Reginald Gatling’s doom found him beneath an oak tree, on the last Sunday of a fast-fading summer.
He sat breathing rapidly and with needle-stabs at each breath, propped against the oak. His legs were unfelt and unmoving like lumps of wax that had somehow been affixed to the rest of him. Resting his hands on the numb bulk of them made him want to vomit, so he clutched weakly at grass instead. The tree’s rough bark found skin through one of the tears in his bloodstained shirt. The tears were his own fault; he hadn’t started to run in time, and so the best route of escape had appeared to be through a tangle of bramble-hedge that edged the lake here in St. James’s Park. The brambles had torn his clothes.
The blood was from what had come after.
“Look at him panting,” said one of the men, scorn thick in his voice. “Tongue out like a dog.”
The best that could be said about this man at present was that he stood partly between Reggie and the glare of the sun, which was dipping slowly through the afternoon sky, cradled in a tree-fork of blue space like a burning rock pulled back in a slingshot. Hovering. Waiting. At any moment it could be released and come flying towards them, and they’d all be brightly obliterated.
Reggie coughed, trying to banish the nonsense simmering in his mind. His ribs spasmed with renewed pain.
“Now, now,” said the other man. “Let’s at least be civil.” This voice was not scornful. It was as calm and uncaring as the sky itself, and the last shreds of courage in Reggie shrivelled up to hear it.
“George,” Reggie said. An appeal.
The calm-voiced George was facing out into the park, presenting Reggie with a view of the silken back of his waistcoat and the white of his shirtsleeves: cuffs rolled up fastidiously, but still speckled with blood. He was surveying the open green space at the foot of the slight incline crowned by the oak tree. On this summer Sunday, St. James’s was busy with humanity taking their last gulps of fine weather before autumn closed over their heads. Herds of children shrieked and ran, or fell out of trees, or tossed pebbles at the indignant ducks. Groups of friends picnicked, couples strolled with aimless leisure, ladies bumped parasols as they passed one another on the paths and used the excuse to adjust the fall of their lace sleeves. Men lay dozing with boaters tipped over their faces, or nibbled on grass blades as they reclined on an elbow and turned the pages of a book.
None of these people looked back at George, or at Reggie, or at the other man; and even if they did, their gazes passed on without focus or concern. None of them had so much as glanced over when the screaming had started. Nor when it continued.
Reggie could only just glimpse the pearly whisper of uneven air that signified the curtain-spell.
George turned, stepped closer, and hunkered down, careful with his trousers, brushing a speck of dirt from the polished toe of his shoe. Reggie’s entire body, wax-legs and all, tried to flinch back from George’s smile. His nerves remembered pain and wanted to press the body itself into the rough bark, through it—to dissolve somehow.
But the tree was unyielding, and George was too.
