The fact that Kyle then manages to describe what he saw when he looked at Doctor Campbell’s hands seems to be ignored by Luce.

At first I thought it was a trick of the light.

With the sun starting its climb down from its high point in the sky towards a resting place on the horizon, it could have been the result of light and shadow across his skin.

But it was nothing to do with the light, and all to do with the physical appearance of the doctor’s hands. The skin of his hands was shifting, as if moved by ripples across its surface, or currents below. It was like the skin itself had suddenly become capable of moving , and it wasn’t using muscles to do it, it was doing it itself.

As I watched in horrified fascination, a sudden rush of tiny bumps spread across his skin like a rash. It looked a little like gooseflesh, and before long there were thousands of the bumps, covering his skin.

Each bump was crowned with a tiny black dot.

The doctor didn’t seem to notice, he just stood there, utterly still while the rash seemed to harden upon the surface of his skin and then, suddenly, began to disgorge thin, whip-like threads from each of the bumps. Skin-coloured and minutely thin, these threads sprayed out of the dot at the centre of each bump, like water under pressure, or pink silly string from a can. Each thread, or filament, was ten to fifteen centimetres long, and seemed able to support itself, standing out from his flesh like thin, hard fibres.

The filaments began to stretch, pulling themselves further from the bumps that housed them, adding twenty centimetres to their length with every second that passed.

The bass vibration deepened again in the air around us.

The filaments on the doctor’s left hand were reaching out towards the person next to him.

My dad.

The fibres were moving towards my dad’s hand and I had an urge to swat at them, to keep them away from him, to stop them touching him.

Except I didn’t want them touching me.

And then it was too late.

The filaments seemed to sense their proximity to Dad’s hand and homed straight in on it, flailing at the back of his hand and then sticking to it. Where each filament touched, a bump appeared; identical to the bumps that had spread across the doctor’s own skin.

The pores of the bumps opened to accept the filaments, before sucking them inside and sealing themselves closed.

The doctor’s hand was now linked to my dad’s hand by hundreds of flesh-coloured threads.

The bass sound ceased abruptly.

‘What are they doing? ’ Lilly asked, with disgust in her voice.

‘They’re mutating,’ Kate O’Donnell said.

I shook my head.

Things started coming together in my head.

Digital code. Data. Computer code as a means of invasion. Thin flesh-coloured threads. Fibre-optic cables.

‘Not mutating,’ I said. ‘Connecting.’

Three simple words.

‘Not mutating. Connecting.’

The keys that started unlocking the puzzle.

Of course it wasn’t until we reached the barn that it all came together… but now I’m doing what I have been avoiding: I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s all starting to blur together, and the pieces are starting to bleed in over other pieces. I have to keep it together.

So you’ll know.

So you’ll understand.

When things start moving, they can really start moving.

We were still reacting to the bizarre sight of the doctor and my dad connecting when suddenly everyone in the crowd was at it.

Filaments began spreading from person to person, to the right, to the left, behind and in front, connecting the crowd into a vast network, bound together by those unnatural fibres.

As a group we stepped back, edging away from the sight before us.

Doctor Campbell was blinking in a definite pattern of blinks – two quick, one slow, three very quick indeed, two slow, then a lot of fluttering blinks, then the whole pattern repeated again – and every member of the crowd did exactly the same thing, at exactly the same time. Connected by those terrible fleshy fibres, the crowd was now acting as one.

We turned and walked away from them.

I don’t know about the others, but I didn’t even look back.

No one followed.

We headed out of the village, along the high street. We were driven by an impulse to get as far away from the village green as we could, and it was a few minutes before any of us managed to speak.

So we carried on, along the road that led out to Crowley, and eventually on to Cambridge.

Finally, as pavement faded out into grass verge beneath our feet, Kate O’Donnell managed to speak.

‘We’re nothing to them,’ she said helplessly. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Then we’ll get help,’ Mr Peterson told her. ‘The police. The army. Someone.’

‘That’s if there’s anyone left,’ Lilly said. ‘What if it’s not just Millgrove? What if it’s Crowley? And Cambridge? And London? Paris? New York? What if it’s everybody? Who’s going to help us then?’

On either side of us spread the countryside, with fields and trees and hedges. It seemed too ordinary, too normal, for anything to be truly wrong.

Birds sang in the trees and swooped across the landscape.

Grasshoppers and crickets leapt from the grass as we passed.

It all looked so peaceful, so tranquil, so safe.

But the road was quieter than I had ever seen it, and that made the stillness seem artificial, sinister. There were no cars driving in from Crowley, or Cambridge, or from anywhere at all. Perhaps the thing we were fleeing was widespread.

But still we walked.

There was nothing else to do.

The sky was reddening on the horizon as the sun sank in the sky, setting the clouds on fire as it went, and we walked towards that horizon.

Twin towers pulled me out of a downward mental spiral.

I saw them silhouetted against the bloodied sky and stopped dead in my tracks. Lots of things suddenly collided inside my head, adding up, making some weird kind of sense.

Old man Naylor’s grain silos.

A couple of hundred metres away.

Lilly stopped next to me and followed my gaze. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her face, lined by the red of the setting sun.

‘Isn’t that where…?’ she asked, trailing off to avoid having to finish the sentence with the science fiction stuff she hated.

I nodded.

‘UFO central,’ I said.

‘But Robbie Knox and Sally Baker made that story up to get attention,’ Lilly said. She paused and then asked, ‘Didn’t they?’

I shrugged.

Yes, they probably did just make it up.

They said they saw bright lights hovering over one of the silos. Not helicopters. Not planes.

Everyone said that they weren’t the type to make up a story like that, but Simon and I had seen the way it had made them minor celebrities among their peers.

‘What are you thinking?’ Lilly asked. ‘That maybe the UFOs were the first phase of all this? That maybe there’s some link there?’

To tell the truth, I don’t know what I was thinking. It just made that weird kind of sense to me. It might be nothing more than a bizarre coincidence, but maybe ‘coincidence’ was a name given to things by people who just haven’t spotted a connection yet.

Kate and Mr Peterson had joined us and were looking at the silos too.

‘I’ve never liked those things,’ Kate said. ‘I’ve always thought they were incredibly ugly.’

She had a point. Like concrete lighthouses without lights to burn or ships to warn, the silos were local landmarks that probably featured in most travel directions given to nonlocals. They were dull and grey and rose far above anything else.

‘I think we should take a closer look,’ Lilly said.

It was kind of nice that she had faith in one of my hunches.

Kate O’Donnell shook her head.

‘And why would we want to look at a couple of grain silos?’ she asked, a sarcastic tone creeping into her voice. ‘Unless we’re saying that Kyle’s alien invasion is suddenly wheat-based?’

‘Er… because it might be important.’ Lilly’s response was sarcastic too.

‘It sounds more like a wild goose chase to me,’ Kate said crossly. ‘I say we keep walking, see how far this phenomenon extends.’

Lilly pursed her lips, put her hands on her hips.

‘And I say we go and check out a possible lead,’ she said, firmly.

‘A lead? ’ Kate said. ‘What is this? An American cop show?’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘why don’t you and Mr Peterson wait here? Lilly and I will go and check out the silos. It’s probably nothing, but…’

‘But?’

‘There might be an answer there,’ I finished. ‘Something other than grain.’

Kate shook her head.

‘We’ll give you fifteen minutes,’ she said. ‘Then Rodney and I are walking.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said, then turned to Lilly. ‘You up for this?’

‘Of course,’ she said, and we set out towards the concrete towers.

The sky was darkening, it seemed, with every step we took down the rutted track that led to Naylor’s farm. Empty fields stretched around us on each side and I suddenly felt very vulnerable and afraid.

There was probably nothing waiting at the end of this side-quest, but that wasn’t the point. At least we were doing something.

I think Lilly felt this sense of purpose too.

‘Do you even believe in UFOs?’ she asked me.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘It just means the flying object was unidentified. It doesn’t necessarily mean there are aliens aboard.’

She tutted.

‘What?’

‘I just wanted to know if you thought we were going to find anything, you know, weird, in those silos.’

It seemed that as soon as Lilly’s words were out there was a sudden, uncanny glow from up ahead. It wasn’t even full dark yet, more like a murky twilight, but we could see a sickly light shining brighter than the air around it, a light that seemed… different … to any light I had seen before. It seemed grainy , somehow, as if it were made of particles in the air up ahead.

We stopped in our tracks and looked ahead.

Instinctively, I put a protective arm around Lilly’s shoulders. When I realised what I had done I was half-expecting her to throw me off, or to say something sarcastic, but she didn’t do either.

So I hugged her to me, wishing that things were different between us.

When we got out of this – if we got out of this – I would try to make things up to her.

I squeezed her shoulder and we walked towards the light.

Light is supposed to be reassuring. You learn that when you’re very young. It defeats the bad things creeping around in your room.

Every parent knows the magic gesture that chases the monsters away.

Click.

Let there be light.

Here, though, light was kind of the problem.

It looked wrong and I suddenly remembered what Mr Peterson had said earlier, about things from this world looking like they belonged in this world; that they followed rules that allowed us to recognise them, allowed us to understand them.

It had sounded like mad ravings at the time, but now I knew exactly what he had been talking about.

The light we were walking into didn’t look as if it belonged here at all.

I had no idea how we should be approaching the silos, how much stealth we needed.

In the end, however, we just walked perfectly normally towards them.

Ordinarily, light illuminates pretty much everything in its path, but this seemed more selective in its illumination. It clumped around objects and highlighted them, while leaving empty areas relatively dark.

Intelligent light? I remember thinking. How is that even possible?

‘Look,’ Lilly said, and showed me her arm. ‘Look at this.’

I could see Lilly’s bare arm, but I could see more than that. The particles of light had clustered around her limb and I could see dark lines running along the skin, branching off, connecting to other lines, filling Lilly’s arm.

Then it became clear to me exactly what the light was showing me and I felt a little sick.

I was seeing through Lilly’s skin to the veins and arteries beneath. I looked closer and could even see the blood pumping through her.

‘You have to admit,’ Lilly said, ‘that this is pretty damned cool.’

I nodded, suddenly mute.

‘I reckon we’re in the right place,’ she said. ‘Let’s go get a look inside those silos.’

We were about twenty metres from the first of the silos when a group of people appeared around the corner in front of us, heading the same way. I gestured for Lilly to get out of sight and jogged for cover at the side of the yard.

As the group drew closer to us I realised that I knew most of them. Five members of the Naylor family, including old man Naylor himself, were leading a young woman towards the silo.

Lilly was pointing at the young woman, mouthing something, but there was a rushing sound in my ears and a cold, leaden feeling moving swiftly down my spine.

I recognised her.

I recognised her all too well.

I’d lived next door to her my whole life.

It was Annette Birnie, Danny’s sister.

She didn’t look like she was doing too well. Her hair, normally straight and neat and perfectly arranged, was a wild tangled mess, and the face it framed was pale and drawn. Dark skin ringed her eyes. She was moving in a halting fashion, as if she were in shock, and every few steps one of the Naylor family would push her forwards to hurry her up.

‘She’s one of us,’ Lilly whispered, with horror in her voice. ‘She’s one of the 0.4 and she’s been alone since it happened. We had each other, Kate O’Donnell, Mr Peterson. She had no one. No one at all.’

I knew that Lilly was right and felt a horrible pang of sympathy. To have been completely alone through all of this, I couldn’t even begin to think how that must have felt. She must have thought she was losing her mind.

‘We should have found her, helped her,’ Lilly said.

‘We didn’t know,’ I said. ‘We just didn’t know.’

‘Danny hypnotised her too,’ Lilly said crossly. ‘We should have known.’

‘He hypnotised her days ago,’ I countered. ‘Why would that have affected her today?’

Lilly shook her head.

‘We have to help her now,’ she said, and there was a steely tone to her voice that told me she wasn’t taking no for an answer.

‘If you’ve got a plan, I’m all ears,’ I said.

‘I distract them, you save Annette,’ she said, as if it were the easiest thing in the world she was laying out. ‘Just like in one of your comic books.’

‘You read comic books?’

‘No, but when we’re out of this I’ll let you show me a couple of comic books to convince me they’re worth my time. Deal?’

‘Deal.’

‘Now stay here. I’ll get them looking the other way.’

‘I should be doing that part of the plan.’

She shook her head.

‘Annette knows and trusts you.’ She smiled wickedly. ‘She has a lower opinion of me.’

‘Sounds like there’s some history between you.’

‘There’s always history. You know that. Now let’s do this.’

‘You take care of yourself,’ I said, but it didn’t seem like enough, and then I was leaning forwards, taking her face in my hands, and kissing her on the lips.

She kissed back and then it was over and we were both standing there, wondering what had just happened.

‘A kiss for luck?’ she said.

‘We’ll call it that for now,’ I said. ‘Now go. Distract. We’ve got a friend to rescue.’

Lilly clung to the shadows and made her way quickly up the side of the yard, past a row of dilapidated barns, while I just stood there waiting for a chance to get to Annette. I could still feel the ghost impression of Lilly’s lips upon mine.

The Naylor family procession had paused next to the closest silo and old man Naylor was standing in front of the structure. He extended his arms before him and a whole load of those weird filaments tore loose from his hands and adhered to the front of the silo. Suddenly, the surface of the structure started to glow, then peel back, creating an opening, then a door.

Hell of a way to make an entrance, I thought, and then the new door swished aside.

The alphabet of hooks and eyes that we saw on Kate O’Donnell’s computer was floating in the air inside the silo, as if the symbols were being projected on to the air itself. They twisted and curled and looked sort of brownish to my eyes. But, even as I said the word ‘brownish’ to myself, I realised that was about a million miles away from describing the actual colour.

I watched in fascination as the characters of that alphabet changed and mutated before my eyes. I was wondering how it was possible that there could be a language written across the air, and I felt myself taking a step forwards, towards the silo, without meaning to, as if my body had suddenly broken free of my mind’s control.

I felt my foot rising up to take another step. I couldn’t stop it.

And I couldn’t take my eyes off the symbols in the silo.

My foot took another step.

I knew that I would be in the sightline of the Naylor family any second, but my body still wasn’t listening. I felt my foot readying itself for another step.

No. No. No, I tried to tell my foot.

The foot started moving again.

‘HEY!’ I heard Lilly’s voice and it snapped me out of it. I managed to drag my eyes away from the silo and my foot back from its forwards course.

I saw the Naylors turn to find the source of the interruption and there she was, Lilly, standing about fifty metres away in the middle of the yard, hands on her hips. I actually smiled when I saw her, she looked so composed and… well, heroic, I guess.

I saw the Naylor clan react to her arrival with surprise and old man Naylor even stepped away from the silo towards her. His… filaments retracted so fast that their movement was a blur.

Annette just stood there, looking dazed and lost.

‘HEY!’ Lilly shouted again. ‘Any of you weirdos know where a nought-point-four can get a bed for the night?’

The Naylors looked at her and seemed to confer, although I’m not convinced any of them actually spoke. Then old man Naylor nodded his head at Lilly.

I sucked in a deep breath and readied myself.

The Naylors started towards her but she stood her ground. I felt proud and sick and scared. The Naylors kept moving forwards, and for a horrible couple of seconds I thought the old man was going to stay behind to guard Annette, but then he followed the rest of his clan, and together they moved in on Lilly.

They were thirty metres away.

Then they were twenty-five.

Then twenty.

It was show time.

I broke from the shadows, hunched down, and hurried over to Annette Birnie. She was staring into the silo, her eyes filled with the uncanny alphabet within, and I had to physically touch her, on the shoulder, to get her to notice me.

‘Annette,’ I said calmly. ‘It’s me. Kyle. I’m here to help you. To get you away from here.’

She looked at me blankly. For a moment I thought she didn’t even recognise me. Then her eyes seemed to show a sudden awareness and her brow furrowed with confusion.

‘Kyle?’ she asked, almost robotically. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘We have to get out of here,’ I said. ‘There’s no time to explain. But there are more of us. There’s me and Lilly and Mrs O’Donnell and Mr Peterson. We know what’s happened. We want to help you.’

‘Help me?’ Annette’s gaze met mine and I saw that there were tears in her eyes. ‘No. There’s no help. There is only… in there.’ She pointed at the silo.

‘I really don’t think you want to go in there, Annette,’ I said.

I sneaked a quick look over to where the Naylors had almost reached Lilly.

‘You want me?’ I heard her yell. ‘Then you’re going to have to catch me!’

She turned and ran away from them, deeper into the darkness of the farm.

Time was running out.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Come with me.’

Annette shook her head. Her eyes were wide and all pupils. She looked helpless and defeated.

‘In there I can become one of them,’ she said slowly, as if explaining something very simple to a rather dull child. ‘In there it all ends.’

‘You don’t want to be one of them,’ I said.

‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ Annette Birnie looked at me and I saw all the fear that was running through her head, through the dark windows of her eyes. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’

I was aware that I was using up all the time Lilly had bought me, but I really hadn’t planned for the contingency of Annette not wanting to come with us. I’d thought that she’d be looking for a way to escape, not looking forward to joining them.

Another glance told me that the Naylors weren’t going to give chase. They were standing, looking into the distance, but they weren’t following Lilly.

‘You won’t be alone,’ I said, in what I thought was a soothing voice. ‘Come on, we can help you.’

‘Help me?’ she said in a puzzled voice. ‘How do you know what I want? ’

The question baffled me.

‘Look,’ I said, taking her arm and trying to drag her away from the silo. ‘Just come with me…’

She didn’t let me finish.

‘NO!’ she said, and she said it very loudly.

So loudly it attracted the attention of the Naylors.

Time had completely run out.

The Naylors had spotted me now and were making their way back towards us.

‘You want to be like them?’ I asked, a cruel note in my voice.

Annette’s tears came thick and fast now.

‘That’s all I ever wanted,’ she said, and turned on her heel. Before I could stop her she moved into the silo.

The moment she entered, the alphabet seemed to sense she was there.

I watched, terrified, as the characters started to twist and flex through the air towards her, the hooks extending to reach her with something that looked like hunger.

‘ANNETTE!’ I screamed, but she didn’t appear to hear me.

Instead, she threw her arms apart and made a cross shape of her body – like a sacrifice – and then the hooks and eyes and squiggles and lines closed in around her, superimposing their alien message over her. At first they fizzed and skated across her skin, and then they stopped moving and seemed to sink into her flesh.

There was a smile on her face as her body absorbed the letters of that terrible language, and I think that scared me more than anything else I was seeing.

Her smile.

I turned and ran, back the way Lilly and I had come.

Lilly caught up with me before I made it back to the road. She wasn’t even out of breath.

‘Where’s Annette?’ she asked.

I shook my head.

‘She wouldn’t come,’ I said. ‘She actually wanted to become one of them.’

I thought Lilly would be angry that I couldn’t persuade Annette, but instead she just nodded.

‘I guess she finally found a way to fit in…’

I looked at her blankly.

‘A few years ago me and Annette were at camp together. Girl Guides, if you must know, but tell anyone else and you’re dead.

‘Anyway, long story short and all that, we kind of paired up while we were there. We were talking one night, out under the stars, and it was probably because we weren’t really friends that she confided in me.

‘She told me about how she had never felt like she fitted in, that there was this huge weight of expectation that everyone put on her, but that no matter how hard she tried she always felt like an outsider, an impostor, a fake. She’d even thought about killing herself because she couldn’t bear the idea of going through life alone.

‘Nothing I said helped, and after camp she never spoke to me again. She showed me a part of herself that was secret, and it would have got in the way if I’d been the one to approach her.’

Lilly took a deep breath and continued.

‘You did your best, Kyle. You’re a nice guy, you know that?’

She gave me a smile, but I didn’t feel like a nice guy.

A nice guy would have found a way to save Annette.

‘So the silo can turn us into one of them?’ Lilly said. ‘Are you tempted?’

I shook my head.

‘Not even hardly,’ I said.

Lilly raised an eyebrow.

‘My parents were barely getting along,’ I explained. ‘Now it’s like nothing ever happened to disturb their happiness.’

‘Is that so bad?’

‘Not if you like lies so much you want to live one,’ I snapped. ‘My dad ran off, and I don’t see why we should forget it. Forgive it? Sure, we could do that. But forget? Forget the sadness he caused? That would be plain wrong.’

‘You think that sadness is better than happiness?’

‘No. But it is important.’

‘Because we learn from it?’ Lilly asked.

I nodded.

‘The real question is do we tell the others?’ I said.

‘Tell them what?’

‘That they just have to go to Naylor’s farm and the nightmare’s over for them.’

‘There are few enough of us around as it is,’ Lilly said. ‘Why on earth would we want to tell them that?’

A secret then.

Shared between Lilly and me.

I liked that.

We walked down the road to meet the other two.

We joined up with the others and we told our lie.

Nothing happened, we said.

It almost made me want to retract the lie when Kate O’Donnell gave us a triumphant I told you so look, but Lilly and I had made our pact of silence, so we just fell into step with her and Mr Peterson and carried on down the road.

My stomach felt empty and hollow and I wished one of us had had the foresight to bring some kind of provisions along. It had been a long time since I had last eaten.

That made me think of the second can of Red Bull, and I put my hand in my pocket to pull it out. There was a dull, metallic sound as if the can had hit against something in my pocket, but I didn’t think about it at the time, because I was already greedily pulling the ring pull and taking a couple of sips. I handed the can to Lilly and she smiled, drank a bit, handed it back.

I offered the can to the adults – Mr Peterson took a drink, Kate just frowned at the can and shook her head – and we kept on walking.

It was Mr Peterson who heard it first.

I turned around and saw that he had stopped in the middle of the road behind us. He had his head cocked to the left and was cupping his ear with his hand. I motioned to Lilly and Kate and walked back to where he was standing.

‘You OK there, Mr P?’ I asked.

He looked exhausted, his face red and blotchy, dark shadows under his eyes, and his greying hair was sticking out at strange angles.

‘Can you hear it?’ He asked in a breathless voice and he sounded so earnest and… and afraid, I guess, and it contrasted with the silly cupped ear thing so that I almost burst out laughing.

Almost.

But then I heard it too.

Lilly and Kate had joined us but I hardly noticed them arrive.

I was listening to the sound.

That is if ‘sound’ is the right word for it. Because it seemed like it was made up of a lot of sounds: a high-pitched hiss like gas escaping at pressure from a ruptured pipe; an insectile chitter like a locust swarm; that deep, bass vibration we’d heard in the village; a high, keening wail.

It sounded distant.

But not that distant.

Certainly not distant enough.

And I realised that I had heard the sound before, back at Kate O’Donnell’s house, just before she shut her computer down.

‘What is that?’ Kate asked.

‘Nothing good,’ I said.

The noise drew closer.

I’m not exaggerating, my skin bristled with gooseflesh.

There was something about the sound that hit me at a primal level. A bit like how the sound of a Tyrannosaur would have affected a tiny mammal that stumbled into its killing grounds.

Closer, the sound was terrifying.

It sounded like something was out there in the half-light, getting closer and closer to us with every passing second. Something awful, something dangerous, something that we could not even begin to imagine the shape or size of.

We started walking, moving away from the sound. It was the only thing to do. Whatever was out there was coming after us, I was certain.

Lilly’s walking pace speeded up, and we all matched her speed.

Everyone’s face reflected their fear.

Fear of whatever was making that sound.

Getting closer with every second.

We ran.

A jog became a run became a sprint and still that sound was close on our heels.

My eyes were squeezed shut and I had stopped thinking of anything except that noise behind us.

Suddenly I realised: the noise was no longer behind us.

It was to the side of us.

Running parallel to the road, across the fields, shadowing us.

Running parallel to us.

Running to overtake us.

Except, of course, running isn’t the right word for it at all. Sure, I could hear it crashing through the undergrowth at great speed, but there were no footsteps. Just this weird phasing static that was more like some stereo-panning effect from a video game than an actual sound in the real world.

I opened my eyes and started scanning the hedges by the side of the road for a sign of the thing that was making such a terrible noise. I could see nothing there, and that made me even more terrified. I ran faster.

I’ve never been particularly athletic, but I think I could have run for the county if I’d matched the speed I was making then, spurred on by that inhuman sound.

I was even starting to feel that I might outrun it.

Suddenly Lilly screamed my name.

The scream pulled me back to the real world.

I turned my head to face forwards.

Just in time.

I killed the speed. Ground to a halt and stood there, gasping for air.

I realised that Lilly had just saved my life.

The thing that had been following us, then moving alongside us, had now overtaken us.

It was waiting there, directly in front of me.

Blocking my way forwards.

It’s not easy to describe it. In fact, the more I think about it, it’s probably easier to talk about what this thing wasn’t, than to struggle with what it was. I mean, I don’t think the thing was solid, and I’m reasonably sure that it didn’t have a form that the human eye could recognise. It didn’t look alive, but it didn’t look not -alive, either. It didn’t look natural, but it didn’t look entirely unnatural .

Oh yeah, I’m making a good job of this.

Let me try again.

It seemed more like something missing from this world, than something added to it. It was as if there were a tear in the skin of our world, and it had revealed this terrible thing beneath it.

At the time I remember thinking about those pictures you see in anatomy books, when they show a person, and then the bones and muscles inside them.

You strip away the skin of this world, I thought, and this is what you find hiding underneath.

‘What in God’s name is it?’ Kate O’Donnell asked, and I saw her cross herself.

I shook my head.

It was too much.

This tear in the world had been following us, hunting us, and now it had us.

And we were too tired and too scared to do anything about it.

It moved closer, pushing against the surface of our world and making the air seem to bulge as it did so. I stood there wondering what stuff this… thing, this tear, was made of, and I wondered what it would do to us when it reached us: whether it would hurt; whether it would dissolve us, melt us, or suck us through into its cold blackness until we were nothing.

There were tears streaming down my cheeks, and I could feel the cold breath of infinity roaring in my face.

‘Hey!’ someone shouted from somewhere behind me. ‘Are you going to just stand there and let that thing wipe you off the face of the planet?’

I turned around.

Somehow I wasn’t surprised.

By the side of the road, standing straight and tall, stood Danny. He nodded towards the tear in space and cocked his head to one side.

‘If you have any interest in surviving the next few seconds,’ he said, ‘then I suggest you toss over that video camera you picked up on the green.’

I thought, Video camera? What is he talking about?

The air bulged again and the tear moved closer.

I thought, How does he know I’m carrying his mum’s video camera?

Danny said, ‘Quickly. Throw it here.’

I reached down and fumbled the camera out of my pocket. Lights were flashing on its tiny casing.

It had switched itself on when the can of drink hit it.

It had been filming the inside of my pocket all that time.

‘Do it now,’ Danny advised and I threw it over to him. He caught it in one hand and switched it off.

Then he smiled and nodded towards the tear in space. It was already drawing back, moving away, as if its interest in us – the interest that had it screaming across the countryside – had suddenly ended.

‘Danny, what the -?’ I started, but Danny shut me up with a dismissive wave of his hand.

‘I guess you all have some questions,’ Danny said, and his face suddenly looked sad. ‘Follow me and I’ll try to answer them for you.’

Then the sad look was gone.

He turned and started walking into the field behind him, away from that terrible patch of moving darkness, away from the road, away from Millgrove, away from Crowley.

After a few seconds, we followed.

We trudged across a field sun-baked into clay, following Danny Birnie in pursuit of answers. Danny had been there at the start of all this, and there was something right about his being here now.

I realised that I was afraid. Not of the terrible thing that had been seconds away from destroying us, but afraid of my friend.

Of Danny.

Of what he had become.

He walked quickly, neither slowing down nor turning to check that we were keeping up with him. Or if we were even following him, for that matter.

The sky was almost full dark now, with a summer-stuffed moon looming on the horizon, surrounded by wisps of cloud and tiny, icy chips of starlight.

For centuries humankind had stared up into a sky like that and wondered whether they were alone in the universe.

Now I thought we had our answer.

A dark, tall shape loomed out of the darkness ahead and Danny led us towards it. Eventually the shape resolved itself out of the near dark, revealed itself to be an old, ramshackle barn on the edge of the field.

‘I guess here is as good as anywhere,’ Danny said.

He walked into the barn.

It was no longer Danny, I was certain of that. He was one of them . This could be a trap, an ambush, a massacre.

But he might really have answers.

Answers we needed.

We followed him into the barn.

Quietly.

Like cattle.

Or…

NOTE

The last break in the narrative as the end of the tape once more gets in the way. Howard Tillinghast sees this break as crucial. ‘This is the point at which innocence breathes its last gasp of oxygen, before revelation takes it away, forever.’

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 670