Майк Ланкастер: Human.4

NOTE—"golfing"

Two things here:

1. 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 meters, rather than tens of kilometers) 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 realized 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 realized 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 recognize 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 materialized 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 hypnotize 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 center 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 realizing 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.