It was emerging from the shaft, its grey bulk filling the hole, lit by some radiance from below. Its eyes, deep-set in the naked bone of its elephantine head, met Cameron's through the open door. They seemed to touch him like a kiss, entering his thoughts through his eyes.
He was not turned to salt. Pulling his curious glance away from the face, he skated across the ante-chamber and started to climb the stairs two and three at a time, falling and climbing, falling and climbing. The door was still ajar. Beyond it, daylight and the world.
He flung the door open and collapsed into the hallway, feeling the warmth already beginning to wake his frozen nerves. There was no noise on the stairs behind him: clearly they were too in awe of their fleshless visitor to follow him. He hauled himself along the wall of the hallway, his body wracked with shivers and chatterings.
Still they didn't follow.
Outside the day was blindingly bright, and he began to feel the exhilaration of escape. It was like nothing he'd ever felt before. To have been so close, yet survived. God had been with him after all.
He staggered along the road back to his bicycle, determined to stop the race, to tell the world —His bike was untouched, its handlebars warm as his wife's arms.
As he hooked his leg over, the look he had exchanged with Hell caught fire. His body, ignorant of the heat in his brain, continued about its business for a moment, putting its feet on the pedals and starting to ride away.
Cameron felt the ignition in his head and knew he was dead.
The look, the glance behind him —Lot's wife.
Like Lot's stupid wife —The lightning leapt between his ears: faster than thought.
His skull cracked, and the lightning, white-hot, shot out from the furnace of his brain. His eyes withered to black nuts in his sockets, he belched light from mouth and nostrils. The combustion turned him into a column of black flesh in a matter of seconds, without a flame or a wisp of smoke.
Cameron's body was completely incinerated by the time the bicycle careered off the road and crashed through the tailor's shop window, where it lay like a dummy, face down amongst the ashen suits. He, too, had looked back.
The crowds at Trafalgar Square were a seething mass of enthusiasm. Cheers, tears and flags. It was as though this little race had become something special for these people: a ritual the significance of which they could not know. Yet somewhere in them they understood the day was laden with sulphur, they sensed their lives stood on tiptoe to reach heaven. Especially the children. They ran along the route, shouting incoherent blessings, their faces squeezed up with their fears. Some called his name.
'Joel! Joel!'
Or did he imagine that? Had he imagined, too, the prayer from Loyer's lips, and the signs in the radiant faces of the babies held high to watch the runners pass?
As they turned into Whitehall Frank McCloud glanced confidentially over his shoulder and Hell took him.
It was sudden: it was simple.
He stumbled, an icy hand in his chest crushing the life out of him. Joel slowed as he approached the man. His face was purple: his lips foamy.
'McCloud,' he said, and stopped to stare in his great rival's thin face.
McCloud looked up at him from behind a veil of smoke that had turned his grey eyes ochre. Joel reached down to help him.
'Don't touch me,' McCloud growled. The filament vessels in his eyes bulged and bled.
'Cramp?' asked Joel. 'Is it cramp?'
'Run, you bastard, run,' McCloud was saying at him, as the hand in his innards seized his life out. He was oozing blood through the pores on his face now, weeping red tears. 'Run. And don't look back. For Christ's sake, don't look back.'
'What is it?'
'Run for your life!'
The words weren't requests but imperatives.
Run.
Not for gold or glory. Just to live.
Joel glanced up, suddenly aware that there was some huge-headed thing at his back, cold breath on his neck.
He picked up his heels and ran.
'— Well, things aren't going so well for the runners here, Jim. After Loyer going down so sensationally, now Frank McCloud has stumbled too. I've never seen anything quite like it. But he seems to have had a few words with Joel Jones as he ran past, so he must be OK.'
McCloud was dead by the time they put him in the ambulance, and putrefied by the following morning.
Joel ran. Jesus, did he run. The sun had become ferocious in his face, washing the colour out of the cheering crowds, out of the faces, out of the flags. Everything was one sheet of noise, drained of humanity.
Joel knew the feeling that was coming over him, the sense of dislocation that accompanied fatigue and over-oxygenation. He was running in a bubble of his own consciousness, thinking, sweating, suffering by himself, for himself, in the name of himself.
And it wasn't so bad, this being alone. Songs began to fill his head: snatches of hymns, sweet phrases from love songs, dirty rhymes. His self idled, and his dream-mind, unnamed and fearless, took over.
Ahead, washed by the same white rain of light, was Voight. That was the enemy, that was the thing to be surpassed. Voight, with his shining crucifix rocking in the sun. He could do it, as long as he didn't look, as long as he didn't look —Behind him.
Burgess opened the door of the Mercedes and climbed in. Time had been wasted: valuable time. He should be at the Houses of Parliament, at the finishing line, ready to welcome the runners home. There was a scene to play, in which he would pretend the mild and smiling face of democracy. And tomorrow? Not so mild.
His hands were clammy with excitement, and his pinstripe suit smelt of the goat-skin coat he was obliged to wear in the room. Still, nobody would notice; and even if they did what English-man would be so impolite to mention that he smelt goaty?
He hated the Lower Chamber, the perpetual ice, that damn yawning hole with its distant sound of loss. But all that was over now. He'd made his oblations, he'd shown his utter and ceaseless adoration of the pit; now it was time to reap the rewards.
As they drove, he thought of his many sacrifices to ambition. At first, minor stuff: kittens and cockerels. Later, he was to discover how ridiculous they thought such gestures were. But at the beginning he'd been innocent: not knowing what to give or how to give it. They began to make their requirements clear as the years went by, and he, in time, learnt to practice the etiquette of selling his soul. His self mortifications were studiously planned and immaculately staged, though they had left him without nipples or the hope of children. It was worth the pain, though: the power came to him by degrees. A triple first at Oxford, a wife endowed beyond the dreams of priapism, a seat in Parliament, and soon, soon enough, the country itself.
The cauterized stumps of his thumbs ached, as they often did when he was nervous. Idly, he sucked on one.
'— Well We're now in the closing stages of what really has been one hell of a race, eh, Jim?'
'Oh yes, It's really been a revelation, hasn't it? Voight is really the outsider of the field; and here he is streaking away from the competition without much effort. Of course, Jones made the unselfish gesture of checking with Frank McCloud that he was indeed all right after that bad fall of his, and that put him behind.'
'It's lost the race for Jones really, hasn't it?'
'I think that's right. I think it lost the race for him.'
'This is a charity race, of course.'
'Absolutely. And in a situation like this it's not whether you win or lose —'
'It's how you play the game.'
'Right.'
'Right.'
