Orion knew something was up the moment he reached the front door of his house. There wasn’t anything different about the overgrown lawn, the chipped paintwork or the foil-covered windows, and Mum’s old VW beetle with the black-painted windows was still in the drive looking as beaten-up and decrepit as ever. It was just a gut feeling he had, a familiar spike of foreboding in the pit of his stomach, and he knew it well enough by now to trust it. It never seemed to be wrong.
Apprehensively, he turned his key in the lock, and opened the door. The house was a mess. The hallway was filled with cardboard boxes and black bags half-packed with belongings. The lightbulbs were missing, and the carpet had been torn up in places. It meant only one thing; Mum thought there were bugs again. He found her upstairs in his bedroom, stuffing clothes haphazardly into a suitcase. There was a crater in the wall where she had been chipping at the plaster with a chisel, which now lay discarded on the bedside cabinet. She had been pulling the floorboards up in here too.
“Orion, you’re safe!” she exclaimed when she saw him, and promptly crammed a foil hat on his head. She was wearing one too. She made them herself out of coathangers and baking foil, to protect them from mind rays and other invisible threats. They had lightbulbs on the front, which were supposed to light up if the person wearing it had been posessed. They never had.
“Mum,” he protested, “we’ve only been here a month, and you’ve hardly been out. How can there be bugs already?”
“Keep your hat on!” she squealed, as he reached up to take the uncomfortable thing off, “They could come at any time! We have to be quick now they know we know they’re watching us!”
She tugged a drawer out of his desk and upended it into a black bag. Satisfied that there were no bugs in it, she tossed it aside and started on the next one. Orion looked around and saw that most of the other cupboards and drawers had already suffered the same fate.
“Are you sure there’s bugs?” he asked skeptically. Their life of constant packing and moving and unpacking then packing again used to be exciting when he was eight or nine, but now he was fourteen it was becoming tiresome. He had been to five different schools just in the last year, and never had time to make any friends. Not that he ever would, if they found out about the foil-covered windows and the mind-rays.
“I haven’t found them yet,” said Mum, “but I know that neighbour on the left – the one who’s always watching when I look away – he’s been in here again this morning.”
“How do you know that?”
“It was while I was still asleep – I got that headache I always get when they’ve been here, because they send microwaves through the walls when they come round, and look!” She brandished a spatula triumphantly, “He brought back this spatula that he took last time!”
Orion looked at the spatula. It was bundled tightly in clingfilm, presumably to protect them from any mind rays it might be emitting. They had lost a spatula a while back, and of course Mum blamed the neighbour, because he was ‘always in here taking things’, but Orion was sure it had just been lost. Now she had just found it again.
“Mum…” he sighed. He used to believe it all. The thieving neighbours and posessed old ladies, the white vans with alien symbols written in the dirt that followed them with the mind-ray emitters, the bugs and the energy-brains and the telescope on the moon. Now he wasn’t so sure.
“It’s all in my diagram,” she told him, “It all fits in exactly with what we know about them. The way they work. Come on, I’ll show you.”