“What is the ADAAAAHPT doing on the floor?” said Professor Stefan. “He’s your responsibility, Hilbert. You can’t just leave assistants lying around. Makes the place look untidy.”
Professor Hilbert, the Assistant Head of Particle Physics, looked at Brian in puzzlement.
“He appears to have fainted.”
“Fainted?” said Professor Stefan. “Fainted? Listen here, Hilbert: Elderly ladies faint. Young women of a delicate disposition faint. Assistants do not faint. Tell him to stop all of this nonsense immediately. I want my Jammie Dodgers. He’ll have to get some fresh ones. I’m not eating those ones after they’ve been on the floor. We can give them to the numbskulls in Technical Support.”
“We don’t have any Technical Support,” said Professor Hilbert. “There’s only Brian.”
He helped Brian to sit up, which meant that Professor Hilbert was now technically supporting Technical Support.
“Guh—” said Brian.
“No, it’s not good,” said Professor Hilbert. “It’s not good at all.”
“Guh—” said Brian again.
“I think he may have bumped his head,” said Professor Hilbert. “He keeps saying that it’s good.”
“You mean that he’s bumped his head so hard he thinks good is bad?” said Professor Stefan. “We can’t have that. Next he’ll be going around killing chaps and asking for a round of applause as he presents us with their heads. He’ll make a terrible mess.”
Brian raised his right hand, and extended the index finger.
“It’s a guh—it’s a guh—it’s a guh—”
“What’s he doing now, Hilbert?”
“I think he’s rapping, Professor.”
“Oh, do make him stop. We’ll have no hip-hoppity music here. Awful racket. Now, opera, there’s—”
“IT’S. A. GHOST!” shrieked Brian.
Professor Hilbert noticed that Brian’s hair was standing on end, and his skin was covered in goose bumps. The atmosphere in the lab had also grown considerably colder. Professor Hilbert could see Brian’s breath. He could see his own breath. He could even see Professor Stefan’s breath. He could not, however, see the breath of the semitransparent young woman, dressed as a servant girl, who was standing in a corner and fiddling with something that was obvious only to her. Her image flickered slightly, as though it were being projected imperfectly from nearby.
Professor Hilbert stopped supporting Brian, who duly fell backward and would have banged his head painfully had not some Jammie Dodgers absorbed most of the impact.
“So it is,” said Professor Hilbert. “I say, it’s another ghost.”
Professor Stefan peered at the young woman over the top of his spectacles.
“A new one, too. Haven’t seen her before.”
Professor Hilbert carefully approached the ghost.
“Hello,” he said. He waved his hand in front of the ghost’s face, but she didn’t seem to notice. He considered his options, then poked at the woman’s ribs. His finger passed right through her.
“Bit rude,” said Professor Stefan disapprovingly. “You hardly know the girl.”
“Nothing,” said Professor Hilbert. “No response.”
“Just like the rest.”
“Indeed.”
Slowly, the image of the girl began to fade, until finally there was only a hint of vapor to indicate that she had ever been there at all, If, in fact, she had ever been there at all. Oh, she was certainly somewhere, of that Professor Hilbert was sure. He just wasn’t convinced that the somewhere in question was a laboratory in twenty-first-century Biddlecombe.
Brian had managed to struggle to his feet, and was now picking pieces of Jammie Dodger from his hair. He stared at the corner where the girl had been.
“I thought I saw a ghost,” he said.
“Yes,” said Professor Hilbert. “Well done, you. And on only your second day, too. You can’t go around fainting every time you see one, though. You’ll end up on the floor more often than you’re upright if you do.”
“But it was a ghost.”
“Just make a note of it, there’s a good chap. See that big hard-backed notebook on the desk over there?” He pointed to a massive black volume, bound in leather. “That’s our record of ‘ghost sightings.’ Write down the time it began, the time it ended, what you saw, then sign it. Professor Stefan and I will add our initials when you’re done. To save yourself some time, just turn straight to page two hundred and seventy-six. That’s the page we’re on now, I think.”
Brian looked like he might faint again.
“Page two hundred and seventy-six? You mean that you’ve filled two hundred and seventy-five other pages with ghost sightings?”
Professor Hilbert laughed. Even Professor Stefan joined in, although he was still disturbed at the loss of so many perfectly good Jammie Dodgers.
“Two hundred and seventy-five pages!” said Professor Stefan. “Young people and their ideas, eh?”
“Two hundred and seventy-five pages!” said Professor Hilbert. “Dear oh dear, where do we get these kids from? No, Brian, that would just be silly.”
He wiped a tear of mirth from his eye with a handkerchief.
“That’s volume three,” he explained. “We’ve filled one thousand two hundred and seventy-five pages with ghost sightings.”
At which point Brian fell over again. When he eventually recovered himself, he added the sighting to the book, just as he had been told. He noted down everything he had seen, including the hint of black vapor that had hung in the air like smoke after the ghost had disappeared. Had Professors Hilbert and Stefan taken the time to read Brian’s note, they might have found that black vapor very odd.
• • •
Outside, the statue of Hilary Mould stared, solid and unmoving, at the old factory. A cloud passed over the moon, casting the statue in shadow.
When the moon reappeared, the statue was gone.
* * *
4. For those of you reading in American instead of English, a Jammie Dodger is a popular English biscuit consisting of two pieces of shortbread with jam in the middle. And a biscuit is what you call a cookie, even though a cookie is just a cookie (a flat biscuity thing) everywhere else, and what you call a biscuit we call a scone, except we use butter and cream, and you use shortening or milk. And, while we’re on the subject, aluminium is spelled with two i’s, not one, although actually your American spelling is arguably the more correct since that’s the one that the British inventor Humphry Davy adopted for it in 1808, although you’re still wrong about changing words ending in –re (centre, spectre) to –er. In fact, even words like minister, monster, and November used to be spelled with an –re at one point, so it’s no use arguing. And it’s pronounced “Wooster” sauce although it’s spelled Worcestershire. Don’t ask me why. I’m Irish.
5. It was, to put it simply, the stuff that made stuff stuff.
6. Again, if you’re reading in American, we call them “sweets” and you call them “candy.” I’m not going to argue about it as long as you let me have one of yours.
7. There is a certain type of shop that just loves sticking the letter e on the end of words in the hope it will make said shop appear older and more respectable. Businesses selling candles, sweeties, Christmas decorations, and models of fairies are particularly prone to this, although in reality the only thing that the e adds is 10 percent extra on to the price of everything. Mr. Pennyfarthinge’s fondness for the “Olde E” was so extreme as to qualifye as a forme of mentale illnesse.
8. Uncle Dabney’s Impossibly Sour Chews were banned in a number of countries after the sheer sourness of them had turned the faces of several small boys inside out. See also: Uncle Dabney’s Dangerously Explosive Spacedust (tooth loss due to explosions), Uncle Dabney’s Glow-in-the-Dark Radiation Gums (hair loss due to radiation poisoning), and Uncle Dabney’s Frog-Shaped Pastilles (mysterious disappearance of entire populations of certain frogs). The late Uncle Dabney was, of course, quit
e insane, but he made curiously good sweets.
III
In Which We Travel to a Galaxy Far, Far Away, but Since It’s Not a Long Time Ago the Star Wars People Can’t Sue Us
SOME THINGS ARE BETTER left unsaid. Among them are “This situation can’t really get any worse,” which is usually spoken before the loss of a limb, a car going off a cliff, or someone pushing a button marked DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON. EVER. WE’RE NOT JOKING; “Well, he seems like a nice person,” which will shortly be followed by the arrest of the person in question and the removal of bodies from his basement, possibly including your own; and finally, and most better-left-unsaid of all, “You know, I think everything is going to be just fine,” because that means everything is most assuredly not going to be fine, not by a long shot.
So. Everything is going to be fine. Are we clear on that?
Good.
• • •
In another part of the Multiverse, a couple of dimensions from Biddlecombe, a small green planet orbited a slowly dying star. The news that the star was dying might have proved alarming to the inhabitants of the planet had any of them been sufficiently advanced to be capable of understanding the problem, but so far the planet had not produced any form of life that was equipped to do anything more sophisticated than eat while trying not to be eaten itself. Much of the planet was covered by thick coniferous forests, hence its color from space, although it also boasted some very nice oceans, and a mountain that, at some point in the future, representatives of some species might try to climb because it was there, assuming the star didn’t die long before then.
The creature that moved through the depths of one of the planet’s oceans didn’t have a name since, as we have established, there was nobody around with the required intellectual curiosity to give it one. Also, as the creature was very large, very toothy, and very, very hungry, any contact with it would have gone somewhat along the lines of “Look, a new species! I shall name it—AAARRGHHH! My leg! Help, help! No, AAARRGGHH! My other leg!” etc., which doesn’t tend to look good in serious academic journals.
There was very little in the oceans that the creature had not encountered before, and nothing that it had so far not tried, successfully, to eat. But on this particular occasion its attention was caught by a small bright glowing mass, a clump of atoms that vaguely resembled a cluster of blue fish eggs. The creature, always hungry and open to trying new foodstuffs, wolfed the blue mass down and proceeded on its none-too-merry way, already on the lookout for even more tasty and interesting things to eat.
It had been swimming for a mile or so when it began to consider what all of this hunting and eating was about, really. I mean, it swam so it could eat, and it ate so it could keep swimming, and that was the sum of its existence, as far as it could tell. It wasn’t much of a life when you thought about it, which it hadn’t until only moments before, and there had to be more to it all than that. What would happen, it wondered, if it sent other creatures out to hunt on its behalf while it put its fins up and made plans for the future, among which were the enslavement of the planet’s population—hey, we’re on a planet?—followed by the building of spaceships and the further enslavement of lots of other planets’ populations, upon which it could then feed to its belly’s content? That sounded great! Oh, and apparently the star—star?—around which its planet was orbiting was dying, so the sooner it got started on this whole business of building spaceships, whatever they were, the better.
Before it could get to work on the fine print of its grand design, a larger, even toothier, and even hungrier monster bit it in half, and the creature’s brain had barely time enough to think, Oh, well, that’s just great, that is, before its divided body was chomped to mincemeat and began the great journey through the digestive tract of another.
Whereupon that large, hungry creature began to wonder about the nature of good and evil, and how evil seemed much more fun, all things considered, and so this continued for a time until there was an unfamiliar popping sound in the ocean’s depths, and into existence popped a wobbly being with one eye. It was wearing a very fetching top hat tied with a piece of elastic beneath what passed for its chin, just to ensure that its hat didn’t float away, as it was very fond of that hat.
The massive ocean monster, all teeth and gills and eyes and horns and scales, looked at the new arrival, opened its jaws, and prepared to chew, but before it could start chomping, the little hat-wearer shot into its mouth and down its gullet. The monster gave a kind of fishy shrug and swam on, distracted from the peculiar appearance of its latest meal by all of this evil stuff, which sounded just fascinating.
Deep inside the monster’s gut, the gelatinous mass, whose name was Crudford, Esq., began searching through half-digested flesh and bone. It stank something awful in there, but Crudford, cheerful and contented by nature, didn’t mind. In fact, he even whistled a happy tune just to pass the time. Eventually, somewhere in the newly consumed remains of a giant segmented eel, he found what he had been looking for: a small group of atoms that glowed a bright blue. Crudford lifted his hat, the elastic stretching as he did so, and retrieved from the top of his head a glass bottle. The bottle was sealed with a cork, and the blue atoms in the monster’s belly found a kind of reflection in a similar, but larger, cluster already contained inside. Crudford removed the cork and carefully added the new atoms to the old before resealing the bottle and placing it safely under his hat. His jellied features split into a deep smile, and he patted his hat happily.
“There you are, Mrs. Abernathy,” he said. “We’ll have all those bits of you back together again in no time.”
With that, he popped out of existence again, and the huge sea creature that had recently swallowed him forgot all about being evil and simply went back to eating things, which was probably for the best.
• • •
There were many advantages to being an entity composed entirely of transparent jelly. Actually, there weren’t, but Crudford, Esq., who was a creature of boundless optimism, tried to find the bright side of any situation, even his own, which was very unbright. Looked at from the outside, he appeared to be on the same level as slime,9 and in possession of only a single hat. But in Crudford’s own mind he was a sluglike object on the rise, a wobbling thingummy on the way to greater things. Someday, an opportunity would present itself, and there would be only one gelatinous demon for the job: Crudford, Esq.
Amazingly enough, that day had come when Mrs. Abernathy, the left-hand demon of the Great Malevolence, the most evil being in the Multiverse, had suddenly found herself with each of the billions and billions of individual atoms that made up her body separated from its neighbors and scattered through the Multiverse, all because she had messed with Samuel Johnson, his dog, two policemen, four elves, and an ice-cream salesman.10 Oh, and four of her own demons, including Nurd the Scourge of Five Deities, who everyone had thought so useless at being a demon that even Crudford was more terrifying than him.
Crudford imagined that being blown apart at the atomic level must have hurt a lot. Unfortunately for Mrs. Abernathy, as Crudford had come to realize, she hadn’t just been blown apart at the atomic level: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that made up her atoms had also become separated from one another, and then the particles within the protons and neutrons, known as quarks, had been scattered for good measure. There were three quarks within each proton and neutron, bound together by other particles called gluons, and all of those various bits and pieces were now scattered throughout the Multiverse. Being blown apart on the subatomic level must have hurt an awful, awful lot, thought Crudford. Still, look on the bright side: at least Mrs. Abernathy was seeing new places.
But cometh the hour, cometh the congealed, hat-wearing jelly being.11 It turned out that Crudford had always been very good at squeezing into small spaces, and oozing through tiny holes. No one in Hell was entirely sure what Crudford was made from, exactly, but it was remarkable stuff, and there was no other creature remotely like him in that
awful place.
And Crudford couldn’t just squeeze through cracks in rocks and wood and metal: no, Crudford could ooze through the rips and tears in universes, the holes and flaws between dimensions. It made him the perfect candidate to search for, and gather up, Mrs. Abernathys’s quarks and gluons and occasional reconstituted atoms so that the process of putting her back together again could begin. At last, Crudford had found his purpose. The re-creation of Mrs. Abernathy was his responsibility, and his alone. He was searching for subatomic needles in the universal haystacks of the Multiverse, and he loved it.
He could even explore those spaces between universes, although Crudford didn’t like hanging about there for long. Like everyone else in Hell, he had always felt that the Great Malevolence, the foulest, most vile entity imaginable—but probably a lovely demon once you got to know it, Crudford tried to believe—was the cherry on the cake when it came to beings of which one ought to be frightened.
But Crudford had come to learn that there were things in the gaps between universes that made the Great Malevolence look like a small flowery unicorn that pooed fairy dust. At least you knew where you stood with the Great Malevolence. Admittedly, that was on the edge of an infinite fiery pit or a cold, bottomless lake of ice, into either of which the Great Malevolence might plunge you if the mood took it, but there was no mystery about the old GM: it hated everything that breathed, especially everything that breathed on Earth, and ultimately it wanted to torment the living for eternity and turn the Multiverse into a realm of ash and fire. Fair enough, thought Crudford. Aim high. Everybody needs an ambition.
But between universes there were entities that didn’t feel anything at all, not even hatred. They had no form, and barely a consciousness. They existed only to bring about nonexistence. They put the “thing” in “nothing.” When Crudford came close to their nonkingdoms, he was aware of their nonattention coming to rest upon him, their complete and utter uncaringness, and even his relentless optimism would start to flag somewhat.