Do Not Remove
They arrived in silence, with cash and contracts, and perfectly folded smiles. They took the houses, the jobs, and even the bins. And slowly, without malice or fanfare, they took the people too...
There had once been a castle, heavy and crenellated, glowering from the hill like a mother-in-law at a wedding. A structure which looked better in rain than in sun, and Queenston, being itself, obliged. It rose on a rise which curled like a question never quite solved. Depending on whom you accosted in the pub, it had been made to keep something out, or lock something dreadful in.
The castle was long gone. Some said the stones were lugged off to brace the vicarage, others insisted its bones were folded beneath the Aldi car park, where the asphalt gave off a dubious warmth at night - like breath through cloth, or a cadaver beneath the floorboards. A few of the ley-line lot claimed it had simply dropped into the ground.
Marley Square had been the town’s droning core - squalid, sentimental, and gloriously indifferent to strangers. You could get greengages, sharp as compunction. Children’s shoes flashed as they walked. Kings and queens were said to have been crowned nearby, though nobody gave a damn when the off-licence caught fire.
The fishmonger - Kevin or Colin or some other cardigan of a name - was magnificent in his awfulness. Ruddy as a slapped arse, and vinegary with gin before lunch, he wouldn’t eat what he sold, and shrieked like a pantomime matron if nicked by a sprat. The stench of his stall loitered well into Sunday. He’d been there forty years, in which time he’d supplied fish - and attitude - to three generations of the same families. He went to their weddings, bitched about their divorces, then stood dry-eyed at their funerals.
Jimmy the butcher was even better. A fat man who wore his bloodied apron like the flag of a vanquished nation. He knew what cut you needed before you opened your maw. He gave bones to the dog owners, an extra rasher to the pensioners, and bore a comedy tie beneath the apron - always slightly off-centre, like a wink. He called everyone ‘sir’ or ‘darling’ with the same irreverent democracy.
The square was beautifully imperfect - its broken teeth infilled lazily with tar, the benches worn smooth by decades of backsides, carved with everything from initials to crude anatomical speculations. There were too many bins, all of them large and full. The bronze gorillas were already a joke then - a civic error everyone hated, yet no one removed. At best, they evoked something rejected from a leisure centre in Swindon.
The once lauded drinking fountain worked back then. Children queued on hot days, their cheeks blushing and shirts sticking, the water splashing over everything like a baptism in municipal joy. The ornamental fountains that followed were better - children tore through them shrieking, limbs pinwheeling, soaked to the soul and loving it. The kind of unrepeatable happiness which requires both sunlight and a lack of litigation.
The river, however, was properly sullen - as thick as gravy and twice as moody. But it was theirs. It bore the sodden relics of ordinary lives: knackered rucksacks, bikes too bent to steal, shopping trolleys crusted with moss and barnacles like something out of a failed biennale. Once, it held trout. Men remembered catching them as boys, frying them on camping stoves - the taste of freedom ignited by stolen matches. Now it compelled joggers - tight-shorted, inhaling virtue, exhaling shame, while broadcasting their so-called triumphs to indifferent apps.
Summer laid powdered pollen on the pavements like icing sugar and everyone sneezed. Winter brought crushed glass and broken resolutions. The theatre near the river still claimed it was under refurbishment, according to a sign older than some of the cast members. It had shown amateur dramatics, end-of-term pantos, and the occasional touring company brave enough to risk the provincial gaze. Nobody could recall what they’d seen, but they all remembered the smell - dust and velvet. They remembered the warmth of a crowd forgiving someone who forgot their lines and kept going anyway. Then the veil of lockdown sank into place - that floury, suspicious intermission where time curled up like a cat and everyone baked banana bread and pretended not to cry.
They came in the stillness between furlough and fracture, when the pubs were mute and the clapping for the NHS still echoed, hollow and compulsory. Not with weapons or manifestos. Just the tang of fresh paint and the scratch of pens on contracts. Parasites sensing the fever of a wounded host.
Refugees, apparently. From somewhere far away but cruel. Though they didn’t act like refugees. They bought the houses - not just the charming old terraces with good bones, parquet, and clotted cream porches, but the unloved ones, too. The bungalows which smelt of cabbage and sadness. The semis which had hosted fistfights and first kisses. The new builds where young families planted lavender and hope. No haggling, no chain, and no mortgage faffs. Just cash. Transfer. Keys. Curtains. And then silence.
Then they took the roles - but these were only masks. They became teaching assistants who never crouched, nor praised - who never came home with glitter on their sleeves. PTA volunteers who ran things with military precision and vanished before the coffee cooled. A headteacher who knew every metric but not a single name.
One drove the 111 bus, their gloved hands fixed at ten and two, their eyes resolutely ahead. No deviation. Another took the lollipop shift, smiling just enough to avoid suspicion, but not enough to feel human. Her eyes tracked children like a CCTV rig. Dozens turned up as pallbearers - carrying the town’s dead with the cool, correct solemnity of hotel staff returning a lost item.
There was one at the supermarket - she ran the self-checkouts. Moved like a spider. Observed. Learnt. Mimicked. But she didn’t care to understand.
And the glass cleaner at The Queen’s Tun - tall, narrow, with a stare like wet ash. He polished the windows without ever looking through them, nor touching the world, never acknowledging the slurry of gravy, beer, and breath around him. Instead, he cleaned like someone wiping down an autopsy table.
They brought with them the un-British trait of efficiency. Not the muddled, Post-It-note kind - friendly and a little late - but something of the morgue. The kind which smells of bleach and makes you want to cry without knowing why. They removed the broken drain in Marley Square, which had bubbled since Blair, into which children had dropped lolly sticks, and sometimes, dreams.
The bins were collected on time. No more Tuesday panic, meaning no more shared bonding, cursing the council. Just silent, hygienic men who left nothing and said less.
The library reopened on Mondays, but the books looked wrong. The foxed paperbacks with notes in the margins and a faint smell of ghosts were replaced by pristine editions, catalogued like dental records. The old librarian, who knew your soul from your borrowing history, and loved to judge, was gone. And the new one never looked up.
Their homes were immaculate, with lawns like astroturf, and hedges like algorithms. No wind chimes, no weeds, and no rogue marigolds. Life stopped at the property line because their tidiness didn’t spill.
Cordon of The Unknowable
Then, one day in late September, they all lined up. There had been no announcement, and the cause was not clear. Just hundreds of them - possibly thousands - their hands clasped, 18 inches apart, as erect and steadfast as calculating chess pieces across Queenston’s arteries. From Castle Street to the High Street, reaching past the duet of department stores to the river, then over the mighty bridge. Quiet figures in neutral clothes and military boots. They stood for an hour. Not 59 minutes, not 61: one hour. They didn’t twitch. And at 9:47 - they unclasped, soundlessly, and walked back into the roles.
Nobody spoke of it. Not in the paper, nor online. The whole town gaslit itself. But the message was obvious: we are here, we are many, we are watching, and you cannot stop us.
It was like what happened to the red squirrels. Not even a proper eviction. Just obsolescence. A gentler species ejected by something greyer and less interesting, but better at surviving. No malice. Just better teeth and fewer scruples. You awaken to familiar branches laden with strangers. They look squirrel-shaped, but they don’t belong.
Even their dogs were wrong. They never barked, rolled or wagged and walked in lockstep, the joyless little replicants, slack on leads looped lazily around the waists of their keepers. But their children were worse. Mannered to the point of being AI-generated. No skinned knees, scabs, nor muddy shoes. And they spoke like manuals.
Their cars were always grey. They reversed excruciatingly slowly, indicators ticking like deathwatch beetles. No music, nor rage.
They filled the churches, bringing identical Tupperware, containing perfectly baked ginger biscuits which were never nibbled. They took minutes in metallic ink, hands moving like printer heads.
When asked where they came from, they said, ‘Oh, here and there.’ And then something twee, like ‘Wouldn’t miss a cream tea for the world,’ uttered without irony, as if the phrase had been plucked from a lucky dip. Their vowels were perfect. Their idioms were folded napkins. Their accents: the King’s English via Google Translate.
‘Best not grumble,’ said one, marching over a dead fox. ‘Weather’s been kind,’ murmured another, while sleet stabbed sideways. Nobody ever asked them twice. Because the people who asked questions didn’t always come back.
Among themselves, they spoke in something else: smooth and slippery, like silk dipped in mercury, and too quiet to pin down - the sound of a mirror lying.
If you looked hard, there were clues. Their hair didn’t move. Not in wind, not in rain, and not in bed; it was hair as a concept. Their skin never wrinkled either. No laugh lines, tan, freckles, or bruises. And they never carried a scent.
The local GP, Dr. Malcolm Henderson saw it first. He had delivered half the town, and buried the rest. He posted on Nextdoor - annotated and wary. He mapped arrival dates. Cross-referenced electoral registers, DVLA data, and bin alignments. The thread said their houses avoided prime numbers. Their gardens never browned. And what was going on at the old telephone exchange, which lit up at night with gatherings of ‘the incomers’, where ‘machinery hummed’. The post ended with a question: ‘Who is orchestrating this, and where have the real people gone?’
Dozens, then hundreds, replied with their own stories, patterns, and then warnings. Then silence. By morning, the post was gone. So was his account. So was Dr. Henderson. His surgery had a polite sign in a stretched take on Times New Roman: ‘Dr. Henderson has relocated.’ But nobody knew where.
And then came the stout orange signs. Three of them, planted, deeply, unmissable on the gyratory. Glyphs which squirmed when you looked at them too long. On the back: ‘Police Aware. Do Not Remove.’ Nobody did. The phrase applied not only to the signs, but to the arrivals themselves - lodged, inscrutable, and beyond interference.
After that, the records changed. Electoral rolls dropped names. The library wiped borrowing histories. People disappeared not in drama, but in paperwork.
Castle Street became a parody - vintage shopfronts lit like stage sets. The sweet shop glowed radioactive. The fudge glistened like candles. Restaurants bore names which slid if you stared for too long. Their windows tinted, their smells synthetic, their menus unknowable. But they were full. Every night. The same diners. The same meals. The same stares. One man said the food tasted like childhood, but couldn’t remember what that was.
Five years. That’s all it took.
Queenston remained as a postcode, a parish - a set of coordinates. But its soul was depleted. The river ran clear - not living clear, but sterile, disinfected, embalmed even. The post arrived precisely at noon. The square’s fountains sang like computers trying to sense. The bronze gorillas now looked like guards.
Queenston had been red in all the right ways - shabby, opinionated, occasionally furious. Full of oddball cousins who scolded you for swearing by swearing themselves, mad old women dressed like children’s TV presenters, kids who drew cocks on the bus stop in Biro. Now it was monochrome - sleek, silent, and perfectly aligned. The newcomers weren’t bad. Not even rude. That would have been something. No - they were too smooth, too optimised. Like something a distant software developer imagined a villager might be.
The townspeople - the real ones, the few who remained - stopped asking. Not because they didn’t care, but because asking felt provocative. Because the ones who asked were replaced. And then came the last question. From a child, of course. The last one.
‘Mum,’ she said, ‘why do Miss. Everett’s eyes blink sideways? Why doesn’t her hair move? Why do her clothes smell like the inside of the computer shop?’
The mother froze. Something flickered - a memory, maybe. A life. She looked at her daughter, whom she finally truly saw, and for a moment, you could almost believe she remembered what it meant to love. Then she smiled. Too wide, too white, and far too late.
By nightfall, the house was empty. Lights off. A ‘For Sale’ sign staked by lunch, removed by dinner, with a grey car blinking backwards into the drive in the morning.
The last family who remembered was erased – like a Sim, quietly dragged to the edge of the screen and dropped into nothing.
If the castle had once been built to keep something out, it had failed. But maybe that had never been the point. Maybe the walls were always meant to keep something in - to lock the human mess behind polite stone. They hadn’t invaded Queenston. They hadn’t even conquered it. They’d simply replaced it.
Now the whole town points east - aligned, obedient, and hollow. And in the silence which settles - neat as static, antiseptic as grief - you can just make out the brittle sound of a country forgetting how to laugh in its own tongue.