Sharon ran.
She ran until the ground stopped splitting, the wires stopped spitting, the water stopped flowing up from beneath her feet, the car alarms stopped wailing, the windows stopped cracking and the world was at last a solid thing of neat little houses, empty bus stops and the distant wailing of sirens.
Somehow Rhys had managed to run with her, stumbling through the night-time streets of Tooting, all tidy little rows of tidy little houses largely inhabited by people with an appreciation of patios. She hadn’t attempted the spirit walk, much less a spirit run, but a stagger through the solid reality of London, no shadows in the walls nor whisperings in the street, just the racing of her own heart as she and Rhys fled the wrecked remnants of the Friendlies’ temple. Kevin had scampered after them with a cry of “Don’t forget me!” pausing on each street corner to hop up and down with urgency as Edna, wheezing and holding her sides, brought up the rear.
The four of them had united, too breathless to speak, on the edge of a crooked green park with inexplicable apparatus for children to have fun on, if they could solve the intellectual challenge of how.
Kevin, though the least winded, swayed with incredulity and indignation for a good three minutes while the others gasped their way towards normality, before he threw up his hands and wailed, “What the fuck?!” He sagged against the iron railings of the park, his face as morose as his body language.
Edna managed to say, “Are… Are they… Are they going to… follow?”
“I guess we’d know by now,” panted Sharon. “Bloody hell, I need to do a sport or something.”
Rhys didn’t speak. His face was ash-grey and, as Sharon turned to look at him, his gaze drifted down to where his hand was still pressed against his side, fingers red with blood.
“Oh,” he whimpered. Then added “Sorry,” and fell, slowly and gently, to the ground.
Sharon caught his shoulders before his head could slam into the pavement. “Oh, my God!” wailed Kevin. “There’s dirt everywhere and he’s bleeding!”
“I’ll call an ambulance,” stammered Edna. But Sharon interrupted before the older woman could move.
“How are we going to explain this to anyone?”
“But what if there’s digestive fluids in the blood?” demanded Kevin. “That’s so gross.”
Sharon looked into Rhys’ face. His eyes were half-open, staring at a distant nothing; his lips tried to move but produced no words. She peeled away the shirt around his side and there were two marks gouged in his skin, the marks of animal claws, the blood too thick and black for her to see anything clearly.
Edna didn’t move; Kevin wavered, eyes transfixed by the blood seeping through Sharon’s hands. “Rhys?” she whispered. His eyes flickered. “Oi! Rhys!” Louder, more urgent. “Hey, hay-fever-nut druid!” she shouted, loud enough to send his eyelids quivering back up, whites rolling beneath. “Oi, you!” she repeated, shaking him by the shoulder. “You don’t bloody go nowhere, you hear? You stay with me.”
She turned to the others. “There’s a number on my phone,” she said, pressing down gingerly against the wound in Rhys’s side. “Sammy the Elbow. Call him.”