"So what can we do?" I asked.
He scratched his chin. "There is too much to explain right now," he said. "We must tend to your friend. If he does not get the antidote before tomorrow morning, the serum will not work. Besides, we have plenty of time to discuss secret powers." He grinned. "You could say we have all the time in the world."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.
MR. CREPSLEY LED THE WAY up the stairs and out of the building. He walked confidently through the darkness. I thought I could see a bit better than I could when coming in, but that might just have been because my eyes were used to the dark, not because of the vampire blood in my veins. up the stairs and out of the building. He walked confidently through the darkness. I thought I could see a bit better than I could when coming in, but that might just have been because my eyes were used to the dark, not because of the vampire blood in my veins.
Once outside, he told me to hop up on his back. "Keep your arms wrapped around my neck," he said. "Do not let go or make any sudden movements."
As I was getting up, I looked down and saw he was wearing slippers. I thought it was strange but didn"t say anything.
When I was on his back, he started running. I didn"t notice anything strange at first, but soon began to realize how fast buildings were zipping by. Mr. Crepsley"s legs didn"t seem to be moving that quickly.
Instead, it was as if the world was moving faster and we were slipping past it!
We reached the hospital in a couple of minutes. Normally it would have taken twenty minutes, and that was if you sprinted all the way.
"How did you do that?" I asked, sliding down.
"Speed is relative," he said, tugging his red cloak tight around his shoulders, pulling back into the shadows so we could not be seen, and that was all the answer he gave.
"Which room is your friend in?" he asked.
I told him Steve"s room number. He looked up, counting windows, then nodded and told me to hop back up on his back. When I was in position, he walked over to the wall, took off his slippers, and laid his fingers and toes against the wall. Then he shoved his nails forward - into the brick!
"Hmmm," he muttered. "It is crumbly but it will hold us. Do not panic if we slip. I know how to land on my feet. It takes a very long fall to kill a vampire."
He climbed up the wall, digging his nails in, moving a hand forward, then a foot, then the other hand and foot, one after the other. He moved quickly and within moments we were at Steve"s window, crouching on the ledge, gazing in.
I wasn"t sure of the time, but it was very late. n.o.body was in the room except for Steve. Mr. Crepsley tried the window. It was locked. He laid the fingers of one hand beside the gla.s.s covering the latch, then clicked the fingers of his other hand.
The latch sprang open! He shoved the window up and stepped inside. I got down from his back. While he checked the door, I examined Steve. His breathing was more ragged than it had been and there were new tubes all over his body, hooked up to menacing-looking machines.
"The poison has worked rapidly," Mr. Crepsley said, gazing down at him over my shoulder. "We might be too late to save him." I felt my insides turn to ice at his words.
Mr. Crepsley bent over and rolled up one of Steve"s eyelids. For a few long seconds he stared at the eyeball and held Steve"s right wrist. Finally he grunted.
"We are in time," he said, and I felt my heart lifting. "But it is a good thing you did not wait any longer. A few more hours and he would have been a goner."
"Just get on with it and cure him," I snapped, not wanting to know how close to death my best friend had come.
Mr. Crepsley reached into one of his many pockets and produced a small gla.s.s vial. He turned on the bedside lamp and held the bottle up to the light to examine the serum. "I must be careful," he told me. "This antidote is almost as lethal as the poison. A couple of drops too many and ..." He didn"t need to finish.
He tilted Steve"s head to one side and told me to hold it that way. He leaned one of his nails against the flesh of Steve"s neck and made a small cut. Blood oozed out. He stuck his finger over it, then removed the cork of the bottle with his other hand.
He lifted the vial to his mouth and prepared to drink. "What are you doing?" I asked.
"It must be pa.s.sed on by mouth," he said. "A doctor could inject it but I do not know about needles and the like."
"Is that safe?" I asked. "Won"t you pa.s.s on germs?"
Mr. Crepsley grinned. "If you want to call a doctor, feel free," he said. "Otherwise, have some faith in a man who was doing this long before your grandfather was born."
He poured the serum into his mouth, then rolled it from side to side. He leaned forward and covered the cut with his lips. His cheeks bulged out, then in, as he blew the serum into Steve.
He sat back when he was finished and wiped around his mouth. He spat the last of the fluid onto the floor. "I am always afraid of swallowing that stuff by accident," he said. "One of these nights, I am going to take a course and learn how to do this the easy way."
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 h.e.l.l 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN.
I ACTED SURPRISED WHEN MOM GOT 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. 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 n.o.body"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 cla.s.s 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. 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 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 cla.s.s 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. n.o.body 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 want to come to school?" I asked, shocked. to come to school?" I asked, shocked.
"Sounds weird, doesn"t it?" He laughed. "Normally I"m looking for an excuse to stay home. Yet now, when I have one, I want to go! But you don"t know how dull it is being stuck indoors alone all the time. It was fun for a couple of days, but a whole week of it ... brrr!"
I thought of telling Steve the truth but wasn"t sure how he"d take it. He had wanted wanted to become a vampire. I didn"t think he"d like knowing Mr. Crepsley had picked me instead of him. to become a vampire. I didn"t think he"d like knowing Mr. Crepsley had picked me instead of him.
And telling Annie was out of the question. She hadn"t mentioned Madam Octa since Steve recovered but I often found her watching me. I don"t know what was going through her head, but my guess is it was something like: "Steve got better, but it wasn"t because of you. you. You had the chance to save him and you didn"t. You told a lie and risked his life, just so you wouldn"t get into trouble. Would you have done the same if it had been You had the chance to save him and you didn"t. You told a lie and risked his life, just so you wouldn"t get into trouble. Would you have done the same if it had been me? me?"
Steve was the center of attention that Friday. The whole cla.s.s crowded around and begged for his story. They wanted to know what had poisoned him, how he"d survived, what the hospital had been like, if they"d operated on him, if he had any scars, and so on.
"I don"t know what bit me," he said. "I was at Darren"s house. I was sitting by the window. I heard a noise but before I could look to see what it was, I got bitten and pa.s.sed out." This was the story we had agreed upon when I went to visit him at the hospital.
I felt stranger than ever that Friday. I spent the morning gazing around the cla.s.sroom, feeling out of place. It seemed so pointless. "I shouldn"t be here," I kept thinking. "I"m not a normal kid anymore. I should be out earning my living as a vampire"s a.s.sistant. What good will English, history, and geography do me now? This isn"t my scene."
Tommy and Alan told Steve about my skill on the soccer field. "He"s running like the wind these days," Alan said.
"And playing like Pele," Tommy added.
"Really?" Steve asked, looking at me oddly. "What"s brought on the big change, Darren?"
"There isn"t any change," I lied. "I"m just on a roll. I"m lucky."
"Listen to Mr. Modest!" Tommy laughed. "Mr. Dalton has said he might put him at forward for the under-seventeen soccer team. Imagine one of us playing for the under-seventeens! n.o.body our age has ever made that team."
"No," Steve mused. "They haven"t."