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they had to get used to him again, learn to accept him as an old friend who'd been away a little while. It was a nice thought, and he closed his eyes against it and let their minds play softly across his like wind chimes. |
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Soon he felt himself grow sleepy. If he dozed off, his mother would get upset. He did not want to go to Dr. Tojian's . . . that meant a blood test that would show he had gone off his medication. That would be a problem. |
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He rolled on his side and let his mind drift back to the night Daisy had attacked him. He couldn't remember exactly what had happened. Just her hissing and clawing, then those dreamlike images of her dead and mangled, as if a truck had gone over her . . . but his hands were wet with blood. And she had not been back since then. If he had hurt her, he didn't remember, just as he didn't remember attacking Bobby G. Some kind of selective amnesia, the doctors had called it. But it wasn't his fault, because they had said some bad microbe had gotten into his systemwhatever a microbe was. Some kind of bug that made him lose control, forget things, see things that weren't there. Had to be some kind of wild bug, and he tried to imagine what it looked like, if it had legs and antennae. He wondered where it was in him, and if it had made him do something bad to Daisy. |
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His mind continued to drift. |
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And now he was walking through Magog, noisy with critters. And preternaturally greenas if each tree leaf and shrub were glowing with an inner light. While he moved through the neon forest, he happened to look down at his feet. They were large and hairy, like some kind of Halloween-monster feet with long clawlike toes and thick black hair. Odder still, they were not touching the ground. He was floating through the woods as if filled with helium. Instead of worrying, he decided to go along for the ride. Shortly he spotted Daisy sitting in a small elm, smiling absurdly like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. As he approached, her grin gave way to an awful fright. Her ears flattened back and she hissed at him, showing the white needles of teeth. Suddenly she exploded, her head flying off like a deflating balloon . . . He floated on until Bobby Gorawlski emerged from a large rock like a popup. His face was a bright pink ball with stitches crisscrossing his face in a big X. But the X did not hold its shape for long, spreading almost at |
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