It was part of the act.
I laughed.
"Very funny, everyone," I said loudly. "You had us worried, there."
No one moved. No one laughed. No one did anything but remain still.
I waited.
Nothing.
No joke, then.
So what was going on?
Chapter 7
A weird kind of panic descended.
I mean, this was just plain freaky.
These were all people we knew; people we saw every day; people we had grown up with; said "hi" to if we saw them on the street.
But they weren’t moving.
They weren’t moving at all.
I’m not sure I’ve done this… stillness . . . justice yet. I mean, this wasn’t people pretending to be still. You know, like when they play musical statues, or whatever, and they freeze, but not really.
The truth is, people can’t stay still for long. Not without a whole lot of practice. Not this amount of people. Not for this long. Human bodies aren’t built for inactivity. They sway. They smile. They move, even if it’s only a little. They giggle.
None of the audience was doing any of these things.
It was eerie and unnatural.
Mrs O’Donnell said, "I’ve had enough of this."
She got to her feet, stomped over to Danny and pushed him, very gently. He didn’t offer any resistance. He moved, but in the way an inanimate object moves when pushed. He swayed slightly. Then stopped. His face didn’t change. Not a muscle of his body twitched.
Mrs O’Donnell snapped her fingers in front of his face. He didn’t react. He didn’t even blink, and I realized that I hadn’t seen any of the audience blink in all the time we had been awake.
I had a really bad feeling spreading through me, the kind that brings bumps of gooseflesh up on the skin of your arms. That makes the nape of your neck feel cold.
Mr Peterson was sitting, rocking backwards and forwards, while his lips moved in silent conversation with himself.
"What’s wrong with him?" Lilly asked.
I shrugged.
"Shock, I guess," I said. "I sort of feel like sitting down and doing it myself."
I pointed out over the audience.
"The question we ought to be concentrating on is: what’s wrong with them?"
Lilly took my arm again, and her fingers fixed tight this time.
"What about Simon?" she whispered.
"Let’s go see," I said, feeling disappointed. How bad is that, by the way? To feel disappointed that she was concerned about my best friend?
I led her from the stage and on to the green below.
Among the crowd, the level of weirdness was raised by a factor of ten.
Or twenty.
Down there, the effect was even more astonishing.
It was as if everyone had been switched off in the middle of whatever it was they were doing. Like the stopped mechanical exhibits you’d see at closing time in a museum, turned off in mid-motion.
People held canned drinks in the air. Kids had their hands in packets of crisps. Old man Davis was frozen in the midst of scratching his nose. Annie Bishop and her boyfriend, Nigel Something-or-other, were in the middle of a kiss. Ned Carter was looking up at the sky. Ursula Lincoln was coughing, with her hand up to her mouth.
About halfway to where we had left Simon I found my mum and dad. They were just sitting there, totally still, my mum’s finger pointing accusingly at my meek-looking dad. They had been arguing, and then they had just stopped.
There were only four of us outside of stopped time, and able to move around those that were frozen in it.
But it wasn’t time that had stopped. Things were moving. It was only the people that were stopped. There were flies buzzing around; wasps crawling around the drinking holes of soft drink cans; clouds of midges swirling in the summer air. Birds still crossed the sky. A cool breeze blew, carrying sweet wrappers and other discarded items. Mrs Winifred’s Italian greyhound, Bambi, was walking around, looking lost.
Whatever this was, it seemed only to affect human beings.
All human beings except me, Lilly, Mrs O’Donnell and Mr Peterson.
It was one hundred per cent weird.
"I’m scared," Lilly confessed.
"Me too." I smiled a tight-lipped smile. "But we’ve got to keep it together. There’s an explanation for this. We’ve just got to find it."
"Well, I don’t have an explanation," Lilly said, pouting. "Not a one. I mean this is impossible, you realize that, don’t you? It’s like one of those awful movies on the Sci-Fi Channel. I really hate science fiction."
Standing there—looking afraid, with fear-wide eyes, dilated pupils and all her usual defenses down—Lilly looked . . . well, really pretty.
It’s something about her that she tries to hide, so I guess it’s her way of staying out of things, by distancing herself from them. You don’t get involved, you don’t get let down, I guess.
Now, though, she looked different.
Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparked with life. No longer a disinterested observer, she had come to life.
Anyway, Simon was sitting in the exact same place we’d left him. His hands were folded in his lap and his face was frozen in the same open-mouthed expression as the others.
Lilly touched Simon’s face.
"He’s warm," she said, moving her fingers to his neck. She held two fingers on the side of his neck, held them there trying to find a pulse, and then she smiled. "Still alive."
The relief in her voice was obvious.
I felt a harsh twinge of jealousy. Yeah, I know, not exactly an honorable reaction, and I’m not proud.
"If he’s alive, there’s hope," I offered, and Lilly’s face brightened.
"But how do we wake them up?" she asked. "We were the ones who were supposed to be hypnotized . Did it go wrong? Did Danny hypnotize everyone else? Even himself?"
I was going to attempt an answer, when my train of thought was interrupted by a loud wailing sound behind us.
Chapter 8
Mr Peterson had lost it.
Just seriously lost it.
When we got back to the stage we found him on his knees, head in his hands, making the horrible sound we’d heard. His face was red and his cheeks were wet with tears. His head was bowed, revealing a sunburnt bald spot in his graying hair.
Mrs O’Donnell was bent over, trying to comfort him, but he thrashed her away with wild, windmill arms. There was spittle around his lips.
"What happened?" I asked her.
Mrs O’Donnell shook her head.
"I don’t know. He’d stopped the rocking and was sitting there in his seat, looking around. And then this…"
Lilly approached him warily, keeping her distance in case those arms struck out again.
"Mr Peterson?" she asked soothingly. "Can you tell us what is wrong?"
There was no reply, just an increase in the volume of Mr Peterson’s wailing. A thin, high-pitched noise that sounded more like the voice of Mr Peebles than his own.
Suddenly it hit me: just how much trouble we were in. Everyone on the village green had been inexplicably, completely immobilized, by some force or sickness that we couldn’t guess. Only the four people who’d been hypnotized as part of Danny’s act remained unaffected by the event.
We were alone.
But where did that leave us? What could we do?
"We need to get help," I said. I turned to Mrs O’Donnell. "The Happy Shopper is open today—how many people are working there?"
"Just Tony," she said. "Tony Jefferson. Shop Manager. Everyone else is here."