Darren Shan: Cirque Du Freak [A Living Nightmare]

I was about to reply, but then Steve moved. His neck flexed, then his head, then his shoulders. His arms twitched and his legs started to jerk. His face creased up and he began to moan.

"What's happening?" I asked, afraid that something had gone wrong.

"It is all right," Mr. Crepsley said, putting away the bottle. "He was on the brink of death. The journey back is never a pleasant one. He will be in pain for some time, but he will live."

"Will there be any side effects?" I asked. "He won't be paralyzed from the waist down or anything?"

"No," Mr. Crepsley said. "He will be fine. He will feel a bit stiff and will catch colds very easily, but otherwise he will be the same as he was before."

Steve's eyes shot open suddenly and focused on me and Mr. Crepsley. A puzzled look swept across his face and he tried speaking. But his mouth wouldn't work, and then his eyes went blank and closed again.

"Steve?" I called, shaking him. "Steve?"

"That is going to happen a lot," Mr. Crepsley said. "He will be slipping in and out of consciousness all night. By morning he should be awake and by afternoon he will be sitting up and asking for dinner.

"Come," he said. "Let us go."

"I want to stick around a while longer, to make sure he recovers," I replied.

"You mean you want to make sure I have not tricked you." Mr. Crepsley laughed. "We will come back tomorrow and you will see that he is fine. We really must go now. If we stay any…"

All of a sudden, the door opened and a nurse walked in!

"What's going on here?" she shouted, stunned to see us. "Who the hell are…"

Mr. Crepsley reacted quickly, grabbing Steve's bedcovers and throwing them over the nurse. She fell down as she tried to remove the sheets, getting her hands stuck in their folds.

"Come," Mr. Crepsley hissed, rushing to the window. "We have to leave immediately."

I stared at the hand he was holding out, then at Steve, then at the nurse, then at the open door.

Mr. Crepsley lowered his hand. "I see," he said in a bleak voice. "You are going to go back on our deal." I hesitated, opened my mouth to say something, then acting without thinking turned and made a dash for the door!

I thought he would stop me, but he did nothing, only howled after me as I ran: "Very well. Run, Darren Shan! It will do you no good. You are a creature of the night now. You are one of us! You will be back. You will come crawling on your knees, begging for help. Run, fool, run!"

And he began to laugh.

His laughter followed me through the corridor, down the stairs, and out the front door. I kept glancing over my shoulder as I ran, expecting him to swoop down on me, but there was no sign of him on the way home, not a glimpse or a smell or a sound.

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

IACTED 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.