The Infernals

  Suddenly, they stopped, and Infernals of all shapes and forms turned their heads in the direction of the Mountain of Despair. Flames flickered deep in its heart as a shape appeared in the doorway. It was the Watcher, now many times taller and broader than before, its red skin glowing as though the creature had recently been forged in the fires within, a being of metal or stone that would slowly cool to gray and black.

  “How did it get in?” hissed Brompton to Edgefast as the shadow of the Watcher advanced before them.

  “It must have sneaked by,” said Edgefast, trying not to catch Brompton’s eye.

  “It’s forty feet tall! What did it do, wear a hat and dark glasses? Some guard you are.”

  But all questions about the Watcher, and any amazement that the guards, and the two armies, and Mrs. Abernathy and Duke Abigor might have felt at its altered appearance, faded away as it became clear that another presence was emerging from the mountain, a figure that dwarfed the Watcher just as the Watcher towered above most of the demons arrayed on the field. A fierce stench of sulfur swept across the plain and the light from within the mountain was lost, the flames hidden by the mass of the approaching creature. All was utter stillness and silence among the assembled armies. Even the dwarfs were quiet, seemingly frozen into muteness and immobility by what they were seeing. In Nurd’s Aston Martin, Boswell buried his muzzle in Samuel’s armpit and closed his eyes in terror, just as his nose twitched at the stink of what was coming, forming a picture of it in his dog brain that he was unable to erase.

  So enormous was the Great Malevolence that he had to crouch in order to pass beneath the lintel of the mountain’s door. When he stood erect at last there was a grandeur to the sight, and a sense of awe infected all who witnessed it, for here was not merely the most ancient and ferocious of evils, but the element of Evil itself given form. From this being flowed all that was wrong, all that was foul, all that blighted hope in world upon world, universe upon universe. His crown was formed from spurs of bone that grew from his own skull, jagged and yellow. His great frame was still sheathed in the armor that he had donned in expectation of his crusade upon Earth, etched with the names of every man and woman born and yet to be born, for he hated them all and wanted to remember his fury at each one, the great litany of names constantly being added to as more humans entered the world. And some of those names burned, for there were those who had damned themselves by their actions, and so were destined to join him.

  Most of the flesh on the Great Malevolence’s face had long since decayed, leaving a thin layer of brown, leathery skin draped over his bones, broken at his cheeks, so that the muscles and bone beneath were clearly visible. His teeth were jagged and double-rowed, set in blackened, diseased gums, and a pale pink serpent’s tongue licked at his rotted lips.

  But terrible though his face was, it was his eyes that truly chilled, for they were almost human in the depth of their feeling, filled with unbounded rage and a dreadful, poisonous sadness. From where he watched inside Nurd’s car, Samuel understood at last why this being hated men and women so much: he hated them because they were so like himself, because the worst of them was mirrored in him. He was the source of all that was bad in men and women, but he had none of the greatness, and none of the grace, of which human beings were capable, so that only by corrupting them was his own pain diminished, and thus his existence made more tolerable.

  Now he stared out over the battlefield, the Watcher poised before him, and as he spoke all trembled in fear.

  “WHO HAS DARED TO RAISE OPPOSING ARMIES IN MY REALM? WHO SETS DEMON AGAINST DEMON?”

  As if by a prearranged signal the armies separated, putting as much space as possible between themselves and their commanders, so that Mrs. Abernathy and Duke Abigor stood isolated.

  “My lord and master,” said Abigor, bowing his head. “It is good to see you restored to us. Without your hand to guide us we have been lost, and we have been betrayed by our own. I have been forced to act to protect this great kingdom against the treason of one who was once beloved of you, this”—he gestured at Mrs. Abernathy with disgust—“polluted personage, this patchwork woman.” He seemed about to say more, but the Great Malevolence raised a clawed finger and Duke Abigor was silent as his master turned his attention to Mrs. Abernathy.

  “DOES ABIGOR LIE?”

  “No, my master,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “For we have been lost, and we have been betrayed, but the treason was not mine. Look to the standards: I fight under your banner, but Abigor fights only under his own.”

  “Permit me to explain—” Abigor began to say, but his words turned to fat black flies that buzzed against his cheeks and tongue, and Mrs. Abernathy allowed herself a sly grin as her opponent tried to spit out the insects, but with each one that he ejected two more came into being until Abigor’s mouth was filled with them.

  “I set out to make amends to you for my failings, and I have done so,” continued Mrs. Abernathy, now that she had silenced Abigor for a time.

  “YOUR FAILINGS WERE GREAT. SO TOO MUST BE THE RECOMPENSE.”

  “And it is,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “For I have brought you the child who sabotaged all that we had worked for. I have brought you Samuel Johnson!”

  She waved to the wagon driver, who urged on his horses, bringing the covered cage to the clearing on the battlefield. Beside her Abigor had found enough power to disperse the flies, and interrupted her.

  “She lies, my master! I fight beneath my own banner only because she uses your standard to hide her treason. She has compounded betrayal with more betrayal. She stole the child from me. It was I who found a way to open the portal, but she took the boy from my castle that she might claim credit for his capture.”

  The wagon drew nearer, its prize waiting to be revealed, lightning flashing to reveal the shape inside the cage.

  “And where is the portal that you opened, Duke Abigor?” asked Mrs. Abernathy. “Show it to us, that we may marvel at it. Display it for our master, that we may harness its potential for another invasion.”

  “It vanished,” spluttered Abigor. “I could not keep it open for long. I could only find time to snatch the boy before it closed again.”

  Mrs. Abernathy raised her arms.

  “Let me give you proof of his treason, my master,” she said. “For I know the location of the portal. I know, for it lies … within me!”

  Her eyes shone a cold blue, and a blue glow filled her mouth. The air around her seemed to swirl, forming a column of dust and ash that caught the light coming from within her, so that she became the center of her own blue world. As she grew taller and taller she was both Mrs. Abernathy and her old, ancient self, the demon Ba’al, its tentacles writhing, its massive head visible beneath Mrs. Abernathy’s stretched skin, like one transparent image overlaid upon another. Her segmented jaws opened wider and wider—ten, twenty, thirty feet in width—revealing a tunnel of dark light with a blue heart.

  “Behold, my master!” she cried. “Behold the portal! And behold—Samuel Johnson!”

  The wagon master whipped away the black cloth, and the crowd gasped at the figure of Mr. Happy Whip, grinning his plastic grin at the assembled forces of Hell.

  And at that moment a rock with four eyes shot from the ranks, followed closely by a cloth-covered wagon adorned with unimpressive horns. The disguises fell away, revealing Dan, Dan the Ice-Cream Man, hunched over the wheel of his beloved van, urged on by Sergeant Rowan, and Constable Peel, and four determined dwarfs; revealing Samuel Johnson in the Aston Martin once owned by his dad, Boswell held tightly in the crook of one arm, the other hand resting on the shoulder of a goggle-eyed Wormwood.

  And revealing Nurd: Nurd, no longer Nurd the inept, Nurd the coward; no longer Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities. No, this was a Nurd transformed. This was Nurd, the Vanquisher of Demons. This was Nurd, the Triumphant.

  This was Nurd, the Frankly Terrified.

  Before Mrs. Abernathy could react, Nurd had driven the car straight into her mout
h, the ice-cream van barely inches behind him. As they disappeared through the portal, the faint strains of “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” floated from Mrs. Abernathy’s jaws over the great plain.

  Even on a battlefield where two massive armies faced each other, and the Devil himself towered over them both seeking an explanation for what was going on, a pair of motorized vehicles driving straight down a demon’s throat, a throat recently transformed into a gateway between universes, still counted as something quite out of the ordinary. Nothing happened for a number of seconds, apart from the occupants of the two vehicles falling through a wormhole of sorts, with all that entailed, including being stretched to the point of agony and then compressed in a similarly painful manner, but all this was hidden from the denizens of Hell, who continued to stare at Mrs. Abernathy to see how she might respond to this recent turn of events.

  Mrs. Abernathy might have hidden the seeds of the portal within herself, but she had not intended it to be used in the manner to which Samuel, Nurd, and company had just put it. She had planned on manifesting it at a point outside herself and then, with her master’s help, drawing all the power that she could from the Collider in one fell swoop and reversing the portal’s direction of travel, so that instead of moving objects from Earth to Hell, it would move them from Hell to Earth. It would not be enough to pass an army through, but it would be enough to transport the Great Malevolence and herself to the world of men, and there they would create a new Hell, just the two of them. Unfortunately that plan now looked like it would have to be put on the back burner, for Mrs. Abernathy had more pressing concerns.

  Her body shuddered. She gagged and choked, like someone who has swallowed a piece of food that has gone down the wrong way, which, in a vehicular sense, was more or less what had happened. The blue light grew stronger and brighter, so bright that the assembled demons, even the Great Malevolence himself, were forced to look away from it, so bright that it turned from blue to white, and burned so strongly that Mrs. Abernathy screamed.

  The portal collapsed, and Mrs. Abernathy imploded, her being turning in upon itself, the substance of her spiraling inward as every atom in her body was separated from the next. Her disguise of human skin was sucked from her, revealing the old monster within. Her segmented jaws were pulled into her throat, her tentacles folded themselves over the front of her body as though to protect her, and there was a soft popping sound as the portal closed and the fragments of her being were scattered throughout the Multiverse.

  XXXVII

  In Which We Get to the “Happy Ever After” Part

  THERE WAS A BLUE flash on Ambrose Bierce Drive and two vehicles appeared: an Aston Martin, its windows so cracked that it was impossible to see through them, its four wheels splayed outward like the legs of a collapsing animal so that the car rested on its underside; and a very battered ice-cream van, containing four similarly battered dwarfs covered from head to toe in raspberry syrup; two policemen whose hats had melted; and one bewildered ice-cream salesman with smoking hair.

  “Next time we take the train,” said Jolly, staggering from the back of the van. “I feel like I’ve been dragged through a washing machine backward.”

  His fellow dwarfs joined him, Dozy utilizing one of his horns to scrape up the last of the syrup. Acrid smoke began to emerge from beneath the van, quickly followed by flickering flames. Dan, Dan the Ice-Cream Man looked on mournfully as the remains of his business went up in smoke.

  “Perhaps I wasn’t really cut out to be an ice-cream salesman,” he said. “At least the insurance will cover it, I suppose.”

  Jolly tapped him on the arm. “Think you’ll buy a new van, then?”

  “Probably. Don’t know what I’ll do with it, though.”

  “Funny you should mention that,” said Jolly, adopting his most trustworthy of expressions. “How would you feel about transporting four hardworking, self-motivated individuals to a variety of business engagements?”

  “Sounds all right,” said Dan.

  “It does, doesn’t it?” said Jolly. “I wish we actually knew four hardworking, self-motivated individuals, but in their absence, how about driving the four of us around instead?”

  Sergeant Rowan and Constable Peel helped Nurd, Wormwood, Samuel, and Boswell to free themselves from the Aston Martin, as the doors had buckled badly when they traveled through the portal.

  Nurd patted the roof of the car sadly. “I think she may have taken her last trip,” he said, as Wormwood wiped a tear from his eye. Wormwood had grown to love the Aston Martin almost as much as he loved Nurd; more so, even, as the car had never hit him with a scepter, used unpleasant language toward him, or threatened to bury him upside down in sand for eternity.

  “At least you have a car, or what’s left of one,” said Constable Peel. “How are we going to explain the loss of our patrol car, Sarge? And where did it go?”

  “We’ll never know, son,” said Sergeant Rowan.41

  Suddenly, there was movement in the flaming ice-cream van, and seconds later Shan and Gath emerged from the conflagration, patting out small patches of fire on their fur.

  “Forgot about them,” said Angry, with the casual air of someone who has left a shoelace undone rather than abandoned two creatures to an inferno of metal and plastic.

  “Where did they come from?” asked Constable Peel.

  “We hid them in the fridges while you were up front with the sarge and Dan,” said Jolly. “Sorry. I mean, it wasn’t like we could leave them in Hell, not after that winged bloke found Samuel at their cave. It wouldn’t have been fair.”

  “We’ve brought four demons to Earth,” said Sergeant Rowan. He had gone rather pale. “They’ll have my stripes.”

  Constable Peel grinned. “I don’t have any stripes.”

  “I know. They’ll have your guts for garters instead.”

  “Oh.”

  “Indeed. Not grinning now, are you?”

  “But we’ll get into terrible trouble, Sarge, and I’ve had enough trouble to last a lifetime. The chief constable isn’t going to approve of us bringing demons back from Hell. He doesn’t even like going abroad for his holidays because it’s full of foreigners. If we tell him what we’ve done, we’ll be directing traffic for the rest of our lives.”

  Sergeant Rowan looked at Shan and Gath. Having put out the flames on their fur, they were now fortifying themselves with the last of their home brew.

  “Then we won’t tell him,” said Sergeant Rowan.

  “But we can’t just leave them and Nurd and Wormwood to wander around. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “We’re not going to leave them to wander around either,” said Sergeant Rowan. “Constable Peel, I have a plan.”

  Nurd looked at the blue sky above his head, clouds scudding across it, lit by the amber glow of a beautiful setting sun. He smelled flowers, and grass, and burning ice-cream cones. He saw a cat scratching its back against a pillar, and a bird pecking seeds from a feeder. He felt exhilarated, and free.

  And very afraid. He was an alien creature here, a demon. They might hate him, or fear him, and lock him away. What about Wormwood? Wormwood had barely been able to look after himself in Hell. Without Nurd he’d be lost, but even Nurd wasn’t sure how they were going to survive in the world of men.

  A hand grasped his, squeezing it tightly. Nurd looked down and saw Samuel. Beside him, Boswell wagged his tail.

  “It’s going to be okay,” said Samuel. “Look, you have a whole new world to explore.”

  The whole trip to Hell, with all of its traumas and triumphs, had lasted a mere three hours on Earth, and his mother, although worried, had not yet begun to actively fret, although she did as soon as Samuel explained to her what had occurred. A cup of tea was definitely in order, but this time Mrs. Johnson went out to get the milk herself while Samuel had a bath. When Mrs. Johnson returned Wormwood was in the bath, and Nurd was wearing one of Mr. Johnson’s old bathrobes and blowing bubbles from a small plastic pipe.

/>   “What are we going to do about those two?” asked Mrs. Johnson as she arranged tea and cake on a tray. “They can’t stay here forever. We don’t have enough room.”

  “There’s a plan,” said Samuel.

  And there was.

  Samuel went to school as usual the following morning. To those who were perceptive enough to spot the changes, like Tom and Maria, he seemed older somehow, but also stronger and more determined, even before he told his two closest friends all that had happened the previous day. Then, his spare glasses fixed firmly upon his nose, he strode up to the canteen, where he found Lucy Highmore and two of her friends finishing some homework at one of the tables.

  “Hello,” said Samuel to Lucy. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  Lucy nodded, and her friends packed up their books and departed, giggling. Lucy looked hard at Samuel Johnson for the first time. She had never been unkind to him, but neither had she exchanged more than a couple of words with him before. They were in different classes, and only mixed at assembly. Now, face to face, and with no distractions, she thought that he was quite handsome in a funny way, and although they were the same age, there was a sadness, and a wisdom, in his eyes that made him appear older than she.

  “My name’s Samuel.”

  “I know.”

  “Yesterday I asked out a letter box, thinking it was you.”

  “Do I look like a letter box?”