Free The Boy Who Could See Demons by Carolyn Jess-Cooke Page A

big brass spotlight and holding the new screws in his mouth.
    ‘Bad idea for a boy with an attention deficit disorder to be fiddling with the set, don’t you think?’ Ruen said, clasping his hands behind his back.
    ‘So?’ I whispered, careful not to let anyone see my mouth moving. I saw Anya down below but I didn’t say anything, though I noticed Ruen staring at her. ‘So what?’ I asked him again.
    Ruen looked like he was making a plan. ‘So. He would be easily distracted. Doesn’t Katie’s mother always make a big fuss at the end, coming on stage and hugging her in front of everyone?’
    I thought about it. There’s something about Katie’s mum that I don’t like. She always claps the loudest when she comes to see Katie, but her smile is false and sometimes she smells of alcohol. And even though she’s small and works as a school patrol lady, Katie looks scared of her.
    ‘I’m not doing it,’ I told Ruen.
    ‘Please yourself,’ he said, walking away. ‘Only I daresay Katie’ll miss out on her big night.’
    My legs thought they were jelly for a total of nine seconds. I watched after Ruen and opened my mouth to shout because suddenly what he meant dawned on me like someone just poured a bucket of ice down the back of my collar. He meant that if I didn’t do something to Katie’s mum, Katie’s mum would hurt Katie on purpose so she couldn’t perform.
    Just then I saw Jojo waving at me with her arm, as if she was cleaning windows too high to reach. I blinked.
    ‘Oh, you’re back with us, are you?’ she said, though I hadn’t been anywhere.
    I nodded my head.
    She grinned. ‘Got a new joke for the rap scene, Alex?’
    I said Uh-huh and tried to remember it. I told the joke, though suddenly I felt that the word ‘Irishman’ sounded weird inside this place and Jojo wasn’t laughing like she normally did. I remembered the time last week when she came by my house to pick me up for rehearsals and instead she had to phone an ambulance for Mum. I thought of the way her hands shook when she tried to find Mum’s pulse.
    Jojo shouted at us all to regroup and run through Act Three. I ran after Ruen.
    He was in the wings now, his face in the shadows.
    ‘You could always help Katie out, couldn’t you?’ he said calmly. ‘All it would take is for you to shout up at Terry at just the right moment.’
    I could feel my heart beating really quickly. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum .
    ‘Alex?’ I heard Jojo call.
    I stepped closer to Ruen. ‘But wouldn’t that hurt Katie’s mum?’
    Ruen’s eyes were like tiny little knives in his horrible face. He smiled. ‘But doesn’t she hurt Katie?’
    ‘Alex!’
    I spun round and ran back across the stage to take my position. Jojo walked towards me, her eyes watching me strangely, and I started to panic in case she’d spotted Ruen. She bent down in front of me. ‘Are you OK, Alex?’
    I nodded like I was definitely OK.
    ‘You sure?’
    My nod said I was absolutely OK. Jojo jumped up, clapping her hands above her head.
    ‘OK! New plan, everyone. The Opera House manager has told me we’ve a little more time tonight, so we’re going to take it from the top again and smooth out the creases.’
    Some people groaned and some shouted, ‘Hooray!’ If we were starting from the beginning then I was on first. I tried to remember the new joke I wanted to tell but it wouldn’t come to my mind. It felt as though my brain had turned into the stuff I sometimes pull out of the pipe of the vacuum cleaner.
    And then Ruen came back, but he was no longer the Old Man. He was Ghost Boy, and as he crossed the stage he turned around to me and gave me a smile and his eyes were black. The lights went down and everything went dark until my eyes adjusted. Gareth and Liam stumbled across the stage, with guns, towards Ruen and I almost cried out, thinking they were going to run into him.
    ‘Who’s there?’ Liam shouted. The smoke machine started dribbling out a blanket of silvery fog. A