Ayoung woman with curly, auburn hair stood in front of the mirror one morning and tried to run a brush through her long tresses. It was no good. Her hair had always done whatever it wanted to do, and it saw no reason to change now. Still, wild and free was back in fashion. She’d fit in with all the other chic women walking the streets of Rome.
Wiping the sleep from her eyes, she poured herself a small cup of black espresso coffee and wandered through to the living-room in her nighty. The morning sunlight filtered through the balcony windows and she felt as good as she had in any morning of the past few hundred years.
She opened the balcony doors and, as she stepped out into the sunlight, leaves the same colour as her hair fluttered by on the wind. She breathed in deeply and let the smell of autumn filter through to every cell in her body. The air tasted of smoke, nostalgia and even …change.
She blinked and walked back through to the salon, placing her cup of coffee on a window ledge. She knelt down on a thick carpet beside a glass coffee table and reached for the deck of Tarot cards that lay beside a small crystal altar. She spread out the cards in a fan and selected seven. She turned them over one by one, and with each card her eyes gleamed more and more.
She stared in amazement at the cards and reached over to the altar to pick up seven wooden dice. She cast them across the table, made a quick calculation in her head and then walked over to a desk in the corner, where a laptop was waiting on standby. She fired up the internet and a few moments later a search page displayed:
The Sleeping Celebrity Awakes
The mysterious case of the nine-year-old boy lying in a coma for the last three months took an exciting turn last week when the patient abruptly woke up. Known only as ‘Theo’, the boy seemed to be in good health and amused his fans by declaring he ‘wanted to save the world’.
A smile broke out from ear to ear across her face. She walked over to collect her cup of coffee on the balcony and looked up at the sky. ‘It’s about time,’ she called merrily.
She drank the espresso in one gulp, dressed herself in a smart skirt and jersey, packed a day-bag and walked out of her apartment for the last time. She hailed a taxi and, as the cab pulled up, she tossed the apartment keys to an old homeless woman begging on the pavement.
‘Fifth floor. Apartment 521. It’s yours,’ she said in Italian, before jumping into the taxi. The old woman watched her speed away in disbelief, looked at the keys in her hand and began fervent prayers of thanks to the Mother Mary.
The taxi-driver could not bring himself to ask for any money from such a beautiful young woman, and all the way to the airport he told her about his family problems. She listened sympathetically and, by the time they arrived at the international terminal, the driver concluded that perhaps things weren’t so bad after all. It was just good to talk to someone.
‘You are feeling sleepy.’
‘No, not really. I slept fine last night.’
Dr Bunsen snorted and put down the watch he’d been dangling in front
of Theo’s eyes. Never in all his years as a doctor had he met such a disagreeable brat – and he’d known plenty. Here he was, a distinguished psychologist with 15 years of expertise and experience, trying to cure the child – and what was his reward? Smart-alec answers from a precocious nine-year-old. The worst part was that the ungrateful wretch had the irritating smirk of someone who knew something he didn’t.
‘Theo, I want to help you. But how do you expect to get better if you don’t want to help yourself?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘Except that you refuse to tell us who you really are, hmm? Exactly what are you hiding?’
‘Nothing.’
‘There you go again. An answer to everything. You must trust in us to know what’s best for you. You’re only a child and haven’t had the chance to learn very much yet.’
Dr Bunsen leant forward and softened his voice to the extent that it sounded menacing. ‘Theo, if you continue to resist treatment, I may have to recommend a course of medication to overcome these emotional blockages of yours. Now you don’t want that, do you?’
Of all the reactions to his barely veiled threat, Theo’s response was the last one Bunsen could have expected. The boy burst out laughing, covering his mouth with his hand and almost crying with mirth. What the doctor didn’t know was that Bozo was sitting at the end of the bed, mirroring every move he made. The look on the Bloon’s face as he leant forward on his fist to intimidate Theo was too funny for words.
‘Bozo!’ Theo cried, despite himself.
‘What did you call me?’ Bunsen’s voice suddenly became sharp and dangerous. ‘Bozo? Now listen, you conceited little brat,’ he snarled. ‘Maybe all the cameras and celebrity status have gone to your ugly little head. This is my hospital and I have the power to make things very uncomfortable for you, my friend.’
It seemed as if Bunsen had ripped off his mask and Theo saw the doctor as he had always imagined him to be. His face screwed up in fury, his lips twisted cruelly and he stared at Theo with eyes burning with hatred.
‘From now on, kid, there’s going to be a little more co-operation around here and…’ – at that moment Nurse Sandra arrived with the food-trolley – ‘…and I’m glad we had the opportunity for this little chat, Theo.’ Dr Bunsen smiled brightly, flashing him one last, dark look. ‘Ah, here’s Sandra with your lunch. Mmm, spaghetti – this hospital is like a hotel! We’ll carry on tomorrow, Theo. Do think about what I said, won’t you?’ Bunsen left the room in a hurry and Theo’s eyes followed him in terror.
‘What was all that about?’ Sandra asked with a puzzled look. Theo could feel his heart beat so fast it felt like it might punch a hole through his chest and bounce down the corridor like a rubber ball. Sandra put her hand to his forehead. ‘You’re sweating! What did Dr Bunsen say to you?’
Theo wanted to tell her, but somehow he didn’t dare. As Bunsen said, he was just a kid – who would believe him? ‘He scared me,’ was all he managed to stutter.
‘Doctors can be like that sometimes,’ Sandra sighed. ‘They spend so many years studying that I think they forget what it’s like to be young. Don’t pay him any mind.’ She moved on with the food-trolley and Theo turned to see Bozo looking as shaken as him. The Bloon’s oval eyes shone bright yellow and his tail trembled behind him.
‘Man,’ Bozo managed to say. ‘I knew he was mean but not that mean.’
‘Bozo, we have to get out of this place,’ Theo said quickly. ‘We’ve been sitting around here for too long doing nothing.’
‘On the other hand,’ Bozo replied with a slurp, as he struggled with a long piece of spaghetti, ‘the food here isn’t too bad. Where else are we going to get three meals a day brought to us in bed?’
‘But Bunsen has got it in for me now,’ Theo complained.
‘Huh! Let him just try talking like that to you again,’ Bozo puffed, throwing a few punches in the air.
‘A fat lot of good you were when I needed you,’ Theo muttered. ‘But really, Bozo, we need to get out of here. We need to find the Cure for the Storyteller, remember?’
‘So?’ Bozo shrugged, gargling with Theo’s milk. ‘This is a hospital, right? There must be rooms full of medicine here – some pill or other has got to work. And then I can get back to Bloonland. Man, I could murder some blue cheese…’ he concluded wistfully.
‘Bozo, I’m serious!’ Theo insisted. ‘I’ve been thinking about what Sandra told me last night. She said that most illnesses were in the mind.’
‘So?’
‘So if the world is the mind of the Storyteller, we need to get out there and discover what’s wrong with it. Then maybe we can find a cure.’ ‘But you can see all of the world on the Hypnosis-box – as many channels as you want.’
‘You mean the television,’ Theo corrected him.
‘I mean the Hypnosis-box,’ Bozo laughed. ‘It was funny to see Bunsen try to hypnotise you by dangling a watch in front of your eyes. All he really had to do was turn on that Box and you’d have been at his mercy.’
‘I would not!’ Theo snapped hotly.
‘You would too. Here’s how you look when you’re watching something. You go like this.’ Bozo slumped his shoulders and jutted his neck forwards. He allowed his jaw to drop like an ape and his eyes blurred stupidly.
‘I do NOT look like that when I watch TV!” Theo yelled.
‘Sure you do. And you know what? The more you watch, the dumber you get. You’re all completely hooked: the longer you go without a remote control in your hands, the more nervous you get.’ Bozo giggled. ‘The Storyteller used to make us laugh by telling us how you Hoomans want to live for ever, yet you spend, like, ten years of your life as slaves to the Box.’
‘I’m sick of you making fun of Hoomans – I mean, humans – all the time,’ Theo shouted. ‘We are not slaves!’
Before Bozo could retort, another voice spoke from the doorway and cut their argument dead.
‘Am I interrupting something?’
They both turned in shock and beheld a smiling, young woman with auburn hair and gleaming green eyes.