“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.
And Mrs. Abernathy.
“Oh no,” said Samuel as Mrs. Abernathy extended her hands for the final time. Streams of blue light shot from her fingertips and erupted from the puddle, enveloping Samuel and Boswell. For a second there was only a terrible coldness, and suddenly every atom in Samuel’s body felt as though it were being torn from its neighbor, and he was falling, falling into blackness and beyond.
X
In Which Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs Make an Unpleasant Discovery
IT WAS DOZY WHO woke first. He was called Dozy because of his ability to take a nap at any time. He could nap on roller coasters, on a sinking ocean liner, or while his toes were being set on fire-all of which he had actually done. Dozy was the kind of bloke who could take a nap while he was already taking another nap.
He stretched his arms and yawned. He felt as if his body had been stretched on a rack, disassembled, and then reassembled by someone who wasn’t particularly worried about whether or not all of the bits were in the right place. Under similar circumstances, most people might have wondered why this might be, but Dozy had been drinking Spiggit’s Old Peculiar for some time, and was used to waking up feeling that way.
He looked out of the window and saw what appeared to be immense white sand dunes stretching before him. He scratched his head as he tried to remember where it was they were supposed to be going when-well, whenever it was that whatever it was happened. Had they a seaside engagement? Dozy quite liked the sea. He decided to leave everyone else sleeping and stretch his legs.
The sky above his head was filled with dark clouds tinged with red, so he figured that it was either sunrise or sunset, and it looked like there might be rain on the way. He took a deep breath, but he couldn’t smell the sea. He couldn’t hear the sea either. Dozy tried to remember if there was a desert anywhere in the vicinity of Biddlecombe, and decided that there wasn’t. There was a beach nearby, at Dunstead, but it was mainly stones and old shopping carts, and not like this at all. The sand beneath his feet was very white, and very fine. That sky was odd, though. The clouds kept changing shape and color, so that at times the sky appeared to be filled with faces tinged fireplace orange and chimney red. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have said that it was on fire. There was certainly a smell of burning in the air, and not nice burning either. It smelled as though someone had left a great many steaks on an enormous barbecue for far too long, and then allowed them to rot.
He began to climb the nearest dune in the hope of getting his bearings, whistling as he went. There were more dunes. He climbed another, then another. When he reached the top of the third dune, he stopped whistling. He stopped doing anything at all, really, except staring.
Stretched before him, all the way to the flaming horizon, were desks, and at the desks sat small red men with horns on their heads. Each of the desks had a hole on one side, through which other small red men were feeding pieces of something white that emerged from the far side of the desks as fine white sand. A third group of small red men moved back and forth between the desks, loading the sand into buckets and carrying it away, while the little seated men carefully noted the details of the operation in big books.
To his right, at a much larger desk, sat a tall man in a black cloak with scarlet lining. Unlike the little fellows below, his skin was very pale, and his horns were larger and seemed to have been polished to a bright sheen. He had a thin mustache on his upper lip, and a beard that came to a pronounced point at the end of his chin. It was the sort of beard worn by someone who is Up to No Good, and doesn’t care who knows it. It was a beard that conjured up images of Dastardly Schemes, of women being Tied to Train Tracks and orphans being Deprived of Their Inheritances. It was a beard that screamed “I’m a Wrong ’Un, and Make No Mistake About It.”
On the desk, close to where the bearded gentleman’s black, pointed boots were currently crossed, there was a sign that read: “A. Bodkin, Demon-in-Charge.”
Dozy noted that A. Bodkin, Demon-in-Charge, was reading a newspaper called The Infernal Times. 23 The headline read:
GREAT MALEVOLENCE CONSIDERING NEXT MOVE
“Victory Will Be Ours,” says Chancellor Ozymuth. “Anyone who doubts this will be dismembered.”
A smaller substory announced:
ACTION TO BE TAKEN AGAINST MRS. ABERNATHY
“Someone has to take responsibility for failure of invasion,” says Chancellor Ozymuth, “and I’ve decided it should be her.”
This Chancellor Ozymuth seems to be getting around, thought Dozy. He might not have been the brightest of dwarfs, but he was developing the uncomfortable suspicion that all was not quite right here.
“
Morning,” he said, then thought about it. “Afternoon. Er, evening?”
A. Bodkin looked to where Dozy was standing. He puffed his cheeks and blew air from his mouth in the bored, world-weary manner of middle managers everywhere whose lot in life is to be disturbed just when they’re about to reach the good bit of something, and therefore never get to experience the good bit of anything, which makes them even more bored and world-weary.
“Yes?” said A. Bodkin. “What is it?”
“Just wondering what all those blokes are doing.”
A. Bodkin lowered his newspaper.
“Blokes? Blokes? They’re not ‘blokes’: they’re highly trained demonic operatives, not just some imps-come-lately with lunch boxes and an attitude. Blokes. Tch!”
A. Bodkin returned to his newspaper, muttering about unions, and toilet breaks, and demons being lucky to have a job.
“Yes, but what are they doing?” repeated Dozy.
A. Bodkin rustled his newspaper in an I’m-very-busy-and-don’t-want-to-be-disturbed way, then, realizing that the short annoying person by his desk was not about to go away, lowered the paper again resignedly and said:
“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re grinding the bones of the dead.”
“Grinding?” said Dozy.
“Yes.”
“Bones?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Dead?”
“Yes. They’re hardly going to grind the bones of the living, are they? That would just be messy.”
“Right,” said Dozy. He put his hands in his pockets and kicked idly at the sand, then remembered that it was not sand after all and apologized to it. “It’s nice to have a trade, I suppose.”
He sucked at his lower lip and thought for a moment.
“Where is this, exactly?” he asked.
“Oh, you’re not lost, are you?” said A. Bodkin. “Not another one. I mean, how hard can it be to get this right? You’re bad, you die, you come to Hell, you get processed, we find you a job somewhere. You’d think, after all this time, the chaps in Head Office would have this down to a fine art. Tch! I mean, really. Well, you’ll just have to make your own way to Central Processing. I’m far too busy supervising to help you.”
He raised his left arm and examined an hourglass on his wrist to indicate just how busy he was. Sands poured from the upper glass into the lower one, but the level of the sands in the upper glass didn’t get any lower, and the level in the lower glass didn’t get any higher.
“Just one small thing,” said Dozy. “Tell you the truth, two small things. Smallish. Actually, not small. Bit big, to be honest.”
He laughed nervously.
“Go on, then,” said A. Bodkin. “But this had better be the end of it. You’re distracting me from my work. Production has already decreased in the time that we’ve been talking. If I don’t keep an eye on this lot, I’ll have protests, people asking for tea breaks and time off to visit their aunties or go to the dentist. Look at them: they’re already on the verge of revolt!”
Dozy looked at the lot in question. They looked about as likely to revolt as A. Bodkin was to mind a baby without stealing its pram.
“That business about being dead,” said Dozy. “What did you mean by that, exactly?”
“Oops, sorry,” said A. Bodkin, who didn’t look sorry at all. “You mean, you didn’t know. Tragic, just tragic.” He stifled a giggle. “Well, frankly, you’re dead. No longer alive. Faithfully departed. If there’s a bucket nearby, then you’ve kicked it. If you were a parrot, you’d have dropped off your perch. And the second thing?”
“Huh?” said Dozy, who was still trying to come to terms with the first thing, which he hadn’t liked the sound of at all. “Oh, you mentioned something about Hell.”
“Yes?”
“That would be-why?”
“Because that’s where you are: Hell.”
“The Hell?”
“Are you aware of any other?”
“No, but I didn’t think Hell was real.”
“Now you know better. Happy?”
“No, can’t say that I am. I don’t feel dead.”
He pinched himself. It hurt.
A. Bodkin looked at him in a curious manner.
“You know, you don’t appear dead either,” said A. Bodkin. “Most dead people tend to look slightly dead: you know, pale, missing a limb or two, bullet holes, blood, bleh.” A. Bodkin let his forked tongue loll from his mouth and made the whites of his eyes show in a reasonable impression of someone whose best days are behind him and no longer has to worry about brushing his teeth in the mornings. “But you don’t look like that at all.”
Dozy was already backing away. “Nice talking to you,” he said. “Good luck with all of the bone stuff. Be seeing you again. Byee-ee!”
He trotted back down the dune. He looked over his shoulder just once, to see A. Bodkin tugging at his beard in a thoughtful way that boded ill for someone.
Dozy started running.
XI
In Which Samuel Arrives, and Nurd Departs
SAMUEL FELT BOSWELL LICKING his face. He tried to brush the dog away, but Boswell seemed insistent that he wake up. Samuel didn’t want to. His limbs ached, and his head hurt. He wondered if he might not be coming down with something.
Then he remembered: disappearing vans; a blue light; Mrs. Abernathy’s face in a puddle…
Mrs. Abernathy.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on his side by the bank of a dark, muddy river that flowed viscously in the direction of a copse of crooked trees. Beneath his cheek was hard ground topped with sparse, blackened grass. He raised himself to his knees, and Boswell yipped with relief. Samuel gathered his dog into his arms and stroked him, all the while looking around and trying to get some sense of where he was. He had a memory of falling, and being aware that he was falling, but when he tried to stop himself he just fell faster. There had been a moment of compression and severe pain, and then nothing.
Above him were black clouds broken by veins of burning red. It was like looking into the heart of a volcano, and he experienced a sensation of dizziness as, briefly, up became down, and down became up, and he had a vision of himself kneeling at the bottom of a great sphere suspended in a furnace. He had to fight the urge to fall back and hold on to the ground. Instead he hugged Boswell tighter and said, “It’s okay, it’s all okay,” but he was trying to convince himself as much as the animal.
Mrs. Abernathy had done this, he knew, which meant that they could only be in one place: Hell. Somehow she had wrenched them from their world into hers, and that could only be for one purpose: she wanted revenge. Already, she would be looking for them.
Although he was now just thirteen, and no longer considered himself a child, Samuel wanted to cry. He wanted his mother; he wanted his friends. Back in Biddlecombe, when he had faced Mrs. Abernathy’s wrath, he had done so surrounded by familiar buildings, and with the support of those whom he loved, and who loved him in return. Here he was alone, except for Boswell, and it says much about the kind of boy Samuel was that, even in the midst of his own fear and sorrrow, he wished he had remembered to let go of Boswell’s leash before he was transported. His loyal dog had no business being here, and yet Samuel was also not a little grateful that Boswell had in fact come with him, for there was at least one other being who was on his side in this terrible place.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. Boswell was not the only one who cared about him. There was another. The question was: how could Samuel find him?
Wormwood tapped Nurd on the shoulder.
“Master, why have we stopped?”
The car, still disguised as a rock, had been making good progress across the Vale of Fruitless Journeys, as Nurd put as much distance as possible between themselves and the cave in which they had been hiding. The Vale was formed of massive slabs of brown stone on which the car left no tracks. To the west (or maybe it was to the south, such concepts as direction having little or
no meaning in a place where reality struggled to maintain a grip on itself) they ended at the Forest of Broken Forms, where those who had been vain about their looks, and dismissive of those whom they didn’t consider as pretty as themselves, were condemned to spend their lives as ugly trees. But that way was too close to the Mountain of Despair for Nurd’s liking, and so they had proceeded in another direction, or what they hoped was another direction given that Hell had a habit of confounding such expectations, so that you might head off away from Point A with the best of intentions only to find yourself rapidly back at Point A without ever having veered from a straight line. Ultimately, they wanted to reach the Honeycomb Hills, where they could hide themselves before the Watcher or, worse, its mistress, came hunting for them.
But now Nurd had brought the car to a halt and was staring into the distance in the troubled manner of someone who thinks he may have left the gas on even though he can’t remember ever owning a gas oven.
“Master?” said Wormwood, by now growing concerned.
Nurd’s brow furrowed, and a single tear rolled down one of his cheeks as he whispered softly:
“Samuel?”
Mrs. Abernathy was not the only denizen of Hell who had been changed by experiencing the world of men at first hand. Nurd, too, had been altered. To begin with, he was a little kinder to Wormwood than he had been before, and not only because Wormwood knew how to keep the car running. During the long period of his banishment, Nurd had spent a lot of time moping, complaining, and generally bemoaning his lot in life. When he wasn’t doing that, he was usually hitting Wormwood on the head for being annoying. But since his return to Hell he had started to view Wormwood as, for want of a better word, a friend. Admittedly he might have preferred a friend who wasn’t as prone to waving a finger under Nurd’s nose and inviting him to look at what had just been excavated from some orifice of his body, but beggars can’t be choosers.
The Infernals aka Hell's Bells Page 7
