John Connolly - The Infernals aka Hell's Bells

“DOES THE COLLIDER STILL RUN?”

The Watcher nodded.

“GOOD.”

The Watcher frowned. The link between Hell and the world of men was no more. Whatever power Mrs. Abernathy had harnessed to create the gateway had vanished with her. It would take time to find a way to access the Collider’s power again, and surely the men and women responsible for it would be more careful this time. As far as the Watcher was concerned, the kingdom was once more isolated.

The Great Malevolence, seeming to read his servant’s thoughts, spoke again.

“THERE IS ANOTHER KINGDOM.”

And the Watcher, almost as ancient as the one it served, understood. There was a kingdom that existed alongside the world through which men walked, a kingdom filled with dark entities, a kingdom of beings who hated men almost as much as the Great Malevolence himself.

The Kingdom of Shadows.

“PREPARE THE WAY.”

The Watcher departed, and the Great Malevolence closed his eyes, allowing his consciousness to roam across universes, touching those who were most like himself, evil creatures intent upon doing harm to others, and in each mind he left a single order.

SEEK THE ATOMS. SEEK THE ATOMS WITH THE BLUE GLOW. FIND HER…

THANKS TO MY EDITORS and publishers at Simon & Schuster and Hodder & Stoughton, my agent Darley Anderson and his staff, and to Dr. Colm Stephens, administrator of the School of Physics at Trinity College, Dublin, who was kind enough to read the manuscript of this novel and correct my errors. Any that remain are entirely my own fault. Finally, love and thanks to Jennie, Cameron, and Alistair.

1.Not to be confused with St. Nick’s Place, which is the North Pole. You don’t want to make that mistake, and end up selling your soul to Santa.

2.And by the way, what kind of person are you, reading the second part of a series before the first? I mean, really? Do you put on your shoes before your socks, or put your pants on before your underwear? Now the rest of the readers have to hang around, whistling and examining their fingernails in a bored manner, while I give you special treatment. I bet you’re the sort who arrives halfway through the movie, spilling your popcorn and standing on toes, then taps the bloke next to you on the shoulder and says, “Have I missed anything?” It’s people like you who cause unrest…

3.Duke Kobal was officially the demon of comedians, although only the really unfunny ones, with additional responsibility for the jokes in Christmas crackers. You know, like What’s the longest word in the English language? Smiles, because there’s a “mile” between the first and last letters. A mile. No, a mile. Yes, as in distance. Yes, I know there’s not really a mile, but-okay, stop talking. I’m serious, you’re starting to annoy me. No, I don’t want to wear a paper hat. I don’t care if it’s Christmas, those hats make my head itch. And I don’t want to see what you’ve won. No, I don’t. Seriously. Fine, then. Oh great, a compass. If I take it away, will you get lost? See, that’s funny. Well, I thought it was.

Christmas: Duke Kobal loves it.

4.Actually, the decision on whether to go backward or forward in time might well tell you something important about the person in question. The English writer Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was reputed to have said that “The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise, the world would begin to turn the other way around.” What Bennett was saying is that it’s better to look forward than to look back, because that’s how progress is made. On the other hand, George Santayana (1863-1952), an American writer, said that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ In other words, it’s a question of balance: the past is a nice country to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

5.There is also the small matter of what is known as the “Grandfather Paradox”: What would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather before your mum or dad was born? Would you then cease to exist? But the argument is that you’re already in existence, as you were around to travel back in time, so if you do try to kill your grandfather then you’ll obviously fail. Hang on, though: Is it possible that you might just “pop” out of existence if you did manage to kill your grandfather? No, because that would imply two different realities, one in which you exist and the other in which you don’t exist, which won’t do at all. This has led the eminent physicist Professor Stephen Hawking to come up with the Chronology Protection Conjecture, a kind of virtual ban on time travel. Professor Hawking believes that there must be a rule of physics to prevent time travel, because otherwise we’d have tourists from the future visiting us, and people popping up willy-nilly trying to shoot grandparents in order to prove a point. In the end, though, if you’re the kind of person who, at the first mention of time travel, brings up the possibility of killing your grandfather, then you’re probably not someone who should be allowed near time machines or, for that matter, grandfathers.

6.“What do you mean, you’re giving me a small anesthetic? I want a big anesthetic. I want the kind that they give to elephants before they operate on them. I want my chin to feel like it’s been carved from rock, like it’s part of Mount Rushmore. I don’t want to feel ANY pain at all, otherwise there’ll be trouble, you hear? Why did you become a dentist anyway? Do you like hurting people? Well, do you? You’re a monster, that’s what you are, a monster!”

Sorry about that, but you know what I mean…

7.Just one more thing about time travel, while we’re on the subject. Quantum theory suggests that there is a probability that all possible events, however strange, might occur, and every possible outcome of every event exists in its own world. In other words, all possible pasts and futures, like the one where you didn’t pick up this book but read something else instead, are potentially real, and they all coexist alongside one another. Now, let’s suppose that we invent a time machine that allows us to move between those alternative time lines. Why, then you could set about killing grandfathers to your heart’s content by moving back on one time line, indulging your inexplicably murderous grudge against your granddad, and then proceeding forward on another.

And if you think all of these notions of parallel worlds and other dimensions are nonsense, please note that Jonathon Keats, a San Francisco-based experimental philosopher, has already begun selling real estate in those extra dimensions of space and time. In fact, he sold 172 lots of extradimensional real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area in one day. I’m not sure what that proves, exactly, other than the fact that there are people in San Francisco who will pay good money for things that may not exist, which perhaps says more about San Franciscans than about scientific theory. Also, I’d pay good money to see those people try to enforce their property rights when faced with a ray-gun-wielding monster from another dimension. “Now look here, I paid good money for this piece of land and-” Zap!