The Infernals

  The most diabolical creatures of that realm, the Infernals, were answering her call.

  In Which Mr. Merryweather’s Elves Embark on a New Adventure

  MR. MERRYWEATHER’S ELVES WERE making good time on the motorway. There had been some initial problems with driving the van, since the only one of them who had a license was Jolly, and his legs were even shorter than those of his fellow dwarfs and therefore had no chance at all of reaching the brake or the accelerator. This problem was solved by gluing a bottle of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar to each of the van’s pedals with extra-strong adhesive, so Jolly simply had to step on a bottle cap to speed up or slow down.

  The dwarfs had been feeling somewhat glum since Mr. Merryweather had stomped off down the road, muttering and waving his fists, and vowing never again to work with anyone who couldn’t look him in the eye without standing on a chair. Say what you wanted to about Mr. Merryweather—and the dwarfs had said virtually everything about him that they could, including a number of insults that would be unprintable in a guide to swearing for sweary sailors—he had at least found them work, and he had stood by them following various incidents of assault, arson, and on one occasion, conspiracy to overthrow an elected government. Without him they were going to struggle to find jobs, and avoid arrest.

  Mumbles and Dozy stared mournfully into their glasses of Spiggit’s. Even though the van’s suspension was suspect and made drinking from a glass difficult, it was generally considered unwise to drink Spiggit’s directly from the bottle.21 In the first place, it was uncivilized, as ale always tasted better from a glass. In the second place, Spiggit’s tended to have an odd, cloudy residue that lurked at the bottom of every bottle, rather like one of those strange creatures that live in deep trenches on the seabed, waiting to snap at the unwary. Jolly had once drunk some of that residue as an experiment.22 The immediate effect was to cause him to seek the comfort of a toilet for so long that it was suggested he might like to take out a mortgage on it. Three months later, as he told anyone who would listen, his insides still weren’t right, for somewhere in his digestive organs Spiggit’s Old Peculiar continued to ferment away merrily, as the beer had the kind of long life more usually associated with lethal radiation. He was still prone to attacks of temporary blindness, an occasional inability to remember his own name, and explosive burping, which had led to one of the incidents of alleged arson after he belched a little too close to a naked flame.

  So Mumbles, Angry, and Dozy held on tightly to their glasses of ale (particularly since Spiggit’s, if spilled on skin or clothing and allowed to remain there for more than five seconds, tended to burn) and wondered how they were going to be able to afford to eat, or drink, without Mr. Merryweather to help them. There was a certain urgency to this, as they had only twelve cases of Spiggit’s left in the back of the van, along with two boxes of potato chips and a couple of sandwiches that appeared to be on the turn. It had been suggested that they dump the two boxes of chips in order to make room for more beer, but wiser counsel had prevailed, and they had dumped just one of the boxes of chips, and kept the sandwiches.

  “That’s the end of us,” said Angry. “I’ll have to go back to my old job.”

  “What was that?” said Dozy.

  “Not having a job.”

  “Take up much time, did it?”

  “All day. I had weekends off, though.”

  “Well, you would. You’d exhaust yourself otherwise.”

  “What about you?”

  Dozy shuddered. “Doesn’t bear thinking about. Children’s television.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. Remember that show Beefy and the Noodles?”

  “The one set in the bowl of soup?”

  “That’s the one. I was Percy Pea.”

  “Don’t remember you saying much.”

  “I was a pea. Peas are among your quieter vegetables on account of there not being much air in those pods. You can’t get a carrot to shut up, and don’t get me started on broccoli. I hated being a pea. And the suit smelled funny. The previous Percy Pea died in it.”

  “Really?”

  “Contracted something from the soup. We spent hours in that soup. It was horrible. Anyway, he caught a disease from the soup, and he died, but they didn’t find out until after the weekend. They thought the suit was empty, so they just pushed him back into his pod and left him there. That suit never smelled the same after.”

  “It wouldn’t, would it?” said Angry. “You can’t leave a dead person in a pea suit for a weekend and not expect it to smell a bit. Stands to reason. A day, maybe: you can get rid of a day’s dead smell, but not a weekend’s. What about you, Mumbles, what did you do?”

  “Vovos,” said Mumbles.

  “Oh,” said Angry.

  “Missed that,” said Dozy.

  “He says he did voice-overs,” said Angry, who tried to hide his confusion by looking more confused. “You know, for commercials, and movie trailers, and the like.”

  There was a pause while the dwarfs took this in.

  “Nice work if you can get it,” said Dozy, eventually.

  “Have to have a talent for it,” said Angry, who had developed an extra wrinkle in his forehead as he tried to figure out the precise trajectory of Mumbles’s career path.

  “Anglebog,” agreed Mumbles.

  “Indeed,” replied Angry, neutrally. “Good pronunciation would be the key.”

  “What about you, Jolly?” said Dozy. “What will you do?”

  “Do?” said Jolly. “Do? Listen to you lot. We’re not finished yet. We’ve been through worse times than this. We’ve been arrested, deported, and almost sold into slavery. You have to be optimistic. I guarantee that opportunity lies around the next bend.”

  He was so convincing that they raised their glasses and cheered.

  Opportunity did not, in fact, lie around the next bend. What did was an unmarked police car, in which Constable Peel and Sergeant Rowan of the Biddlecombe constabulary were checking the speeds of cars and drinking tea from a thermos.

  “Lovely tea, this,” said Sergeant Rowan. “How do you get it to taste like that?”

  “Honey,” said Constable Peel.

  “Fantastic. Never would have thought of it.”

  “Honey,” Constable Peel continued, “and … elves. With beer.”

  Sergeant Rowan sniffed his tea. “No, I don’t get any hint of elves or beer. Honey, yes, but not little people.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Sarge. There are elves in that van. And they’re drinking beer.”

  Sergeant Rowan squinted at the side of the van as it passed, and saw glasses of beer being raised in little hands. “Mr. Merryweather’s Elves,” he read aloud. He thought for a moment. No, it couldn’t be. Not that bunch. Completely different. Admittedly, it did look like the same van. It even looked like the same—

  Dwarfs.

  “Constable, stop that van!”

  Dozy shifted on his seat. “Can we stop somewhere? I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Yeah, and I wouldn’t mind some food,” said Angry. “I’m famished.”

  “There’s no service station around here, lads,” said Jolly. “Still, that’s the exit for Biddlecombe. We can find somewhere there.”

  He pulled off the motorway, not noticing the police car that was in pursuit, and quickly found himself on Shirley Jackson Road, which led to the center of Biddlecombe. As he drove along he passed an ice-cream van, and a small boy with a dachshund on the end of a leash. Jolly liked small dogs. Being the height that he was, he had to be careful around big ones.

  Now there were blue lights in his rearview mirror, and in his wing mirror. Funny, there seemed to be blue light everywhere. That was—

  “Missed!” shouted Mrs. Abernathy. “I missed him.”

  She was staring intently at the shard of glass in which she had been monitoring the progress of Samuel Johnson and his little mutt. She had focused all of her energy upon it, intent upon bringing him to her, and inst
ead a vehicle of some kind had got in her way. She concentrated again, feeling already that some of her power had ebbed.

  “Careful,” she whispered to herself. “Careful …”

  She raised her hands as if the boy were already before her and she was about to clutch his throat, and twin bursts of blue light streaked from her fingers and through the glass. She was aware of an impact of some kind in the world of men, the force of which made her blink hard. When she opened her eyes Samuel Johnson was still in Biddlecombe, except now he had stopped walking and was looking around in bewilderment.

  Samuel was puzzled. He could have sworn that, just moments before, a van carrying little men had been about to pass him, but it now seemed to have disappeared. Then a police car had approached him, and that had vanished too. And hadn’t there been an ice-cream van nearby? He’s been considering buying a cone for himself, even if the weather was still a bit cold. Perhaps he was working too hard, or he needed to get his glasses changed.

  There was something spinning on the road before him. As he drew closer, it grew still. It was a bottle of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar. A faint blue light danced around the cap, causing it to burst and spray beer all over the road. There was more blue light on the fender of the car beside him, and on the garden gate to his left, and in a puddle of oil on the ground, a puddle in which he could see himself reflected, and Boswell.

  And Mrs. Abernathy.

  “Oh no,” said Samuel as Mrs. Abernathy extended her hands for the final time. Streams of blue light shot from her fingertips and erupted from the puddle, enveloping Samuel and Boswell. For a second there was only a terrible coldness, and suddenly every atom in Samuel’s body felt as though it were being torn from its neighbor, and he was falling, falling into blackness and beyond.

  In Which Mr. Merryweather’s Dwarfs Make an Unpleasant Discovery

  IT WAS DOZY WHO woke first. He was called Dozy because of his ability to take a nap at any time. He could nap on roller coasters, on a sinking ocean liner, or while his toes were being set on fire—all of which he had actually done. Dozy was the kind of bloke who could take a nap while he was already taking another nap.

  He stretched his arms and yawned. He felt as if his body had been stretched on a rack, disassembled, and then reassembled by someone who wasn’t particularly worried about whether or not all of the bits were in the right place. Under similar circumstances, most people might have wondered why this might be, but Dozy had been drinking Spiggit’s Old Peculiar for some time, and was used to waking up feeling that way.

  He looked out of the window and saw what appeared to be immense white sand dunes stretching before him. He scratched his head as he tried to remember where it was they were supposed to be going when—well, whenever it was that whatever it was happened. Had they a seaside engagement? Dozy quite liked the sea. He decided to leave everyone else sleeping and stretch his legs.

  The sky above his head was filled with dark clouds tinged with red, so he figured that it was either sunrise or sunset, and it looked like there might be rain on the way. He took a deep breath, but he couldn’t smell the sea. He couldn’t hear the sea either. Dozy tried to remember if there was a desert anywhere in the vicinity of Biddlecombe, and decided that there wasn’t. There was a beach nearby, at Dunstead, but it was mainly stones and old shopping carts, and not like this at all. The sand beneath his feet was very white, and very fine. That sky was odd, though. The clouds kept changing shape and color, so that at times the sky appeared to be filled with faces tinged fireplace orange and chimney red. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have said that it was on fire. There was certainly a smell of burning in the air, and not nice burning either. It smelled as though someone had left a great many steaks on an enormous barbecue for far too long, and then allowed them to rot.

  He began to climb the nearest dune in the hope of getting his bearings, whistling as he went. There were more dunes. He climbed another, then another. When he reached the top of the third dune, he stopped whistling. He stopped doing anything at all, really, except staring.

  Stretched before him, all the way to the flaming horizon, were desks, and at the desks sat small red men with horns on their heads. Each of the desks had a hole on one side, through which other small red men were feeding pieces of something white that emerged from the far side of the desks as fine white sand. A third group of small red men moved back and forth between the desks, loading the sand into buckets and carrying it away, while the little seated men carefully noted the details of the operation in big books.

  To his right, at a much larger desk, sat a tall man in a black cloak with scarlet lining. Unlike the little fellows below, his skin was very pale, and his horns were larger and seemed to have been polished to a bright sheen. He had a thin mustache on his upper lip, and a beard that came to a pronounced point at the end of his chin. It was the sort of beard worn by someone who is Up to No Good, and doesn’t care who knows it. It was a beard that conjured up images of Dastardly Schemes, of women being Tied to Train Tracks and orphans being Deprived of Their Inheritances. It was a beard that screamed “I’m a Wrong ’Un, and Make No Mistake About It.”

  On the desk, close to where the bearded gentleman’s black, pointed boots were currently crossed, there was a sign that read: “A. Bodkin, Demon-in-Charge.”

  Dozy noted that A. Bodkin, Demon-in-Charge, was reading a newspaper called The Infernal Times.23 The headline read:

  GREAT MALEVOLENCE CONSIDERING NEXT MOVE

  “Victory Will Be Ours,” says Chancellor Ozymuth. “Anyone who doubts this will be dismembered.”

  A smaller substory announced:

  ACTION TO BE TAKEN AGAINST MRS. ABERNATHY

  “Someone has to take responsibility for failure of invasion,” says Chancellor Ozymuth, “and I’ve decided it should be her.”

  This Chancellor Ozymuth seems to be getting around, thought Dozy. He might not have been the brightest of dwarfs, but he was developing the uncomfortable suspicion that all was not quite right here.

  “Morning,” he said, then thought about it. “Afternoon. Er, evening?”

  A. Bodkin looked to where Dozy was standing. He puffed his cheeks and blew air from his mouth in the bored, world-weary manner of middle managers everywhere whose lot in life is to be disturbed just when they’re about to reach the good bit of something, and therefore never get to experience the good bit of anything, which makes them even more bored and world-weary.

  “Yes?” said A. Bodkin. “What is it?”

  “Just wondering what all those blokes are doing.”

  A. Bodkin lowered his newspaper.

  “Blokes? Blokes? They’re not ‘blokes’: they’re highly trained demonic operatives, not just some imps-come-lately with lunch boxes and an attitude. Blokes. Tch!”

  A. Bodkin returned to his newspaper, muttering about unions, and toilet breaks, and demons being lucky to have a job.

  “Yes, but what are they doing?” repeated Dozy.

  A. Bodkin rustled his newspaper in an I’m-very-busy-and-don’t-want-to-be-disturbed way, then, realizing that the short annoying person by his desk was not about to go away, lowered the paper again resignedly and said:

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? They’re grinding the bones of the dead.”

  “Grinding?” said Dozy.

  “Yes.”

  “Bones?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes. They’re hardly going to grind the bones of the living, are they? That would just be messy.”

  “Right,” said Dozy. He put his hands in his pockets and kicked idly at the sand, then remembered that it was not sand after all and apologized to it. “It’s nice to have a trade, I suppose.”

  He sucked at his lower lip and thought for a moment.

  “Where is this, exactly?” he asked.

  “Oh, you’re not lost, are you?” said A. Bodkin. “Not another one. I mean, how hard can it be to get this right? You’re bad, you die, you come to Hell,
you get processed, we find you a job somewhere. You’d think, after all this time, the chaps in Head Office would have this down to a fine art. Tch! I mean, really. Well, you’ll just have to make your own way to Central Processing. I’m far too busy supervising to help you.”

  He raised his left arm and examined an hourglass on his wrist to indicate just how busy he was. Sands poured from the upper glass into the lower one, but the level of the sands in the upper glass didn’t get any lower, and the level in the lower glass didn’t get any higher.

  “Just one small thing,” said Dozy. “Tell you the truth, two small things. Smallish. Actually, not small. Bit big, to be honest.”

  He laughed nervously.

  “Go on, then,” said A. Bodkin. “But this had better be the end of it. You’re distracting me from my work. Production has already decreased in the time that we’ve been talking. If I don’t keep an eye on this lot, I’ll have protests, people asking for tea breaks and time off to visit their aunties or go to the dentist. Look at them: they’re already on the verge of revolt!”

  Dozy looked at the lot in question. They looked about as likely to revolt as A. Bodkin was to mind a baby without stealing its pram.

  “That business about being dead,” said Dozy. “What did you mean by that, exactly?”

  “Oops, sorry,” said A. Bodkin, who didn’t look sorry at all. “You mean, you didn’t know. Tragic, just tragic.” He stifled a giggle. “Well, frankly, you’re dead. No longer alive. Faithfully departed. If there’s a bucket nearby, then you’ve kicked it. If you were a parrot, you’d have dropped off your perch. And the second thing?”