his lips might have been surgically removed.
Beside him sat Voight.
Impossible as it seemed it was Voight's face that glanced back out of the smoked glass windows; he was even dressed for the race.
Cameron didn't like the look of this at all. He'd seen the South African five minutes earlier, off and running. So who was this? A double obviously. It smelt of a fix, somehow; it stank to high heaven.
The Mercedes was already disappearing around a corner. Cameron turned off the radio and pedaled pell- mell after the car. The balmy sun made him sweat as he rode.
The Mercedes was threading its way through the narrow streets with some difficulty, ignoring all the One Way signs as it went. Its slow passage made it relatively easy for Cameron to keep the vehicle in view without being seen by its occupants, though the effort was beginning to light a fire in his lungs.
In a tiny, nameless alley just west of Fetter Lane, where the shadows were particularly dense, the Mercedes stopped. Cameron, hidden from view round a corner not twenty yards from the car, watched as the door was opened by the chauffeur and the lipless man, with the Voight look-alike close behind, stepped out and went into a nondescript building. When all three had disappeared Cameron propped his bike up against the wall and followed.
The street was pin-drop hushed. From this distance the roar of the crowd was only a murmur. It could have been another world, this street. The flitting shadows of birds, the windows of the buildings bricked up, the peeling paint, the rotten smell in the still air. A dead rabbit lay in the gutter, a black rabbit with a white collar, someone's lost pet. Flies rose and fell on it, alternately startled and ravenous.
Cameron crept towards the open door as quietly as he was able. He had, as it turned out, nothing to fear. The trio had disappeared down the dark hallway of the house long since. The air was cool in the hall, and smelt of damp. Looking fearless, but feeling afraid, Cameron entered the blind building. The wall-paper in the hallway was shit-coloured, the paint the same. It was like walking into a bowel; a dead man's bowel, cold and shitty. Ahead, the stairway had collapsed, preventing access to the upper storey. They had not gone up, but down.
The door to the cellar was adjacent to the defunct staircase, and Cameron could hear voices from below.
No time like the present, he thought, and opened the door sufficiently to squeeze into the dark beyond. It was icy. Not just cold, not damp, but refrigerated. For a moment he thought he'd stepped into a cold storage room. His breath became a mist at his lips: his teeth wanted to chatter.
Can't turn back now, he thought, and started down the frost-slick steps. It wasn't impossibly dark. At the bottom of the flight, a long way down, a pale light flickered, its uninspired glow aspiring to the day. Cameron glanced longingly round at the open door behind him. It looked extremely tempting, but he was curious, so curious. There was nothing to do but descend.
In his nostrils the scent of the place teased. He had a lousy sense of smell, and a worse palate, as his wife was fond of reminding him. She'd say he couldn't distinguish between garlic and a rose, and it was probably true. But the smell in this deep meant something to him, something that stirred the acid in his belly into life.
Goats. It smelt, ha, he wanted to tell her then and there how he'd remembered, it smelt of goats.
He was almost at the bottom of the stairs, twenty, maybe thirty, feet underground. The voices were still some distance away, behind a second door.
He was standing in a little chamber, its walls badly white-washed and scrawled with obscene graffiti, mostly pictures of the sex-act. On the floor, a candelabra, seven forked. Only two of the dingy candles were lit, and they burned with a guttering flame that was almost blue. The goaty smell was stronger now: and mingled with a scent so sickly-sweet it belonged in a Turkish brothel.
Two doors led off the chamber, and from behind one Cameron heard the conversation continuing. With scrupulous caution he crossed the slippery floor to the door, straining to make sense of the murmuring voices. There was an urgency in them.
'— hurry —'
'— the right skills —'
'children, children —'
Laughter.
'I believe we — tomorrow — all of us —'
Laughter again.
Suddenly the voices seemed to change direction, as if the speakers were moving back towards the door. Cameron took three steps back across the icy floor, almost colliding with the candelabra. The flames spat and whispered in the chamber as he passed.
He had to choose either the stairs or the other door. The stairs represented utter retreat. If he climbed them he'd be safe, but he would never know. Never know why the cold, why the blue flames, why the smell of goats. The door was a chance. Back to it, his eyes on the door opposite, he fought with the bitingly cold brass handle. It turned with some tussling, and he ducked out of sight as the door opposite opened. The two movements were perfectly syncopated:
God was with him.
Even as he closed the door he knew he'd made an error. God wasn't with him at all.
Needles of cold penetrated his head, his teeth, his eyes, his fingers. He felt as though he'd been thrown naked into the heart of an iceberg. His blood seemed to stand still in his veins: the spit on his tongue crystallized: the mucus on the lining of his nose pricked as it turned to ice. The cold seemed to cripple him: he couldn't even turn round.
Barely able to move his joints, he fumbled for his cigarette lighter with fingers so numb they could have been cut off without him feeling it.
The lighter was already glued to his hand, the sweat on his fingers had turned to frost. He tried to ignite it, against the dark, against the cold. Reluctantly it sparked into a spluttering half-life.
The room was large: an ice-cavern. Its walls, its encrusted roof, sparkled and shone. Stalactites of ice, lance-sharp, hung over his head. The floor on which he stood, poised uncertainly, was raked towards a hole in the middle of the room. Five or six feet across, its edges and walls were so lined with ice it seemed as though a river had been arrested as it poured down into the darkness.
He thought of Xanadu, a poem he knew by heart.
Visions of another Albion —'Where Alph the sacred river ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea.'
If there was indeed a sea down there, it was a frozen sea. It was death forever.
It was as much as he could do to keep upright, to prevent himself from sliding down the incline towards the unknown. The lighter flickered as an icy air blew it out.
'Shit,' said Cameron as he was plunged into darkness. Whether the word alerted the trio outside, or whether God deserted him totally at that moment and invited them to open the door, he would never know. But as the door swung wide it pushed Cameron off his feet. Too numb and too frozen to prevent his fall he collapsed to the ice floor as the smell of the goat wafted into the room.
Cameron half turned. Voight's double was at the door, as was the chauffeur, and the third man in the Mercedes. He wore a coat apparently made of several goat-skins. The hooves and the horns still hung from it. The blood on its fur was brown and gummy.
'What are you doing here, Mr Cameron?' asked the goat-coated man.
Cameron could barely speak. The only feeling left in his head was a pin-point of agony in the middle of his forehead.
'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
