0.4 Read Online Free Page B

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, whenthe 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.

. . .
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