The Infernals aka Hell's Bells
Page 24
24. Not even the jobs of the really lame demons like Watchtower, the demon of people who ring the doorbell just as you’re about to serve dinner; Eugh, the demon of things found dead in soup, with additional responsibility for flies in ointment; Bob, the demon of things that float when you don’t want them to; Glug, the demon of things that sink when you don’t want them to; and Gang and Agley, the demons responsible for disrupting the best-laid plans of mice. Mice really hate them. If it wasn’t for them, mice would rule the world.
25. From this we may surmise that Old Ram was a priest or church minister of some kind. Who knows, he may even have been a pope, for there have been some very dodgy popes over the years. Alexander VI, who was one of the infamous Borgias, and was pope from 1492 to 1503, sired at least seven children and was described as being similar to a hungry wolf. Benedict IX (who reigned at various points from 1032 to 1048) was pope on three occasions, but surrendered the papacy on two of them in exchange for lots of gold before being hounded out of Rome in 1048. Finally, Stephen VI (896-897) disliked his predecessor, Formosus, so much that he had the corpse dug up and put on trial. Found guilty, Formosus had his garments removed, two fingers cut off, and was then reburied. But Stephen, who was still angry at Formosus, ordered him to be dug up again and Formosus’s body was thrown into the Tiber. Stephen probably would have sent divers to find the corpse so he could do something else to it if he hadn’t been strangled himself in 897, suggesting that Stephen wasn’t much to write home about either when it came to being a pope.
26. The ILC, or International Linear Collider, was the proposed next stage in the physicists’ attempts to understand the nature of this, and possibly other, universes. It would be a straight-line tunnel thirty-one kilometers long, and in it electrons and positrons (antimatter electrons) would be fired from opposite ends, reaching accelerations of 99.9999999998 percent of the speed of light before they collided. The collisions would be more precise than in the Large Hadron Collider, and therefore potentially more likely to provide answers to those big scientific questions: What happened in the Big Bang? How many dimensions are there in space? What is the nature and purpose of the different subatomic particles? And what does the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that gives matter mass and gravity, look like? Which was all well and good, except that the LHC had already cost $7 billion and the ILC was likely to cost nearly as much again. In scientific terms, this is a little like your parents scrimping and saving to buy you the latest computer games console only for you to tell them that there’s a new one coming out in six months’ time, but this one would just have to do until then. Ungrateful lot, scientists…
27. Translated from lies to truth, this means “No, I hardly told him anything at all, and what I did tell him was just enough to enable me to continue to pursue my ultimate goal without having him worry about what suit he might wear to the Nobel Prize ceremony, because he’s not going. I’m the only one who is going. Just me. Got a problem with that? No, I didn’t think so. It’s mine, all mine! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Laughter fades to madness. Men in white suits arrive with promises of a nice padded cell, three meals a day in pill form, and no nasty sharp edges upon which you might bang your knee and hurt yourself.
Similar translations from other areas of life of which you should be aware include: “The check is in the post.” (A check may be in the post, but it’s not your check, and it’s not going to your letter box.) “I’ll think about it.” (I don’t need to think about it, because the answer is no.) “You don’t look a day older.” (You really don’t look a day older-you look ten years older, and that’s in dim light.) “You may feel a small sting.” (Only death will hurt more, and that won’t take as long.) And the ever-popular “It’s perfectly safe. It isn’t even switched on…” usually spoken just before moments of electrocution, the loss of a limb due to incorrect use of a hedge trimmer, and people being blown up by gas ovens.
28. Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.
29. A Scottish proverb says that “Evil doers are evil dreaders.” In other words, those that do ill, or think ill of others, naturally expect others to do ill to them. Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart. Or, as the French writer Voltaire put it, “Fear follows crime, and is its punishment.”
30. Because Hell was huge, and only a fraction of it was occupied, the Great Malevolence had largely given up on trying to decorate every inch of it in a suitable manner. After all, there’s only so much time that you can spend putting up big black mountains that loom menacingly, and building great fiery pits in which demons toil, before you start to think, Well, why bother? Thus most of Hell is like the spare room in your house, the one your dad keeps promising to turn into his den but instead just fills with boxes of unread books, and old bills, and that exercise bike he bought and now claims doesn’t work properly because it’s too hard to cycle, although it’ll be fine once he gets around to fixing it, and anyway, it cost a fortune, that bike.
Dads: they’re just made that way.
31. Plays in ancient Greece always included a group of between twelve and twenty-four actors who would comment on the action onstage, and they were known as the “chorus.” If you’re bored, and fancy amusing your parents (and when I say “amuse,” I mean “annoy greatly”) you can form your own one-person Greek chorus by following your mum and dad around the house and giving them a little commentary on their comings and goings. You know: “Mum takes milk from the fridge. Mum pours milk. Mum puts milk back. Mum tells me to stop talking about her in that weird way.” Or: “Dad goes to the bathroom. Dad drops pants. Dad rustles newspaper. Dad tells me to go away or I’ll never receive pocket money again.” The long winter evenings will just fly by, I guarantee it.
32. Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) was a Russian scientist who signaled the arrival of his dogs’ food by ringing a bell or, occasionally, giving them an electric shock, which wasn’t very nice of him. He found that the dogs began producing saliva even before they tasted any food, simply because they’d heard the bell, or received a shock. This is known as “conditioning.” You have to wonder, though, if the dogs eventually got a bit tired of the shocks and the bells and the absence of food, and made their unhappiness known to Pavlov. This is known as “biting.”
33. When we see colors, what we’re really seeing is a certain frequency and wavelength of light hitting our eyes. Photons, which are units of light, have to leave an object in order for us to pick up on pink, or blue, or that strange brown color only found in damp earth and school uniforms. Black is the absence of photons, an absence that we choose to describe as a color. There is a school of philosophy known as Existentialism, which takes the view that life is all a lot of nothing, really, and as a consequence we are all in a state of great sadness. Unsurprisingly, Existentialists don’t get invited to many birthday parties.
34. In mythology the basilisk was known as the “King of Serpents” because of its crown-shaped crest. To it were variously ascribed the capacity to kill with its gaze, its breath, or the sound of its cry. It was even said that if a soldier pierced its skin with a spear, the poison in the basilisk’s blood would flow up the weapon and kill its assailant. It was rumored to be hatched by a rooster from the egg of a toad or serpent, thus providing an interesting variation on the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Actually, scientists believe that they have now proved that some form of chicken came first, as a particular protein in eggshells can only be produced inside a chicken. Mind you, it was probably a very surprised chicken that pushed out the first egg: “Cluck! Mavis, dear-cluck, cluck-you won’t believe what’s just fallen out of my bottom…”
35. Tricky business, infinity, and a lot harder to explain than one might think. One of the more interesting theoretical manifestations of infinity, and the problems and paradoxes associated with it, was proposed by David H
ilbert, and takes the form of Hilbert’s Hotel. Hilbert’s Hotel is always full, but whenever a new guest arrives the hotel can always find room for him, because it’s an infinite hotel with an infinite number of rooms. So, if a new guest arrives, he gets put in Room 1, the person in Room 1 moves to Room 2, and so on. Then an infinite coach, full of an infinite number of people, arrives, but the hotel can still fit them in. The manager moves all of the current guests into a room with a number twice as large as their current room-so Room 1 moves into Room 2, 2 to 4, 3 to 6, and so on. This means that an infinite number of odd-numbered rooms are now available for the infinite coach filled with an infinite number of guests. Unfortunately, Hilbert’s Hotel can’t exist in the real world because there are only 1080 atoms in the universe, so there isn’t enough matter to create an infinite-sized hotel. You wouldn’t want to stay in it anyway: if you ordered room service, the food would take a long time to arrive and it would always be cold, and if you forgot your key you’d have a terribly long walk back to reception.
36. And what a lovely collective noun that is, a shiver of sharks, because it’s so apt. Similarly, you have to love a smack of jellyfish, which is exactly the sound a load of jellyfish make if you drop them; a lounge of lizards-hence the name “lounge lizard” for a chap who hangs around in bars trying to look sophisticated; a parliament of owls, although this one is a little troublesome because owls actually look a lot smarter than most politicians, and therefore might find the use of “parliament” a bit offensive as a description; an unkindness of ravens, who are clever but talk about other birds behind their backs; a scold of jays, who are always complaining to ravens for being unkind; and a sleuth of bears, as bears make very good detectives due to their foraging skills. Except for the Three Bears, obviously, because they took ages to work out who had burgled their house.
37. And in case you think the idea of adding wee to beer is disgusting, there is actually a verb, to lant, which means to add wee to beer in order to flavor ale and improve its taste. And not just any old wee, but aged wee, which is known as “lant.” Oddly, in olden days lant was also used in wool processing, for cleaning floors, as a glaze on pastry (“This bun tastes a bit funny.” “Too much wee?” “No, too little! Is there a shortage? If so, I can help…”), and, oddest of all, as a means of keeping one’s breath fresh, which raises the question: how bad must people’s breath have smelled already if adding wee to it made it smell better? Frankly, you really don’t want to know.
38. For the most part, subjects just have to put up with them until someone kills the king in question. For example, the Roman emperor Caligula (AD 12-41), who is said to have tried to make his horse, Incitatus, a consul of Rome, was stabbed thirty times. Eric XIV of Sweden (1533-1577) was poisoned by pea soup laced with arsenic. Actually, madness is something of a perennial problem when it comes to royalty, as a considerable number of kings have been distinctly suspect on the sanity front. Lesser-known royal lunatics include Charles VI of France (1368-1422), also known as Charles the Mad-but not to his face-who believed himself to be made of glass and had iron rods placed in his clothing to prevent him from breaking, and once refused to bathe or change his clothes for five months. Meanwhile, Robert of Clermont (1256-1318), younger son of Louis IX of France, went mad after being hit on the head several times with a sledgehammer in the course of a joust, but then being hit on the head with a sledgehammer will do that to a person.
39. The people who say that sarcasm is low wit are usually the ones who keep getting caught out by other people being sarcastic at their expense. Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit? Oh, you don’t say…
40. Like a great many organisms straining for sophistication, the rocks had also created their own basic form of music. Please insert your own joke here.
41. Somewhere in the depths of Hell, a massive invisible floating demon named Fred had just arrived home to his invisible wife, Felicity, and invisible child, Little Fred. “Where have you been, then?” asked his invisible wife. “I don’t know what you think you are, sauntering about like you haven’t a care in Hell, leaving me all alone to keep Little Fred amused. Most of the time, it’s like you’re never here at all.” Fred, being invisible, was tempted to point out that, even when he was there, it was like he was never there at all, but he didn’t think this was the time, as, although he was invisible, and therefore should have presented a hard target for his beloved missus, she seemed to have an uncanny ability to score direct hits upon him with various household objects. Instead he put a police car and a van beside Little Fred, or where he thought Little Fred might roughly be. In the manner of kids everywhere, Little Fred immediately picked up the vehicles and banged them together, before running their wheels across the dirt while making brrrmmmm-brrrmmmm noises.
“They’re supposed to come with little men,” said Fred, “but I know he’d just lose them.”
“What about me?” asked Felicity.
“Just a kiss for you, my love,” said Fred.
He pecked lovingly at the air.
“I’m over here, you idiot…”
42. Most people will spend their lives doing jobs that they don’t particularly enjoy, and will eventually save up enough money to stop doing those jobs just in time to start dying instead. Don’t be one of those people. There’s a difference between living, and just surviving. Do something that you love, and find someone to love who loves that you love what you do.
It really is that simple.
And that hard.
John Connolly
***
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