In the flickering gloomy pit beneath Burns and Stoke, Rhys gasped and slid to the floor.
He’d just seen Sharon and Mr Ruislip vanish, only to reappear a second later as two shapes tumbling into the black pit. He’d rushed to the edge, and seen…
… darkness.
He hadn’t realised how quickly the dark could swallow light, how easily living things could become small.
Now he sat, dizzy and bewildered, eyes heavy and throat clear, mind fuzzy and thoughts racing.
She’d fallen.
She’d fallen.
She’d fallen.
And he hadn’t stopped it.
“Aaa… aaa… atchoo!”
A child giggled out in the darkness of the corridor.
A bicycle tyre slid on stone.
It occurred to Rhys that these were not the normal sounds of an industrial-era storage pit beneath a financial building in Canary Wharf. Also, that if there was nothing left for him, no purpose, no meaning, no future, there was no further point in fearing things unseen and unknown.
He staggered to his feet, cradling his broken hand against his chest, and pushed back the door to the corridor.
In the distance, tiny and pale, the lift stood waiting to carry any who dared approach back into the light. Rhys fingered the packet of antihistamines in his pocket and wondered what would happen if he combined the pills with coffee. Was that medically allowed?
He raised his head and called out, “There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done, so don’t even think about trying.”
So saying, he stepped into the dark of the corridor.
Swish of a wheel in the dark, splash as it rippled through a puddle on the stone floor, then nothing again.
It occurred to Rhys that these corridors were too narrow for a cyclist, even a lithe and dextrous one, but frankly he no longer cared about such practicalities. He took another step forward and heard a child giggle. Then another step, and another. As he walked down the corridor it seemed that no matter how far he went, the lift door still seemed a very long way off, too far off in fact, but when he looked back, so did the door to the pit.
Something dark and fast moved in the corner of his eye; he turned quickly, raising his hands to strike, but it was gone, as if swallowed by the walls themselves.
Something else blurred behind him: a rattle of chain on gears. He spun again, but it was out of sight, swallowed up by the darkness.
“Atchoo!”
The sound of his sneeze echoed down the corridor. He whispered the words of the druid’s guide light, opening his palms to release a sodium-stained creature the size of a small blackbird, its skin glowing with a pervasive pinkish glow. It rose up to circle above his head, spilling its light across the stones around him–and there!
He saw it just for a second, a shadow all in black on a bicycle all in black, as if rider and transport were made of the same stuff, an insubstantial absence of light which wheeled across his vision before vanishing into the wall itself. He heard the laugh again, and there was another figure, a child, a boy in a black hood with black fingers moulded to the handles of his black bicycle. He too rode through the wall, and no sooner was he gone than another appeared, pedalling out of the brickwork itself and circling Rhys; then another, and another, appearing and vanishing into darkness, forming a shoal of childish riders who giggled at their prank. Rhys turned uselessly on the spot as he tried to think of a spell…
“Atchoo!”
Suddenly one rider swerved and pedalled straight for him. Rhys turned to run, but he had nowhere to go, cut off in the circle of riders. He felt something cold and liquid slam into the small of his back and then pass through him–it passed through him and took with it all the warmth in his belly, all the solidity in his bones, knocking him to the ground. As the shadow cyclist giggled and rejoined the circling mass of riders, Rhys thought he could hear them whisper in the dark, Ride with us, ride with us, ride with us…
He crawled onto his hands and knees, gasping for air, and another cyclist pedalled out of the wall and slammed into him, knocking him back to the floor. He gave a faltering gasp of pain as his fingers, now turning blue, scrabbled at the wet stone beneath him. The little circling guide light went out.
Ride with us, ride with us, ride with us…
He saw one of the riders turn and swerve his bike to a stop down the corridor, lining up the front wheel with the end of Rhys’s nose for one last, great charge.
Something glassy rolled in Rhys’s pocket. He felt it: a small bottle containing a spray distilled from canal water and slime. He didn’t need to see the masking-tape label to know what the label said: “Peaceful”.
The shadow cyclist gave a bright “ting-a-ling” on his bell, swung upright into his saddle and charged, standing up on his pedals and leaning forward into his handlebars like a champion jockey as he sped through the darkness towards Rhys. Rhys raised himself onto one arm, pulling the bottle of Peaceful out of his pocket and thrusting it aloft in his shaking, swollen, disfigured hand.
Ride with us, ride with us, roared the bicycle swarm.
“Grow up,” grunted the druid, and as the rider burst through the circling darkness and upon him, Rhys smashed the bottle as hard as he could into the ground.