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Afterwards, I said to Felix, “Shall we go to your room?” He has loads more music than me and some good games as well.
    Felix shook his head. He put his hand up to his mouth and said in a French resistance sort of whisper, “Let’s go to Mickey’s room . . . less chance of being interrupted. . .”
    “Why—”
    “Shh!”
    You always know when Felix is planning something. He has this secretive air, like he knows something and you don’t. He had it now. He wouldn’t tell me anything until we got up to Mickey’s room, which took ages because he’s not very good at climbing stairs. Mickey is Felix’s brother. He works on an oil rig, one month on and one month off.
    When we finally got up to his room, Felix said, “Listen. You know you wanted to see horror films. . .”
    “Yes,” I said cautiously.
    “Well, look!”
    He was sitting on Mickey’s bed. He pulled something out from behind the pillow and flourished it at me.
    “ The Exorcist !”
    I grabbed it off him. We read the back of the box eagerly.
    “‘Inspired by real events . . .’”
    “‘ The Exorcist has, until now, been considered too disturbing for home viewing . . . one of the most shocking and gripping movies ever made.’”
    “Have you seen it?”
    Felix shook his head. “I only found it yesterday. It’s supposed to be the worst film ever though. People used to faint in cinemas. . . There’s this one bit where the girl’s head spins all the way around. . .”
    “What’s so scary about that?” I said.
    “I don’t know,” Felix admitted. “But it’s an 18, so it must be pretty bad. And if you’re going to watch a horror film, this is the one to watch.”
    We shut Mickey’s door and turned on his DVD.
    It was dead boring. We kept expecting monsters or demons or something to appear, but nothing did. There was a whole bit that looked like something out of Indiana Jones , except that nothing happened apart from this old guy digging up coins. We both thought they were probably evil, possessed demonic coins, but they weren’t.
    Then it got confusing. There was a long bit with this kid and her mum, but it kept getting mixed up with some priest who didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything. All he did was drink whisky and visit his mother. The most exciting thing that happened was the girl playing with a Ouija board, but even that wasn’t particularly scary.
    Nothing too bad happened to the girl after she’d done the Ouija board, but you could kind of tell something was going to. There was a funny scene where she wet herself at a party. And then there was a great long bit in a hospital, which neither of us liked much, so Felix tried to fast-forward and find the head-going-round-backwards scene.
    I don’t know if what he found was the bit that made people faint, but it was horrible. There was a room with curtains flapping and books flying around and the kid stabbing herself with a cross and there was blood everywhere and she was saying all this horrible stuff in a voice that didn’t sound like hers and her face had gone all weird and I was just thinking how awful it would be if that was you and something was making you do that and—
    And then Felix’s mum walked into the room.
     
    Felix’s mum wouldn’t let us watch the rest. Felix made a big fuss, going on about how if we didn’t know how it ended we’d be haunted by the kid with the blood for ever after, but she wouldn’t listen.
    “She gets cured,” she said. “End of story. Now go and blow up some aliens or something.”
    Secretly, I was glad we didn’t watch any more. There was something about the idea of something living in your body and making you do creepy stuff that I didn’t like. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing on Felix’s computer. But after that I couldn’t stop wondering about whatever it was that had happened to that kid. “Inspired by real events”, it said on the box. What did that mean? What if it was really true? Could something