frozen within time

chapter one

The satallight falling to earth changed life for ever for Alex and Kristen aims. It was catastrophic.
One day their world was full of colour and the light and sound------and the next, in just a few terrible seconds, it was grey and swarms of insects engulfed it.

'No! No! No! No!' Wailed kristen, panic rising threw her, while Alex aimed the remote at the TV and pressed a button again and again, as if this could make a difference.

'We should never let uncle John put it up' said Alex
'Satellight dishes should be put up by the men from sky, not by random uncle's! Now we've only got the old aerial. Press the TV button . . . See if there's anything coming threw at all.'

Kristen crawled across the room and prodded the TV button below the screen, which switched the system to the old free terrestrial channels . . . If there were any left these days, it was a desperate measure.
Only minutes ago they could have watched hundreds of different channels, from music to documentaries to cartoons . . . Pop divas wiggling there hips at cameras, ravening dinosaurs plunging through realistic CGI swamps, real people arguing spitefully with other people in live reality shows, unreal Disney teenagers with perfect teeth, singing and dancing . . . And now. . . . What?

The tall ancient oaks which surrounded the house made barely possible to get even BBC1 through on the old aerial. BBC2 was slightly better and channel 4 would come and go. Forget the rest.

By 11am Alex and Kristen was slumped back in their unusual possition----the possition they'd been in for almost a the wet, wet, wet summer, sprawled across the old parquet flooring in the sitting room, propped up on there elbows, watching a repeat of a 1970s detective series.

'We'll have to ask uncle John to phone up sky; signed Alex.

'It'll take him for ever to get around to it tough.'
He absent-mindedly scored the damp dark stain on the floor with one fingernail, while Kristen toggled a loose woodblock up and down, they both squinted at the 1970s detective who was solving crimes through a relentless attack of bees. The bees were not part of the plot----it was just really bad reception.
There was a hot, Dusty smell coming from the overworked set, but they were both too dl and damped down that morning to do anything about it.

They would have liked to go outside. but the endless rain made playing a huge and wild garden almost impossible. a deep valley of overgrown shrubs and trees, it had become a vast mud bath, especially on the lower lawn by the stream, were they usually liked to play. You'd go in up to your ankles there.
Sadly, playing inside, when uncle John was working, wasn't easy either. Alex and Kristen would tend to get noisy, and then he'd tend to get angry, because he couldn't concentrate. Uncle John wasn't bad really.

He was just very brainy and intense and when he was caught up in his work upstairs he had no patience for anything else. it was was easier when mum and dad were around, but this summer, like most summers, they were away again, on tour. They were a magic act. Truly. Alex and kristen's dad could eat fire and sawed their mum in half on a regular basis. They were very good much in demand----- and their high season was always may to September, and Christmas, of course. right now they were on a cruise ship somewhere.

This meant that uncle John, who lived with them all in the large old house on the outskirts of town, become there guardian whenever high season came around. He was quite a good guardian. In the way that he didn't rt care what his thirteen year old nephew and twelve year old niece did---- as long as it didn't end in death or, worse, a lot of noise.

'Do you think he he'd notice if we were dead?' Alex mumbled, resting his chin in his hands staring at the seventies tv detective, speeding along in his open topped car, through the swarm.
'Who---uncle j?' Said Kristen, rolling onto her back and staring at the high, ornate curling with a lacklustre yawn. 'Not for a few days, probably. Unless we managed to be dead and very noisy at the same time.'