He took two painkillers.

It’ll go, he thought, it’s probably just the weather.

The weather was, in fact, humid and heavy; the air had the unpleasantly charged feeling that only a thunderstorm will clear.

By the time he managed to struggle through maths, geography and English, the pain at the base of his skull had set up branch offices in his temples, at the top of his head, and behind his eyeballs. He experimented with the pain, turning his head left and right, testing his fingers against each throbbing pulse, seeking remedy in pressure, position, movement.

By lunchtime he was in too much pain to consider eating, and he carried himself stiffly so as not to cause unnecessary movement in his neck and shoulders.

He had cross-country after school; his last practice before the Christmas break. He made his way to the track in a trance of habit. Boy brushed against his legs as he walked,and he leant a hand on the dog’s back to steady himself.

Peter smiled with pleasure at his arrival, and Justin nodded, causing a jolt so intense he had to grasp the wooden edge of the grandstand to keep from falling over. He concentrated on distributing the weight of his body evenly across both feet, clenching his teeth and groaning slightly with exertion.

Migraine, he thought. This must be what it’s like to have a migraine. He could smell the fetid black blood, sticky and foul, pooling in ugly wells under his skin. The light hurt his eyes. When he squeezed them shut, tears oozed from beneath his eyelids: murky, dark, corrupt. He wondered if he could find a doctor to punch holes in his skull, insert a shunt to suck out the corrupt beings breeding within (jagged black bats, winged griffins with screeching voices). They fed on his brain, thrusting greedy mouths into the sweet yellow jelly.

‘OI, CASE! ARE YOU DEAF AS WELL AS THICK?’ Coach had apparently been attempting to summon him for some time.

Justin dredged up the impulse to walk over to the track. He generally didn’t mind pain; it tended to disappear if you kept running, or at least you forgot about it amid the thousand other, more familiar pains. Perhaps this would go away too. Perhaps he could fly off the blocks, swoop through the air like a kestrel, and leave it behind. From the corner of his eye (the use of peripheral vision caused a slim stiletto of icy steel to twist behind his eyeball) he thought he saw Peter looking at him oddly.

He heard Boy howl, a horrible, long, high-pitched noise that made his teeth chatter with fear.

Then he crouched down, ducked his head, and from the explosion at the base of his skull, assumed he’d been struck by lightning. He sank to his knees under the force of it, toppled over on one side, teeth locked, limbs twitching with the effort of remaining alive. He looked down to see that his stomach had been ripped out of his abdomen by a gigantic vicious claw, which even now was squeezing the bleeding, displaced organ till the bile gushed out of his mouth.

You bastard, he thought. You bloody bastard.

Even Coach hesitated.

‘That’s one hell of a hangover you’ve got, Case. What happened, too many Babychams last night?’ He sounded uncharacteristically nervous. ‘Prince, get over there and help him up. Then fill me in on the tragic details, bring a few tears to my eyes.’

But Peter was already there.

The rest of the team looked on in shocked silence as Peter crouched next to his violently shuddering friend. Peter covered him with his jacket, wiped the vomit from his mouth, glanced up at the faces leaning in all around him, and spoke softly, with uncharacteristic force.

‘Somebody phone an ambulance.’ He spoke very clearly so there could be no mistaking his words or their meaning. ‘And tell them to hurry.’