The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale (15 page)

Hang on: weren’t there
three
billy goats in the window just a
moment ago? And why is that troll licking its lips? It’s very lifelike. Perhaps a bit too lifelike . . .

Meanwhile, what looked like hundreds of elves danced and sang as they labored happily in Santa’s workshop, although what they appeared to be producing were just more versions of themselves as more elves poured off the production line. Children pressed their noses against the windows, mouths agape. Even their parents were amazed. It was the greatest Christmas display anyone had ever seen. A bit graphic, admittedly, but very impressive.

The main doors of the store opened, and Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley appeared. Behind him, Wreckit & Sons remained dark. Clearly another surprise was planned, and people remarked aloud that if the windows were that good, imagine what the inside must be like!

“Welcome!” said Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley. “Welcome, all!”

His voice boomed, even though there was no microphone visible. A hush descended on the crowd.

“On behalf of Mr. Grimly, I’d like to say how greatly pleased we are that you could join us on this very special evening. I can assure you it is one that will not easily be forgotten.”

A round of applause came from the crowd, although they weren’t entirely sure what they were applauding. Most of them were hoping for some free stuff, just for entering into the spirit of the thing.

“I’m especially pleased to welcome our guest of honor for the evening: Mr. Samuel Johnson and, of course, his dog, Boswell.”

There was another smattering of applause, but not much.

“Why him?” someone asked. “What’s he ever done?”

“Well, there was all that invasion-from-Hell business.”

“Oh, but that was ages ago. What’s he done since then, eh? I mean, yes, he saved the world and all that, but he can’t expect us to go around bowing and scraping to him for the rest of our days just because of some demons. Anyway, I heard that they weren’t real. It was all made up to promote a film, or a television show, or something.”

Samuel stepped forward, Lucy Highmore on his left arm, and Boswell’s leash held tightly in his right hand. A photographer from the local paper popped up and took a couple of pictures, although Samuel noticed that he was pointing his lens at Lucy alone, and the only part of Samuel likely to end up in any photos was his left ear.

Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley placed a hand on Samuel’s shoulder. It felt both hard and strangely light.

“So good of you to come,” said Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley. “So very good.”

He looked around, as though expecting someone else to appear.

“And your, um, friends?” he inquired.

“What friends?” asked Samuel.

“Mr. Cushing, and Mr. Lee. Won’t they be joining us?”

“I don’t know who you mean,” lied Samuel.

Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley seemed about to differ, then changed his mind.

“Not to worry,” he said. “Perhaps they’re just a little delayed. They’ll join us in time: I’m certain of it.”

He cleared his throat, and raised his hands to silence the crowd, which was getting restless.

“We have two other gentlemen whom we would like to honor this evening. They are the sleepless guardians of the law, the men who keep us all safe at night. May I please ask Sergeant Rowan and Constable Peel to step forward?”

Sergeant Rowan and Constable Peel looked shocked to be singled out in this way. They were simply supposed to be on crowd duty, and nobody had suggested that they would be honored with anything other than overtime. Now their names were being called out, and the same voice that, moments earlier, had been complaining about Samuel was asking why they were so special, and commenting how, at the rate things were going, everybody in town would be special except him, and what kind of world were we living in, exactly?

The two policemen came and stood awkwardly beside Samuel and Lucy and Boswell. There was a third, generally polite burst of applause, as everybody liked to stay on the right side of the police.

“If all four of you—and, of course, the delightful Boswell—would come into the store for a moment, we have a small presentation we’d like to make,” said Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley.

“And when we’re done,” he continued, addressing the crowd once more, “the main festivities will begin, and you’ll all get what’s coming to you.”

Which was an odd way to put it, thought Sergeant Rowan as he and the others moved toward the darkened interior of the store. He glanced again at the window displays and noted that,
close up, the polar bears looked less like bears than some kind of abominable snowmen; and the reindeer had very vicious horns and spiked hooves; and the workshop elves had a mean, spiteful appearance about them; and those machines were producing an awful lot of them, so many, in fact, that pretty soon the window areas wouldn’t be big enough to hold them all. They were already piling up, except that they weren’t piling up so much as lining up. But the workshop machines were just tossing them on the floor of the store, and there was nobody around to set them on their feet, so how exactly were they ending up in neat rows before the windows?

And why would somebody design Christmas elves with such sharp teeth?

But by then the four humans, along with one small dog, had crossed over the threshold of Wreckit & Sons. As soon as they were inside, Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley vanished, and the darkness of the store closed so tightly around them that they could not see their own hands in front of their faces, and they were only vaguely aware of the sounds from outside of glass breaking and people screaming.

“Sarge?” said Constable Peel to the blackness.

“Yes, Constable.”

“Maybe we should have told the man that we didn’t want to be special after all.”

“It’s a little late for that, Constable, don’t you think?”

But Constable Peel didn’t get to reply, because the darkness swallowed his words, and then his breath.

And, finally, it swallowed him.

In Which History Comes Alive

N
URD WAS LYING ON
the top bunk, staring at the ceiling. Mrs. Johnson had gone out to bingo again. Nurd suspected that Mrs. Johnson was a bingo addict. Whenever anyone mentioned a number in conversation, Mrs. Johnson would instinctively try to cross it out.

Nurd was sulking, although it was hard to tell because Nurd’s face naturally formed a kind of sulk, even when he was happy.

“I spy with my little eye—” said the voice of Wormwood from the lower bunk.

“I’m not playing anymore,” said Nurd.

“Come on. It’s fun.”

“No, it’s not. I-Spy is only ever fun for the person doing the spying. I hate I-Spy. Anyway, you’re on the bottom bunk staring up at the top bunk. So far you’ve spied a mattress, some wood, and a sheet. You’re unlikely to spot a camel, are you, or a spaceship? There’s a limit to how interesting it can be.”

“I’ll look somewhere else, then.”

“No.”

“Please, just one more? Oooh! Oooh! I’ve just spotted something. It’s great. Seriously. Please? Oh, please?”

Nurd sulked even more. While he really did understand the reason why Samuel hadn’t wanted him to go along to the grand reopening of Wreckit’s store, he remained hurt. Once again, Nurd recalled that he had once been a demon with high hopes. He’d even had ambitions to take over the Earth. They hadn’t worked out very well because Nurd was useless at being properly demonic, and a squirrel with a nut allergy had a better chance of ruling the world, but at least it had been something to aim for.

Now here he was, sharing a small room with Wormwood, and Wormwood wasn’t meant for small rooms. Wormwood could have made a cathedral smell a bit funny. Nurd had grown fond of Wormwood in the way a dog might grow fond of a particularly friendly flea, but he really did wish that they could see a little less of each other.

A lot less of each other.

“Go on, then,” said Nurd. “But this is absolutely, positively the last time, and I’m only taking three guesses.”

“Understood,” said Wormwood. “You’re the best demonic master I’ve ever had!”

“I’m the only demonic master you’ve ever had.”

“You have a point,” admitted Wormwood. “Now, I spy with my little eye something beginning with
e
.”

Nurd thought about it. He was very competitive and he didn’t like to lose, not even at I-Spy. He had managed to guess mattress, wood, and sheet easily enough. He wasn’t about to be beaten on the final try by Wormwood.

“Eiderdown,” he said.

“Wrong!”

Nurd scratched his ear. It helped him to think. He poked at his ear hole, and kept poking until the tip of his finger came out of the other ear. Nurd wasn’t sure why it sometimes did that. Wormwood had once suggested a possible answer. Nurd had kicked him in the bum for his trouble, but not before putting on his pointiest boots.

“Electric blanket,” said Nurd.

“Wrong again!”

He heard Wormwood sniggering, and wondered where he might have left those pointy boots.

Nurd looked around the room, trying to see it from Wormwood’s angle. Electricity? No, that couldn’t be it. Samuel’s exercise log? Possibly, although it was a bit of a stretch.

Ah, he had it! On the floor by Samuel’s bed was a small, stuffed elephant. It had once been Samuel’s favorite stuffed toy, but was now beloved of Boswell, who liked to sleep with it for company.

Nurd made a trumpeting sound, and prepared for his final triumph.

“It is,” he said grandly, “an elephant.”

“WRONG!” howled Wormwood. “Wrongedy wrong wrong, Mr. Wrongly Wrongington!”

“It has to be an elephant,” said Nurd. “I’ve looked. There’s nothing else around here beginning with the letter
e
.”

“Ring-ring,” said Wormwood. “Call for you. It has to be for you, because it’s a WRONG number.”

“I’m warning you,” said Nurd, who now remembered where he had left those boots.

“You don’t have a right hand,” continued Wormwood. “You just have a left hand and a WRONG hand.”

“I shall inflict grave pain upon you with a pointy boot,” Nurd warned. “I shall take a very long run-up to do it. It will be such a long run-up that you will have grown old by the time my boot finally reaches you, and I shall kick you so hard that, when you open your mouth, the tip of my boot will be visible at the back of your throat.”

“You lost, you lost . . .”

“Tell me what it was.”

“Don’t have to if I don’t want to.”

“TELL ME!!!!!”

Flames shot out of Nurd’s mouth and ears. His cloak billowed like the wings of a bat. His eyes turned red, and his eyebrows caught fire.

“
It was an elf
,” said Wormwood in a tiny voice.

“Excuse me?” said Nurd as he regained control of himself.

“
An elf
,” said Wormwood, a little louder. “I spied an elf.”

Nurd rubbed his finger along his forehead. He could just about feel where his eyebrows used to be.

“Elves don’t exist,” he said. “Dwarfs exist, not elves. You can’t have seen an elf.”

“I did,” said Wormwood. “And I still spy an elf. It’s outside the bedroom window.”

Despite himself, Nurd leaned over the edge of his bed to take a look. Wormwood was right. Standing on the windowsill, wearing a jaunty green hat and a suit of red felt, was an elf. It had unusually sharp teeth, and red dots gave a kind of life to its cheeks. It had very dark eyes. They should have done something about the eyes, thought Nurd. Nobody likes an elf with scary eyes.

“How did that get there?” said Nurd.

“Maybe it climbed up,” said Wormwood.

“It’s a Christmas elf,” said Nurd. “It’s made of wood. You might as well expect a clothes peg to climb up.”

Wormwood left his bunk bed and padded to the window. He peered at the elf. The elf peered back.

“It’s very lifelike,” he said.

“It’s. An. Elf,” said Nurd. “It can’t be lifelike. There’s nothing life to be like.”

Wormwood began to open the window.

“What are you doing?” said Nurd.

“I want to take a closer look at it.”

Nurd suddenly had the sense that this might not be a good idea. He couldn’t have said why except that they were on the second floor of a house and somehow there was an elf on their windowsill, which meant that either the elf had, as Wormwood suggested, managed to climb up, or, as seemed more likely, someone or something had put it there from above. Whatever the case, opening the window didn’t strike Nurd as the wisest of moves.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, “not until—” But the rest of the sentence was drowned out by the creak of the window being opened. There was a blast of cold air. In the distance, Nurd could hear sirens and—

Were those screams?

• • •

At the Biddlecombe Visitor Centre and Battlefield Museum, the caretaker, Mr. Karloff, was closing up for the evening. He wanted to get down to Wreckit’s for the grand unveiling of the new store because very little that was exciting ever happened in Biddlecombe, or very little that didn’t involve people claiming to have seen demons, or the dead coming to life. Mr. Karloff wasn’t sure that he believed all of that nonsense. During the supposed invasion of Biddlecombe by the forces of Hell, Mr. Karloff had been visiting his sister Elsa in Skegness, and had missed the whole affair. Despite the fact that some very trustworthy people claimed it was all true, honest to goodness, would I lie to you, Mr. Karloff regarded it as evidence of some form of mass hysteria.

It had not been a busy day at the visitor center, but then it was rarely a busy day there. For some reason, tourists didn’t want to come to Biddlecombe to stare at a damp field in which, long ago, two small armies led by very cautious men had eventually got around to fighting each other by mistake. The sign above the museum’s door read
WE BRING HISTORY TO LIFE!
, which was not true in any way, shape, or form. There were stones with more life than the Biddlecombe Battlefield Museum.

Mr. Karloff had tried to make the experience more interesting
by creating a reconstruction of the battle using small plastic soldiers which he had carefully painted with his own hands. There weren’t enough Vikings and Saxons to make it look impressive, so he had bulked up the numbers with whatever he had lying around at home. If someone closely examined Mr. Karloff’s version of the Battle of Biddlecombe, they might have spotted some confused-looking German soldiers painted like Vikings, along with half a dozen cowboys and a couple of Indians who had been drafted into the Saxon ranks. The rest of the museum was filled out with some spearheads, broken axes, and the odd bone that had been found poking out of the field after spells of heavy rain.