The Gates (2009) (7 page)

“Now eat your bacon,” said Samuel’s mum. “I’ve left it under the grill for you.”

She kissed him on the head again, then went upstairs.

Samuel ate his bacon. Sometimes he just didn’t understand adults. He wondered if he ever would, or if there would come a time, after he became a grown-up himself, when it all made sense to him.

He finished his food, fed the scraps to Boswell, then washed his plate and sat down at the table again. He patted Boswell thoughtfully. There was still the not-so-small matter of the opening of the gates of Hell to be dealt with, and his mum had been no help at all with that.

“Now what are we supposed to do?” asked Samuel.

If Boswell could have shrugged, he would have.

The doorbell rang at number 666. It was Mrs. Abernathy who answered. Standing before her was the postman, holding a large parcel. He wasn’t the usual postman, who was on holiday in Spain, and he had never seen Mrs. Abernathy before, but he thought she was very good looking.

“Parcel for Mr. Abernathy,” he said.

“That would be my”—Mrs. Abernathy, unused to talking to someone who wasn’t another demon, had to think for a moment—“husband,” she finished. “He’s not here at the moment.”

“No problem. You can sign for it.”

He handed Mrs. Abernathy a pen, and a form on a clipboard. Mrs. Abernathy looked confused.

“Just sign, er, there,” said the postman, pointing to a line at the bottom of the form.

“I don’t seem to have my glasses,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “Would you mind stepping inside for a moment while I look for them?”

“It’s just a signature,” said the postman. “On a line. That line.” Once again, he pointed helpfully at the line in question.

“I don’t like signing anything that I haven’t read,” said Mrs. Abernathy.

It takes all sorts, thought the postman. “Right you are, then, ma’am. I’ll wait here while you look for your glasses.”

“Oh, please, come inside. I insist. It’s so cold out, and it may take me a moment or two to find them.” She moved farther
into the house, still holding the clipboard. The clipboard was very important to the postman. It contained details of all of the parcels and registered letters that he had delivered that day, and he wasn’t supposed to let it out of his sight. Reluctantly he followed Mrs. Abernathy into the house. He noticed that the blinds and curtains were drawn in the rooms adjoining the hall, and there was a funny smell, like rotten eggs and recently struck matches.

“Bit dark in here,” he said.

“Really?” said Mrs. Abernathy. “I happen to like it this way.”

And the postman noticed, for the first time, that there seemed to be a blue glow to Mrs. Abernathy’s eyes.

The door closed behind him.

But Mrs. Abernathy was in front of him, so who could have closed it?

He was turning to find out when a tentacle curled itself round his neck and lifted him off the floor. The postman tried to say something, but the tentacle was very tight. He had a brief glimpse of a huge mouth, and some big teeth, and then everything went dark forever.

Humans were puny, thought Mrs. Abernathy. She had been sent to find out their strengths and weaknesses, but already she could tell that the latter far outweighed the former.

On the other hand, they didn’t taste bad at all.

Mrs. Abernathy licked her lips and went into the dining room, where the curtains were drawn. Three figures sat upon chairs, doing nothing in particular apart from smelling funny. Mr. Abernathy and the Renfields were starting to turn an ugly shade of purple, like meat that was going bad, and their
fingernails had begun to drop off. That was the trouble with destroying the life force of another being, and taking on its shape. It was like opening a banana, throwing away the fruit, and then sewing up the skin in the hope that it would continue to look like a banana. It would, but only for a while, and then it would start turning black.

“I’m concerned about the boy,” said Mrs. Abernathy.

Her husband looked at her. His eyes were milky.

“Why?” he asked, his voice little more than a croak as his vocal cords began to decay. “He’s just a child.”

“He will talk.”

“Nobody will believe him.”

“Somebody might.”

“And if they do? We are more powerful than they can ever be.”

Mrs. Abernathy snorted in disgust. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” she said. “The only powerful thing about you is your smell.”

She shook her head and walked away. That was the problem with lower demons: they had no cunning, and no imagination.

Mrs. Abernathy was of the highest order of demons, only a level below the Great Malevolence himself. She had knowledge of humans, for the Great Malevolence had spoken of them to her, and with him she had watched them from afar, as if through a dark window. What he saw fed his hatred and jealousy. He rejoiced when men and women did bad things, and howled with rage when they did good. He wanted to reduce their world to rubble and scarred earth, and destroy every living thing in it that walked, crawled, swam, or flew. It was Mrs. Abernathy
who would pave the way for him. The Great Malevolence, and the humans’ machine with its beams and particles, would do the rest.

But there remained the problem of the boy. Children were dangerous, Mrs. Abernathy knew, more so than adults. They believed in things like right and wrong, good and evil. They were persistent. They interfered.

First she would find out what Samuel Johnson knew. If he had been a naughty little boy, one who had been sticking his nose in where he had no business sticking it, he would have to be dealt with.

A
FTER HIS MOTHER LEFT
to do her shopping, Samuel spent some time at the kitchen table, his chin cupped in his hands, considering his options. He knew that Mrs. Abernathy, or the entity that now occupied her body, was up to no good, but he was facing a problem encountered by young people the world over: how to convince adults that you were telling the truth about something in which they just did not want to believe.

His mother had told him not to play computer games, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use his computer at all. With Boswell at his heels, Samuel went up to his bedroom, sat at his desk, and began to search the internet. He decided to start with what he knew for certain, so he typed “gates of Hell” into the search engine.

The first reference that came up was to a huge bronze sculpture entitled
La Porte de l’Enfer,
which in English means
The Gate of Hell,
by an artist named Auguste Rodin. Apparently, Rodin was asked to create the sculpture in 1880, and promised
to deliver it by 1885. Instead Rodin had still been working on it when he died in 1917. Samuel did a small calculation and discovered that Rodin had been thirty-two years late in delivering the sculpture. He wondered if Rodin might have been related to Mr. Armitage, their local painter, who had been supposed to paint their living room and dining room over a single weekend and had in fact taken six months to do it, and even then had left one wall and part of the ceiling unfinished. Samuel’s father and Mr. Armitage had had a big argument about it when they met in the street. “It’s not the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Mr. Armitage had said. “I’ll get round to it when I can. You’ll want me flat on my back painting angels next.”
¹⁶

Samuel’s father had suggested that if Mr. Armitage
had
been asked to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he would have taken twenty years instead of four, and still would have left God without a beard. At that point, Mr. Armitage had said a rude word and walked away, and Samuel’s father had ended up finishing the ceiling and wall himself.

Badly.

Anyway, while Rodin’s gates looked very impressive, they didn’t seem to have a blue light around them, and Samuel read that they had been inspired by a writer named Dante, and his book
The Divine Comedy.
Samuel suspected that neither Dante nor Rodin had ever really seen the gates of Hell, and had just taken a guess.
¹⁷

After that, Samuel found some dodgy heavy-metal groups who either had songs named after the gates of Hell, or simply liked putting images of demons on their album covers in order to make themselves seem more terrifying than they really were, since most of them were just hairy chaps from nice families who had spent too much time alone in their bedrooms as teenagers. Samuel did discover that the Romans and Greeks believed the gates were guarded by a three-headed dog called
Cerberus, who made sure that nobody who entered could ever leave, but they also believed a boatman took dead people across the River Styx, and Samuel had seen no sign of a river in the Abernathys’ basement.

He tried “doors of Hell,” but didn’t have any more luck. Finally, he just typed in “Hell,” and came up with lots of stuff. Some religions thought that Hell was hot and fiery, and others thought it was cold and gloomy. Samuel didn’t think any of them could know for certain, since by the time someone found out the truth he would be dead and the information would probably be too late to be useful. What he did find interesting was that most of the world’s religions believed in Hell, even if they didn’t always call it that, and lots of them had names for whatever they felt ruled over it: Satan, Yanluo Wang, Yamaraj. The one thing on which everyone seemed to agree was that Hell wasn’t a very pleasant place, and was not somewhere that you wanted to end up.

After an hour, Samuel stopped searching. He was frustrated. He wanted answers. He wanted to know what to do next.

He wanted to stop Mrs. Abernathy before she opened the gates.

Samuel’s mother was trying to work out if two small cans of baked beans were better value than one big can when a figure appeared beside her. It was Mrs. Abernathy.

“Hello, Mrs. Johnson,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “How lovely to see you.”

Mrs. Johnson didn’t know why exactly it was lovely for Mrs. Abernathy to see her. She and Mrs. Abernathy barely
knew each other, and had never exchanged more than a polite hello in the past.
¹⁸

“Well, it’s lovely to see you too,” Mrs. Johnson lied. Something about Mrs. Abernathy was making her uneasy. In fact, now that she thought about it, there were lots of things not quite right about the woman standing next to her. She was wearing a lovely black velvet overcoat, which was far too nice to wear for shopping, unless you were shopping for an even lovelier black overcoat and wanted to impress the salesperson. Her skin, although very pale, paler than Mrs. Johnson remembered from their previous brief meetings, had a bluish tinge to it, and the veins beneath her skin were more obvious than before. Her eyes too were very blue. They seemed to burn with a faint flame, like a gas fire. Mrs. Abernathy was wearing lots of strong perfume, but she still smelled a little funny, and not in a ho-ho way.

As Mrs. Johnson looked at Mrs. Abernathy, and inhaled her perfume, she felt herself becoming sleepy. Those eyes drew her in, and the fire within them grew more intense.

“How is your delightful son?” Mrs. Abernathy asked. “Samuel, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, who couldn’t remember anyone calling Samuel “delightful” before. “Samuel.”

“I was wondering if he ever mentioned me to you?”

Mrs. Johnson heard the words emerge from her mouth before she was even aware that she was thinking them.

“Why, yes,” she said. “He was talking about you only this morning.”

Mrs. Abernathy smiled, but the smile died somewhere around her nostrils.

“And what did he say?”

“He seemed to think …”

“Yes?”

“… that you were trying …”

“Go on.”

“… to open …”

By now, Mrs. Abernathy was leaning in very close to Mrs. Johnson. Mrs. Abernathy’s breath stank, and her teeth were yellow. Her lipstick was bright red, and slightly smeared. In fact, thought Mrs. Johnson, it looked a little like blood. Mrs. Abernathy’s tongue flicked out, and for just a moment, Mrs. Johnson could have sworn that it was forked, like a snake’s tongue.

“ … gates …”

“What gates?” said Mrs. Abernathy.
“What
gates?” Her hand reached for Mrs. Johnson, gripping her shoulder. Her nails dug into Mrs. Johnson’s arm, causing her to wince.

The pain was enough to bring Mrs. Johnson out of her daze. She took a step back, and blinked. When she opened her eyes, Mrs. Abernathy was standing farther away from her, a strange, troubled look on her face.

Try as she might, Mrs. Johnson couldn’t remember what it was they had been talking about. Something about Samuel, she thought, but what?

“Are you all right, Mrs. Johnson?” asked Mrs. Abernathy. “You look a little unwell.”

“No, I’m fine,” said Mrs. Johnson, although she didn’t feel fine. She could still smell Mrs. Abernathy’s perfume and, worse, whatever it was the perfume was being used to disguise. She wanted Mrs. Abernathy to go away. In fact, she felt that it was very important for her to stay as far from Mrs. Abernathy as possible.

“Well, take care,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “It was nice talking to you. We should do it more often.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, meaning, “No.”

No, no, no, no, no.

When she arrived home Samuel was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing on a sheet of paper, using crayons. He hid it away when she entered, but she glimpsed a blue circle. Samuel looked at her with concern.

“Are you okay, Mum?”

“Yes, dear. Why?”

“You look sick.”

Mrs. Johnson glanced in the mirror by the sink.

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.” She turned to Samuel. “I met—,” she began to say, then stopped. She couldn’t remember who she had met. A woman? Yes, a woman, but the name wouldn’t come to her. Then she wasn’t certain that it had been a woman at all, and seconds later she wasn’t sure she’d met
anyone.
It was as though her brain were a big house, and someone was turning off the lights in every room, one by one.

“Met who, Mum?” asked Samuel.

“I … don’t know,” said Mrs. Johnson. “I think I’m going to lie down for a while.”