The days before we were to meet seemed to drag by endlessly. I was dying to ask Mum if she had any knowledge or memory of the conversation I had with her in the safe room, but I didn't dare. How could I explain seeing Jamie and Mark in the Polsons' house without both Mum and Dad putting their foot down and preventing me from returning the following Wednesday. But it was Mum who brought up the subject while we were eating dinner the following night. It was just her, me and Sophie as Dad was working late. As usual Sophie was grousing about how I was always allowed more freedom than her. "And all I get is the blame," she grumbled. "Why can't I go to Nettie's with Abi next week?" "Mum - " I protested. "I think it's only fair, Abi," she said. "But Nettie didn't invite Sophie, she only invited me." I knew I was being mean, but at this stage it could ruin everything to have to bring her along. You may not believe this because I'm always slagging her off, but I was genuinely worried about exposing her to all the risks we were about to take. I would never be able to forgive myself if something happened to her. But Mum took the decision out of my hands. "Actually she has invited Sophie. I was speaking to her today on the 'phone and she did say 'Please tell Sophie she's welcome to come too.' Besides, Abi, I know you'll take care of her and perhaps you are starting to understand the importance of letting into your life the thing that you're afraid of." This was typical Mum. She'd say something that could mean all sorts of things and leave it to you to decide how it applied to you. "Thanks, Mum," Sophie said and poked her tongue at me. "How do you mean?" I asked Mum, ignoring this. "Well, responsibility for a start. And then ... well, perhaps you can think of some other examples?" Suddenly the image flashed into my mind of Jamie's face as he recognised Trancer in my safe room. "You don't mean - " "Maybe we'll see Mark this time," Sophie said. "Maybe he'll be dancing in the window." "Look after her if you go, Abi," Mum said I sighed, wondering just how much Mum really knew ... There was no alternative. If Sophie was going to be at Nettie's I had to let her in on what was going on and what we planned to do. But I had no intention of taking her with us to the Polsons' house. "Why can't I come?" she protested. It was typical of Sophie. Even though she had been spooked on our visit to the Polsons she now saw it all as a big, funny adventure which she didn't want to be left out of. "'Cos you can't, and don't you dare mention this to Mum and Dad." "What do you take me for?" I had a million answers to that but for once I let her have the last word. Lizzie came over the next day. She had broken up with her hippie. "It didn't work out," she said glumly. "He had bad breath. And he wasn't even a hippie but a trainee estate agent in a blond wig." I sympathised, but I was dying to tell her about Jamie and Mark. "So you mean what I saw at the Phoenix was a ghost?" she said when I had finished. "Well, like my Mum says, there's more than one type of ghost. I believe that Trancer is a living part of Jamie. When Jamie travels out of his body he travels as Trancer." "God, Abi, you're not going all spooky and metaphysical on me, are you?" "Come and see for yourself next Wednesday," I said. She looked startled. "Really? I mean ... Well, I don't know ..." "Please, Lizzie, I need you there." "To look after Sophie?" I grinned. "How did you guess?" At last Wednesday arrived. Tomorrow I would be back at school. All my instincts and everything I had learnt so far about what the Polsons were doing to Jamie and Mark told me that this could be the last chance to rescue them before the Polsons' Trance Mission program enabled them not just to feed off the boys' psychic energy but to take over complete ownership of Jamie and Mark's souls. Would we be in time or was it already too late? Sophie, Lizzie and I travelled down from Swanleigh to London and at two o'clock we met up with Natalie, Chrissie and Col at Nettie's. We were all, in varying degrees, nervous and excited. Nettie had left me the key and we waited in the living room with the lights off, too keyed up to talk, apart from Soph who kept asking if she could come with us, although we had already agreed that she was to stay at the flat with Lizzie and Chrissie. As three o'clock approached the tension became unbearable. The minutes passed and still the car had failed to appear in the driveway. The garage door remained shut. By twenty past three I was starting to think that we'd got the day wrong or that Duncan's information was unreliable. Could it be that I had left a tell-tale sign of my presence in the house and they had decided to vary their routine, or not leave the house at all? They could even have already departed, taking Jamie and Mark with them. And then at last we saw the garage doors open and the car drive out. Sophie begged once again to come with Natalie, Col and me, and said how it wasn't fair, but Lizzie pulled out a computer game which she kept in her bag as a trump card for baby-sitting stroppy thirteen-year-olds and Soph became instantly engrossed in it. Col had supplied us each with a walkie-talkie so we could keep contact with Chrissie and co. If we were not back by quarter to six Lizzie and Chrissie would ring the police if contact was broken. We took the same entrance route as before: I had warned Natalie and Col about getting through the nettles and climbing through the hole in the fence and they had kitted themselves up like commandos on a night-raid. In ten minutes we had penetrated the Polsons' driveway. Col was well-prepared. A friend of his who worked for a locksmith had supplied him with a set of skeleton keys, but getting into the kitchen from the utility room was the easy bit. I had of course warned him about BBJ, so Col had got Chrissie to sneak two or three heavy sedative pills from their dad's surgery. He had ground these into a tinful of dog food which we'd brought with us in a plastic container which Col was now spooning into a bowl. "I know how to do this," he said, "because I used to help Dad in the surgery. I even wanted to be a vet myself, but then I caught the bug." Computers of course. "The problem will be how long it takes for the sedative to take effect," he added. "It could be anything between twenty and thirty minutes. I'm going to put the bowl by the kitchen door. I hope I'll be able to handle him, but you'd better be prepared for me to make a quick exit." Even from outside in the driveway where Natalie and I were waiting, we could hear BBJ going berserk as Col entered the utility room and then after a minute his barking became even louder as Col opened the kitchen door with the skeleton key. The barking continued for a few seconds and then stopped and a moment later Col re-emerged in the driveway, looking slightly pale. He slammed the utility-room door behind him. "He's gone for it ... but only just," he said when he'd caught his breath. "But I'm afraid it may take a while." For the next twenty minutes we waited tensely in the driveway. For the first few minutes BBJ was obviously preoccupied with his meal, but then the barking started up again and the time seemed to stretch by interminably. "How's it going?" came Lizzie's voice on the walkie-talkie. "We're still waiting for BBJ to go to sleep," Col replied. "Have you found Mark yet?" Sophie broke in. I wished we'd saved one of the sedatives for her. After ten or fifteen minutes BBJ seemed to calm down and five minutes later the barking stopped altogether. Natalie and I were itching to go in, but Col stopped us. "Give it another few minutes and he'll be out." He grinned. "My animal rights friends will probably never talk to me again but I'll just have to live with that." When we finally entered the utility room we found BBJ lying unconscious in the middle of the floor. "When do you think he'll wake up?" I asked anxiously. "Couple of hours at the outside." He looked at his watch and I checked mine. It was gone four o'clock. "We'd better get moving." Col went through to the study and sat down at the computer. We watched as he hacked through the security into the CD-ROM system and interfaced his own VR-headset to connect to the programs which the master console was feeding through to Jamie and Mark. "My God!" he exclaimed and almost threw off the headset. "I don't know what this stuff is but it's doing my head in. It's lethal!" I didn't care to see for myself and nor did Natalie. We left him to shut down the program and insert another disc, one that he had prepared with Natalie's help. It was time to see Jamie and Mark ... I put a hand on Natalie's shoulder as we approached the cellar entrance. "Don't worry, Natalie," I whispered. "It'll be alright." I had tried to prepare her for the shock but her face went a deadly white as she leaned towards the peephole and got her first view of her brothers for nearly five years. I could see her mouthing their names silently and when she lifted her face from the fisheye lens she was crying. "How could anyone do that to another human being," she sobbed. "How could they do that to Jamie and Marky? Why didn't I stop it?" "Don't blame yourself, you weren't to know." "But I did know. I felt they were evil and I did nothing!" "You're here now, it's not too late," I said, with as much confidence as I could muster. "I've switched the program," Col said from behind us and I relayed this information to Lizzie and Chrissie on the walkie-talkie. Col peered into the viewer and when he looked up I could see that he was also badly shaken. "They're like - " space=1 src="dotc.gif">"Zombies," I finished and he nodded. "This has got to work," he muttered, but I could hear doubt in his voice. We took turns to watch as the new VR program was fed to Jamie and Mark. Col had switched on a monitor which could be viewed directly from the peephole and which must have had been switched off on my last visit, because I didn't remember seeing it. We were now able to see something of what was being relayed to the boys on their headsets. Using advanced computer graphics Col had brought to vivid and dynamic virtual-reality life scenes from their childhood, which Natalie had assembled from snapshots, mementoes, videos and the boys' favourite cassettes before the Canons left for Germany. Natalie had dictated a voice-over to go with the other sounds and images on the disc and Col had made a copy on a small handheld cassette recorder that we could listen to at the same time as it was being played back on their headsets. He switched it on. "Hello, Jamie ... hello, Mark ... it's me ... Natalie. It's been such a long time since I've seen you that, well, you may have thought I was dead or maybe you've forgotten me, but I've never forgotten you." On the screen was a video of Natalie, talking to camera, which Col had filmed a few days earlier. The boys sat rigidly still. I had no idea if they could see or hear her. "I've thought about you every day since I left Germany, but then that wasn't a good time and I don't think it's been a good time for you since we left home in London ..." The screen faded out and into a close-up of Jamie and Mark wearing paper hats as they sat with their family round the Christmas table. Jamie was leaning into the camera, crossing his eyes and pushing up his nostrils up with his fingers, while Mark was half-collapsed under the table in hysterics ... "Do you remember, Jamie, Marky, when we were all a family together, remember all those Christmases and birthdays, the family picnics on the Surrey Downs and how we used to go tobogganing down the hill behind the school..." The visuals changed, intercut with snapshots of the children, music from their childhood, pictures of their favourite toys and games ... The boys were like statues. I tried putting myself into their mind. To think like they thought ... I am in a computer program. I am the program. I don't know any difference between the program and myself. The program is my life, my God, my mother, my father, my food, my air, my thoughts, my sleep. I live because of it. Without it I do not exist ... The program has now been interrupted. I am in standby mode. I am waiting for my program to resume. I cannot respond to another program because I have not been programmed to do so ... I am shut down, suspended until I am restarted... Could it be like that? Could they be beyond the reach of any other programming, unable to even compute Col's video let alone respond to it? The thought was somehow more terrifying than the voice that had roared in my head on my previous visit; the voice that seemed to come from Mark ... "Do you remember Abi and Sophie who used to live across the road," Natalie was saying, and suddenly there we were on the monitor, playing with the boys in their back garden. The video must have been taken during the summer before we left for Swanleigh, because we were all dancing to a song that was in the charts that year. "They're here, Abi's here. And she wants to talk to you." Suddenly I was there on camera, looking apprehensive as I began talking to the boys. "Hello, Jamie and Mark, I hope you'll see this but I just don't know because I think sometimes you can't see or don't want to see ... I just want to tell you, Jamie, that I know there's a part of you that's been trying to get through to me and that's why I saw you dancing in your window ... and then I saw you again at the festivals, though you called yourself Trancer ... and we got to be good friends until Trancer went away again. Anyway, the next time I saw you was here in the house and you didn't seem to know me again, but just at the end you did remember me, and I saw you dancing again at the window ... "This probably isn't making any sense but I believe you're both still in there, though you don't know it, and you don't have to live this way, plugged into machines all the time. You can be like you used to be in the old days when we used to go to school together ... Do you remember the hidey-hole we used to have, Jamie? When we buried the treasure?" On the video I held up the silly striped purple knitted bobbly Rasta hat which Jamie had got his gran to knit for him one winter. He'd worn it almost continuously for two or three months after that even though everyone used to make jokes about it, like calling him Noddy, and then he'd suddenly gone off it. So we'd decided to bury it, "to see if it could stand the test of time". While my video had been playing, Col had dubbed Techno music onto the sound and then I'd put the stripy hat on my head and started dancing, imitating Jamie's quirky movements, all flailing arms and wavy wrists. "This is how you used to dance, Jamie. And you still dance like that ... Ask Trancer, Jamie ... he knows how you dance." It was at that moment that, on camera, I had started crying. Natalie and Col who had already seen the video, had let me watch through the fisheye lens of the peephole all this time, so I had an uninterrupted view, not just of the film on the monitor, but of Jamie and Mark. Mark remained immobile, arrested, catatonic. But in the last few seconds of the film I started to see a subtle change come over Jamie. Still locked into his headset his whole body, legs and arms began to writhe as though he were fighting some inner demon. His movements became wilder, and he started thrashing around in his seat until he finally stood up and yanked off his headset, looking towards the staircase at the far end of the basement lab. I gasped with surprise and joy. His eyes were full of tears. He ran up the stairs and opened the door, falling into Natalie's arms and hugging her and then me. But all the while this was going on I began to hear the voice again. Just as it had the last time it came roaring into my head like a train coming out of a tunnel and I could see from Natalie and Col's expressions that they could hear the voice too. Down in the cellar, Mark hadn't moved but I knew without the shadow of a doubt that he was transmitting the voice. Get out ... we don't need you ... you are not wanted ... And then there came a new and chilling message: Trance mission ... prepare to annihilate ... We looked at each other in horror. Was Mark still hooked into the previous program or was he now responding to Col's new program? In that case we were all in imminent danger of being destroyed as Mark prepared to execute the figures of his early childhood, including himself. Or was this part of what Natalie had told us about: was Polson about to complete the transmigration of Mark's soul and erase the boy's identity forever? Or was he simply about to destroy anyone who stood in his way...?
There was no alternative. If Sophie was going to be at Nettie's I had to let her in on what was going on and what we planned to do. But I had no intention of taking her with us to the Polsons' house. "Why can't I come?" she protested. It was typical of Sophie. Even though she had been spooked on our visit to the Polsons she now saw it all as a big, funny adventure which she didn't want to be left out of. "'Cos you can't, and don't you dare mention this to Mum and Dad." "What do you take me for?" I had a million answers to that but for once I let her have the last word. Lizzie came over the next day. She had broken up with her hippie. "It didn't work out," she said glumly. "He had bad breath. And he wasn't even a hippie but a trainee estate agent in a blond wig." I sympathised, but I was dying to tell her about Jamie and Mark. "So you mean what I saw at the Phoenix was a ghost?" she said when I had finished. "Well, like my Mum says, there's more than one type of ghost. I believe that Trancer is a living part of Jamie. When Jamie travels out of his body he travels as Trancer." "God, Abi, you're not going all spooky and metaphysical on me, are you?" "Come and see for yourself next Wednesday," I said. She looked startled. "Really? I mean ... Well, I don't know ..." "Please, Lizzie, I need you there." "To look after Sophie?" I grinned. "How did you guess?" At last Wednesday arrived. Tomorrow I would be back at school. All my instincts and everything I had learnt so far about what the Polsons were doing to Jamie and Mark told me that this could be the last chance to rescue them before the Polsons' Trance Mission program enabled them not just to feed off the boys' psychic energy but to take over complete ownership of Jamie and Mark's souls. Would we be in time or was it already too late? Sophie, Lizzie and I travelled down from Swanleigh to London and at two o'clock we met up with Natalie, Chrissie and Col at Nettie's. We were all, in varying degrees, nervous and excited. Nettie had left me the key and we waited in the living room with the lights off, too keyed up to talk, apart from Soph who kept asking if she could come with us, although we had already agreed that she was to stay at the flat with Lizzie and Chrissie. As three o'clock approached the tension became unbearable. The minutes passed and still the car had failed to appear in the driveway. The garage door remained shut. By twenty past three I was starting to think that we'd got the day wrong or that Duncan's information was unreliable. Could it be that I had left a tell-tale sign of my presence in the house and they had decided to vary their routine, or not leave the house at all? They could even have already departed, taking Jamie and Mark with them. And then at last we saw the garage doors open and the car drive out. Sophie begged once again to come with Natalie, Col and me, and said how it wasn't fair, but Lizzie pulled out a computer game which she kept in her bag as a trump card for baby-sitting stroppy thirteen-year-olds and Soph became instantly engrossed in it. Col had supplied us each with a walkie-talkie so we could keep contact with Chrissie and co. If we were not back by quarter to six Lizzie and Chrissie would ring the police if contact was broken. We took the same entrance route as before: I had warned Natalie and Col about getting through the nettles and climbing through the hole in the fence and they had kitted themselves up like commandos on a night-raid. In ten minutes we had penetrated the Polsons' driveway. Col was well-prepared. A friend of his who worked for a locksmith had supplied him with a set of skeleton keys, but getting into the kitchen from the utility room was the easy bit. I had of course warned him about BBJ, so Col had got Chrissie to sneak two or three heavy sedative pills from their dad's surgery. He had ground these into a tinful of dog food which we'd brought with us in a plastic container which Col was now spooning into a bowl. "I know how to do this," he said, "because I used to help Dad in the surgery. I even wanted to be a vet myself, but then I caught the bug." Computers of course. "The problem will be how long it takes for the sedative to take effect," he added. "It could be anything between twenty and thirty minutes. I'm going to put the bowl by the kitchen door. I hope I'll be able to handle him, but you'd better be prepared for me to make a quick exit." Even from outside in the driveway where Natalie and I were waiting, we could hear BBJ going berserk as Col entered the utility room and then after a minute his barking became even louder as Col opened the kitchen door with the skeleton key. The barking continued for a few seconds and then stopped and a moment later Col re-emerged in the driveway, looking slightly pale. He slammed the utility-room door behind him. "He's gone for it ... but only just," he said when he'd caught his breath. "But I'm afraid it may take a while." For the next twenty minutes we waited tensely in the driveway. For the first few minutes BBJ was obviously preoccupied with his meal, but then the barking started up again and the time seemed to stretch by interminably. "How's it going?" came Lizzie's voice on the walkie-talkie. "We're still waiting for BBJ to go to sleep," Col replied. "Have you found Mark yet?" Sophie broke in. I wished we'd saved one of the sedatives for her. After ten or fifteen minutes BBJ seemed to calm down and five minutes later the barking stopped altogether. Natalie and I were itching to go in, but Col stopped us. "Give it another few minutes and he'll be out." He grinned. "My animal rights friends will probably never talk to me again but I'll just have to live with that." When we finally entered the utility room we found BBJ lying unconscious in the middle of the floor. "When do you think he'll wake up?" I asked anxiously. "Couple of hours at the outside." He looked at his watch and I checked mine. It was gone four o'clock. "We'd better get moving." Col went through to the study and sat down at the computer. We watched as he hacked through the security into the CD-ROM system and interfaced his own VR-headset to connect to the programs which the master console was feeding through to Jamie and Mark. "My God!" he exclaimed and almost threw off the headset. "I don't know what this stuff is but it's doing my head in. It's lethal!" I didn't care to see for myself and nor did Natalie. We left him to shut down the program and insert another disc, one that he had prepared with Natalie's help. It was time to see Jamie and Mark ... I put a hand on Natalie's shoulder as we approached the cellar entrance. "Don't worry, Natalie," I whispered. "It'll be alright." I had tried to prepare her for the shock but her face went a deadly white as she leaned towards the peephole and got her first view of her brothers for nearly five years. I could see her mouthing their names silently and when she lifted her face from the fisheye lens she was crying. "How could anyone do that to another human being," she sobbed. "How could they do that to Jamie and Marky? Why didn't I stop it?" "Don't blame yourself, you weren't to know." "But I did know. I felt they were evil and I did nothing!" "You're here now, it's not too late," I said, with as much confidence as I could muster. "I've switched the program," Col said from behind us and I relayed this information to Lizzie and Chrissie on the walkie-talkie. Col peered into the viewer and when he looked up I could see that he was also badly shaken. "They're like - " space=1 src="dotc.gif">"Zombies," I finished and he nodded. "This has got to work," he muttered, but I could hear doubt in his voice. We took turns to watch as the new VR program was fed to Jamie and Mark. Col had switched on a monitor which could be viewed directly from the peephole and which must have had been switched off on my last visit, because I didn't remember seeing it. We were now able to see something of what was being relayed to the boys on their headsets. Using advanced computer graphics Col had brought to vivid and dynamic virtual-reality life scenes from their childhood, which Natalie had assembled from snapshots, mementoes, videos and the boys' favourite cassettes before the Canons left for Germany. Natalie had dictated a voice-over to go with the other sounds and images on the disc and Col had made a copy on a small handheld cassette recorder that we could listen to at the same time as it was being played back on their headsets. He switched it on. "Hello, Jamie ... hello, Mark ... it's me ... Natalie. It's been such a long time since I've seen you that, well, you may have thought I was dead or maybe you've forgotten me, but I've never forgotten you." On the screen was a video of Natalie, talking to camera, which Col had filmed a few days earlier. The boys sat rigidly still. I had no idea if they could see or hear her. "I've thought about you every day since I left Germany, but then that wasn't a good time and I don't think it's been a good time for you since we left home in London ..." The screen faded out and into a close-up of Jamie and Mark wearing paper hats as they sat with their family round the Christmas table. Jamie was leaning into the camera, crossing his eyes and pushing up his nostrils up with his fingers, while Mark was half-collapsed under the table in hysterics ... "Do you remember, Jamie, Marky, when we were all a family together, remember all those Christmases and birthdays, the family picnics on the Surrey Downs and how we used to go tobogganing down the hill behind the school..." The visuals changed, intercut with snapshots of the children, music from their childhood, pictures of their favourite toys and games ... The boys were like statues. I tried putting myself into their mind. To think like they thought ... I am in a computer program. I am the program. I don't know any difference between the program and myself. The program is my life, my God, my mother, my father, my food, my air, my thoughts, my sleep. I live because of it. Without it I do not exist ... The program has now been interrupted. I am in standby mode. I am waiting for my program to resume. I cannot respond to another program because I have not been programmed to do so ... I am shut down, suspended until I am restarted... Could it be like that? Could they be beyond the reach of any other programming, unable to even compute Col's video let alone respond to it? The thought was somehow more terrifying than the voice that had roared in my head on my previous visit; the voice that seemed to come from Mark ... "Do you remember Abi and Sophie who used to live across the road," Natalie was saying, and suddenly there we were on the monitor, playing with the boys in their back garden. The video must have been taken during the summer before we left for Swanleigh, because we were all dancing to a song that was in the charts that year. "They're here, Abi's here. And she wants to talk to you." Suddenly I was there on camera, looking apprehensive as I began talking to the boys. "Hello, Jamie and Mark, I hope you'll see this but I just don't know because I think sometimes you can't see or don't want to see ... I just want to tell you, Jamie, that I know there's a part of you that's been trying to get through to me and that's why I saw you dancing in your window ... and then I saw you again at the festivals, though you called yourself Trancer ... and we got to be good friends until Trancer went away again. Anyway, the next time I saw you was here in the house and you didn't seem to know me again, but just at the end you did remember me, and I saw you dancing again at the window ... "This probably isn't making any sense but I believe you're both still in there, though you don't know it, and you don't have to live this way, plugged into machines all the time. You can be like you used to be in the old days when we used to go to school together ... Do you remember the hidey-hole we used to have, Jamie? When we buried the treasure?" On the video I held up the silly striped purple knitted bobbly Rasta hat which Jamie had got his gran to knit for him one winter. He'd worn it almost continuously for two or three months after that even though everyone used to make jokes about it, like calling him Noddy, and then he'd suddenly gone off it. So we'd decided to bury it, "to see if it could stand the test of time". While my video had been playing, Col had dubbed Techno music onto the sound and then I'd put the stripy hat on my head and started dancing, imitating Jamie's quirky movements, all flailing arms and wavy wrists. "This is how you used to dance, Jamie. And you still dance like that ... Ask Trancer, Jamie ... he knows how you dance." It was at that moment that, on camera, I had started crying. Natalie and Col who had already seen the video, had let me watch through the fisheye lens of the peephole all this time, so I had an uninterrupted view, not just of the film on the monitor, but of Jamie and Mark. Mark remained immobile, arrested, catatonic. But in the last few seconds of the film I started to see a subtle change come over Jamie. Still locked into his headset his whole body, legs and arms began to writhe as though he were fighting some inner demon. His movements became wilder, and he started thrashing around in his seat until he finally stood up and yanked off his headset, looking towards the staircase at the far end of the basement lab. I gasped with surprise and joy. His eyes were full of tears. He ran up the stairs and opened the door, falling into Natalie's arms and hugging her and then me. But all the while this was going on I began to hear the voice again. Just as it had the last time it came roaring into my head like a train coming out of a tunnel and I could see from Natalie and Col's expressions that they could hear the voice too. Down in the cellar, Mark hadn't moved but I knew without the shadow of a doubt that he was transmitting the voice. Get out ... we don't need you ... you are not wanted ... And then there came a new and chilling message: Trance mission ... prepare to annihilate ... We looked at each other in horror. Was Mark still hooked into the previous program or was he now responding to Col's new program? In that case we were all in imminent danger of being destroyed as Mark prepared to execute the figures of his early childhood, including himself. Or was this part of what Natalie had told us about: was Polson about to complete the transmigration of Mark's soul and erase the boy's identity forever? Or was he simply about to destroy anyone who stood in his way...?
I don't know if you've ever had a message in your head that you were about to be annihilated, but it can do funny things to you. For a start your stomach turns to jelly and you start to realise what a wonderful job your knees normally do carrying the rest of your legs around, because they seem quite incapable of doing the job at all and you have a strong urge to sit down. And then you begin to appreciate how quietly and efficiently your heart goes about its business most of the time, without going on strike or making a nuisance of itself and acting like a hooligan, because now it's doing just that except you can't really do anything about it because you're having problems breathing. And then it gets worse and you know you're starting to panic. Well, I was, and I imagine everyone else was too, but we all seemed to be panicking so quietly that you wouldn't have known it. There was only one person who could stop Mark now, I thought. Only one person who could communicate with him and possibly still even influence him. We pleaded with Jamie to do something, but he was still dazed and confused, too upset to respond. Trance mission ... preparing to annihilate in three minutes ... "Jamie, do something!" Natalie begged but Jamie still clung to us, like one of those soggy bits of greens you can't scrape off the plate. In the lab, Mark had not moved but you could tell that he was concentrating all his psychic energy on the task he was programmed to perform. How different the two boys were now. Where had all Jamie's brightness and energy gone? This gave me an idea. I looked him in the eyes. "Jamie, if you can't do it, let Trancer have a go." He didn't seem to hear me. But then I saw the light come into his eyes and the flicker of a smile played on his lips. "Maybe it's time we swapped a few dance steps." "Jamie!" For a second I thought he was asking me to dance, and even for Trancer this was taking coolness in the face of danger a little far. Then I remembered Reading. It was what Trancer had said when I had told him about Jamie. He suddenly looked shamefaced, but then said without a trace of irony, "I'm sorry, Abi, I didn't mean to sound flippant. I'll do my best ..." Then he looked at me uncertainly. "By the way, who's Trancer?" He squeezed my hand and Natalie's and returned down the lab steps to his console. He put on the headset and I could see he was focusing his mind on the same images as Mark. "Do you think we should go down?" I asked Natalie. "Yes," she replied. "They both need our support. We need to concentrate our minds on Mark and how much we love him." As we descended into the lab, I could feel a crackly, fizzling, explosive electricity in the atmosphere and I knew this was coming from the clash of wills and psychic energy between the two brothers and it was as though their voices were fighting for control of the airwaves in my head. Trance mission ... preparing to annihilate in two minutes... Remember me, Marky? Remember Mum and Dad and Natalie. She's come back. We all love you. Preparing to annihilate ... everything must be destroyed... As the countdown reached ninety seconds, Col who was standing beside me started to panic. "We're going to die and it's all my fault!" he shouted. "I set up this program and now it's going to kill us ... I have to shut the computer down!" He rushed upstairs to the study, but the countdown continued inside our heads and the battle intensified. Trance mission ... preparing to annihilate in one minute ... As the screens of the monitors went blank, Jamie jumped up from the console and ripped the headset off Mark's head. Mark turned on him, and there was a look on his face that I'll never forget - a blank, inhuman fury - and, without moving a finger, he sent his older brother flying back against the opposite wall of the lab. At the same moment I heard a commotion in the hallway above and suddenly Sophie came crashing down the stairs, closely followed by Chrissie, Lizzie and Col. As she took in the appalling scene - Mark standing like a robotic terminator, as though all he was at that moment was a supercharged brain lasering bolts of high-voltage electricity at his older brother who was trying without much success to pull himself up from the floor - Sophie freaked. "Marky," she screamed, bursting into tears, "what have they done to you?" The countdown had reached twenty-five seconds when Mark faltered, staring at her. I tried to stop her but Sophie shook me off and rushed over to Mark, holding her hands out to him. He stared at her hand. And then, reluctantly, as though he had been distracted from a purpose that was all he had existed for until a few seconds ago, but which had suddenly become pointless and irrelevant, he took it in his. Trance mission ... aborting ... The voice was now barely audible. At eight seconds the countdown in our heads petered out. I felt as though little Mark Canon, who I had last seen when he was six, had suddenly, seven years on, entered the room. And he had no idea what was happening or what he had been about to do. He looked around at our faces, confused and bewildered - and then saw Jamie. "What are you doing on the floor, you wally? Hi, Natalie, I'm really hungry. And I've got a terrible headache." He stared at Sophie again. "Aren't you Sophie Edwards ... What are you doing here?" "They wouldn't let me come with them, Mark, to rescue you. But then the walkie-talkie went dead and - " Mark looked at her in bewilderment. "Rescue me from what? Why are you all looking so strange? Like you've seen a ghost!" That's when we all fell on him, hugging him, laughing and crying. "I think we're the ghosts, Mark," Jamie said. "Someone did something very bad to us, but I can't remember much about it." "That sounds like Trancer," I said. He looked at me in astonishment. "You said something about Trancer before. For some reason it makes me think me of a dream I kept having ... I think I was dancing..." "You were, Jamie." "But how do you know about it?" I was about to answer him when I saw something out of the corner of my eye that made my skin crawl and my heart race. In the hallway above I could hear BBJ barking again, the effects of the sedative clearly having worn off, but that wasn't what was scaring me. Natalie had seen it too, for the blood drained from her face until it was white with fear ... "It's them!" she said, and I felt the anger that was welling up in her. Everyone turned towards the cellar staircase. I watched what appeared to be a pool of blank ink that was slowly dropping from step to step - and then suddenly I knew what I was seeing. The long shadow of Gerald Polson was slowly descending into the cellar ...
Instinctively, we retreated from Polson as he walked towards us. His face was bgcolor="black as thunder and he stared contemptuously at all of us, as though we were cockroaches who'd crawled through the chinks in the walls of his precious laboratory and who he would need to crush under his foot. "James and Mark!" he said curtly, in that unctuous, creepy, smooth-as-velvet voice. "Return to your workstations: we will debrief later. Trance Mission stage three version four point six." To my horror, I watched as his words seemed to operate just like the hypnotic trigger on a group of "subjects" which I'd seen on a TV programme a few months earlier. Jamie and Mark instantly reverted to their trancelike state and sat down at their seats at the workstation, though the screens remained blank. He smiled and turned back to the rest of us, instinctively homing in on Col. "I notice you have attempted to delete several programs we are currently running, but we do of course back-up all our work on a continuous basis. Our research and preparations have taken many years, as I am sure you, Natalie, may possibly appreciate, and we will not allow it to be interrupted. The computer is of course on a network system and we are linked to other computers, other minds, in many parts of the world. We have important contacts. This cannot be stopped. Our work must go on. I repeat, our work must go on." He pressed a switch on one of the computers and the screens came alive. I glanced at them and felt my head starting to pound again as the images and data began spewing out at a phenomenal speed. "As for the rest of you," he went on, turning to face us, "in breaking into our house and interfering with our work, you have made a basic error in imagining that there could be any purpose in your being here. "Goals and purposes are for those who have a role in the structure of life here on earth; most people have no such role but they are unfortunately still allowed to exist. They are of no concern to us. "What is of concern to us is our research and experimentation, which will fundamentally change humanity. This work has now reached a crucial stage. Your complete ignorance of its importance does not exempt you from having to accept the consequences of your interference. "You have no function because you have no future. You are, in a sense, already dead, but your actual death will allow us to monitor the progress of a particularly vital stage in our research, which is the annihilation process at the physical level by transmission of the appropriate instructions through our subjects here," he indicated Jamie and Mark. "Their psychic energy levels are at this very moment being supercharged and the process should be completed in - " he looked at his watch " - approximately four minutes." "You mean you're getting my brothers to do your dirty work for you ... to kill us," Natalie shouted angrily. "You're just scum ... filthy, evil scum. You used my parents and destroyed them when you'd finished with them and you nearly destroyed Jamie and Mark - " "Far from it, Natalie," Polson smiled. "Why should we wish to destroy what is useful to us. James and Mark are very much part of our future. When the transmigration process is complete we will have integrated their energies within ourselves." "You are going to take over their souls," I gasped. Polson turned to me and once again I felt myself going weak under that horrible mesmerising gaze. "Souls ... what a small, imperfect word, and quite inadequate as a formula for defining and quantifying the whole range of electrical energies which make up the inner potential of a human being. But yes ... Abigail, you do seem fond of coming here, don't you ... you are correct. We already have complete access to our subjects' electrical blueprints and their transference to ourselves is of paramount importance. What, in comparison, is the value of so-called souls to these subjects?" "They're not subjects," Sophie broke in angrily, "they're Jamie and Mark!" Polson ignored her. "Of themselves, James and Mark, are nothing, any more than any of you are. But they are extremely effective tools, as I am about to demonstrate. Unfortunately, none of you will live to appreciate the results." Without even turning, he fired out another order. "Trance Mission stage four!" So this was it, I thought, we're all going to die. I should have been paralysed with fear, but I wasn't. Why was that? What was it that was different about the atmosphere since Jamie and Mark had seemed to switch back into their state of trance? Of course! It was the voice. The voice that Mark had sent spinning through my brain, making it hard for me to think. The voice that had terrified me so much it had caused me to open the door into my safe room to seek a refuge from it. I couldn't hear it. If Jamie and Mark were concentrating their psychic energy on some target with a view to annihilation, that target wasn't me, and looking round at Sophie and co., I somehow knew that they couldn't hear the voice either. I glanced towards Jamie and Mark in time to see a look darting between them, a kind of psychic nod of agreement. The next moment the cellar floor began to shake and I started to feel rather than hear a deep, reverberating sound, like the rumbling engines of a ship or the start-up of an earthquake. The reverberations increased until every molecule in my body seemed to be churning in rhythm with the vibrations. The last thing I remember before I bgcolor="blacked out was seeing Lizzie, Chrissie and Sophie clinging to each other for dear life; Jamie and Mark were standing up, looking at me but somehow beyond me, and then the lights went out, plunging the cellar into darkness as the lab machinery began to explode ... When I came to, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. The lab was on fire, the computer equipment had disintegrated; some bits of machinery were still burning, sending out an acrid smoke that made me cough and splutter; others, like the VDUs, had simply imploded. But it was as if Sophie, Natalie, Chrissie, Lizzie, Col and I were in a fireproof zone, as though an invisible shield were protecting us. As for Jamie and Mark, they were standing exactly as I had last seen them, except that they were now looking upwards towards the ceiling. Where to my astonishment I saw Polson suspended like a chandelier ... As I watched him he slowly started to spin and then they seemed to be revving up their psychic engine because he span at increasing speed until he suddenly crashed to the floor. Even now there was something about him that frightened me; as though he could still reach into himself and find a button that would allow him to recover every bit of the control he'd exerted over the boys for the past few years. But as he picked himself up, his eyes bulging with rage and the veins swollen in his forehead, there was a noise at the top of the stairs that made everyone turn. Standing there in bgcolor="black twinset and pearls, looking as though she had been waiting all her life for this moment, Mrs Munster reminded me of the old silent film actress in Sunset Boulevard who has gone completely mad and thinks she is a star once again. It would have been hilarious, except that she had a revolver in her hand. "Shoot them, now!" Polson shouted, the oiliness in his voice obliterated by coarse, venomous, choking rage. She pointed the gun somewhere between Natalie, Col and me. "Not them! They're sewage! We'll flush them away later. Shoot the boys!" Monica Polson faltered. "But Gerald ... we can't kill them ... not at this stage ... we need them. We'd have to start all over again--" "Kill them!" Polson screamed. "They're rabid. Shoot them like dogs!" Reluctantly she pointed the revolver at Jamie and Mark, but there was something that seemed to be stopping her from pulling the trigger. "What's the matter with you?" Polson stormed. "Didn't you hear me? Shoot them!" Jamie and Mark seemed to be completely unperturbed and I realised that they were still looking ahead at nothing in particular. But then slowly, acting in unison, as though connected by a common brain, they turned towards Mrs Munster. The revolver trembled in her hand and then slowly she turned her body and pointed it at her husband. "No" - " he screamed and then she shot him three times, once in the head and twice in the heart. Then, almost mechanically, she turned the gun on herself, pressing the barrel to her temple and pulled the trigger ...
The police had finished their questioning for the day. Mum and Dad had arrived and so had Lizzie's mum and Chrissie and Col's parents. We were all back in Duncan and Nettie's living room, even BBJ who, in Mr Summers's expert hands, had rolled over on his back with his paws in the air. So Big Bad Jonah wasn't really so bad after all. We were all very tired but deliciously happy, especially Mark and Jamie. "I'm starting to remember the dreams," Jamie said as we sat together a little apart from the others. "I used to find myself dancing in all kinds of strange places. I once even danced with a group of Aborigines on a beach somewhere in Australia ..." "Perhaps you were in dream time," I said. "That's what the Aborigines believe in, that there's another reality, a kind of parallel universe, where we all live, but we don't know it because we only go there in our dreams." "I must have gone there when I saw you," Jamie said. "I remember how when you touched my face, I felt as though someone was trying to wake me up ... But if I was in dream time and you were in real time, how did we meet?" "Maybe there are crossover places between the two universes, and that's how you could send me messages. But how could you have lived like that, hooked up to those machines for all that time?" "I can't tell you much about it, because I don't remember now, but I expect I will in time ... that's what I'm afraid of." "It may come back to you in dreams," I said. "If it does, I'll call out to you to rescue me again." "But will you appear as yourself or as Trancer?" "Who's Trancer?" I stared at him. "Don't tell me you've forgotten again." Jamie grinned. "Only kidding. Once you mentioned it to me it all started to come back to me. I know that's what I called myself when we met at that festival. And then I remember meeting him in this room, but it was like when you used to live here." "You remember that?" I said in astonishment. "But that only happened in my mind. I introduced you to Trancer in my mind, in my safe room - I created a little room in my mind where everything would be safe, when I was frightened by the voice Mark transmitted into my head." He looked puzzled. "This voice ... what sort of things did it say?" "It said things like 'Get out, we don't need you...'" "I remember that voice ... it didn't really come from Mark, though it sounded like him, it came from the Polsons. They put all those programs into our heads. It was like we were being brainbathed - " "Brainwashed," I corrected him. "OK, so I've forgotten a few words. I've been out of circulation for five years, remember, except that I was able to escape sometimes." "Into your safe room?" "Yes," he said, "I always felt safe when I was dancing. But it never seemed to last." "You mean when you'd start to turn into a zombie?" "Who's calling who a zombie?" "Me. I just called you a zombie." "You mean I was like this?" He crossed his eyes and turned instantly into the undead and I broke up laughing. Nettie, observing him, whispered to Mum, "Poor kids, it'll take years to undo the mental damage. And a lot of counselling. Do you know any good counsellors?" "I know a couple who won't be available," Natalie said drily. "I think after what they've been through, what they need is a good home with a lot of love and plenty of decent food and rest," Mum said. "What do you think, Paul?" Dad gave her a searching look. "Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?" "I didn't know you could be so telepathic," she smiled. "In that case, as long as you promise there'll be no psychic tests--" "And no computers," Mum added. "Then maybe Jamie and Mark could come and live with us," Dad said. "Of course we'll have to get through all the red tape, but that shouldn't be a problem. What do you think, kids?" We stared at each other open-mouthed. "Can Mark sleep in my room?" Sophie said excitedly. Mum and Dad exchanged glances. "I don't think that's a good idea, Soph," Mum said diplomatically. "For the time being you and Abi can share a room until we can sort out the best sleeping arrangements." "Mum!" we both protested, but then we both decided you couldn't have everything. "It's time we did some home improvements anyway, Paul," Mum said. "What about converting the spare room into two more bedrooms?" "Mmmm," said Dad. "I might need a bit of help though." "You'd better not count on Duncan," Nettie muttered, and we all laughed, except Duncan. "Really, Net, that's not fair. If you knew how much time I was spending--" "... on the Eurostar," Nettie completed wearily. "Yes, I've heard you mention it a couple of times." "What's Swanleigh like?" Jamie asked. "Don't raise your hopes too high," I warned him. "Let's just say, I am the only significant cultural icon in a village boasting thirty-odd houses, a pub and a single shop that doesn't even sell foaming beauty wash." Sophie meanwhile was becoming re-acquainted with Mark. "Do you like Take That?" she asked him. "What's that, a card game?" Sophie rolled her eyes. "You've got a lot to catch up on."
So that's how Jamie and Mark came to live with us and in the end Dad did convert the spare room with help from Duncan who was a reformed character after Nettie had insisted he worked on the baby's nursery which used to be my bedroom and where I had first seen Jamie dancing in the window. Duncan and Nettie had their baby, whom they called Katie, and whenever I visit them I take her to the park in her pram, but I keep away from the alleyways because the house they lead to is now a bad house. It has been bought and sold twice - "They left pretty sharp because of the weird vibes," Nettie's told me - and has now been left vacant and ramshackled, its windows bgcolor="blacker than ever, and I've always tried to avoid even looking at it. But one afternoon in Katie's room I couldn't help glancing out of the window and for a split second I thought I saw a flash of orange at the window. As Mum says, there's more than one type of ghost, but it couldn't have been Jamie because he and Mark are now back at school, both making good progress, though Jamie was miffed when he was put in the same class as Mark ... and I don't blame him. The thought of having to be in the same class as Sophie makes my hair stand on end, and to tell you the truth it's as scary to me as anything that happened to us that summer. Jamie and Mark are more or less back to their old selves, and as the adoption went through without a hitch we now have two brothers, so you can imagine how noisy mealtimes are. "Sometimes I think I'm invisible round here," Sophie complains. "Who said that?" Jamie and I say together, looking round the room in mock terror and Mark collapses in giggles. But sometimes late at night Jamie wakes up screaming and then me or Mum will go into his bedroom and put our arms round him and tell him it's a nightmare and he's safe now. Strangely enough Mark seems to have forgotten the whole experience. But I know that something inside him hasn't, because of what happened last week. I dreamt I was back at the house across the road, frozen in terror between Big Bad Jonah and Jamie and Mark who stood across the hallway, and as the dog's barking increased, the voice came roaring once again into my hand. "Please stop it!" I begged them. "It's over ... Jamie ... Mark, it's over, isn't it?" And then Jamie turned into Trancer and began dancing in front of me. But Mark remained immobile, implacable, unseeing, and the voice grew in volume until it was unbearable ... I woke up and rushed to Jamie's room, but he met me on the landing. "I've been having an awful dream," he said. And without speaking we knew it was the same dream. We went into Mark's room to check that he was OK. He was sitting up in bed, rigid. His eyes were open and he was back in the trance. Next morning he seemed to have no memory of the incident. "Come on you kids," Dad said, "I'll run you to school." "Do we have to go to school today?" said Sophie, lazy cow. "I like school," said Jamie. "What about you, Mark?" Mark looked up and there was a glint in his eyes that I thought looked new and different and yet somehow familiar but I couldn't say from where. "The work must go on," he said.
