John Connolly - The Infernals aka Hell's Bells

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 instead 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.

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. 23The 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.