Майк Ланкастер: Human.4

"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 realize 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 defenses 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 honorable 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 hypnotized . Did it go wrong? Did Danny hypnotize 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 graying 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 immobilized, by some force or sickness that we couldn’t guess. Only the four people who’d been hypnotized 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 humor 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.