by Neil Gaiman
“And do you recall an incident involving the switching of newborn babies?” said Crowley.
Mary Hodges hesitated. When she did speak, it was as though memories that had been scabbed over were being disturbed for the first time in years.
“Yes,” she said.
“Is there any possibility that the switch could have gone wrong in some way?”
“I do not know.”
Crowley thought for a bit. “You must have had records,” he said. “There are always records. Everyone has records these days.” He glanced proudly at Aziraphale. “It was one of my better ideas.”
“Oh, yes,” said Mary Hodges.
“And where are they?” said Aziraphale sweetly.
“There was a fire just after the birth.”
Crowley groaned and threw his hands in the air. “That was Hastur, probably,” he said. “It’s his style. Can you believe those guys? I bet he thought he was being really clever.”
“Do you recall any details about the other child?” said Aziraphale.
“Yes.”
“Please tell me.”
“He had lovely little toesie-wosies.”
“Oh.”
“And he was very sweet,” said Mary Hodges wistfully.
There was the sound of a siren outside, abruptly broken off as a bullet hit it. Aziraphale nudged Crowley.
“Get a move on,” he said. “We’re going to be knee-deep in police at any moment and I will of course be morally obliged to assist them in their enquiries.” He thought for a moment. “Perhaps she can remember if there were any other women giving birth that night, and—”
There was the sound of running feet downstairs.
“Stop them,” said Crowley. “We need more time!”
“Any more miracles and we’ll really start getting noticed by Up There,” said Aziraphale. “If you really want Gabriel or someone wondering why forty policemen have gone to sleep—”
“Okay,” said Crowley. “That’s it. That’s it. It was worth a try. Let’s get out of here.”
“In thirty seconds you will wake up,” said Aziraphale, to the entranced ex-nun. “And you will have had a lovely dream about whatever you like best, and—”
“Yes, yes, fine,” sighed Crowley. “Now can we go?”
NO ONE NOTICED THEM leaving. The police were too busy herding in forty adrenaline-drunk, fighting-mad management trainees. Three police vans had gouged tracks in the lawn, and Aziraphale made Crowley back up for the first of the ambulances, but then the Bentley swished into the night. Behind them the summerhouse and gazebo were already ablaze.
“We’ve really left that poor woman in a dreadful situation,” said the angel.
“You think?” said Crowley, trying to hit a hedgehog and missing. “Bookings will double, you mark my words. If she plays her cards right, sorts out the waivers, ties up all the legal bits. Initiative training with real guns? They’ll form queues.”
“Why are you always so cynical?”
“I said. Because it’s my job.”
They drove in silence for a while. Then Aziraphale said, “You’d think he’d show up, wouldn’t you? You’d think we could detect him in some way.”
“He won’t show up. Not to us. Protective camouflage. He won’t even know it, but his powers will keep him hidden from prying occult forces.”
“Occult forces?”
“You and me,” explained Crowley.
“I’m not occult,” said Aziraphale. “Angels aren’t occult. We’re ethereal.”
“Whatever,” snapped Crowley, too worried to argue.
“Is there some other way of locating him?”
Crowley shrugged. “Search me,” he said. “How much experience do you think I’ve got in these matters? Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don’t let you go around again until you get it right.”
The angel stared out at the rushing hedgerows.
“It all seems so peaceful,” he said. “How do you think it will happen?”
“Well, thermonuclear extinction has always been very popular. Although I must say the big boys are being quite polite to each other at the moment.”
“Asteroid strike?” said Aziraphale. “Quite the fashion these days, I understand. Strike into the Indian Ocean, great big cloud of dust and vapor, goodbye all higher life forms.”
“Wow,” said Crowley, taking care to exceed the speed limit. Every little bit helped.
“Doesn’t bear thinking about it, does it,” said Aziraphale gloomily.
“All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that.”
“Terrible.”
“Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.”
“That was nasty.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t resist it.”
They stared at the road.
“Maybe some terrorist—?” Aziraphale began.
“Not one of ours,” said Crowley.
“Or ours,” said Aziraphale. “Although ours are freedom fighters, of course.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Crowley, scorching rubber on the Tadfield bypass. “Cards on the table time. I’ll tell you ours if you tell me yours.”
“All right. You first.”
“Oh, no. You first.”
“But you’re a demon.”
“Yes, but a demon of my word, I should hope.”
Aziraphale named five political leaders. Crowley named six. Three names appeared on both lists.
“See?” said Crowley. “It’s just like I’ve always said. They’re cunning buggers, humans. You can’t trust them an inch.”
“But I don’t think any of ours have any big plans afoot,” said Aziraphale. “Just minor acts of ter— political protest,” he corrected.
“Ah,” said Crowley bitterly. “You mean none of this cheap, mass-produced murder? Just personal service, every bullet individually fired by skilled craftsmen?”
Aziraphale didn’t rise to it. “What are we going to do now?”
“Try and get some sleep.”
“You don’t need sleep. I don’t need sleep. Evil never sleeps, and Virtue is ever-vigilant.”
“Evil in general, maybe. This specific part of it has got into the habit of getting its head down occasionally.” He stared into the headlights. The time would come soon enough when sleep would be right out of the question. When those Below found out that he, personally, had lost the Antichrist, they’d probably dig out all those reports he’d done on the Spanish Inquisition and try them out on him, one at a time and then all together.
He rummaged in the glove compartment, fumbled a tape at random, and slotted it into the player. A little music would …
. . . Bee-elzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me …
“For me,” murmured Crowley. His expression went blank for a moment. Then he gave a strangled scream and wrenched at the on-off knob.
“Of course, we might be able to get a human to find him,” said Aziraphale thoughtfully.
“What?” said Crowley, distractedly.
“Humans are good at finding other humans. They’ve been doing it for thousands of years. And the child is human. As well as … you know. He would be hidden from us, but other humans might be able to … oh, sense him, perhaps. Or spot things we wouldn’t think of.”
“It wouldn’t work. He’s the Antichrist! He’s got this … sort of automatic defense, hasn’t he? Even if he doesn’t know it. It won’t even let people suspect him. Not yet. Not till it’s ready. Suspicion will slide off him like, like … whatever it is water slides off of,” he finished lamely.
“Got any better ideas? Got one single better idea?” said Aziraphale.
“No.”
“Right, then. It could work. Don’t tell me you haven’t got any front organizations you could use. I know I have. We could see if they can pick up the trail.”
“What could they do that we couldn’t do?”
“Well, for a start, they wouldn’t get people to shoot one another, they wouldn’t hypnoti
ze respectable women, they—”
“Okay. Okay. But it hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in Hell. Believe me, I know. But I can’t think of anything better.” Crowley turned onto the motorway and headed for London.
“I have a—a certain network of agents,” said Aziraphale, after a while. “Spread across the country. A disciplined force. I could set them searching.”
“I, er, have something similar,” Crowley admitted. “You know how it is, you never know when they might come in handy … ”
“We’d better alert them. Do you think they ought to work together?”
Crowley shook his head.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” he said. “They’re not very sophisticated, politically speaking.”
“Then we’ll each contact our own people and see what they can manage.”
“Got to be worth a try, I suppose,” said Crowley. “It’s not as if I haven’t got lots of other work to do, God knows.”
His forehead creased for a moment, and then he slapped the steering wheel triumphantly.
“Ducks!” he shouted.
“What?”
“That’s what water slides off!”
Aziraphale took a deep breath.
“Just drive the car, please,” he said wearily.
They drove back through the dawn, while the cassette player played J. S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor, vocals by F. Mercury.
Crowley liked the city in the early morning. Its population consisted almost entirely of people who had proper jobs to do and real reasons for being there, as opposed to the unnecessary millions who trailed in after 8 a.m., and the streets were more or less quiet. There were double yellow no-parking lines in the narrow road outside Aziraphale’s bookshop, but they obediently rolled back on themselves when the Bentley pulled in to the curb.
“Well, okay,” he said, as Aziraphale got his coat from the back seat. “We’ll keep in touch. Okay?”
“What’s this?” said Aziraphale, holding up a brown oblong.
Crowley squinted at it. “A book?” he said. “Not mine.”
Aziraphale turned a few of the yellowed pages. Tiny bibliophilic bells rang in the back of his mind.
“It must have belonged to that young lady,” he said slowly. “We ought to have got her address.”
“Look, I’m in enough trouble as it is, I don’t want it to get about that I go around returning people’s property to them,” said Crowley.
Aziraphale reached the title page. It was probably a good job Crowley couldn’t see his expression.
“I suppose you could always send it to the post office there,” said Crowley, “if you really feel you must. Address it to the mad woman with the bicycle. Never trust a woman who gives funny names to means of transport—”
“Yes, yes, certainly,” said the angel. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them on the pavement, picked them up, dropped them again, and hurried to the shop door.
“We’ll be in touch then, shall we?” Crowley called after him.
Aziraphale paused in the act of turning the key.
“What?” he said. “Oh. Oh. Yes. Fine. Jolly good.” And he slammed the door.
“Right,” mumbled Crowley, suddenly feeling very alone.
TORCHLIGHT FLICKED IN THE LANES.
The trouble with trying to find a brown-covered book among brown leaves and brown water at the bottom of a ditch of brown earth in the brown, well, grayish light of dawn, was that you couldn’t.
It wasn’t there.
Anathema tried every method of search she could think of. There was the methodical quartering of the ground. There was the slapdash poking at the bracken by the roadside. There was the nonchalant sidling up to it and looking out of the side of her eye. She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.
It didn’t.
Which meant, as she had feared all along, that it was probably in the back of a car belonging to two consenting cycle repairmen.
She could feel generations of Agnes Nutter’s descendants laughing at her.
Even if those two were honest enough to want to return it, they’d hardly go to all the trouble of finding a cottage they’d barely seen in the dark.
The only hope was that they wouldn’t know what it was they’d got.
AZIRAPHALE, LIKE MANY Soho merchants who specialized in hard-to-find books for the discerning connoisseur, had a back room, but what was in there was far more esoteric than anything normally found inside a shrink-wrapped bag for the Customer Who Knows What He Wants.
He was particularly proud of his books of prophecy.
First editions, usually.
And every one was signed.
He’d got Robert Nixon,16 and Martha the Gypsy, and Ignatius Sybilla, and Old Ottwell Binns. Nostradamus had signed, “To myne olde friend Azerafel, with Beste wishes”; Mother Shipton had spilled drink on his copy; and in a climate-controlled cabinet in one corner was the original scroll in the shaky handwriting of St. John the Divine of Patmos, whose “Revelation” had been the all-time best seller. Aziraphale had found him a nice chap, if a bit too fond of odd mushrooms.
What the collection did not have was a copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, and Aziraphale walked into the room holding it as a keen philatelist might hold a Mauritius Blue that had just turned up on a postcard from his aunt.
He’d never even seen a copy before, but he’d heard about it. Everyone in the trade, which considering it was a highly specialized trade meant about a dozen people, had heard of it. Its existence was a sort of vacuum around which all sorts of strange stories had been orbiting for hundreds of years. Aziraphale realized he wasn’t sure if you could orbit a vacuum, and didn’t care; The Nice and Accurate Prophecies made the Hitler Diaries look like, well, a bunch of forgeries.
His hands hardly shook at all as he laid it down on a bench, pulled on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and opened it reverentially. Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshiped books.
The title page said:
THE NIFE AND ACCURATE PROPHEFIES
OF AGNES NUTTER
In slightly smaller type:
Being a Certaine and Prefice Hiftory from the Prefent Day
Unto the Endinge of this World.
In slightly larger type:
Containing therein Many Diuerse Wonders and
precepts for the Wife
In a different type:
More complete than ever yet before publifhed
In smaller type but in capitals:
CONCERNING THE STRANGE TIMES AHEADE
In slightly desperate italics:
And events of a Wonderful Nature
In larger type once more:
‘Reminifent of Noftradamus at hif beft’—Ursula Shipton
The prophecies were numbered, and there were more than four thousand of them.
“Steady, steady,” Aziraphale muttered to himself. He went into the little kitchenette and made himself some cocoa and took some deep breaths.
Then he came back and read a prophecy at random.
Forty minutes later, the cocoa was still untouched.
THE RED-HAIRED WOMAN in the corner of the hotel bar was the most successful war correspondent in the world. She now had a passport in the name of Carmine Zuigiber; and she went where the wars were.
Well. More or less.
Actually she went where the wars weren’t. She’d already been where the wars were.
She was not well known, except where it counted. Get half a dozen war correspondents together in an airport bar, and the conversation will, like a compass orienting to North, swing around to Murchison of The New York Times, to Van Horne of Newsweek, to Anforth of I.T.N. News. The war correspondents’ War Correspondents.
But when Murchison, and Van Horne, an
d Anforth ran into each other in a burnt-out tin shack in Beirut, or Afghanistan, or the Sudan, after they’d admired each other’s scars and had downed a few, they would exchange awed anecdotes of “Red” Zuigiber, from the National World Weekly.
“That dumb rag,” Murchison would say, “it doesn’t goddamn know what it’s goddamn got.”
Actually the National World Weekly did know just what it had got: it had a War Correspondent. It just didn’t know why, or what to do with one now it had her.
A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus’ face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist’s impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife’s cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world.17
That was the National World Weekly. They sold four million copies a week, and they needed a War Correspondent like they needed an exclusive interview with the General Secretary of the United Nations.18
So they paid Red Zuigiber a great deal of money to go and find wars, and ignored the bulging, badly typed envelopes she sent them occasionally from around the globe to justify her—generally fairly reasonable—expense claims.
They felt justified in this because, as they saw it, she really wasn’t a very good war correspondent although she was undoubtedly the most attractive, which counted for a lot on the National World Weekly. Her war reports were always about a bunch of guys shooting at each other, with no real understanding of the wider political ramifications, and, more importantly, no Human Interest.
Occasionally they would hand one of her stories over to a rewrite man to fix up. (“Jesus appeared to nine-year-old Manuel Gonzalez during a pitched battle on the Rio Concorsa, and told him to go home because his mother worried about him. ‘I knew it was Jesus,’ said the brave little child, ‘because he looked like he did when his picture miraculously appeared on my sandwich box.”’)
Mostly the National World Weekly left her alone, and carefully filed her stories in the rubbish bin.
Murchison, and Van Horne, and Anforth didn’t care about this. All they knew was that whenever a war broke out, Ms. Zuigiber was there first. Practically before.
