0.4

one. Notice that when you relax those fingers, the ball of light becomes dimmer. You are turning down the light, just by relaxing your fingers. Relax them some more. Turn the brightness down some more.’

I let my fingers relax. The light lost some of its brightness.

‘Now I want you to start to relax your hands, let them become weightless. Watch the light dimming as you do it. Feel the relaxation spread to your arms, making them weightless. The light dims some more. It’s all hazy now, that light, and as you relax it gets hazier. Let your body relax, let your mind become soothed by the light as it fades, relax your arms, your shoulders, your neck. Let your mind grow as dark as the screen, as the light fades, as your body relaxes. Let go of all the thoughts that are weighing you down.’

I felt my mind do just that, letting go of all the baggage, all the chatter.

As the light faded out into perfect darkness I realised that Danny’s voice was fading out with it.

It didn’t seem odd, in fact I welcomed the darkness.

Soon there was nothing else.

Just darkness.

And peace.

NOTE

The Parker experiment attempted to test Daniel Birnie’s method of hypnosis using the exact words transcribed here. It was a total failure. Either Kyle Straker’s memory or Birnie’s method was flawed.

Peace, perfect peace.

I’d never realised that my head was so darned noisy, that thoughts and images and sounds are ringing around it constantly. You don’t think of your head as being a particularly chaotic place to live.

I wasn’t asleep, I knew that, but I must have been in a state pretty close to sleep.

I could still hear things outside my head, but I couldn’t focus on them.

There’s a difference between hearing something and listening to it.

It’s kind of hard to say much more about the experience – soon I wasn’t thinking, or seeing, or hearing: I wasn’t anything really.

As it turned out, however, it didn’t last long and…

NOTE

It seems that Kyle was as unfamiliar with old-fashioned tape recordings as people today would be. He was unaware of the blank beginning and end of an analogue tape. As a result, when the tape switched off, he probably thought that his last few words had been captured, but they were not.

This is true of all three of the Straker tapes.

Tape One Side Two

… orgotten that tapes need turning over? How did they ever get to be a dominant technology? You don’t turn a CD over – why would you split an album up into two halves?

It’s funny, all the ordinary stuff – the last of my ordinary stuff – all of it fitting on to one side of a cassette.

The next thing I remember…

06

The next thing I remember is that I woke up.

Suddenly.

Pulled out of a state of peace and calm, I opened my eyes and for a few seconds I couldn’t process anything and just sat there, waiting for my brain to start working properly again.

The world was a sickening, Technicolor blur. I could see rows of blurry pink balloons that were, perhaps, faces. I could sense people around me, could hear sounds and feel people close to me, but it took a while for me to put everything together.

Then my vision kicked back in. The pink balls I had seen were the faces of the audience, staring up at me and the other people upon the stage.

I had a sudden feeling that something was different; that something had changed.

I looked around and saw that Lilly was opening her eyes. Her eyes looked… I don’t know, almost supernaturally blue as they locked on to mine, and this weird half-smile played across her lips. Then she broke eye contact, and her face kinda creased up with puzzlement.

I followed her eye line.

Danny was standing close by, watching us with a strange expression on his face.

It wasn’t a look of confusion.

It was more like shock.

He was standing totally still, hands clenched into tight fists at his sides. He seemed frozen to the spot.

Completely immobile.

‘What on earth is going on?’ someone asked, and I followed the sound back to my right-hand side.

Mrs O’Donnell was staring wide-eyed across the audience. Her pinched face looked alarmed. She was half-out of her seat as if she had been trying to stand, something had stopped her, and she hadn’t worked out what to do next.

And her face looked pale.

Very pale indeed.

‘What is it?’ I asked her. ‘What’s wrong?’

Instead of answering she just pointed out into the crowd and I noticed her hand was shaking. I followed her finger and realised I was shaking too.

I felt my mind fighting to explain it away.

And failing.

Everyone in the audience was statue-still, frozen in their place just like Danny was. But they weren’t just still: they were utterly motionless. And their faces were frozen in an expression exactly the same as Danny’s. You know when you freeze-frame a DVD and everything stops until you press ‘play’ again? It was a lot like that. I guess.

One of my dad’s favourite pictures is that weird one by Edvard Munch called The Scream. He’s got a print of it in his study, and we used to joke that it was the real thing, back when the original got stolen. The painting shows a figure – you can’t really tell if it’s a man or a woman – standing on a bridge, in front of a blood-red sky. A couple of figures are watching in the background, but they’re not important, the main focus is that figure in the foreground; hands on either side of its face, its mouth wide open.

I’ve looked at that picture more than a hundred times, hanging there over my dad’s desk, and I have tried to figure out what is going on in that figure’s head, to make it look so full of despair.

I still don’t know, but I saw it imprinted across the faces of everyone in Millgrove.

Everyone except four, anyway.

I – I haven’t got the words to describe how disturbing the sight was. Every one of those faces was gripped by some fear, or despair, that had literally frozen them to the spot. It was too unreal, too weird, and I turned away.