Mike Lancaster - 0.4

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…’