You’re not normally aware of it, but there’s always some kind of noise going on in the background, even when it’s quiet. If there are other people in the house you hear them moving about or breathing, you hear the radio in a muffled kind of way from distant rooms, you hear the hum of the fridge, you hear sounds from the street outside, dogs barking, people walking past and cars vrooming along, etc, etc.

But now all that had stopped. Cut off, abruptly, as if someone had hit the mute button.

‘Mum? Dad?’

Silence.

I went out into the hall. ‘Maeve? Ben?’

No answer.

‘Billiam?’

They’d all been in the house a minute ago. Maeve was up in her room, presumably on Facebook, Dad was having a bath, Ben was helping Mum cook in the kitchen (he likes doing that) and Billiam was hanging around their feet hoping they’d drop something he could eat (‘If it goes to ground, it belongs to the hound’, that’s what we say in our house). But now they’d all disappeared. Where?

It was kind of freaky. I went outside into the street. Everything was there, as usual, all the houses with cars parked outside and bins in the front gardens. Clouds were slowly drifting across the sky, so it wasn’t like everything had stopped moving. But there didn’t seem to be any people. No birds sang. What was going on?

I walked into the centre of town. I didn’t see a living thing. No dogs or cats. Not even any insects. I got to the High Street and all the shops were there as usual but nobody was in them. I stepped into Sainsbury’s, and the automatic doors swished open to let me in, and there were all these aisles of fruit and vegetables and stuff, and there was rubbish music playing softly, but there were no customers and nobody on the tills. Not a soul in sight. It was kind of eerie.

I didn’t like being on my own any more. ‘I wish Evan was here.’

Evan appeared in front of me. I felt incredibly relieved to see him. But he looked seriously confused. ‘Sam! What’s going on? Where is everybody?’

‘I was hoping you might be able to tell me. Where have you just come from?’

‘I don’t know! I was watching telly, that amazing news story about how everyone’s stopped dying – and I was just thinking, I bet Sam’s got something to do with this, and then everything went black. And now I’m here. Come on, what did you wish?’

‘I wished there were no problems in the world.’

Evan’s confused expression morphed into the lost-in-thought one. His hands went to his mouth. ‘Right . . . that’s quite a wish, Sam!’

‘I s’pose it is,’ I agreed. ‘But how could it make everyone disappear?’