“Let me look at you.”
I stood in front of him. He shined a tiny bright light into my eyes and peered into me. He shined it into my ears. I felt his breath and his scent all over me. He lifted my shirt and pressed his stethoscope against my chest and listened to me. I felt his clammy hands on my skin.
“What day is it?” he asked me. “What month is it? What’s the name of the Prime Minister?”
Dad chewed his lips as he watched and listened.
“Good lad,” he murmured as I answered.
Dr. Death touched my cheek.
“Is there anything you’d like to tell me?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Don’t be shy,” he said. “Me and your dad have been through everything you’re going through.”
I shook my head again.
“He’s a fit and healthy lad,” he said. “Just keep an eye on him.” His mouth grinned as he looked at me. “And make sure he stays in bed at night.”
He kept me close to him.
“It’s a difficult time,” he said. “Everything inside you’s changing. The world can seem a wild and weird place. But you’ll get through it.”
“Did you treat Ernie?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Ernie Myers. The man who lived here before.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Death. “Yes, Mr. Myers was one of mine.”
“Did he talk about seeing things?”
“Things?”
“Strange things. In the garden, in the house.”
From the corner of my eye I saw Dad chewing his lips again.
“Mr. Myers was very ill,” said Dr. Death. “He was dying.”
“I know that.”
“And as the mind approaches death it changes. It becomes less … orderly.”
“So he did?”
“He did speak of certain images that came to him. But so do many of my people.”
He held me again with his long fingers.
“I think you need to play football with your friends,” he said. “I think you need to go to school again.” He looked at Dad. “Yes, I think he should go to school again. Too much inside the house.” He tapped my head. “Too much thinking and wondering and worrying going on in there.”
He stood up and Dad went with him to the door. I heard them muttering together in the hallway.
“School for you tomorrow,” said Dad as he came back in. He was trying to be all brisk and efficient but he pressed his lips together and looked at me and I saw the scared look in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I whispered.
We held each other tight; then we looked out at the yard.
“Why did you ask those things about Ernie?” he said.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Crazy notions.”
“It’s true, what you told us? That you were sleepwalking?”
For a moment I wanted to tell him everything: Skellig, the owls, what Mina and I got up to in the night. Then I knew how weird it would seem.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s true, Dad.”
Chapter 33
I DID GO TO SCHOOL NEXT DAY. Rasputin started his lesson by welcoming me back. He said I’d missed a lot, but he hoped I’d be able to catch up. I told him I’d been studying evolution, and that I’d found out about the archaeopteryx. He raised his eyebrows.
“Do you think there are things like the archaeopteryx in the human world?” I asked him.
He peered at me.
“Humans that are turning into creatures that can fly?” I said.
I heard Coot sniggering behind me.
“Tell him about the monkey girl,” he said.
“What’s that?” said Rasputin.
“The monkey girl,” said Coot.
I heard Leakey telling him to shut up.
“Maybe there’s beings that’s left over from the apes,” said Coot. “Monkey girls and monkey boys.”
I ignored him.
“Our bones would need to become pneumatized,” I said.
Rasputin came to me and tousled my hair.
“Wings might help, as well,” he said. “But I can see you’ve been reading widely. Well done, Michael. And stop interrupting, Coot. We all know who the monkey boy is here.”
Coot giggled. He grunted like an ape as Rasputin turned and went back to the front. He said we were past evolution now. We’d moved on to studying our own insides: the muscles, the heart and lungs, the digestive system, the nervous system, the brain.
“Keep coming to school, Michael,” he said. “You don’t want to miss anything more.”
“No, sir,” I said.
He unrolled a long poster of a cutaway man, bright red lungs and heart exposed in his chest, stomach and intestines, networks of blood vessels and nerves, maroon muscles and white bones, blue-gray brain. He stared out at us through cavernous eyes. A few of the others shuddered in disgust.
“This is you,” said Rasputin.
Coot giggled.
Rasputin called him to the front. He acted out stripping Coot’s skin away, tearing open his chest.
“Yes,” he said. “Inside we’re all the same, no matter how horrible the outside may seem to be. This is what we would see were we to open up our Mr. Coot.”
He smiled.
“Of course, there may be a little more mess than appears in the picture.”
Coot scuttled back to his desk.
“Now,” said Rasputin. “I’d like you to place your hand on the left side on your chest like this. Feel the beating of your heart …”
We felt our hearts. I knew how stupid it would be to tell Rasputin that I could feel two hearts: the baby’s and my own.
“This is our engine,” said Rasputin. “Beating day and night, when we’re awake and when we’re sleeping. We don’t have to think about it. Mostly we’re hardly aware that it’s even there. But if it stopped …”
Coot squawked, as if he’d been strangled.
“Correct, Mr. Coot.”
Rasputin squawked too, and flopped across his desk.
I looked around. Half the class lay sprawled across their desks, pretending to be dead.
Leakey was watching me. I could tell he wanted to be friends again.
In the yard that lunchtime, I played football as hard as I could. I did sliding tackles and diving headers. I dribbled and dummied and went for wild overhead kicks. I scored four goals, made three more, and my team won by miles. At the end there was a long rip down the side of my jeans. The knuckles of my left hand were scratched and scraped. There was blood trickling from a little cut over my eye.
