"Anyway, I started asking him about what had happened to him, you know, all the freezy stuff, and he looked at me like I was mad."
She broke off and then she shook her head.
"No," she said sadly. "Except he didn’t look at me like that. I think I could maybe have coped with that. This look was something else." She paused as she tried to pin down her thoughts. "He looked at me like I was… dirt."
I thought about how Doctor Campbell had looked at me.
"Anyway," she continued, "I got angry with him. At first I thought that he just didn’t believe me, or something. But it wasn’t that. It was like he was . . . looking down on me. As if he knew something that I didn’t. So I got cross with him, and he just walked away. Just turned his back on me and walked. He didn’t turn around."
Her top lip was quivering and she had tears welling in her eyes.
I felt a sudden flare of anger at Simon for doing that to Lilly, and then a stabbing pang of guilt when I realized it actually wasn’t a whole lot different to what I had done to her after visiting her parents" house.
"So I think: Fine. Be like that," she continued. "And I walk home—the whole thing rolling round and round inside my brain. And I’m scared and angry and confused and angry again. And my parents are like: What’s up with you? And I don’t even know where to start. And they look like my parents, they sound like my parents, but there’s something… off about them, so I tell them that we’ll talk later and I need to go to my room, and that’s when Doctor Campbell rings the doorbell."
"Your parents didn’t call Doctor Campbell either?" I asked her.
"No," she said, sounding a little baffled by the question. "They didn’t have time. I mean I hadn’t even gone upstairs when he turned up, so how could they have called him? And then there’s the whole telephones not working thing."
Mrs O’Donnell leaned forwards in her seat.
"Do you think Simon told him to come around and see you?"
Lilly looked genuinely shocked.
"Why would he…?" she started. "I mean . . . he wouldn’t . . . would he?"
Mrs O’Donnell shrugged.
"I guess it all depends on what we’re saying happened to these people," she said. "If we’re saying they were merely disorientated by the effect of their . . . of the trance, then, no, I don’t think your boyfriend would have told Doctor Campbell to come around to see you."
Mrs O’Donnell leaned back again.
"But I suspect neither of you is altogether satisfied with that as an explanation for the changes in personality that you noticed."
"It wasn’t Simon," Lilly said, with such certainty that Mrs O’Donnell raised an eyebrow of surprise. "And they weren’t my parents."
"Well," Mrs O’Donnell said, "that’s certainly a big statement to be making, isn’t it?"
Lilly nodded. "It’s true," she said.
"But it was us that were hypnotized ," Mrs O’Donnell said. "It was us that were put into a trance. This could be just some weird altered version of reality caused by Danny’s act."
That had been Doctor Campbell’s line, and it had a persuasive logic to it.
"But-" Lilly tried to interrupt but was silenced by a curt wave of Mrs O’Donnell’s hand.
"All I’m saying is that we cannot discount the possibility that there are psychological reasons for all that is happening to us. There are only four of us who saw things one way, and everyone else saw things another. Four individuals out of . . . what?… a total of a thousand people saw something that the other nine-hundred-and-ninety-six did not; whose version of the events would you believe first? Honestly, it wouldn’t be ours."
I had stopped listening.
My mind had just slotted some details together, and I felt a shiver travel the length of my spine.
"Oh," I said. "Oh no."
Mrs O’Donnell looked over at me.
"What is it?" she asked.
Her voice seemed to travel miles to reach me through the sudden rush of panic I felt.
"Oh no. No no no no," I said. "How many people did you say live in Millgrove?"
"It’s about a thousand," she said. "Just under, I think."
"And how many of us were hypnotized ? Are seeing things differently to everyone else?"
"Four," she said, as if explaining something to a very dull child.
I didn’t care.
The numbers were too terrifying.
"So, what are we, you know, as a percentage of the village’s population?" I asked, feeling sick, hoping my maths was wrong.
"Well, we would be four out of a thousand . . . Which would make us . . . let me think…" She stopped. "Oh," she said coldly. Her face had lost some of its color. She looked at me. "That’s very good, Kyle," she said. "We are in trouble, aren’t we?"
"Er, what are we talking about here?" Lilly asked, bemused.
"What percentage of the village population do we represent?" I asked her.
She shook her head. She should have worked it out way sooner than me.
"The answer is zero-point-four," I said. "We are zero-point-four of a per cent."
Chapter 21
"We have to find Rodney," Mrs O’Donnell said and it took me a few seconds to work out who she was talking about. Even though we had been talking about the four of us, it seemed crazy that I could have forgotten about the fate of the fourth person.
Mr Peterson.
Last seen in a fetal ball on the stage at the talent show.
Where we had left him.
"What happened to him?" I asked. "I mean, after everyone started moving again?"
"I don’t know," Mrs O’Donnell said. "I was so relieved, I . . . I kind of forgot about him. I wandered down the high street, sort of in a daze, but no one was talking. They were just filing past, completely silent. When I spoke to someone they responded, but it was like they would rather not be talking. As if there was something . . . new . . . going on in their heads. They no longer seemed to need to chatter away about nothing. It was eerie. Like . . . like a funeral, or something."
I drained the orange squash and rolled the glass around on my trouser leg.
"I . . . I need to ask something," I said. "And . . . well, there’s no sort of easy way to . . . Are we talking aliens here, do you think?"
Both Lilly and Mrs O’Donnell looked at me seriously.
It was Lilly who spoke first.
"There’s no such thing as aliens," she said definitely.
"Wow, I had no idea that scientists had actually figured that out," I said. "Last I heard they were still keeping an open mind."
"You know what I mean. No little green men and silver spaceships."
"That’s not the only kind of alien life possible," I said. "Has anyone seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers?"
Mrs O’Donnell sighed.
"You do realize that was a film?" she said caustically. "Not a documentary. And Invasion of the Body Snatchers wasn’t really about aliens. It was about Communism, and the remake was about the changing roles of men and women in modern society."
"I thought they were from outer space," I said grumpily. "In fact, I remember them saying that the pod things that took over people and changed them were aliens."
Mrs O’Donnell’s face told me that she thought I had missed the point that she was making.
"The differences in text and subtext aside," she said, "you’re thinking that alien pod creatures arrived in Millgrove during a village talent show, and took over everybody except the handful of people hypnotized by a boy magician?"