Perhaps we will set fire to the sky, he thought. And he left that place, almost imperceptibly.
It was nearly time.
The delivery man had left his van on the grass verge by the dual carriageway. He walked around to the driver’s side (carefully, because other cars and lorries were still rocketing around the bend), reached in through the open window, and took the schedule from the dashboard.
Only one more delivery to make, then.
He read the instructions on the delivery voucher carefully.
He read them again, paying particular attention to the address, and the message. The address was one word: Everywhere.
Then, with his leaking pen, he wrote a brief note to Maud, his wife. It read simply, I love you.
Then he put the schedule back on the dashboard, looked left, looked right, looked left again and began to walk purposefully across the road. He was halfway across when a German juggernaut came around the corner, its driver crazed on caffeine, little white pills, and EEC transport regulations.
He watched its receding bulk.
Cor, he thought, that one nearly had me.
Then he looked down at the gutter.
Oh, he thought.
YES, agreed a voice from behind his left shoulder, or at least from behind the memory of his left shoulder.
The delivery man turned, and looked, and saw. At first he couldn’t find the words, couldn’t find anything, and then the habits of a working lifetime took over and he said, “Message for you, sir.”
FOR ME?
“Yes, sir.” He wished he still had a throat. He could have swallowed, if he still had a throat. “No package, I’m afraid, Mister … uh, sir. It’s a message.”
DELIVER IT, THEN.
“It’s this, sir. Ahem. Come and See.”
FINALLY. There was a grin on its face, but then, given the face, there couldn’t have been anything else.
THANK YOU, it continued. I MUST COMMEND YOUR DEVOTION TO DUTY.
“Sir?” The late delivery man was falling through a gray mist, and all he could see were two spots of blue, that might have been eyes, and might have been distant stars.
DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.
The delivery man had a brief moment to wonder whether his new companion was making a joke, and to decide that he wasn’t; and then there was nothing.
Red sky in the morning. It was going to rain.
Yes.
WITCHFINDER SERGEANT Shadwell stood back with his head on one side. “Right, then,” he said. “Ye’re all ready. Hae ye got it all?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pendulum o’ discovery?”
“Pendulum of discovery, yes.”
“Thumbscrew?”
Newt swallowed, and patted a pocket.
“Thumbscrew,” he said.
“Firelighters?”
“I really think, Sergeant, that—”
“Firelighters?”
“Firelighters,”28 said Newt sadly. “And matches.”
“Bell, book, and candle?”
Newt patted another pocket. It contained a paper bag inside which was a small bell, of the sort that maddens budgerigars, a pink candle of the birthday cake persuasion, and a tiny book called Prayers for Little Hands. Shadwell had impressed upon him that, although witches were the primary target, a good Witchfinder should never pass up the chance to do a quick exorcism, and should have his field kit with him at all times.
“Bell, book, and candle,” said Newt.
“Pin?”
“Pin.”
“Good lad. Never forget yer pin. It’s the bayonet in yer artillery o’ light.”
Shadwell stood back. Newt noticed with amazement that the old man’s eyes had misted over.
“I wish I was goin’ with ye,” he said. “O’ course, this won’t be anything, but it’d be good to get out and about again. It’s a tryin’ life, ye ken, all this lyin’ in the wet bracken spying on their devilish dancin’. It gets into yer bones somethin’ cruel.”
He straightened up, and saluted.
“Off ye go, then, Private Pulsifer. May the armies o’ glorification march wi’ ye.”
After Newt had driven off Shadwell thought of something, something that he’d never had the chance to do before. What he needed now was a pin. Not a military issue pin, witches, for the use of. Just an ordinary pin, such as you might stick in a map.
The map was on the wall. It was old. It didn’t show Milton Keynes. It didn’t show Harlow. It barely showed Manchester and Birmingham. It had been the army’s HQ map for three hundred years. There were a few pins in it still, mainly in Yorkshire and Lancashire and a few in Essex, but they were almost rusted through. Elsewhere, mere brown stubs indicated the distant mission of a long-ago witchfinder.
Shadwell finally found a pin among the debris in an ashtray. He breathed on it, polished it to a shine, squinted at the map until he located Tadfield, and triumphantly rammed the pin home.
It gleamed.
Shadwell took a step backward, and saluted again. There were tears in his eyes.
Then he did a smart about turn and saluted the display cabinet. It was old and battered and the glass was broken but in a way it was the WA. It contained the Regimental silver (the Interbattalion Golf Trophy, not competed for, alas, in seventy years); it contained the patent muzzle-loading Thundergun of Witchfinder-Colonel Ye-Shall-Not-Eat-Any-Living-Thing-With-The-Blood-Neither-Shall-Ye-Use-Enchantment-Nor-Observe-Times Dalrymple; it contained a display of what were apparently walnuts but were in reality a collection of shrunken headhunter heads donated by Witchfinder CSM Horace “Get them afore they Get You” Narker, who’d traveled widely in foreign parts; it contained memories.
Shadwell blew his nose, noisily, on his sleeve.
Then he opened a tin of condensed milk for breakfast.
IF THE ARMIES OF GLORIFICATION had tried to march with Newt, bits of them would have dropped off. This is because, apart from Newt and Shadwell, they had been dead for quite a long time.
It was a mistake to think of Shadwell (Newt never found out if he had a first name) as a lone nut.
It was just that all the others were dead, in most cases for several hundred years. Once the Army had been as big as it currently appeared in Shadwell’s creatively edited bookkeeping. Newt had been surprised to find that the Witchfinder Army had antecedents as long and almost as bloody as its more mundane counterpart.
The rates of pay for witchfinders had last been set by Oliver Cromwell and never reviewed. Officers got a crown, and the General got a sovereign. It was just an honorarium, of course, because you got ninepence per witch found and first pick of their property.
You really got to rely on those ninepences. And so times had been a bit hard before Shadwell had gone on the payrolls of Heaven and Hell.
Newt’s pay was one old shilling per year.29
In return for this, he was charged to keep “glimmer, firelock, firebox, tinderbox or igniferous matches” about his person at all times, although Shadwell indicated that a Ronson gas lighter would do very well. Shadwell had accepted the invention of the patent cigarette lighter in the same way that conventional soldiers welcomed the repeating rifle.
The way Newt looked at it, it was like being in one of those organizations like the Sealed Knot or those people who kept on refighting the American Civil War. It got you out at weekends, and meant that you were keeping alive fine old traditions that had made Western civilization what it was today.
AN HOUR AFTER LEAVING the headquarters, Newt pulled into a layby and rummaged in the box on the passenger seat.
Then he opened the car window, using a pair of pliers for the purpose since the handle had long since fallen off.
The packet of firelighters was sent winging over the hedge. A moment later the thumbscrew followed it.
He debated about the rest of the stuff, and then put it back in the box. The pin was Witchfinder military issue, wi
th a good ebony knob on the end like a ladies’ hat pin.
He knew what it was for. He’d done quite a lot of reading. Shadwell had piled him up with pamphlets at their first meeting, but the Army had also accumulated various books and documents which, Newt suspected, would be worth a fortune if they ever hit the market.
The pin was to jab into suspects. If there was a spot on their body where they didn’t feel anything, they were a witch. Simple. Some of the fraudulent Witchfinders had used special retracting pins, but this one was honest, solid steel. He wouldn’t be able to look old Shadwell in the face if he threw away the pin. Besides, it was probably bad luck.
He started the engine and resumed his journey.
Newt’s car was a Wasabi. He called it Dick Turpin, in the hope that one day someone would ask him why.
It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today.
Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he’d enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company.
In vain did he point out its 823cc engine, its three-speed gearbox, its incredible safety devices like the balloons which inflated on dangerous occasions such as when you were doing 45 mph on a straight dry road but were about to crash because a huge safety balloon had just obscured the view. He’d also wax slightly lyrical about the Korean-made radio, which picked up Radio Pyongyang incredibly well, and the simulated electronic voice which warned you about not wearing a seatbelt even when you were; it had been programmed by someone who not only didn’t understand English, but didn’t understand Japanese either. It was state of the art, he said.
The art in this case was probably pottery.
His friends nodded and agreed and privately decided that if ever it came to buying a Wasabi or walking, they’d invest in a pair of shoes; it came to the same thing anyway, since one reason for the Wasabi’s incredible m.p.g. was that fact that it spent a lot of time waiting in garages while crankshafts and things were in the post from the world’s only surviving Wasabi agent in Nigirizushi, Japan.
In that vague, zen-like trance in which most people drive, Newt found himself wondering exactly how you used the pin. Did you say, “I’ve got a pin, and I’m not afraid to use it”? Have Pin, Will Travel … The Pinslinger … The Man with the Golden Pin … The Pins of Navarone …
It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty-nine thousand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch-hunting, twenty-nine thousand said “ouch,” nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine didn’t feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retractable pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.
Her name was Agnes Nutter.
She was the Witchfinder Army’s great failure.
ONE OF THE EARLY ENTRIES in The Nice and Accurate Prophecies concerned Agnes Nutter’s own death.
The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe. In Germany the bonfires were built and burned with regular Teutonic thoroughness. Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings. But the English never seemed to have the heart for it.
One reason for this may have to do with the manner of Agnes Nutter’s death, which more or less marked the end of the serious witch-hunting craze in England. A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people, arrived at her house one April evening to find her sitting with her coat on, waiting for them.
“Ye’re tardie,” she said to them. “I shoulde have beene aflame ten minutes since.”
Then she got up and hobbled slowly through the suddenly silent crowd, out of the cottage, and to the bonfire that had been hastily thrown together on the village green. Legend says that she climbed awkwardly onto the pyre and thrust her arms around the stake behind her.
“Tye yt well,” she said to the astonished witchfinder. And then, as the villagers sidled toward the pyre, she raised her handsome head in the firelight and said, “Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judgéd, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne deathe be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do notte understande.”
And, apparently, she smiled and looked up at the sky over the village and added, “That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole.”
And after that strange blasphemy she said no more. She let them gag her, and stood imperiously as the torches were put to the dry wood.
The crowd grew nearer, one or two of its members a little uncertain as to whether they’d done the right thing, now they came to think about it.
Thirty seconds later an explosion took out the village green, scythed the valley clean of every living thing, and was seen as far away as Halifax.
There was much subsequent debate as to whether this had been sent by God or by Satan, but a note later found in Agnes Nutter’s cottage indicated that any divine or devilish intervention had been materially helped by the contents of Agnes’s petticoats, wherein she had with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roofing nails.
What Agnes also left behind, on the kitchen table beside a note canceling the milk, was a box and a book. There were specific instructions as to what should be done with the box, and equally specific instructions about what should be done with the book; it was to be sent to Agnes’s son, John Device.
The people who found it—who were from the next village, and had been woken up by the explosion—considered ignoring the instructions and just burning the cottage, and then looked around at the twinkling fires and nail-studded wreckage and decided not to. Besides, Agnes’s note included painfully precise predictions about what would happen to people who did not carry out her orders.
The man who put the torch to Agnes Nutter was a Witchfinder Major. They found his hat in a tree two miles away.
His name, stitched inside on a fairly large piece of tape, was Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer, one of England’s most assiduous witchfinders, and it might have afforded him some satisfaction to know that his last surviving descendant was now, even if unawares, heading toward Agnes Nutter’s last surviving descendant. He might have felt that some ancient revenge was at last going to be discharged.
If he’d known what was actually going to happen when that descendant met her he would have turned in his grave, except that he had never got one.
FIRSTLY, HOWEVER, Newt had to do something about the flying saucer.
It landed in the road ahead of him just as he was trying to find the Lower Tadfield turning and had the map spread over the steering wheel. He had to brake hard.
It looked like every cartoon of a flying saucer Newt had ever seen.
As he stared over the top of his map, a door in the saucer slid aside with a satisfying whoosh, revealing a gleaming walkway which extended automatically down to the road. Brilliant blue light shone out, outlining three alien shapes. They walked down the ramp. At least, two of them walked. The one that looked like a pepper pot just skidded down it, and fell over at the bottom.
The other two ignored its frantic beeping and walked over to the car quite slowly, in the worldwide approved manner of
policemen already compiling the charge sheet in their heads. The tallest one, a yellow toad dressed in kitchen foil, rapped on Newt’s window. He wound it down. The thing was wearing the kind of mirror-finished sunglasses that Newt always thought of as Cool Hand Luke shades.
“Morning, sir or madam or neuter,” the thing said. “This your planet, is it?”
The other alien, which was stubby and green, had wandered off into the woods by the side of the road. Out of the corner of his eye Newt saw it kick a tree, and then run a leaf through some complicated gadget on its belt. It didn’t look very pleased.
“Well, yes. I suppose so,” he said.
The toad stared thoughtfully at the skyline.
“Had it long, have we, sir?” it said.
“Er. Not personally. I mean, as a species, about half a million years. I think.”
The alien exchanged glances with its colleague. “Been letting the old acid rain build up, haven’t we, sir?” it said. “Been letting ourselves go a bit with the old hydrocarbons, perhaps?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Could you tell me your planet’s albedo, sir?” said the toad, still staring levelly at the horizon as though it was doing something interesting.
“Er. No.”
“Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir.”
“Oh, dear,” said Newt. He was wondering who he could tell about this, and realizing that there was absolutely no one who would believe him.
The toad bent closer. It seemed to be worried about something, insofar as Newt was any judge of the expressions of an alien race he’d never encountered before.
“We’ll overlook it on this occasion, sir.”
Newt gabbled. “Oh. Er. I’ll see to it—well, when I say I, I mean, I think Antarctica or something belongs to every country, or something, and—”
“The fact is, sir, that we have been asked to give you a message.”
“Oh?”
“Message runs ‘We give you a message of universal peace and cosmic harmony an’ suchlike.’ Message ends,” said the toad.
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch Page 17
