فصل سوم

CHAPTER THREE

Old Running

He hit the corner of Exhibition Road, skidded into the turn, and started sprinting, careening off the crowds filing into the Science Museum. By the time they started to protest, he was just a memory of blurring feet, fifty yards up the road.

A traffic warden tried to grab him with the reflex action all men in uniform have when someone young runs really fast in their direction. “Hey, there …” George tore out of his grip and kept going. One fast look over his shoulder gave him a horror shot of the pterodactyl clipping along the pavement behind him, with a terrible jerky lope. It appeared to run with its legs and simultaneously pull itself forward on the hooked knuckles of its wings.

Nobody paid it any notice.

George screamed and doubled his speed, ducking into a side street, then almost immediately turning into another. He shouted “Help!” but London’s a busy city, and by the time people heard it he was gone.

He got a stitch.

He kept running, pounding through the backstreets, heading for the park.

Usually you can run through a stitch and get over it. This one must have been a different kind. This one just got another one on top of it and hurt twice as bad.

He didn’t slow down.

Running from nightmares is how nightmares begin. Our bodies have really old memories that our minds know nothing about. And these memories made him speed up as he skidded into the road that runs along the bottom of Kensington Gardens.

He couldn’t see how to get into the park, so he turned right and kicked harder.

Behind him, the pterodactyl pulled itself around the corner and sniffed the air. George ran. Looking back, he saw it getting smaller. It seemed to have stopped to look at all the greenery in the park. He ran and ran until a lorry pulled across the pavement and he couldn’t see it anymore.

As soon as he couldn’t see it, George had time to feel the pain in his side. He stumbled and went sprawling as his feet hit a paving-stone edge.

He bounced up on his feet and looked back. Clear.

He didn’t see the tramp until the tramp grabbed him and stopped him dead on the edge of a junction.

George whirled.

“Wha—?”

A lorry thumped through the junction, right over where George would have been.

The tramp let him go. George looked over his shoulder. He couldn’t see anything. He gave in and bent double, gasping with pain and exhaustion, wondering if he was going to be sick.

“Don’t mention it…” wheezed the tramp.

George pointed back down the empty road. The tramp looked back along his arm. The pterodactyl stepped out from behind a tree and looked at them. Then it scuttled behind another tree.

“Did you see it?” George gasped, trying to get the right amount of oxygen into his body as he grasped at the receding wisp of his normal world.

The tramp shrugged and shook his head.

“Just ‘cos you’re paranoid don’t mean they ain’t after you, mind,” he said, and dissolved into a series of lumpy giggles that sounded like he was being choked.

George gulped air. Everything hurt. His feet, his muscles, and his lungs. His head hurt worst of all.

There was no movement from the distant tree.

There was movement closer to him. There was something above the tramp’s head, on the side of the building.

On an elaborate drainpipe, a carving of three fantastical lizardly salamanders fanned out, their tails decora-tively plaited together, their heads facing down, each about eight feet long. That wasn’t what had caught George’s eye.

What caught his eye was the fact that they moved.

George’s jaw fell open.

Above the tramp’s head, the three architectural details had started to writhe. He could hear the hiss and slither of scales against scales as the tails began to unplait themselves. He could see the salamanders’ eyes turn to him, their noses sniffing.

Cold fear wrapped his neck. He pointed. The tramp followed his gesture. He looked puzzled. “What?” One of the lizards got its tail free of the others and reared back, hissing at George. He looked at the tramp for a fast second.

“Can’t you see?”

George heard a distant clack. He tore his eyes from the new horrors on the building wall to see the pterodactyl awkwardly loping toward him, only thirty yards away.

George was running again. He ran past joggers, past dog-walkers, past cyclists.

Nobody stopped. Nobody looked. Nobody helped.

But he didn’t slow down. The one time he did snatch a look back, he could see the salamanders scuttle and slither along the gutter beside the creature, with an un-lizardly sidewinding motion he’d seen in a program about rattlesnakes. It was a movement that was horrible in itself, full of threat and power and evil.

George pumped down the pavement, now running alongside Hyde Park past a modern red-brick building with a tower and a soldier and a horse outside.

The soldier didn’t give him a moment’s look.

He could feel each pace through the soles of his shoes, like the pavement was hitting him, rather than the other way round. He could hear his breath like it was someone running beside him. His chest hurt as if it were being burned inside.

He risked a look behind him.

“Hoi!”

He hit the street cleaner’s barrow at full tilt, smacking all the wind out of his body and sprawling in a mess of brooms and rubbish bags across the pavement.

“HOI!”

George found a breath, and another one, and then a lot more ones that each hurt worse than the last. He wiped tears from his eyes.

“You mad?” the street cleaner wanted to know.

George shook his head, no words left in him.

“You clean that up, pal,” said the sweeper, coming out of the gutter. “You clean that up right now!” George started to cry.

The big sweeper stepped back. Spooked. “Oi. Steady.” Snot ribboned out of George’s nose as he sobbed. The sweeper looked around, scratched himself, and looked as embarrassed as a man with a bulldog tattooed on his neck can do.

“Steady, mate. It’s …”

He looked around again. People in the bus stared at them, like they were on TV. Disconnected. Bored. Passing the time. People in cars ignored them and concentrated on the car in front. A motorcycle despatch rider roared past.

The sweeper picked up two halves of a broom.

“You broke my broom, you …”

George froze. Behind the sweepers shoulder, on the other side of the road, as a red bus jerked forward, he saw a flash of scale. A sliver of beak. And a dark, dark glint of eye.

The pterodactyl had been pacing on the other side of the road, on the park side, using the traffic as cover.

The bushes on his side rustled again, and this time he turned fast enough to see three salamander tails disappear into the foliage.

“Wha—?” asked the sweeper.

But he was talking to thin air. George had gone.