The end justifies the means, thought Aziraphale. And the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.[45] And he lied cheerfully and convincingly: "Oodles. Pots of them. His chest is covered with them‑he makes Diana of the Ephesians look positively nippleless."
"I wouldna know about this Diana of yours," said Shadwell, "but if he's a witch, and it sounds tae me like he is, then, speaking as a sergeant in the WA, I'm yer man."
"Good, " said Aziraphale through Madame Tracy.
"I'm not sure about this killing business," said Madame Tracy herself. "But if it's this man, this Antichrist, or everybody else, then I suppose we don't really have any choice."
"Exactly, dear lady," she replied. "Now, Sergeant Shadwell. Have you a weapon?"
Shadwell rubbed his right hand with his left, clenching and unclenching the fist. "Aye," he said. "I have that." And he raised two fingers to his lips and blew on them gently.
There was a pause. "Your hand?" asked Aziraphale.
"Aye. 'Tis a turrible weapon. It did for ye, daemonspawn, did it not?"
"Have you anything more, uh, substantial? How about the Golden Dagger of Meggido? Or the Shiv of Kali?"
Shadwell shook his head. "I've got some pins," he suggested. "And the Thundergun of Witchfinder‑Colonel Ye‑Shall‑Not‑Eat‑Any‑LivingThing‑With‑The‑Blood‑ Neither‑Shall‑Ye‑Use‑Enchantment‑ Nor‑ObserveTimes Dalrymple . . . I could load it with silver bullets."
"That's werewolves, I believe, " said Aziraphale.
"Garlic?"
"Vampires."
Shadwell shrugged. "Aye, week I dinna have any fancy bullets anyway. But the Thundergun will fire anything. I'll go and fetch it."
He shuffled out, thinking, why do I need another weapon? I'm a man with a hand.
"Now, dear lady," said Aziraphale. "Itrust you have a reliable mode of transportation at your disposal. "
"Oh yes," said Madame Tracy. She went over to the corner of the kitchen and picked up a pink motorbike helmet, with a yellow sunflower painted on it, and put it on, strapping it under her chin. Then she rummaged in a cupboard, pulled out three or four hundred plastic shopping bags and a heap of yellowing local newspapers, then a dusty day‑glo green helmet with EASY RIDER written across the top, a present from her niece Petula twenty years before.
Shadwell, returning with the Thundergun over his shoulder, stared at her unbelieving.
"I don't know what you're staring at, Mr. Shadwell," she told him. "It's parked in the road downstairs." She passed him the helmet. "You've got to put it on. It's the law. I don't think you're really allowed to have three people on a scooter, even if two of them are, er, sharing. But it's an emergency. And I'm sure you'll be quite safe, if you hold on to me nice and tight." And she smiled. "Won't that be fun?"
Shadwell paled, muttered something inaudible, and put on the green helmet.
"What was that, Mr. Shadwell?" Madame Tracy looked at him sharply.
"I said, De'il ding a divot aff yer wame wi' a flaughter spade," said Shadwell.
"That'll be quite enough of that kind of language, Mr. Shadwell," said Madame Tracy, and she marched him out of the hall and down the stairs to Crouch End High Street, where an elderly scooter waited to take the two, well, call it three of them away.
– – -
The lorry blocked the road. And the corrugated iron blocked the road. And a thirty‑foot‑high pile of fish blocked the road. It was one of the most effectively blocked roads the sergeant had ever seen.
The rain wasn't helping.
"Any idea when the bulldozers are likely to get here?" he shouted into his radio.
"We're crrrrk doing the best we crrrrk, " came the reply.
He felt something tugging at his trouser cuff, and looked down.
"Lobsters?" He gave a little skip, and a jump, and wound up on the top of the police car. "Lobsters," he repeated. There were about thirty of them‑some over two feet long. Most of them were on their way up the motorway; half a dozen had stopped to check out the police car.
"Something wrong, Sarge?" asked the police constable, who was taking down the lorry driver's details on the hard shoulder.
"I just don't like lobsters," said the sergeant, grimly, shutting his eyes. "Bring me out in a rash. Too many legs. I'll just sit up here a bit, and you can tell me when they've all gone."
He sat on the top of the car, in the rain, and felt the water seeping into the bottom of his trousers.
There was a low roar. Thunder? No. It was continuous, and getting closer. Motorbikes. The sergeant opened one eye.
Jesus Christ!
There were four of them, and they had to be doing over a hundred. He was about to climb down, to wave at them, to shout, but they were past him, heading straight for the upturned lorry.
There was nothing the sergeant could do. He closed his eyes again, and listened for the collision. He could hear them coming closer. Then:
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
Whoosh.
And a voice in his head that said, I'LL CATCH UP WITH THE REST OF YOU.
("Did you see that?" asked Really Cool People. "They flew right over it!"
"kin'ell!" said G.B.H. "If they can do it, we can too!")
The sergeant opened his eyes. He turned to the police constable and opened his mouth.
The police constable said, "They. They actually. They flew righ . . ."
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Splat.
There was another rain of fish, although of shorter duration, and more easily explicable. A leather jacketed arm waved feebly from the large pile of fish. A motorbike wheel spun hopelessly.
That was Skuzz, semi‑conscious, deciding that if there was one thing he hated even more than the French it was being up to his neck in fish with what felt like a broken leg. He truly hated that.
He wanted to tell G.B.H. about his new role; but he couldn't move. Something wet and slippery slithered up one sleeve.
Later, when they'd dragged him out of the fish pile, and he'd seen the other three bikers, with the blankets over their heads, he realized it was too late to tell them anything.
That was why they hadn't been in that Book of Revelations Pigbog had been going on about. They'd never made it that far down the motorway.
Skuzz muttered something. The police sergeant leaned over. "Don't try to speak, son," he said. "The ambulance'll be here soon."
"Listen," croaked Skuzz. "Got something important to tell you. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . . . they're right bastards, all four of them."
"He's delirious," announced the sergeant.
"I'm sodding not. I'm People Covered In Fish," croaked Skuzz, and passed out.
– – -
The London traffic system is many hundreds of times more complex than anyone imagines.
This has nothing to do with influences, demonic or angelic. It's more to do with geography, and history, and architecture.
Mostly this works to people's advantage, although they'd never believe it.
London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.
The latest solution had been the M25: a motorway that formed a rough circle around the city. Up until now the problems had been fairly basic‑things like it being obsolete before they had finished building it, Einsteinian tailbacks that eventually became tailforwards, that kind of thing.
The current problem was that it didn't exist; not in normal human spatial terms, anyway. The tailback of cars unaware of this, or trying to find alternate routes out of London, stretched into the city center, from every direction. For the first time ever, London was completely gridlocked. The city was one huge traffic jam.
Cars, in theory, give you a terrifically fast method of traveling from place to place. Traffic jams, on the other hand, give you a terrific opportunity
to stay still. In the rain, and the gloom, while around you the cacophonous symphony of horns grew ever louder and more exasperated.
Crowley was getting sick of it.
He'd taken the opportunity to reread Aziraphale's notes, and to thumb through Agnes Nutter's prophecies, and to do some serious thinking.
His conclusions could be summarized as follows:
1) Armageddon was under way.
2) There was nothing Crowley could do about this.
3) It was going to happen in Tadfield. Or to begin there, at any rate. After that it was going to happen everywhere.
4) Crowley was in Hell's bad books.[46]
5) Aziraphale was‑as far as could be estimated‑out of the equation.
6) All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel‑or if there was, it was an oncoming train.
7) He might just as well find a nice little restaurant and get completely and utterly pissed out of his mind while he waited for the world to end.
8) And yet . . .
And that was where it all fell apart.
Because, underneath it all, Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock‑hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times‑he thought briefly of the fourteenth century‑then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.
Okay, so Hell was down on him. So the world was ending. So the Cold War was over and the Great War was starting for real. So the odds against him were higher than a vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owlsley's Old Original. There was still a chance.
It was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
The right place was Tadfield. He was certain of that; partly from the book, partly from some other sense: in Crowley's mental map of the world, Tadfield was throbbing like a migraine.
The right time was getting there before the end of the world. He checked his watch. He had two hours to get to Tadfield, although probably even the normal passage of Time was pretty shaky by now.
Crowley tossed the book into the passenger seat. Desperate times, desperate measures: he had maintained the Bentley without a scratch for sixty years.
What the hell.
He reversed suddenly, causing severe damage to the front of the red Renault 5 behind him, and drove up onto the pavement.
He turned on his lights, and sounded his horn.
That should give any pedestrians sufficient warning that he was coming. And if they couldn't get out of the way . . . well, it'd all be the same in a couple of hours. Maybe. Probably.
"Heigh ho," said Anthony Crowley, and just drove anyway.
– – -
There were six women and four men, and each of them had a telephone and a thick wodge of computer printout, covered with names and telephone numbers. By each of the numbers was a penned notation saying whether the person dialed was in or out, whether the number was currently connected, and, most importantly, whether or not anybody who answered the phone was avid for cavity‑wall insulation to enter their lives.
Most of them weren't.
The ten people sat there, hour after hour, cajoling, pleading, promising through plastic smiles. Between calls they made notations, sipped coffee, and marvelled at the rain flooding down the windows. They were staying at their posts like the band on the Titanic. If you couldn't sell double glazing in weather like this, you couldn't sell it at all.
Lisa Morrow was saying, ". . . Now, if you'll only let me finish, sir, and yes, I understand that, sir, but if you'll only . . ." and then, seeing that he'd just hung up on her, she said, "Well, up yours, snot‑face."
She put down the phone.
"I got another bath," she announced to her fellow telephone salespersons. She was well in the lead in the office daily Getting People Out of the Bath stakes, and only needed two more points to win the weekly Coitus Interruptus award.
She dialed the next number on the list.
Lisa had never intended to be a telephone salesperson. What she really wanted to be was an internationally glamorous jet‑setter, but she didn't have the O‑levels.
Had she been studious enough to be accepted as an internationally glamorous jet‑setter, or a dental assistant (her second choice of profession), or indeed, anything other than a telephone salesperson in that particular office, she would have had a longer, and probably more fulfilled, life.
Perhaps not a very much longer life, all things considered, it being the Day of Armageddon, but several hours anyway.
For that matter, all she really needed to do for a longer life was not ring the number she had just dialed, listed on her sheet as the Mayfair home of, in the best traditions of tenth‑hand mail‑order lists, Mr. A. J. Cowlley.
But she had dialed. And she had waited while it rang four times. And she had said, "Oh, pout, another ansaphone," and started to put down the handset.
But then something climbed out of the earpiece. Something very big, and very angry.
It looked a little like a maggot. A huge, angry maggot made out of thousands and thousands of tiny little maggots, all writhing and screaming, millions of little maggot mouths opening and shutting in fury, and every one of them was screaming "Crowley."
It stopped screaming. Swayed blindly, seemed to be taking stock of where it was.
Then it went to pieces.
The thing split into thousands of thousands of writhing gray maggots. They flowed over the carpet, up over the desks, over Lisa Morrow and her nine colleagues; they flowed into their mouths, up their nostrils, into their lungs; they burrowed into flesh and eyes and brains and lights, reproducing wildly as they went, filling the room with a towering mess of writhing flesh and gunk. The whole began to flow together, to coagulate into one huge entity that filled the room from floor to ceiling, pulsing gently.
A mouth opened in the mass of flesh, strands of something wet and sticky adhering to each of the not‑exactly lips, and Hastur said:
"I needed that."
Spending half an hour trapped on an ansaphone with only Aziraphale's message for company had not improved his temper.
Neither did the prospect of having to report back to Hell, and having to explain why he hadn't returned half an hour earlier, and, more importantly, why he was not accompanied by Crowley.
Hell did not go a bundle on failures.
On the plus side, however, he at least knew what Aziraphale's message was. The knowledge could probably buy him his continued existence.
And anyway, he reflected, if he were going to have to face the possible wrath of the Dark Council, at least it wouldn't be on an empty stomach.
The room filled with thick, sulphurous smoke. When it cleared, Hastur was gone. There was nothing left in the room but ten skeletons, picked quite clean of meat, and some puddles of melted plastic with, here and there, a gleaming fragment of metal that might once have been part of a telephone. Much better to have been a dental assistant.
But, to look on the bright side, all this only went to prove that evil contains the seeds of its own destruction. Right now, across the country, people who would otherwise have been made just that little bit more tense and angry by being summoned from a nice bath, or having their names mispronounced at them, were instead feeling quite untroubled and at peace with the world. As a result of Hastur's action a wave of low‑grade goodness started to spread exponentially through the population, and millions of people who ultimately would have suffered minor bruises of the soul did not in fact do so. So that was all right.
– – -
You wouldn't have known it as the same car. There was scarcely an inch of it undented. Both front lights were smashed. The hubcaps were long gone. It looked like the veteran of a hundred demolition derbies.
The pavements had been bad. The pedestrian underpass had been worse. The worst bit had been crossing the River Thames. At least he'd had the foresight to roll up all the windows.
Still, he was here, now.
In
a few hundred yards he'd be on the M40; a fairly clear run up to Oxfordshire. There was only one snag: once more between Crowley and the open road was the M25. A screaming, glowing ribbon of pain and dark light.[47]
Odegra. Nothing could cross it and survive.
Nothing mortal, anyway. And he wasn't sure what it would do to a demon. It couldn't kill him, but it wouldn't be pleasant.
There was a police roadblock in front of the flyover before him. Burnt‑out wrecks‑‑some still burning‑testified to the fate of previous cars that had to drive across the flyover above the dark road.
The police did not look happy.
Crowley shifted down into second gear, and gunned the accelerator.
He went through the roadblock at sixty. That was the easy bit.
Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone's quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there's a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented.
Whatever the statistics were, they had just gone up by one.
The leather seatcovers began to smoke. Staring ahead of him, Crowley fumbled left‑handedly on the passenger seat for Agnes Nutter's Nice and Accurate Prophecies~ moved it to the safety of his lap. He wished she'd prophecied this[48].
Then the flames engulfed the car.
He had to keep driving.
On the other side of the flyover was a further police roadblock, to prevent the passage of cars trying to come into London. They were laughing about a story that had just come over the radio, that a motorbike cop on the M6 had flagged down a stolen police car, only to discover the driver to be a large octopus.
Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down‑to‑earth police force in Britain.
It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met.
It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour.
Good Omens Page 26
