She stepped aside, and the center of the vortex grew larger, the dark hole at its heart simultaneously expanding and becoming lighter. The gates were almost entirely gone, and the melting metal steamed and boiled. Slowly, shapes became visible through the murk. They were blurred at first, and shrouded in mist, but gradually they became clearer.
It was an army, the largest army ever assembled in any world, and in any universe. All the peoples of the Earth were as nothing before it. Its ranks outnumbered every grain of sand on the planet, every leaf on every tree, every molecule of water in every ocean. Demons of every shape and size, things formed and without form, had assembled behind the remains of the gates. Above the great army towered a black mountain so tall its top could never be seen, its base so wide that a man might walk for a lifetime and never circumnavigate it. At the heart of the mountain was a massive cave, unseen fires glowing within.
And then a dark form appeared at the entrance to the cave; from its head sprouted a crown of bone. It wore black armor carved with the name of every man and woman who had ever been born on Earth, and who ever would be born, in order that it would never forget its hatred for them. In its right hand it held a flaming spear, and on its left arm it bore a shield made from the skulls and bones of the damned, for in every evil man and woman there was something of the Great Malevolence, and when they died he claimed their remains for himself. He towered above his army, so that they were like insects before him. He opened his mouth, and roared, and they shook before him, for his glory was terrible to behold.
Another cheer arose from the assembled masses. Mrs. Abernathy basked in the sound. So consumed was she by the imminent success of their invasion, and the impending arrival of her master, that she failed to notice that the cheers had started to fade, to be replaced by mutterings of confusion, and a voice that appeared to be saying, very politely, “Excuse me …”
Mrs. Abernathy opened her eyes. Standing before her was Samuel Johnson.
“I have a question,” said Samuel.
Mrs. Abernathy was so taken aback that she couldn’t reply. Her brow furrowed. Her mouth opened and tried to form words, but none would come. The gates of Hell were about to be opened at last, the Earth destroyed, and all of its inhabitants torn to pieces, and here was a small boy who seemed to have, well, a question.
Eventually, Mrs. Abernathy responded in the only way that she could.
“What is it?” she said.
“I just don’t see the point,” said Samuel.
“The point?”
“Yes, the point,” said Samuel. “I mean, if you’ve all been stuck in horrible old Hell for ages, and now you’re about to come here instead, why would you reduce it to a ruin and turn it into somewhere that’s just as bad as the place you’ve left? It doesn’t seem to make any sense.”
Beside him, a pink demon with four legs scratched itself in puzzlement. Its form had the consistency of marshmallow, so its fingers got rather lost in the process and jabbed themselves into the demon’s brain, but at least it was thinking, or giving the impression of doing so.
“And what would you have us do?” asked Mrs. Abernathy. “Leave it as it is?”
“Well, yes,” said Samuel. “I mean, it’s got trees, and birds, and elephants. Everybody likes elephants. You can’t not like an elephant. Or a giraffe. And, personally, I’m very fond of penguins.”
The pink demon gave a little shrug of agreement, or as much of a shrug as something without a neck can give, which isn’t very much at all.
“If you destroy it,” continued Samuel, “then you’ll just be back where you started, with a big lump of rock that doesn’t have a whole lot in it except demons. It’s not exactly going to be beautiful, is it?”
Mrs. Abernathy took a step toward him.
“And why do you imagine that we would want beauty?” she said. “Beauty mocks us, for we have none. Goodness appalls us, because we have no goodness. We are all that this world is not, and we are all that you are not.” She raised a hand to the stars above her.
“And this world is just the first. We have a universe to conquer. We have suns to extinguish, and planets to crush. In time, each of those lights in the sky will fade to nothing. We will extinguish them like candle flames between our fingers, until there is only blackness.”
The little pink demon, still thinking about penguins, gave a disappointed sigh. Mrs. Abernathy flicked a finger, and he exploded in a puff of pink and red.
“He goes to the back of the line,” said Mrs. Abernathy as Samuel wiped a piece of demon from his sleeve. “And as for you, I am strangely glad to see you. It means I can kill you now, and enjoy our triumph with the knowledge that you are not alive to spoil it.”
Mrs. Abernathy grinned. Her body began to bulge. Her skin stretched under the pressure, opening tears in her face and on her arms, but no blood came. Instead, something moved in the spaces revealed.
“Now, Samuel Johnson,” she said, “look upon me. Look upon Ba’al, and weep.”
Nurd’s finger was poised over the ignition key. He saw Mrs. Abernathy step away from the portal, but not far enough.
“Come on, Samuel,” he whispered. The little boy was brave, so very brave. Nurd hoped that Samuel wouldn’t die, but the odds in his favor weren’t good. The odds in Nurd’s favor weren’t much better, but he was determined to try. He would be brave, if not for his own sake, then for Samuel’s.
Mrs. Abernathy took another step toward Samuel. Samuel retreated in turn. Then Mrs. Abernathy started to shudder and swell.
“Oh no,” said Nurd. “Here we go …”
Mrs. Abernathy’s skin fell away in clumps, withering and turning to dry flakes as it hit the ground. A gray-black form was exposed, wrapped up in tentacles that now began to stretch and move as they were freed from the constraints of skin. Only her face and hair remained in place, like a rubber mask, but it was stretched so tightly over what was beneath that it bore no resemblance to the woman who had once worn it. One of the tentacles reached up, separated itself into claws, and wrenched the skin mask away.
And still Ba’al grew: six feet, then eight, then ten, on and on, larger and larger. Two legs appeared, bent backward at the knees, from which sharp spurs of bone erupted. Four arms emerged from the torso, but only two ended in clawed fingers. The second pair ended in blades of bone, yellowed and scarred. A great mass of tentacles sprouted from the demon’s back, all of them twisting and writhing like snakes.
Finally, Ba’al reached its full height, towering thirty feet above Samuel. There was a cracking sound, and what had looked like a bump in its chest was revealed as its head, which now untucked itself. It appeared to have no mouth, merely two dark eyes buried deep in its skull, but then the front of the skull split into four parts, like a segmented orange, and Samuel realized that it was all mouth, the four parts lined with row upon row of teeth, a gaping red hole at its center from which a multiplicity of dark tongues emerged.
Samuel was too frightened to move. He wanted to run, but his feet wouldn’t respond. In any case, his back was against the garden hedge. He could go right or left, but he couldn’t go any farther backward. He felt something brush his leg, and looked down to see Boswell, who had escaped from the house and followed his master. Even now, the little dog wanted to be near Samuel.
“Run, Boswell,” he whispered. “There’s a good boy. Run home.”
But Boswell didn’t run. He wished to, but he wasn’t going to desert his beloved Samuel. He barked at the horrid, unknown thing before him, nipping at its heels. One of its bladed limbs shot out in an effort to impale him, but Boswell skipped out of the way just in time and the long bone buried itself in the pavement, lodging firmly. Ba’al tried to free itself, but the bone was stuck.
Something in its struggles snapped Samuel out of his trance. He looked around for a weapon, and saw a half brick that had been dislodged from the house as the portal expanded. He picked it up and hefted it in his hand. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing
.
With a great wrench, Ba’al managed to pull the blade free, even as Boswell continued to bark and snap. A tentacle, larger than the rest, lashed out at him, catching the little dog around the chest and tossing him into the air. The pincers at the tentacle’s end shot out to cut him in two, but they missed him by inches and Boswell fell to the ground, stunned. He tried to get up, but one of his legs was broken and he was unable to raise himself. He yelped in pain, and the sound cut through Samuel, filling him with rage.
“You hurt my dog!” he shouted. By now he didn’t know if he was more angry than scared, or more scared than angry. It didn’t matter. He hated the thing before him: hated it for hurting Boswell; hated it for what it had done to the Abernathys and their friends; hated it for what it wanted to do to the whole world. Behind it, the portal was visible, and Samuel could see the Great Malevolence approaching, his army parting before him so that he could lead the legions of darkness into this new kingdom.
Ba’al bent down before Samuel, surrounding him with tentacles, those four limbs poised to finish him off. Its skull opened up once more, breathing its stink upon him as it hissed, and Samuel saw himself reflected in those dark, pitiless orbs.
He threw the half brick straight into its mouth.
It was a perfect shot. The lump of stone landed in the demon’s throat. It was too far down to be spat out, and too big to be swallowed. Ba’al staggered back, black blood and drool dripping from its jaws as it began to choke. Around it, the assembled creatures watching the unequal battle, waiting for the boy to be destroyed, gave a collective gasp of shock. Ba’al tried to reach into its mouth with its tentacles to free the blockage, but the gap was too narrow for them to gain purchase. It collapsed to its knees as smaller demons ran to its aid, climbing up its body in an effort to reach its mouth. Carefully three of them entered its jaws and began working at the brick, trying to free it. Samuel felt hands grasp his arms. Two of the figures in gold armor were securing him, their red eyes glaring as he was held in place. He struggled against them, but they were too strong.
There was a thud, and something landed before him. It was the half brick. Samuel looked up to see Ba’al rising from its knees, and in its eyes he saw his doom.
At that moment, a vintage Aston Martin, driven by a moon-headed figure in a blanket, sped behind Ba’al and disappeared into the portal, leaving behind it only exhaust fumes and a fading, “Good-byyyyyyyyye…”
For a second, nothing happened. Everyone, and everything, simply stared at the portal, unsure of what they had just seen. Flashes of white light appeared at its edges, and the portal, which had been spinning in a clockwise direction, reversed its flow and began to move counterclockwise. There was a sense of suction, as though a vacuum cleaner had just been switched on, but it seemed to affect only the demons, not Samuel. First the smaller ones, then the larger, were lifted from their feet and pulled inexorably into the portal. Some struggled against its force, holding on to lampposts, garden gates, even cars, but the portal began to spin faster and faster, and one by one they found themselves wrenched from one world and back to the next until the portal was filled with a mass of legs and tentacles and claws and jaws, demons bouncing off one another as they were drawn toward the center. Two of them, oddly, were desperately trying to hold on to glasses of beer.
At last, only one remained. The thing that had once been Mrs. Abernathy was heavier and stronger than anything else that had passed into this world, and it did not want to leave. Every limb, and every tentacle, was stretched to its limit, each clinging to something, however insubstantial, in an effort to fight against the force of the portal, which was now spinning so fast that it was nothing more than a blue blur. Finally, it proved too much even for the great demon, until at last only one tentacle remained clinging to the bottom of the garden gate, the rest of the demon’s body suspended in midair, its legs pointing to the void.
Samuel stepped forward. He stared into Ba’al’s eyes, and raised his right foot.
“Go to Hell,” he said, and stamped down hard on the tentacle with his heel.
The demon released its hold on the gate, and was sucked back to the place from which it had come. The portal instantly collapsed to a small pinpoint of blue light, then disappeared entirely.
Samuel knelt by Boswell and cradled the little dog’s head in his arms. A police car pulled up, and people began to emerge from their homes, but Samuel cared only for Boswell.
“Brave Boswell,” he whispered, and despite his pain, Boswell’s tail wagged at the sound of Samuel’s voice speaking his name. “Brave boy.”
Then Samuel looked up at the night sky, and he spoke another name, and his voice was filled with regret, and fondness, and hope.
“Brave Nurd.”
XXXII
In Which Everyone Lives Happily Ever After, or So It Seems
IT TOOK A LONG time for Biddlecombe to return to normal. People had died or, like the Abernathys and the Renfields, simply disappeared. For months afterward there were scientists, and television crews, and reporters cluttering up the town and asking all sorts of questions that the townsfolk quickly grew tired of answering. Nutcases, and people with nothing better to do, made journeys to the town to see the place in which, for a time, a gateway between worlds had opened. The problem was that, all damage to people and property aside, and the stories told by those who had encountered the demons, no actual evidence survived of what had occurred, apart from the stone statue of the three old gentlemen with shotguns. There were no physical remains of monsters, and those who had taken cell phone pictures of flying creatures, or who had used video cameras to take shots of demonic entities trampling flowerbeds in the local park, found that there was nothing but static to be seen. Oh, everyone accepted that something had happened in Biddlecombe, but, officially, nobody seemed entirely sure of what that something might have been, not even the scientists responsible for the Large Hadron Collider, who, in the wake of what had occurred, decided that in future they needed to keep a very close eye on their experiments. For now, though, the collider would remain powered off, and Ed and Victor were left to play Battleships in peace, while Professor Hilbert dreamed of traveling to other dimensions, but only ones that didn’t have demons in them.
The collider did have three very special visitors in the weeks that followed. Samuel, Maria, and Tom were treated with a great deal of curiosity and respect as they toured the facility, and they did their best to answer all of the scientists’ questions as politely as possible. Samuel and Maria decided that they quite liked the idea of becoming scientists, although they were pretty certain that, after all they’d seen, they’d be more careful about what they got up to than the CERN people had been.
“I still want to be a professional cricketer,” said Tom after their visit. “At least I can understand cricket. And nobody ever accidentally opened the gates of Hell during a test match …”
Eventually Biddlecombe began to fade from the headlines, and that suited everyone in the town just fine. They wanted their dull, pretty old Biddlecombe back, and that was what they got.
More or less.
Over at Miggin’s Pond, a boy named Robert Oppenheimer was throwing stones at ducks. It wasn’t that he had anything against ducks in particular. Had there been a dog, or a lemur, or a meerkat at which to throw stones instead he would happily have done so, but in the absence of any more exotic creatures, ducks would just have to do.
He had managed to hit a few birds, and was looking for more stones, when he was lifted up into the air by one leg and found himself dangling over the surface of the pond. An eyeball appeared on the end of an arm and, well, eyeballed him. Then a very polite voice said:
“I say, old chap, I do wish you wouldn’t do that. The ducks don’t like it and, frankly, I don’t much care for it either. If you persist, I will have no choice but to disassemble you and put you back together the wrong way. As you can imagine, that will hurt a lot. Do I make myself clear?”
Robert nodded, a
lbeit with some difficulty as he was still upside down. “Yes,” he said. “Perfectly.”
“Now say sorry to the ducks, there’s a good chap.”
“Sorry, ducks,” said Robert.
“Right, then, off you go. Toodle-pip.”
Robert was put back, surprisingly gently, on the bank. He found that all of the ducks were watching him, and quacking. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought that they were laughing.
Over time, other people reported similar odd encounters at Miggin’s Pond, but instead of calling in investigators, or selling tickets, the people of Biddlecombe simply kept quiet about it, and gave Miggin’s Pond a wide berth whenever they could.
In the staff room at Montague Rhodes James Secondary School, Mr. Hume sat staring intently at the head of a pin. During the Halloween disturbances, Mr. Hume had been forced to lock himself in a closet while a band of six-inch-high demons dressed as elves shouted at him through the keyhole. The whole experience had shaken him a great deal, and when he had learned of Samuel Johnson’s involvement in the affair he began to consider that the boy might know something about angels and pins that he didn’t.
So he stared hard at the pin, and wondered.
And on the head of the pin, two angels who had been performing a very nice waltz, surrounded by lots of other waltzing angels, suddenly stopped what they were doing as one turned to the other and said:
“Don’t look now, but that bloke’s back …”
One night, almost a month after the events of Halloween, when everyone was getting ready for December, and Christmas, Samuel was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. Boswell watched him from the doorway, his leg still encased in plaster but otherwise his clever, contented self. Samuel had just taken a bath, and the mirror was steamed up. He reached out and wiped some of the steam away. He glimpsed his reflection, and, standing behind him, the reflection of another.