I thrashed my arms and clawed for the tree, feeling the hardness of the wood slipping from my grasp. Leaves and smaller branches whipped at my face as I started to tumble downwards. The moment stretched out in perfect slow motion.
I’m dead, I thought calmly, far more calmly than I would have expected under the circumstances.
I think it was that calmness that saved my life.
It allowed me to give survival one more go.
I made a last, deliberate grab for a branch and it felt as if my arms were being torn from their sockets. My head was thrown backwards and my back arched at a painful angle. Twigs slapped my face and I could taste leaves in my mouth.
But I held on, sweating and trembling, hugging the branch to my chest. My legs fought for even safer purchase and found it.
A few breaths to calm myself down, and to get my heart beating at a more normal rate, then I inched myself down the branch, towards the trunk. Evolution was all well and good, but a monkey would have made a far better job of this than me.
In time I reached the sawed-off "platform" I had seen from my window and tried to lower myself on to it. The angle that the branch met the platform was difficult, but I adjusted my position on the branch and pretty much slid on to it. It was a small area, but wide enough for me to catch my breath and prepare for the next phase of my descent.
I was crouching there, braced on all sides by branches, when suddenly the front door opened and Doctor Campbell stepped out, on to the path, off to my left and only a short distance below me. I felt certain that he would see me, but there was no way to conceal myself further, so I waited with a leaden feeling in my stomach.
Doctor Campbell was speaking to one or both of my parents, who remained inside the house. His voice was loud enough for me to hear everything.
"Make sure he stays where he is," he said grimly. "I’m sorry, but it is clear that he is one of the zero-point-four. There is nothing that can be done for him. He will have to be dealt with."
My mother uttered a strange, strangled sound.
"I will return soon," the doctor said, ignoring her. "Drug him if you have to."
He turned and walked away from the house and his route brought him even closer to my hiding place. I crouched lower as if making myself fractionally smaller would stop him spotting me if he decided to look my way.
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 zero-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 zero-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."
Tape Two Side Two
(Silence)
Chapter 19
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 zero-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?
Zero-point-four—that was four-tenths. Four over ten. Two-fifths. Was that how few people like me still existed? Had the other zero-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 hypnotized 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 paralyzed.
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.