Mike Lancaster - 0.4

In that moment I had given up.

The crowd was close now. Very close, moving towards us as a single entity, like flocking birds or marching army ants.

Still silent.

And in the front row was: my mother; my father; my brother; Doctor Campbell; Mr and Mrs Dartington; Simon; Mrs Carlton, the local busybody; Len Waites, the butcher; Eddie Crichton, who’d never got to hand out a prize at the talent show; Mr and Mrs Parnese, who had a stall selling mobile phone accessories on Cambridge Market; Laura Jones, who was a year below me at school; Peter Parker, who was a librarian, not Spider-Man; a red-faced man I knew by sight, but not by name; Barry and Dennis Geary, the nearest thing to bad boys you got in Millgrove; Karl Raines, the best footballer at our school; Ellie Whatsername, barmaid at the Blue Nun in Crowley; some bloke that is always hanging around her like a faithful puppy.

They stopped about three metres away from us.

Perfectly in synch.

Perfectly silent.

They were looking at us, and they were looking through us, at the same time. A thousand people in a block.

Lilly took hold of my hand and her palm was cold, her hand was shaking. I held it tight and drew strength from that simple gesture.

We stood there together, facing the crowd, waiting for them to make their move.

Kate O’Donnell took a step forwards.

‘What do you want from us?’ she demanded.

There was no answer. The crowd just stood there. It was almost as if they had been frozen again.

‘They’re not even blinking,’ Lilly whispered.

It was true.

They weren’t blinking. Or breathing, it seemed. They weren’t moving at all.

‘WHAT DO YOU WANT?’ Kate screamed this time. She looked red-faced and terrified.

Again, nothing.

The crowd seemed to be ignoring us.

They were just standing there.

Kate jumped from the stage and homed in on Doctor Campbell.

‘All right, you idiot quack,’ she said spitefully. ‘Just tell me what the hell is going on!’

She put her face just centimetres from the doctor’s face and screamed, ‘TELL ME!’

She was so close that he must have felt her words on his face.

But he didn’t appear to flinch.

Kate let out a sound of frustration and sank to her knees, like all the air had been let out of her. I could hear her sobbing. I even felt like joining her. Lilly’s hand tightened its grip on mine, and her fingernails bit into my palm.

Then I heard it.

A low sound that could have been the thrum of an electrical power source, except it seemed to be coming from the crowd of people in front of us. I realised it had been building for a while, but that I had only just become aware of it. It was a deep throbbing sound I could feel throughout my body.

I was vibrating along with the noise.

I felt on the very brink of panic, and still the sound continued to develop; getting louder and deeper and making my body vibrate even more, like the heavy bass you get at a rock concert when the PA is really kicking.

Lilly let go of my hand and put her hands up to cover her ears.

‘What is that?’ she said loudly to compete with the sound that was rising up around us.

The crowd still didn’t move.

They just stood there.

‘My god.’ Kate’s voice was quiet and full of fear. ‘Look.’

She was still on her knees, and she was staring at Doctor Campbell in front of her. I looked over but couldn’t see what she meant.

‘His hands !’ she said. ‘Oh god, look at his hands!’

I thought she had lost her mind.

And then I looked at Doctor Campbell’s hands.

And then I thought maybe I had lost mine.

NOTE

Kyle pauses here and creates a silence that lasts almost a whole minute. Sounds of breathing can be discerned, but nothing else.

Bernadette Luce has written much about this pause. In ‘The Importance of What Isn’t There: Finding Truth in the Gaps’ she hypothesises about the reason for this pause, deciding, after a particularly long discourse, that ‘(T)his is the moment where the power of silence overtakes the weakness of language. Kyle Straker, with his silence, tells us all we need to know about this part of the greater narrative. That it is beyond words, it transcends language, and the gap he leaves as he attempts to find a way to describe what happens next is a silent scream that we hear echoing through the rest of the tape. Gaps always provide a good environment for the manufacture of echoes.’

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.