‘Not yet, Pax,’ I yelled. ‘Not yet. Stay with me!’
I manhandled her on towards the truck, whose driver was now climbing down out of his cab with a look of anger and confusion on his face. He shouted something at me but I ignored him, heading for the narrow gap between the back of the trailer and the tunnel wall. There was just room for us to squeeze through.
Trudie was taking some of her own weight by this time, but her breathing was ragged and shallow as we stumbled up the ramp. Even in the baleful light of the street lamps I could see her face was pale and glistening with sweat.
‘Can’t . . . move my arm,’ she muttered. Then she stopped dead in the road and was violently sick.
I looked back towards the mouth of the tunnel. A dozen or so cars were stopped there, and the trucker was having a loud argument with some of their drivers. At any moment I expected to see them flung aside as Asmodeus came storming through, but there was no sign of the demon. For some reason he’d given up the pursuit, maybe because flinging the manhole cover had taxed Rafi’s damaged body too far, and he’d had to stop and recuperate.
We still had to get out of there though, Pax to an A & E department and me to—Shit, what time was it? I looked at my watch, which showed 11.59. The Super-Self raid was about to start.
Trudie’s gaze met mine. ‘Go on,’ she said, teeth clenched on the pain. ‘I’ll flag down a car.’
‘I can’t leave you lying in the street,’ I protested.
She pushed away from me, stood swaying but unsupported. The whole of the front of her shirt was soaked in red so dark it looked black under the street lights. ‘I’m not lying anywhere,’ she snarled. ‘Go, Castor. I’m not dying; I’ve just got a broken arm. If you think your little toy will do the job, you have to get it over there before Gil sends the troops in and somebody dies.’
A car was coming towards us, slowing down as its driver saw the snarl-up ahead and realised that the tunnel entrance was blocked. Trudie finessed the argument by stepping into its path and forcing it to a sudden halt. The driver was a young guy in a Kings of Leon T-shirt, his windows wound down and his stereo banging out some Jamaican dance-hall number. He stared at Trudie’s blood-soaked shirt in almost comical horror.
‘I have to get to a hospital,’ she said.
‘Y-yeah,’ he stammered. ‘Okay. Jesus!’ He opened the car door and got out to let her into the back seat, although he cast a woeful glance at his light-tan upholstery. He looked almost as pale as Trudie did.
‘Go, Castor,’ Pax said again. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘I’ve memorised your number plate,’ I muttered to the dance-hall fan as I passed him. ‘Get her to where she needs to go. Don’t leave her.’ Then I accelerated into a run as I headed on down Kingsway to the junction with Aldwych.
The Strand was close by, but I was winded and sore from my tussle with Asmodeus and from the earlier hundred-metre freestyle fleeing. I couldn’t keep up the pace, and by the time I got to the bottom of Exeter Street I was limping along in a slo-mo parody of a run.
The pavement outside Super-Self was deserted and the door wide open. Turning in off the street, I almost went sprawling as I tripped over a body lying right across the threshold.
It was a man, tall and well built, lying on his stomach. He was breathing like a bellows: quick and shuddering gulps of air that made his upper body rise and fall as though he was trying to do push-ups.
The Spiro Agnew wristwatch on his right hand told me who I was dealing with.
‘Samir,’ I said, and then when he didn’t answer, ‘Turk? What’s happening?’
There was a sound like the stuttering pop-gurgle-pop of a blocked pipe, but he didn’t answer. When I rolled him onto his back, I saw why.
The lower half of his face was a mask of blood. His mouth gaped open, and the stump of his tongue writhed like a snake as he tried to speak.
16
I could feel it long before I reached the stairs. The fear-thing was awake and feasting. It was almost like a taste in the air, a hot metal tang that stung the back of my throat and made my eyes start to water. More to the point, it made me want to run and hide. I had to force myself to keep walking into that solid wall of terror. Every step was like the moment when you launch yourself off a diving board for the first time as a kid – when you come to the edge and almost can’t make your body do something that stupid and hazardous.
I gripped the smooth-sided box in my pocket, reminding myself that I was armed and dangerous. I wasn’t the hunted here, I was the hunter, and this bloated spider, sitting in the dark in its invisible web, was going to learn that not all flies are created equal.
But all that macho talk flew out of my head when I got to the top of the stairs and saw two more of Gil McClennan’s exorcists trying to crawl up them to safety. The fly analogy came back into my head full force, because that was what they looked like: dying flies, crawling blindly, trying to escape the poison that was killing them and failing because it was already inside them.
I don’t know where the idea came from. I had slowed almost to a halt, fighting so hard against the instinct to turn on my heel and flee that my muscles were starting to lock. Walking down those stairs one at a time was going to be like climbing Everest without oxygen. So I just let my legs stop dead, which was what they wanted more than anything else to do, and leaned far out over that gulf of poisoned air.
There’s an art to falling without being hurt: you have to tuck your head and arms in, concentrate your weight, and lean into the fall so that it turns into a controlled roll. I didn’t do any of those things, because my mind was screaming and squalling inside my skull like a cat in a box as it got closer and closer to the epicentre of this psychic storm front.
At the bottom of the stairs, I climbed doggedly to my feet again. There were more bodies here, some of them moving, some of them not. I took one step forward, then another. Close enough. It would have to be close enough because a third step was beyond me.
My arms jerking and twitching like the detached legs of one of Signor Galvani’s frogs, I fought to get the box out of my pocket. This was my sheet anchor, my ace in the hole, my grail. This would show the thing in the darkness who was boss.
I pressed the tiny toggle switch, and threw the box end over end towards the gaping doors that led to the changing rooms and the swimming pool beyond. It rolled, clattered, came to a halt.
And nothing happened.
Caldessa hadn’t wound the keys.
I made a mewling sound in the back of my throat. I’d thrown the box a good ten feet. To get it back, I’d have to walk ten feet toward the pool, ten feet into that storm of terror.
But looking on the bright side, my trip-hammering heart would probably explode before I’d covered half that distance.
I tried the falling down thing again, but this time it didn’t work. I just sank to my knees without moving an inch further forward. I couldn’t even throw myself flat on the ground. My body was rebelling one joint at a time, closing shop.
Ironically, it was Juliet who gave me the strength to move. The image of her rose suddenly in my mind, as she’d looked when we’d stood here the night before. Perhaps it was because this overmastering, hectoring, screaming fear was like the equally devastating, hectoring lust that she inspired. I used the one as a bulwark against the other, raising my libido as a battered sleazy shield against the slings and arrows of outrageous, pants-wetting, heart-stopping dread.
On hands and knees I shuffled inch by inch towards the box, across the no-man’s-land of my own fractured personality. When my fingers closed on it, it felt like the climax to a lifetime’s questing. And then the closing of the switch was like another lifetime, and the winding of the keys an etiolated eternity of running in a lonely place.