John Connolly - The Infernals aka Hell's Bells

“But that’s the best part!” he said. “We should be losing energy!”

“From a vacuum?” Victor did not sound convinced.

“It’s like I told Professor Stefan,” said Hilbert. “We’re searching for the Higgs boson, right?”

“Right,” said Victor, thinking, he’s lost it.

“And we realize that the Higgs boson may be the theoretical link between our world and the hidden universe?”

“Okay.” Really lost it.

“And we’re assuming that the Higgs boson, if it does exist, is present somewhere in the aftermath of the explosions in the Collider?”

“Absolutely.” Look at him: nutty as a bag of hazelnut crackers.

“Well, what if the energy loss is natural? What if the Higgs boson is decaying in the Collider, but is decaying into particles of another world: dark matter. The Collider would register the decay as an energy loss, when in fact it’s the nature of the particles that has changed. There is no energy loss, because they’re still there. We just can’t see them.”

Victor stared at him, jaw agape. Professor Hilbert might have been mad, but Victor was starting to suspect that he was brilliantly mad, because this was a really, really interesting theory.

“Did you tell Professor Stefan all this?” asked Ed, who felt the same way that Victor did about Professor Hilbert’s ambitions, but was happy enough to be a cog in the wheel of this Nobel Prize-winning operation, in part because he was a modest, unassuming sort of chap, and also because he really liked muffins.

“Most of it,” said Professor Hilbert, 27and Victor and Ed knew that, in Professor Hilbert’s mind, there was only ever going to be one name on the citation from the Nobel Prize committee, and he wasn’t going to endanger that possibility by sharing too much of what he thought with anyone who might have too many letters after his name.

“So we shouldn’t worry about the energy loss?” said Victor.

“No.”

“And you don’t think the portal to He-er, this hidden world is in any danger of opening again?”

“The energy loss isn’t remotely comparable to last time,” said Professor Hilbert, which wasn’t really answering the question at all.

Ed and Victor exchanged a look.

“Two muffin baskets,” said Ed. “Each.”

Professor Hilbert smiled a shark’s smile. “You drive a hard bargain…”

MRS. ABERNATHY WAS IN her element: she sat in her chamber and listened as an array of demons fawned their way into her presence, attempting to find favor with her once again. Even Chelom, the great spider demon, and Naroth, the most bloated of the toad demons, who had fled after the failure of the invasion, now sought a place by her side once again. She wanted to punish them for their disloyalty, but she restrained herself. It was enough that they were coming back to her, and she needed them. She needed all of these Infernals. Later, she would violently dispense with some of those who had abandoned her, if only to remind the others of the limits of her tolerance.

Mrs. Abernathy’s original plan had been to target Samuel and Boswell, and bring them straight to her lair. Unfortunately she had reckoned without a number of factors, including:

a) the difficulty of a targeted acquisition between dimensions

b) an ice-cream salesman

c) a police car

d) a van filled with unknown little people.

She had also exhausted herself bringing them all here, and had fallen into unconsciousness for a time. When she woke, she found that she was unable to locate any of them, at least until the insufferable A. Bodkin had tried to send a message to his superiors, a message that she had intercepted. She now knew roughly the area in which at least some of those whom she had accidentally targeted might be, and by extension where she might find Samuel Johnson, but since this was Hell, which, as we have established, tended to play a little fast and loose with concepts such as direction and geography, it was like being told that a needle is almost certainly in a haystack, and then being shown a very large field filled with very large haystacks. Oh, and the field goes up and down as well as across for very long distances. And it’s a bit diagonal as well.

Therefore Mrs. Abernathy required help if she was to search for the boy, which was why she had decided against immediately torturing those who had earlier turned their backs on her. Instead she listened to their pleas and their excuses before dispatching them to seek out Samuel Johnson. For the most part they had nothing of interest to tell her anyway, but there were certain exceptions. One of those exceptions was standing before her now. Actually, standing might be too strong a word for what it was doing, since it had technically oozed beneath her gaze and had now simply ceased oozing, although assorted substances still dripped from its pores in way that suggested further oozing could only be a matter of time. It resembled a transparent slug with aspirations to be something more interesting, hampered by the fact that it was, and always would be, made of gelatinous material and about three feet tall, and therefore only of interest to other things made of jelly and slightly smaller than itself. Two unblinking eyeballs were set into what was, for now, its front part, beneath which was a toothless mouth. It wore a black top hat, which it raised in greeting using a tentacle that slowly extruded from its body expressly for that purpose, and then was promptly reabsorbed.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” it said. “Happy to see you on the up again, as it were.”

“And you are?” said Mrs. Abernathy.

“Crudford, Esq., ma’am. I work in the Pits of Hopelessness. Don’t really fit in, though. Not the hopeless type. I’ve always been a hopeful sort of gelatinous mass, me. The glass is always half full, that’s what I say. When you’re made of jelly, and only have a hat to your name, it can only get better, can’t it?”

“Someone could take your hat,” said Mrs. Abernathy.

“Agreed, agreed, but it wasn’t my hat to begin with. I just found it, so technically that wouldn’t be much of a reversal, would it?”

“It would if I took it, forced you into it, then slowly roasted you, and it, over a large fire.”

Crudford considered this. “I’d still have my hat, though, wouldn’t I?”

Mrs. Abernathy decided that Crudford, Esq. might just have to be made an example of at some point in the near future, if only to discourage such a brightness of outlook in others.

“So what can you do for me until then?” said Mrs. Abernathy.

“Well, I can ooze. I’ve worked hard at it. Labored my way up from just dripping, through sliming, until I hit on a steady flow. You could say I’ve perfected it. But I appreciate that it’s a skill of limited applicability in most circumstances, if you catch my drift. Still, onward and upward.”

“Mr. Crudford, if I stood on you, would it hurt?”

“Yes. You’d get ooze on your shoe, though.”

“It’s a price I’m willing to pay, unless you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t.”

“Suppose I told you about Chancellor Ozymuth, ma’am, and how he’s been plotting against you,” said Crudford, and he was pleased to see Mrs. Abernathy’s expression of profound distaste change to one of mild distaste, coupled with a side order of interest.

“Continue.”

“As it happens, I was there the last time that you came to visit, when you were trying to see our master, the Great Malevolence. It’s one of the advantages of oozing, see: you can ooze just about anywhere, fitting into all kinds of small spaces, and nobody ever notices. Anyway, I was there, and I saw what happened after you’d gone.”