The Infernals (9 page)

The other scientists glared at him, because that’s just the kind of thing that people say before the roof collapses, the floor cracks, and everything goes to Hell in a handcart, in this case potentially quite literally, assuming someone had remembered to bring along a handcart, but Professor Stefan didn’t notice. Neither did he pay any attention to the fact that Professor Hilbert had sidled away, and had disappeared into a small room marked “Broom Closet—Janitor’s Use Only.”

“See,” said Professor Stefan, who just didn’t know when
to stop tempting fate, “I told you there was nothing to worry about.”

The broom closet that Professor Hilbert had entered was no longer really for brooms. Instead, an array of monitoring equipment had been set up, and two technicians were staring intently at a pair of screens. Between the screens was a speaker, currently silent.

“And?” said Professor Hilbert.

“It all seems to be working as it should,” said the first technician, whose name was Ed. He was staring at an image that resembled a spider encased in a wire tube dotted with bits of brick.

“I agree,” said his companion, Victor. Behind them was an unfinished game of Battleship, which Professor Hilbert pretended not to notice. “There is a marginal energy loss, but that could be a joint again. Anyway, it will be contained within the vacuum.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but it must be. I mean, where else could it go? We’ve examined every inch of the Collider. Its integrity is now beyond doubt.”

“Really?” said Professor Hilbert. “I seem to remember that’s what was said last time.”

“Well, we were wrong then,” said Ed, with the certainty of someone who is convinced he knows where his opponent is hiding a submarine and an aircraft carrier, if only he might be allowed to return to the game. “But we’re right now.”

He smiled amiably. Professor Hilbert did not smile back.

“Keep an eye on it,” said Professor Hilbert as he made for the door. “And if I catch you playing Battleship again, you’ll wish you really were on a sinking aircraft carrier …”

Mrs. Abernathy slumped to her knees. The beams of blue light withdrew into her body, but her eyes retained a blue glow. It had been there ever since the collapse of the portal, but now it was more intense. She trembled for a moment, then was still. Slowly, a smile spread across her face.

The Watcher had not moved. At last it understood. Yes, Mrs. Abernathy had been changed by her time in the world of men, and she had brought back aspects of it with her to Hell: curtains, and vases, and doormats; print dresses, and blond hair, and painted nails.

But it was also she who had first recognized the importance of the Collider experiment. The primal forces involved in the creation of the universe were also present in the most ancient of demons. The re-creation of those forces on Earth had formed a connection between universes that she and the Great Malevolence could exploit. The collapse of the portal, and the consequent failure of their invasion, seemed to have severed that connection forever, but now that appeared not to be so. The connection between worlds remained, but only through her. She had been the first one through the portal, and had held it open initially through sheer force of will. Some small part of the Collider’s energy was still being accessed by her. She had to draw upon it slowly and carefully so as not to alert those responsible for the Collider, for she did not want them to shut it down.
It would not be enough to stage another invasion, but in time it might be. It was not even enough to enable her to cross over from her world to theirs, for a powerful old demon like herself would require enormous energy to move between universes. But it would be sufficient to pull a human being from their world into hers, and she knew just the human being she wanted. She would drag Samuel Johnson to Hell and present him to her master as a prize. Then she would reveal the secret of the blue light to him and he would love her again.

As she rose to her feet, the Watcher began to speak. It told her of strange tracks in the dirt, of a black substance on rocks, of the smell of fumes and burning in the air. When it was finished she touched its head with her hand, and it bowed low with gratitude.

“All good things come to those who wait,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “All good things…”

She began to laugh, a terrible sound. It echoed around the chamber, carried across the plains, and was heard by the demons who had abandoned her. Some fled, fearing her vengeance for their betrayal, but others prepared to return to her, for if Mrs. Abernathy was laughing then circumstances had changed, and they might yet profit from it. Foul beings emerged from holes in the ground and caves in black mountains, from pits of ash and pools of fire. They crawled, wobbled, and slimed their way from their hiding places, and slowly began to make their way back to her.

The most diabolical creatures of that realm, the Infernals, were answering her call.

M
R.
M
ERRYWEATHER’S ELVES WERE
making good time on the motorway. There had been some initial problems with driving the van, since the only one of them who had a license was Jolly, and his legs were even shorter than those of his fellow dwarfs and therefore had no chance at all of reaching the brake or the accelerator. This problem was solved by gluing a bottle of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar to each of the van’s pedals with extra-strong adhesive, so Jolly simply had to step on a bottle cap to speed up or slow down.

The dwarfs had been feeling somewhat glum since Mr. Merryweather had stomped off down the road, muttering and waving his fists, and vowing never again to work with anyone who couldn’t look him in the eye without standing on a chair. Say what you wanted to about Mr. Merryweather—and the dwarfs had said virtually everything about him that they could, including
a number of insults that would be unprintable in a guide to swearing for sweary sailors—he had at least found them work, and he had stood by them following various incidents of assault, arson, and on one occasion, conspiracy to overthrow an elected government. Without him they were going to struggle to find jobs, and avoid arrest.

Mumbles and Dozy stared mournfully into their glasses of Spiggit’s. Even though the van’s suspension was suspect and made drinking from a glass difficult, it was generally considered unwise to drink Spiggit’s directly from the bottle.
21
In the first place, it was uncivilized, as ale always tasted better from a glass. In the second place, Spiggit’s tended to have an odd, cloudy residue that lurked at the bottom of every bottle, rather like one of those strange creatures that live in deep trenches on the seabed, waiting to snap at the unwary. Jolly had once drunk some of that residue as an experiment.
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The immediate effect was to cause him to seek the comfort of a toilet for so long that it was suggested he might like to take out a mortgage on it. Three months later, as he told anyone who would listen, his insides still weren’t right, for somewhere in his digestive organs Spiggit’s Old Peculiar continued to ferment away merrily, as the beer had the kind of long life more usually associated
with lethal radiation. He was still prone to attacks of temporary blindness, an occasional inability to remember his own name, and explosive burping, which had led to one of the incidents of alleged arson after he belched a little too close to a naked flame.

So Mumbles, Angry, and Dozy held on tightly to their glasses of ale (particularly since Spiggit’s, if spilled on skin or clothing and allowed to remain there for more than five seconds, tended to burn) and wondered how they were going to be able to afford to eat, or drink, without Mr. Merryweather to help them. There was a certain urgency to this, as they had only twelve cases of Spiggit’s left in the back of the van, along with two boxes of potato chips and a couple of sandwiches that appeared to be on the turn. It had been suggested that they dump the two boxes of chips in order to make room for more beer, but wiser counsel had prevailed, and they had dumped just one of the boxes of chips, and kept the sandwiches.

“That’s the end of us,” said Angry. “I’ll have to go back to my old job.”

“What was that?” said Dozy.

“Not having a job.”

“Take up much time, did it?”

“All day. I had weekends off, though.”

“Well, you would. You’d exhaust yourself otherwise.”

“What about you?”

Dozy shuddered. “Doesn’t bear thinking about. Children’s television.”

“No!”

“Yes. Remember that show
Beefy and the Noodles
?”

“The one set in the bowl of soup?”

“That’s the one. I was Percy Pea.”

“Don’t remember you saying much.”

“I was a pea. Peas are among your quieter vegetables on account of there not being much air in those pods. You can’t get a carrot to shut up, and don’t get me started on broccoli. I hated being a pea. And the suit smelled funny. The previous Percy Pea died in it.”

“Really?”

“Contracted something from the soup. We spent hours in that soup. It was horrible. Anyway, he caught a disease from the soup, and he died, but they didn’t find out until after the weekend. They thought the suit was empty, so they just pushed him back into his pod and left him there. That suit never smelled the same after.”

“It wouldn’t, would it?” said Angry. “You can’t leave a dead person in a pea suit for a weekend and not expect it to smell a bit. Stands to reason. A day, maybe: you can get rid of a day’s dead smell, but not a weekend’s. What about you, Mumbles, what did you do?”

“Vovos,” said Mumbles.

“Oh,” said Angry.

“Missed that,” said Dozy.

“He says he did voice-overs,” said Angry, who tried to hide his confusion by looking more confused. “You know, for commercials, and movie trailers, and the like.”

There was a pause while the dwarfs took this in.

“Nice work if you can get it,” said Dozy, eventually.

“Have to have a talent for it,” said Angry, who had developed an extra wrinkle in his forehead as he tried to figure out the precise trajectory of Mumbles’s career path.

“Anglebog,” agreed Mumbles.

“Indeed,” replied Angry, neutrally. “Good pronunciation would be the key.”

“What about you, Jolly?” said Dozy. “What will you do?”

“Do?” said Jolly. “Do? Listen to you lot. We’re not finished yet. We’ve been through worse times than this. We’ve been arrested, deported, and almost sold into slavery. You have to be optimistic. I guarantee that opportunity lies around the next bend.”

He was so convincing that they raised their glasses and cheered.

Opportunity did not, in fact, lie around the next bend. What did was an unmarked police car, in which Constable Peel and Sergeant Rowan of the Biddlecombe constabulary were checking the speeds of cars and drinking tea from a thermos.

“Lovely tea, this,” said Sergeant Rowan. “How do you get it to taste like that?”

“Honey,” said Constable Peel.

“Fantastic. Never would have thought of it.”

“Honey,” Constable Peel continued, “and … elves. With beer.”

Sergeant Rowan sniffed his tea. “No, I don’t get any hint of elves or beer. Honey, yes, but not little people.”

“That’s not what I meant, Sarge. There are elves in that van. And they’re drinking beer.”

Sergeant Rowan squinted at the side of the van as it passed, and saw glasses of beer being raised in little hands. “Mr. Merryweather’s Elves,” he read aloud. He thought for a moment. No, it couldn’t be. Not that bunch. Completely different. Admittedly, it did look like the same van. It even looked like the same—

Dwarfs.

“Constable, stop that van!”

Dozy shifted on his seat. “Can we stop somewhere? I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Yeah, and I wouldn’t mind some food,” said Angry. “I’m famished.”

“There’s no service station around here, lads,” said Jolly. “Still, that’s the exit for Biddlecombe. We can find somewhere there.”

He pulled off the motorway, not noticing the police car that was in pursuit, and quickly found himself on Shirley Jackson Road, which led to the center of Biddlecombe. As he drove along he passed an ice-cream van, and a small boy with a dachshund on the end of a leash. Jolly liked small dogs. Being the height that he was, he had to be careful around big ones.

Now there were blue lights in his rearview mirror, and in his wing mirror. Funny, there seemed to be blue light everywhere. That was—

“Missed!” shouted Mrs. Abernathy. “I missed him.”

She was staring intently at the shard of glass in which she had been monitoring the progress of Samuel Johnson and his little
mutt. She had focused all of her energy upon it, intent upon bringing him to her, and instead a vehicle of some kind had got in her way. She concentrated again, feeling already that some of her power had ebbed.

“Careful,” she whispered to herself. “Careful …”

She raised her hands as if the boy were already before her and she was about to clutch his throat, and twin bursts of blue light streaked from her fingers and through the glass. She was aware of an impact of some kind in the world of men, the force of which made her blink hard. When she opened her eyes Samuel Johnson was still in Biddlecombe, except now he had stopped walking and was looking around in bewilderment.

Samuel was puzzled. He could have sworn that, just moments before, a van carrying little men had been about to pass him, but it now seemed to have disappeared. Then a police car had approached him, and that had vanished too. And hadn’t there been an ice-cream van nearby? He’s been considering buying a cone for himself, even if the weather was still a bit cold. Perhaps he was working too hard, or he needed to get his glasses changed.

There was something spinning on the road before him. As he drew closer, it grew still. It was a bottle of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar. A faint blue light danced around the cap, causing it to burst and spray beer all over the road. There was more blue light on the fender of the car beside him, and on the garden gate to his left, and in a puddle of oil on the ground, a puddle in which he could see himself reflected, and Boswell.