Cirque Du Freak [A Living Nightmare]

All that remained of him was his laughter, which echoed through my brain like a witch's cackling curse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I ACTED SURPRISED WHEN MOM GOT off the phone that Monday morning and told me Steve had recovered. She was excited and did a little dance with me and Annie in the kitchen.

"He snapped out of it by himself?" Dad asked.

"Yes," she said. "The doctors can't understand it, but nobody's complaining!"

"Incredible," Dad muttered.

"Maybe it's a miracle," Annie said, and I had to turn my head aside to hide my smile. Some miracle!

While Mom went off to see Mrs. Leonard, I started out for school. I was half-afraid the sunlight would burn me when I left the house, but of course it didn't. Mr. Crepsley had told me I would be able to move around during the day.

I wondered, from time to time, if it had been a bad dream. It seemed crazy, looking back. Deep down I knew it was real, but I tried believing otherwise, and sometimes almost did.

The part I hated most was the thought of being stuck in this body for so long. How would I explain it to Mom and Dad and everybody else? I'd look silly after a couple of years, especially at school, stuck in a class with people who looked older than me.

I went to visit Steve on Tuesday. He was sitting up, watching TV, eating a box of chocolates. He was delighted to see me and told me about his stay in the hospital, the food, the games nurses brought him to play with, the presents that were piling up.

"I'll have to get bitten by poisonous spiders more often," he joked.

"I wouldn't make a habit of it if I were you," I told him. "You might not get well next time."

He studied me thoughtfully. "You know, the doctors are baffled," he said. "They don't know what made me sick and they don't know how I recovered."

"You didn't tell them about Madam Octa?" I asked.

"No," he said. "There didn't seem much point. It would have meant trouble for you."

"Thanks."

"What happened to her?" he asked. "What did you do with her after she bit me?"

"I killed her," I lied. "I got mad and stomped her to death."

"Really? "he asked.

"Really."

He nodded slowly, never taking his eyes off me. "When I first woke up," he said, I thought I saw you. I must have been mistaken, because it was the middle of the night. But it was a lifelike dream. I even thought I saw someone with you, tall and ugly, dressed in red, with orange hair and a long scar down the left side of his face."

I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I looked down at the floor and squeezed my hands together.

"Another funny thing," he said. "The nurse who discovered me awake swore there were two people in the room, a man and a boy. The doctors think it was her mind playing tricks and said it doesn't matter. Strange, though, isn't it?"

"Very strange," I agreed, unable to look him in the eye.

I began noticing changes in myself over the next couple of days. I found it hard getting to sleep when I went to bed, and kept waking in the middle of the night. My hearing improved and I was able to hear people talking from far away. In school, I could listen to voices from the next two rooms, almost as if there were no walls between my class and theirs.

I began to get in better shape. I was able to run around the yard during break and lunch without working up a sweat. Nobody could keep up with me. I was also more aware of my body and was able to control it. I could make a soccer ball do pretty much what I wanted, dribbling around opponents at will. I scored sixteen goals on Thursday.

I grew stronger, too. I was able to do push-ups and pull-ups now, as many as I liked. I didn't have new muscles none that I could see but there was a strength flowing through me that hadn't been there before. I had yet to test it properly but I believed it might be immense.

I tried hiding my new talents but it was difficult. I explained away the running and soccer skills by saying I was exercising and practicing a lot more, but other things were trickier.

Like when the bell rang on Thursday at the end of lunch. The ball had just been kicked into the air by the goalie who I'd put sixteen goals past. It was coming toward me, so I stuck up my right hand to catch it. I did, but as I squeezed, my nails sunk in and burst it!

And when I was eating dinner at home that night, I wasn't concentrating. I could hear our next-door neighbors having a fight and I was listening to their argument. I was eating french fries and hot dogs, and after a while I noticed the food was tougher than it should have been. I glanced down and realized I'd bitten the head off the fork and was chewing it to pieces! Luckily, no one saw, and I was able to slip it into the wastebasket as I was washing up.

Steve called that night. He'd been let out of the hospital. He was supposed to take things easy for a few days and not come to school until after the weekend, but he said he was going crazy with boredom and had persuaded his mother to let him come tomorrow.

"You mean you want to come to school?" I asked, shocked.