SAMUEL AWOKE SHORTLY AFTER eight to the sound of plates banging in the kitchen. He dressed quickly, then went downstairs. Boswell was waiting expectantly for scraps from the breakfast table. He glanced at Samuel, wagged his tail in greeting, then went back to gazing intently at Mrs. Johnson and the remains of the bacon on her plate.
“Mum—,” Samuel began, but he was immediately cut off.
“Stephanie says that you came in late last night,” said his mother.
“I know, and I’m sorry, but—”
“No ‘buts.’ You know I don’t like you being out late by yourself.”
“But—”
“What did I just say? No ‘buts.’ Now sit down and eat your cereal.”
Samuel wondered if he would ever be allowed to complete a sentence again. First Stephanie, and now his mother. If this continued, he’d be forced to communicate entirely through sign language, or notes scribbled on pieces of paper, like someone in solitary confinement.
“Mum,” said Samuel, in his most serious and grown-up of tones. “I have something important to tell you.”
“Uh-huh.” His mother stood and carried her plate to the sink, disappointing Boswell considerably.
“Mother, please.”
Samuel almost never called his mum “mother.” It always sounded wrong, but it had the effect, on this occasion, of attracting her attention. She turned round and folded her arms.
“Well?”
Samuel gestured at the kitchen chair opposite him, the way he saw grown-ups on television do when they invited people into their office to tell them they were about to be fired.
“Please, take a seat.”
Mrs. Johnson gave a long-suffering sigh, but did as she was asked.
“It’s about the Abernathys,” said Samuel.
“The Abernathys? The people at number 666?”
“Yes, and their friends.”
“What friends?”
“Well, I don’t know their friends’ names, but they were a man and a woman, and they were both fat.”
“And?”
“They are no more,” said Samuel, solemnly. He had read that phrase somewhere, and had always fancied using it.
“What does that mean?”
“They’ve been taken.”
“Taken where?”
“To Hell.”
“Oh, Samuel!” His mother rose and returned to the sink. “You had me worried there for a minute. I thought you were being serious. Where do you get these ideas from? I really will have to keep a closer eye on what you’re watching on television.”
“But it’s true, Mum,” said Samuel. “They were all in the Abernathys’ basement dressed in robes, and then there was a blue light and a hole in the air, and a big claw reached out and pulled Mrs. Abernathy inside, and then she appeared again except it wasn’t her but something that looked like her. Then spiderwebs took their fat friends and, finally, Mr. Abernathy was yanked in by a big tongue, and when it was all over there were four of them again, but it wasn’t them, not really.
“And,” he finished, playing his trump card, “they’re trying to open the gates of Hell. I heard Mrs. Abernathy say so, or the thing that looks like Mrs. Abernathy.”
He took a deep breath and waited for a response.
“And that’s why you were half an hour late coming back last night?” asked his mother.
“Yes.”
“You know that you’re not supposed to be out past eight, especially now that the evenings are getting dark.”
“Mum, they’re trying to open the gates of Hell. You know: Hell. Demons, and stuff. Monsters.” He paused for effect, then added: “The Devil!”
“And you didn’t eat your dinner,” said his mum.
“What?” Samuel was floored. He knew that his mother tended to ignore a lot of what he said, but he had never lied to her. Well, hardly ever. There were some things she didn’t need to know, such as where her private stash of chocolate kept disappearing to, or how the rug in the living room had been moved slightly to cover some nasty burn marks after an experiment involving match heads.
“Don’t say ‘what,’ say ‘pardon,’” his mother corrected. “I said you didn’t eat your dinner.”
“That’s because Stephanie sent me to bed early, but that’s not the point.”
“Excuse me, Samuel Johnson, but that’s precisely the point. You came in so late that you couldn’t eat your dinner. There was spinach. I know you don’t like it a lot, but it’s very healthy. And you annoyed Stephanie, and it’s hard to get good babysitters these days.”
Samuel was by now completely bewildered. His mother could be very strange. According to her, this was how the world worked:
THINGS THAT ARE BAD
1. Coming in late.
2. Not eating spinach.
3. Annoying Stephanie.
4. Trying to confuse Mr. Hume with talk of angels and pins.
5. Not wearing the hat his grandmother had knit for him, even if it was purple and made him look like he had a swollen head.
6-99.Lots of other stuff.
100. Trying to open the gates of Hell.
“Mum, haven’t you heard anything I’ve said?” asked Samuel.
“I’ve heard everything that you’ve said, Samuel, and it’s more than enough. Now eat your breakfast. I have a lot to do today. If you want to, you can help me with the shopping later. Otherwise you can just stay here, but no television and no video games. I want you to read a book, or do something useful with your time. It’s all those cartoons and monster-killing games that have given you these ideas. Honestly, dear, you live in a world of your own sometimes.”
And then she did something completely unexpected. Having spent the last five minutes complaining about him, and not believing anything that he’d told her, she came over and hugged him, and kissed his hair.
“You do make me laugh though,” she said. She looked into his eyes, and her face grew sad. “Samuel, all this stuff—these stories, the angels on the pin—it’s not to do with your dad, is it? I know you miss him, and things have been a bit difficult since he left. You know I love you, don’t you? You don’t need to go looking for attention from me. I’m here, and you’re the most important person in my world. You will remember that, won’t you?”
Samuel nodded. His eyes felt hot. They always did when his mum talked about his dad. He’d been gone for two months and three days now. Samuel wished that he’d come back, but at the same time he was angry with him. He wasn’t sure what had happened between his mum and dad, but his dad was now living up north, and Samuel had only seen him twice since the break-up. From a whispered but angry phone conversation that he’d overheard between his mum and dad, someone called Elaine was involved. Samuel’s mum had called Elaine a very bad name during the conversation, and then had hung up the phone and started crying. Samuel was sometimes angry at his mum too, because he wondered if she might have done something to drive his dad away. And, on occasion, when he was feeling particularly sad, Samuel would wonder if he himself had done anything to make his dad leave, if he’d been bad, or mean to him, or had let his dad down in some way. For the most part, though, he sensed that his dad was the one who was most to blame, and he hated the fact that his dad made his mum cry.
“Now eat your bacon,” said Samuel’s mum. “I’ve left it under the grill for you.”
She kissed him on the head again, then went upstairs.
Samuel ate his bacon. Sometimes he just didn’t understand adults. He wondered if he ever would, or if there would come a time, after he became a grown-up himself, when it all made sense to him.
He finished his food, fed the scraps to Boswell, then washed his plate and sat down at the table again. He patted Boswell thoughtfully. There was still the not-so-small matter of the opening of the gates of Hell to be dealt with, and his mum had been no help at all with that.
“Now what are we supposed to do?” asked Samuel.
If Boswell could have shrugged, he would hav
e.
The doorbell rang at number 666. It was Mrs. Abernathy who answered. Standing before her was the postman, holding a large parcel. He wasn’t the usual postman, who was on holiday in Spain, and he had never seen Mrs. Abernathy before, but he thought she was very good looking.
“Parcel for Mr. Abernathy,” he said.
“That would be my”—Mrs. Abernathy, unused to talking to someone who wasn’t another demon, had to think for a moment—“husband,” she finished. “He’s not here at the moment.”
“No problem. You can sign for it.”
He handed Mrs. Abernathy a pen, and a form on a clipboard. Mrs. Abernathy looked confused.
“Just sign, er, there,” said the postman, pointing to a line at the bottom of the form.
“I don’t seem to have my glasses,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “Would you mind stepping inside for a moment while I look for them?”
“It’s just a signature,” said the postman. “On a line. That line.” Once again, he pointed helpfully at the line in question.
“I don’t like signing anything that I haven’t read,” said Mrs. Abernathy.
It takes all sorts, thought the postman. “Right you are, then, ma’am. I’ll wait here while you look for your glasses.”
“Oh, please, come inside. I insist. It’s so cold out, and it may take me a moment or two to find them.” She moved farther into the house, still holding the clipboard. The clipboard was very important to the postman. It contained details of all of the parcels and registered letters that he had delivered that day, and he wasn’t supposed to let it out of his sight. Reluctantly he followed Mrs. Abernathy into the house. He noticed that the blinds and curtains were drawn in the rooms adjoining the hall, and there was a funny smell, like rotten eggs and recently struck matches.
“Bit dark in here,” he said.
“Really?” said Mrs. Abernathy. “I happen to like it this way.”
And the postman noticed, for the first time, that there seemed to be a blue glow to Mrs. Abernathy’s eyes.
The door closed behind him.
But Mrs. Abernathy was in front of him, so who could have closed it?
He was turning to find out when a tentacle curled itself round his neck and lifted him off the floor. The postman tried to say something, but the tentacle was very tight. He had a brief glimpse of a huge mouth, and some big teeth, and then everything went dark forever.
Humans were puny, thought Mrs. Abernathy. She had been sent to find out their strengths and weaknesses, but already she could tell that the latter far outweighed the former.
On the other hand, they didn’t taste bad at all.
Mrs. Abernathy licked her lips and went into the dining room, where the curtains were drawn. Three figures sat upon chairs, doing nothing in particular apart from smelling funny. Mr. Abernathy and the Renfields were starting to turn an ugly shade of purple, like meat that was going bad, and their fingernails had begun to drop off. That was the trouble with destroying the life force of another being, and taking on its shape. It was like opening a banana, throwing away the fruit, and then sewing up the skin in the hope that it would continue to look like a banana. It would, but only for a while, and then it would start turning black.
“I’m concerned about the boy,” said Mrs. Abernathy.
Her husband looked at her. His eyes were milky.
“Why?” he asked, his voice little more than a croak as his vocal cords began to decay. “He’s just a child.”
“He will talk.”
“Nobody will believe him.”
“Somebody might.”
“And if they do? We are more powerful than they can ever be.”
Mrs. Abernathy snorted in disgust. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” she said. “The only powerful thing about you is your smell.”
She shook her head and walked away. That was the problem with lower demons: they had no cunning, and no imagination.
Mrs. Abernathy was of the highest order of demons, only a level below the Great Malevolence himself. She had knowledge of humans, for the Great Malevolence had spoken of them to her, and with him she had watched them from afar, as if through a dark window. What he saw fed his hatred and jealousy. He rejoiced when men and women did bad things, and howled with rage when they did good. He wanted to reduce their world to rubble and scarred earth, and destroy every living thing in it that walked, crawled, swam, or flew. It was Mrs. Abernathy who would pave the way for him. The Great Malevolence, and the humans’ machine with its beams and particles, would do the rest.
But there remained the problem of the boy. Children were dangerous, Mrs. Abernathy knew, more so than adults. They believed in things like right and wrong, good and evil. They were persistent. They interfered.
First she would find out what Samuel Johnson knew. If he had been a naughty little boy, one who had been sticking his nose in where he had no business sticking it, he would have to be dealt with.
IX
In Which We Learn a Little About the Gates of Hell, None of Which Is Entirely Helpful
AFTER HIS MOTHER LEFT to do her shopping, Samuel spent some time at the kitchen table, his chin cupped in his hands, considering his options. He knew that Mrs. Abernathy, or the entity that now occupied her body, was up to no good, but he was facing a problem encountered by young people the world over: how to convince adults that you were telling the truth about something in which they just did not want to believe.
His mother had told him not to play computer games, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use his computer at all. With Boswell at his heels, Samuel went up to his bedroom, sat at his desk, and began to search the internet. He decided to start with what he knew for certain, so he typed “gates of Hell” into the search engine.
The first reference that came up was to a huge bronze sculpture entitled La Porte de l’Enfer, which in English means The Gate of Hell, by an artist named Auguste Rodin. Apparently, Rodin was asked to create the sculpture in 1880, and promised to deliver it by 1885. Instead Rodin had still been working on it when he died in 1917. Samuel did a small calculation and discovered that Rodin had been thirty-two years late in delivering the sculpture. He wondered if Rodin might have been related to Mr. Armitage, their local painter, who had been supposed to paint their living room and dining room over a single weekend and had in fact taken six months to do it, and even then had left one wall and part of the ceiling unfinished. Samuel’s father and Mr. Armitage had had a big argument about it when they met in the street. “It’s not the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Mr. Armitage had said. “I’ll get round to it when I can. You’ll want me flat on my back painting angels next.”16
Samuel’s father had suggested that if Mr. Armitage had been asked to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he would have taken twenty years instead of four, and still would have left God without a beard. At that point, Mr. Armitage had said a rude word and walked away, and Samuel’s father had ended up finishing the ceiling and wall himself.
Badly.
Anyway, while Rodin’s gates looked very impressive, they didn’t seem to have a blue light around them, and Samuel read that they had been inspired by a writer named Dante, and his book The Divine Comedy. Samuel suspected that neither Dante nor Rodin had ever really seen the gates of Hell, and had just taken a guess.17
After that, Samuel found some dodgy heavy-metal groups who either had songs named after the gates of Hell, or simply liked putting images of demons on their album covers in order to make themselves seem more terrifying than they really were, since most of them were just hairy chaps from nice families who had spent too much time alone in their bedrooms as teenagers. Samuel did discover that the Romans and Greeks believed the gates were guarded by a three-headed dog called Cerberus, who made sure that nobody who entered could ever leave, but they also believed a boatman took dead people across the River Styx, and Samuel had seen no sign of a river in the Abernathys’ basement.
He tried “doors of Hell,” but didn’t have any
more luck. Finally, he just typed in “Hell,” and came up with lots of stuff. Some religions thought that Hell was hot and fiery, and others thought it was cold and gloomy. Samuel didn’t think any of them could know for certain, since by the time someone found out the truth he would be dead and the information would probably be too late to be useful. What he did find interesting was that most of the world’s religions believed in Hell, even if they didn’t always call it that, and lots of them had names for whatever they felt ruled over it: Satan, Yanluo Wang, Yamaraj. The one thing on which everyone seemed to agree was that Hell wasn’t a very pleasant place, and was not somewhere that you wanted to end up.
After an hour, Samuel stopped searching. He was frustrated. He wanted answers. He wanted to know what to do next.
He wanted to stop Mrs. Abernathy before she opened the gates.
Samuel’s mother was trying to work out if two small cans of baked beans were better value than one big can when a figure appeared beside her. It was Mrs. Abernathy.
“Hello, Mrs. Johnson,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “How lovely to see you.”
Mrs. Johnson didn’t know why exactly it was lovely for Mrs. Abernathy to see her. She and Mrs. Abernathy barely knew each other, and had never exchanged more than a polite hello in the past.18
“Well, it’s lovely to see you too,” Mrs. Johnson lied. Something about Mrs. Abernathy was making her uneasy. In fact, now that she thought about it, there were lots of things not quite right about the woman standing next to her. She was wearing a lovely black velvet overcoat, which was far too nice to wear for shopping, unless you were shopping for an even lovelier black overcoat and wanted to impress the salesperson. Her skin, although very pale, paler than Mrs. Johnson remembered from their previous brief meetings, had a bluish tinge to it, and the veins beneath her skin were more obvious than before. Her eyes too were very blue. They seemed to burn with a faint flame, like a gas fire. Mrs. Abernathy was wearing lots of strong perfume, but she still smelled a little funny, and not in a ho-ho way.
As Mrs. Johnson looked at Mrs. Abernathy, and inhaled her perfume, she felt herself becoming sleepy. Those eyes drew her in, and the fire within them grew more intense.