that my parents had bought me the laptop I’d been asking for. The one I’ll get when my schoolwork improves, or when I stop daydreaming, or when I start keeping my room tidy.

The only computer in the house was my dad’s, in his study, but I didn’t trust my parents and was pretty sure he wouldn’t want me using it.

So who could I trust?

There were only three names on my list: the three people who had been with me when the rest of the village played musical statues.

Top of that list was Lilly.

Sure, she hated me because I dumped her and never gave her a reason.

But. But. But.

Why should that get in the way?

She’d never know how much it hurt to let her out of my life, or how much I’ve regretted it every time I’ve seen her and Simon together.

We’d been through the same events.

I needed to speak to her.

I sat up.

If I saw Lilly, then Simon would most likely be there too, and maybe I could see if he was acting oddly too.

I could find out what he remembered about the talent show, and see if it matched my parents’ memory or mine.

I’d made up my mind.

I was going to get to the bottom of this.

I got downstairs to find Dad standing in the hall, seemingly studying the wallpaper.

And, more importantly, he was blocking the front door.

He made a show of pretending he wasn’t waiting for me, but had no other reason for standing where he was. He turned when he heard me on the stairs and his face lit up as if he was pleased to see me. Didn’t make it to his eyes, though. They looked at me coldly.

‘Ah, Kyle,’ he said. ‘Are you feeling better?’

I nodded.

‘I’m fine,’ I told him. ‘Lying down seems to have cleared my head a bit.’

‘Good.’ Dad nodded, perhaps to demonstrate that this was indeed good. ‘There’s someone here to see you.’

I hadn’t heard anyone arrive, but then I had been sort of lost in my own thoughts.

So who was it?

Lilly? That had to be who it was. She probably had a whole bunch of questions that needed answers too. Well, she’d beaten me to it.

Dad opened the living-room door and ushered me in.

Mum was sitting in her chair, the one with the various remote controls in pouches on the arm, while the other chair was occupied by our local GP, Doctor Campbell.

The last time I’d seen him had been months ago, when I’d injured my wrist playing tennis with Simon.

Dad followed me in and pointedly shut the living-room door behind him.

‘Hello, Kyle,’ the doctor said, his old face watchful.

‘Hi,’ I said, my mind racing.

I sat down at one end of the sofa, while Dad took a seat at the other end, leaving plenty of distance between us. The three adults looked dreadfully serious, and if I didn’t know better I’d have thought I was in a great deal of trouble for something I had done.

Doctor Campbell smiled at me, but it was a controlled smile. He smoothed out some wrinkles from his trouser leg.

‘Your parents asked me over,’ he said. ‘They thought that you might be feeling… ill.’

I smiled back.

‘Me?’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Good. Good.’ The doctor nodded. ‘So you don’t feel feverish? Or disorientated?’

‘No, I really am fine.’

‘Your parents are quite worried about you.’ His eyes narrowed to slits and it looked like he was watching for my reactions to his words. ‘That was quite a story you told them earlier, wasn’t it?’

I didn’t like this.

I didn’t like it at all.

My mouth was dry and I felt panicked. I didn’t answer. I just sat there looking at the doctor, wondering where this was going.

Doctor Campbell sighed.

‘Tell me what happened today,’ he said, and his voice had a coaxing tone to it.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m really not sure.’

‘But your parents told me what you told them; that everyone in the village turned to statues for… how long did you say?’

He raised an overly furry eyebrow at me.

I shook my head.

‘I didn’t.’ My throat felt scratchy.

He was scrutinising me as if I were a germ under his microscope.

‘You didn’t say? Or you didn’t really experience it?’

I nodded. Evasive.

The doctor frowned, turned to my dad and said, ‘I’m getting nowhere. Perhaps you could try…?’

Dad tried to give me a reassuring smile.

‘C’mon, Kyle,’ he urged. ‘Just tell the doctor what you told us. Maybe he can help.’

For some odd reason I got the impression that helping me wasn’t very high on Doc Campbell’s list of goals here. So I made a deliberate show of massaging my temples and squeezing my eyes shut, as if I were desperately trying to remember something. It wasn’t an Oscar-worthy performance, but it wasn’t half bad.

‘I… I can’t remember,’ I said after a few moments. ‘I think I nodded off upstairs and it’s all just slipping away.’

The doctor shrugged.

‘I suspect that you have had some kind of reaction to the hypnosis,’ he said gravely. ‘A dream, if you like, while in a highly suggestible state. Your mind has invented an alternative version of reality where it was everyone else who got hypnotised, while you and other volunteers were the only ones that were really awake. It’s a kind of inverted version of the way things really were.’

He brushed at his trouser leg again, his eyes never leaving mine.

‘You need to sleep,’ he said. ‘It will give your mind time to sort itself out, allow it to put fantasy and reality back in their proper places.’

He smiled widely.

‘Doctor’s orders,’ he said.

‘I do feel very tired,’ I lied.

‘Then that’s settled,’ the doctor said brightly. ‘You rest. Stay in bed the rest of the day. I’ll stop by tomorrow to make sure that everything is OK. I’ll leave a couple of pills with your parents in case you find sleep difficult.’

‘Thank you, Doctor Campbell.’

‘It’s what I’m here for,’ he said.

No, it’s not , I thought instinctively.

I had to get away from the house. To find Lilly. Maybe Mrs O’Donnell. Talk to them about what they remembered, and find out their impressions of the village now the event was ‘over’.

Then I needed to find Rodney Peterson and find out exactly what he thought he saw.

‘I think I’ll go and lie down a bit more,’ I said.

‘Good boy,’ Doctor Campbell said. ‘You’ll soon see that it was all just a horrible nightmare.’

Liar, liar , I thought. I know it. You know it .

I had a sudden flash of intuition and decided I’d play a hunch.

‘I’m glad Mum and Dad called you,’ I said.

‘So am I, young man,’ he said.

‘Lucky you were by the phone on a Saturday too.’

‘I’m always on call,’ he explained. ‘I guess it’s the curse of being the only doctor in the village.’

I got up and crossed the room towards the door. The telephone was on its cradle on a table nearby. I feinted for the door, went for the phone instead, picked it up and switched it on.

I got a dial tone.

Doctor Campbell was on his feet, starting towards me, but not before I punched in those three numbers.

999.

The doctor reached me and tried to get the phone from me, but I held him off for the few seconds I needed. When he finally wrenched the phone from my hand, I had already confirmed what I had suspected: there was nothing and nobody on the line.

Just those clicks and hisses I knew would be there.

‘I’ll be in my room,’ I said quietly, and made my way up the stairs.

My experiment had proved that Doctor Campbell had lied – Mum and Dad couldn’t have called him: the phone wasn’t working – but past that I couldn’t go.

I needed to get out of the house.

The question now was: how?

I’d talked myself up into my room, where I was now a virtual prisoner.

There was the doctor who was here to ‘check on me’. And there was Dad blocking the door when I went downstairs.

This was all madness. An ordinary life turned upside down.

I was going to have to improvise.

I sat down on my bed.

The sunlight coming through the window made my eyes hurt.

I stood up, went over to the window and opened it. My bedroom occupied the space directly over Dad’s study, with a view of a small front garden that nature was busy taking back from my parents.

My parents and Doctor Campbell were talking in the living room, which we called the front room even though, technically speaking, it looked out across the back garden. If they stayed there for a few more minutes, and if I was brave – or foolish – enough to climb out of my window, there was a chance I could be well away from the house before they even realised I was gone.

I sized up the drop.

It was somewhere between four and six metres, I reckoned.

Risk assessment: a broken leg at least, probably worse.

But if I lowered myself down, so I was hanging from the window frame with my arms fully extended, it would cut about two metres from the drop.

Risk assessment: still a possible broken leg; more likely a twisted or sprained ankle.

The problem with both of these courses of action was that I needed to be certain that I could still walk when I reached the ground.

The risk was too high.

Off to the right side of my window, touching the side of the house, was an old tree. In high winds the branches would often tap against the panes of glass in my window. The branches were a good metre away from me. I could, however, jump across and then climb down the tree.

A metre jump.

The simplest of leaps.

If I was on the ground.

But I wasn’t on the ground, was I?

I was four to six metres up and if I missed the tree, or missed getting a good grip, or got a good grip on a branch that decided to give way, I would fall the whole distance.

And get the ‘worse’ from the first risk assessment: broken legs, possible broken back, with the added chance of cuts, grazes and bruises.

A one-metre jump.

I took out one of the cans of Red Bull from my jacket pocket, opened it, downed it in one and then clambered out through the window.

I put my feet on the narrow, sloping ledge, had my bottom sitting on the frame.

The window opened to the right and was blocking any jump.

I

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 627