Mike Lancaster - 0.4

But he didn’t look my way, and I watched him go, and heard the front door of my house close. It sounded loud and hollow like the door of a tomb.

I was one of the nought -point-four .

That was what Doctor Campbell had said: 0.4.

What on earth did that mean?

I waited a few seconds, slipped through the cover of branches and shimmied down the trunk of the old beech tree.

I had thought that I was scared before.

He will have to be dealt with , the doctor had said, and a chill passed down my spine.

Did it mean that I was going to be killed? It had certainly sounded that way to me.

There is nothing that can be done for him .

He is one of the nought-point-four. Drug him if you have to .

What in hell was going on?

I set off for Lilly’s house to find out.

I had to know if what I was…

NOTE

It is at this point in the tapes that there is an interruption to the recording. A thud, some sounds of movement, and then an indistinguishable background voice.

Although much debate has raged about this section of the tapes, the consensus is that Kyle Straker has just been joined by another person. Later in the recordings it even becomes clear who this person is, but for now the voice is distant and muted and – even with sophisticated technological enhancement – impossible to decipher.

Perhaps we would have discovered more about the other person here, but the tape ends abruptly after Kyle addresses the newcomer.

… yeah , I know. I’m just in the middle of… I will… I just need to …

NOTE

Nathaniel Parker applies a version of Occam’s razor – that the correct answer is often the simplest – arguing that the tape only stopped before ‘… finish recording this.’

(Silence)

I felt like a criminal on the run, making my way through enemy territory. I was terrified of bumping into anyone, but there was no one around to bump into. The village, it seemed, was deserted. Like Mum and Dad, everyone had to be back at home.

Awaiting further instructions .

I couldn’t trust anyone.

Doctor Campbell had said that I was one of the nought -point-four , and that I would have to be dealt with . Did that make everyone else in the village, everyone I knew, part of the other group?

Nought-point-four – that was four-tenths. Four over ten. Two-fifths. Was that how few people like me still existed? Had the other nought-point-six been changed somehow?

0.6.

Six-tenths.

More than half.

Was I now in the minority?

And how mad did that sound?

I didn’t know, not for certain, that there was anything going on here at all.

I was running scared through the village because… because of what?

OK, something had happened in Millgrove; something that had affected everyone in the village, except for four people who were hypnotised at the time.

OK, there was no one on the streets of the village, even though it was a Saturday afternoon and there were always people on the streets.

OK, my parents were acting oddly.

And, OK, the doctor had said a few things that had sounded sinister to me.

But maybe Doctor Campbell was right. Maybe I was suffering from the after-affects of hypnosis, and had experienced an inverted version of reality that had meant I had seen everyone else standing still when it was really me who was paralysed.

Maybe the whole thing was just a fantasy.

Maybe none of it was real.

Maybe it was paranoia and nothing else.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

A nightmare , the doctor had called it: could it be nothing more than that? Could my mind be playing tricks upon me?

And that made me think of Jerry Possett. Local guy. Old – in his seventies, I guess. Probably harmless, but something has gone wrong with his brain. He holds conversations with people who aren’t really there; often arguing with these imaginary people in an angry voice.

To Jerry, those people are really there. He sees them, hears them. But they don’t exist. And Jerry doesn’t seem to know that they don’t exist.

The point I’m making here is that our brains play tricks. They can make us see patterns where there are no patterns; see faces in the grain of a wardrobe; castles in cloud formations; something psychologically revealing in an ink blot; can even make ordinarily sane people see UFOs over old man Naylor’s grain silos.

I don’t know enough about the way the brain works. In fact, I don’t have a clue how the brain works. Hundreds of thoughts flow through my brain from one hour to the next and not one of them is about how I’m thinking them.

So what if this was just my brain going off the rails?

Hallucinations.

Paranoia.

A mental breakdown caused by Danny’s act.

Meningitis.

Swine flu.

Marsh gas.

Maybe my brain just never wired up all that well to begin with and my whole life had been leading up to this moment, where the bad wiring sends sparks of insanity through my skull and makes me into a Jerry Possett, a nutcase to be avoided.

Maybe nought -point-four was simply doctors’ jargon for he’s blown a fuse in his brain and we need to get him somewhere secure before he harms himself or others.

How was it even possible to know if your brain was malfunctioning, because the very thing you need to think it all through is the very thing that might be playing up in the first place.

Was that some kind of paradox?

Was I mad?

I arrived at Lilly’s house and didn’t know what to do.

If her family were behaving anything like my family they wouldn’t let her out; they would be finding excuses to stand by the door and make sure she stayed where she was.

Should I throw stones at her window, to attract her attention?

That would be a whole lot easier if I knew which one was her room.

Did I really want to speak to her, anyway?

Did I want to discover that she had no memory of the things I remembered happening to us? Did I really want to find out that all this was happening because my mind was messed up?

I stood there, trying to find a path through it all.

And then the front door of Lilly’s house burst open and Lilly came hurtling towards me.

Lilly saw me standing there and her face registered both surprise and relief. She sprinted towards me and shouted, ‘RUN!’ with such urgency that I did just that.

Turned around and ran.

Gave into a stampede instinct inherited from an earlier model of humanity, where sabre-toothed tigers stalked the landscape.

I ran, hearing Lilly’s feet slapping the pavement just behind me, and it was as if all the tension of the day had suddenly been given an outlet in one mad burst of energy. I drove my legs as fast as they would carry me, away from Lilly’s house, without an idea in my head as to why we were running.

Nor where we were running to – it didn’t matter.

In those moments, with every thought, breath and muscle focused on the physical act of running, I felt… free .

Someone shouted Lilly’s name from behind us, and Lilly’s footsteps sped up as a result. She gained ground on me, and then she was running next to me.

‘Where are we going?’ I shouted, feeling the words ripped from my lungs.