Crawlers

8:03pm

Jasmine hated crowds. It was partly her height: for her, being in a crowd usually meant getting a faceful of some stranger's armpit. But worse even than that was the loss of control, the helplessness. Jasmine hated feeling powerless, hated it more than anything, but she felt it now: her arms were pressed to her sides; the room was so tightly packed that moving at all was an effort. As the people around her surged and shoved all she could do was sway with the rest and try to keep her feet. 

'It's all right, girls,' said Ms Gresham from beside her. 'It's all going to be all right.' 

Jasmine looked at her teacher. If this was Ms Gresham's best effort to reassure them, it wasn't working. In fact it just made things worse: something was wrong here, badly wrong, Jasmine knew it. She stood on tiptoe, craned her neck and looked over at the Barbican's main entrance. Six angry people in Shakespearean costume - actors from the play - were arguing with glassy-eyed Barbican staff there and meeting with just as little response as Ms Gresham had. 

'Someone must have known about the alarm,' said Jasmine, thinking aloud. 'Why did they lock the doors? Why won't they let us out?' 

'We're trapped here,' said Samantha. 

'What're you talking about, trapped here?' asked Lauren, her voice rising. 'Why would we be trapped here?' 

'Calm down, Lauren,' said Ms Gresham. 'And Samantha, I'd appreciate it if you'd keep observations like that to yourself. This will all be over in a moment, I'm sure.' 

Still on tiptoe, Jasmine craned her head round as best she could, looking for clues about what was going on. 

There! She saw a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye: something had dropped from above to land in the crowd. 

The hubbub was pierced by a scream. 

Jasmine's eye was caught by another falling object, closer this time, over to her left. Now more were falling, and more, until the objects were dropping all over the room. 

More screams. Jasmine felt the crowd crush in around her, flinching as one. 

'What's happening?' a woman next to her was saying, her voice high and shrill. 'What are they trying to get away from? Why won't anyone tell me what's-?' 

Then, unbelievably, the whole ceiling seemed to fall in.

...

Ben ducked, instinctively throwing his arms up over his head. But the impact when it came wasn't like a ceiling collapse; it was more like... what? The touch on his head was light, scrabbling, ticklish. Shuddering, Ben batted it away hard without thinking. He straightened up, opened his eyes, and saw pandemonium. 

All over the foyer people seemed to have gone into some sort of dancing frenzy - twisting, slapping at themselves, waving their arms about. 'Get it off me!' roared Mr Clissold, crashing into him and almost knocking him over. 'Get it off! AAAAAGH!' 

Ben's eyes went wide. 

One of the crawling creatures he'd seen earlier was on Mr Clissold's back. Quickly but very deliberately it made its way up the centre of his spine, out of reach of his slapping hands. Now it was between his shoulder-blades. It waited there a moment, reared up on its rubbery legs and then, before Ben could do anything more than gape, it clamped itself to the back of Mr Clissold's neck. 

Mr Clissold went rigid. His eyes rolled back. Then he fell to the ground. 

Ben stared at his teacher's prone body for a moment, blinking, unable to process what he was seeing. Then suddenly he noticed space all around him: the pressure of the crowd was gone. This, he realized, was for the simple reason that what had happened to Mr Clissold was happening to others too.