“What the hell is going on?” he said, through lips almost too frozen to move.
“Precisely that, Mr Cameron,” the man replied. “Hell is going on.”
As they ran past St Mary-le-Strand, Loyer glanced behind him, and stumbled. Joel, a full three metres behind the leaders, knew the man was giving up. So quickly too; there was something amiss. He slackened his pace, letting McCloud and Voight pass him. No great hurry. Kinderman was quite a way behind, unable to compete with these fast boys. He was the tortoise in this race, for sure. Loyer was overtaken by McCloud, then Voight, and finally Jones and Kinderman. His breath had suddenly deserted him, and his legs felt like lead. Worse, he was seeing the tarmac under his running shoes creaking and cracking, and fingers, like loveless children, seeking up out of the ground to touch him. Nobody else was seeing them, it seemed. The crowds just roared on, while these illusory hands broke out of their tarmac graves and secured a hold on him. He collapsed into their dead arms exhausted, his youth broken and his strength spent. The enquiring fingers of the dead continued to pluck at him, long after the doctors had removed him from the track, examined him and sedated him.
He knew why, of course, lying there on the hot tarmac while they had their pricking way with him. He’d looked behind him. That’s what had made them come. He’d looked — “And after Loyer’s sensational collapse, the race is open wide. Frank the Flash McCloud is setting the pace now, and he’s really speeding away from the new boy, Voight. Joel Jones is even further behind, he doesn’t seem to be keeping up with the leaders at all. What do you think, Jim?”
“Well he’s either pooped already, or he’s really taking a chance that they’ll exhaust themselves. Remember he’s new over this distance —”
“Yes, Jim —”
“And that might make him careless. Certainly he’s going to have to do a lot of work to improve on his present position in third place.”
Joel felt giddy. For a moment, as he’d watched Loyer begin to lose his grip on the race, he’d heard the man praying out loud. Praying to God to save him. He’d been the only one who heard the words — “Yea, though I walk through the shadows of the Valley of Death I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they —”
The sun was hotter now, and Joel was beginning to feel the familiar voices of his tiring limbs. Running on tarmac was hard on the feet, hard on the joints. Not that that would make a man take to praying. He tried to put Loyer’s desperation out of his mind, and concentrate on the matter in hand.
There was still a lot of running to do, the race was not even half over. Plenty of time to catch up with the heroes: plenty of time.
As he ran, his brain idly turned over the prayers his mother had taught him in case he should need one, but the years had eroded them: they were all but gone.
“My name,” said the goat-coated man, “is Gregory Burgess. Member of Parliament. You wouldn’t know me. I try to keep a low profile.”
“MP?” said Cameron.
“Yes. Independent. Very independent.”
“Is that Voight’s brother?”
Burgess glanced at Voight’s other self. He was not even shivering in the intense cold, despite the fact that he was only wearing a thin singlet and shorts.
“Brother?” Burgess said. “No, no. He is my — what is the word? Familiar.”
The word rang a bell, but Cameron wasn’t well-read. What was a familiar?
“Show him,” said Burgess magnanimously. Voight’s face shook, the skin seeming to shrivel, the lips curling back from the teeth, the teeth melting into a white wax that poured down a gullet that was itself transfiguring into a column of shimmering silver. The face was no longer human, no longer even mammalian. It had become a fan of knives, their blades glistening in the candlelight through the door. Even as this bizarrerie became fixed, it started to change again, the knives melting and darkening, fur sprouting, eyes appearing and swelling to balloon size. Antennae leapt from this new head, mandibles were extruded from the pulp of transfiguration, and the head of a bee, huge and perfectly intricate, now sat on Voight’s neck.