433 – Children of the Stones

A creepy village in the south of England, a stone circle and a black hole make for some creepy happenings.
Simon and Eugene discuss the Children of the Stones.
Synopsis: 
Professor Adam Brake and his son Matthew arrive in the small village of Milbury to conduct a 3 month research project .  Milbury is built inside a neolithic stone circle and Adam has come to conduct measurements on the magnetic properties of the stones and the general area.  
As they learn about their new home, they discover that things are stranger than they could imagine.  Most, but not all of the people are the village are “happy” and seem a  bit-trancelike.  Their children, in school, demonstrate prodigious mathematical skills.  Only the recent arrivals in the village seem normal.
Matt and Adam make friends with Sandra and Margaret.  Margaret is the recently-arrived museum curator and Sandra is her daughter.
At the head of it all is the village leader, Mr. Hendricks, a famous astronomer and discoverer of the Hendricks Super-Nova.  He seems to have a sinister agenda.
Strange events begin to pile up.  The stones can impart electro-psychic shocks to Adam and Matt.  Matt begins to be able to get psychic visions, and perform psychometry, the ability to remote sense activities while touching an object associated with the target.
A year before their arrival, Matt found and bought a painting that appears to depict Milbury’s stone circle during some form of supernatural event – a beam of light emitting skywards from the center of the circle while people stand, in awe, circling the light.  In the distance a man and a boy run away from the light.  The picture appears to be a key to an event that has happened before and might be happening again.
Each day it seems more and more of the normal people show up transformed into the Happy Ones.  One day day, Dr. Lyle – the semi-retired local doctor has to leave town to visit an old patient.  Matt inadvertently psychically reads the events from Dr. Lyle’s gloves.  As he attempts to leave town something stops him.  The next day, he and his son have joined the Happy Ones, leaving only Adam, Matt, Margaret and Sandra.
The transformation seems to coincide with a dinner invitation from Mr. Hendricks, who has an extensive computer system and atomic clock in the disused church which he and his butler Mr. Link uses for precise astronomical calculations of his super-nova.
When Margaret and Sandra are next and turn up the next day as Happy Ones, Adam and Matt decide to abandon his research and leave.  They are stopped at the edge of the circle and find themselves trapped in Hendrick’s house, awaiting their fateful dinner appointment time with the next conjunction with the super-nova.
With some clever use of an oscilloscope, they manage to throw off the timing of the event and leave, pretending to be Happy Ones.  Unaware that the timing is off, Hendricks is caught in the beam instead and chaos ensues.  The villagers are transformed into the stones as Adam and Matt escape to sanctuary.
The next day, the village has been “reset” – the villagers are normal, then know Adam and Matt, but they are no longer Happy Ones and seem to have no recollection of any of the events.  Adam and Matt still decide to high-tail it out of town.  As they leave,  a new person arrives, Sir Joshua Lytton, looking very much like a young Mr. Hendricks.  He is greeted at the manor house by a young-looking Mr. Link.  Not only is the village in a circle of stone, it is in a circle of time, too.