Human.4

but they’re not, not really.'

She stood up too.

'I must sound crazy,' she said.

'Not at all,' I said. 'I know exactly what you mean. They have changed.'

We carried on towards Mrs O’Donnell’s house.

'Has Doctor Campbell been round for a visit yet?' I asked her.

She nodded. 'You too, huh? He told me that I had experienced a powerful hallucination, that it was all a dream I was having, but, like, awake. You?'

'Same story.' We were at Mrs O’Donnell’s door now. 'I overheard him telling my parents that I was one of the zero-point-four.'

Lilly looked at me oddly.

'What’s that supposed to mean?' she asked.

I shrugged.

'I haven’t got a clue,' I said. 'I was hoping you’d have an idea.'

I lifted my knuckles to the front door, was just about to knock, and turned to Lilly.

'But I think you’re one of them too,' I said.

***

I knocked.

There were noises from within and we stood and waited for them to get closer. Mrs O’Donnell, it appeared, was in no hurry to open her door. Lilly and I stood there, feeling horribly exposed, and I started thinking that any second two angry sets of parents were going to come around the corner.

Along with Doctor Campbell, no doubt.

Finally, Mrs O’Donnell opened the door. She raised an eyebrow when she saw us, but ushered us inside without a word. She looked around before closing the front door, as if checking no one was following us.

'I wondered if you might come here,' she said, showing us through into the living room.

She was watching us oddly. There was a kind of resigned look, but it was mixed with what might have been a little sternness at us invading her home again.

'Sorry to disturb-' I began, but the sudden seriousness on her face shut me up.

'Can either of you tell me what the hell is going on?' she demanded.

Lilly and I just shook our heads.

'Nothing good,' Lilly said. 'My . . . my parents aren’t my parents any more.'

'Mine neither,' I said.

Mrs O’Donnell looked at us with a kind of weary acceptance.

'Sit down,' she said. 'You’re both out of breath.'

'We ran here,' Lilly explained.

We sat down on one of the two sofas. Mrs O’Donnell disappeared for a few moments and returned with a couple of glasses of orange squash. She handed them out and took a seat on the other sofa.

She asked me what had happened, so I sketched the events since we had parted on the high street. All of that seemed an awfully long time ago, even though Mrs O’Donnell’s clock told me it was just less than an hour. Again, my body and a clock disagreed. Time passed weirdly through the looking glass.

Mrs O’Donnell heard me out, then shook her head and gave an exasperated tut.

'And this thing he called you… zero-point-four . . . you’re sure that’s what he said?'

I nodded.

'Well, what do you think that’s supposed to mean?' she asked.

I told her that I didn’t have a clue.

'Zero-point-four,' she mused. 'Decimals. Pretty meaningless unless you know what they’re referring to.'

She turned to Lilly and her face softened a little.

'And what’s been happening to you, my dear?'

Lilly sighed.

'It hasn’t gone a lot different to Kyle’s afternoon,' she said. 'Simon was, like, totally weird. I met up with him when everyone got moving again, and I thought he might be a little . . . I don’t know . . . disorientated by the . . . well, you know, whatever it is we’re calling all of this.'

She waved a hand in the air as if showing how hard this whole thing was to describe.

'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