John Connolly - The Infernals aka Hell's Bells

19.Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), for example, experimented with blood transfusions, possibly in an effort to discover the secret of eternal youth. Unfortunately, some of the blood was infected with malaria and tuberculosis, and he promptly died. Meanwhile Carl Scheele (1742-1786), the discoverer of tungsten and chlorine, among other chemical elements, liked to taste his discoveries. He survived tasting hydrogen cyanide but not, alas, mercury.

20.Actually, the Collider experiment had been plagued by many difficulties in addition to the unfortunate scientists/demons interface, including a mishap caused by a bird dropping a piece of baguette into the machinery, so that one prominent scientist even suggested it was being sabotaged from the future in order to prevent it from being turned on and sucking the planet into a big black hole, or transforming it to ash. On the other hand, those of us who hadn’t spent too long hanging around with overly imaginative scientists, and who got out of the house occasionally, thought that the idea of sabotage from the future seemed to be pushing it a bit.

21.Actually, as we have established, it was generally considered unwise to drink Spiggit’s at all.

22.Well, I say “experiment,” but his fellow dwarfs simply sat on him and poured the sediment down his throat, then quickly stepped back to watch what happened. While this is still technically an experiment, it also qualifies as torture, as does almost anything involving the involuntary ingestion of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar.

23.There usually isn’t very much to read in The Infernal Times: the weather is always hot with a chance of fireballs; everybody is either miserable, angry, or tormented; and your favorite football team is in the process of losing its most recent match because, in Hell, both teams always lose. And keep losing. To a controversial penalty decision. In extra time. And extra time goes on forever.

24.Not even the jobs of the really lame demons like Watchtower, the demon of people who ring the doorbell just as you’re about to serve dinner; Eugh, the demon of things found dead in soup, with additional responsibility for flies in ointment; Bob, the demon of things that float when you don’t want them to; Glug, the demon of things that sink when you don’t want them to; and Gang and Agley, the demons responsible for disrupting the best-laid plans of mice. Mice really hate them. If it wasn’t for them, mice would rule the world.

25.From this we may surmise that Old Ram was a priest or church minister of some kind. Who knows, he may even have been a pope, for there have been some very dodgy popes over the years. Alexander VI, who was one of the infamous Borgias, and was pope from 1492 to 1503, sired at least seven children and was described as being similar to a hungry wolf. Benedict IX (who reigned at various points from 1032 to 1048) was pope on three occasions, but surrendered the papacy on two of them in exchange for lots of gold before being hounded out of Rome in 1048. Finally, Stephen VI (896-897) disliked his predecessor, Formosus, so much that he had the corpse dug up and put on trial. Found guilty, Formosus had his garments removed, two fingers cut off, and was then reburied. But Stephen, who was still angry at Formosus, ordered him to be dug up again and Formosus’s body was thrown into the Tiber. Stephen probably would have sent divers to find the corpse so he could do something else to it if he hadn’t been strangled himself in 897, suggesting that Stephen wasn’t much to write home about either when it came to being a pope.

26.The ILC, or International Linear Collider, was the proposed next stage in the physicists’ attempts to understand the nature of this, and possibly other, universes. It would be a straight-line tunnel thirty-one kilometers long, and in it electrons and positrons (antimatter electrons) would be fired from opposite ends, reaching accelerations of 99.9999999998 percent of the speed of light before they collided. The collisions would be more precise than in the Large Hadron Collider, and therefore potentially more likely to provide answers to those big scientific questions: What happened in the Big Bang? How many dimensions are there in space? What is the nature and purpose of the different subatomic particles? And what does the Higgs boson, the theoretical particle that gives matter mass and gravity, look like? Which was all well and good, except that the LHC had already cost $7 billion and the ILC was likely to cost nearly as much again. In scientific terms, this is a little like your parents scrimping and saving to buy you the latest computer games console only for you to tell them that there’s a new one coming out in six months’ time, but this one would just have to do until then. Ungrateful lot, scientists…

27.Translated from lies to truth, this means “No, I hardly told him anything at all, and what I did tell him was just enough to enable me to continue to pursue my ultimate goal without having him worry about what suit he might wear to the Nobel Prize ceremony, because he’s not going. I’m the only one who is going. Just me. Got a problem with that? No, I didn’t think so. It’s mine, all mine! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Laughter fades to madness. Men in white suits arrive with promises of a nice padded cell, three meals a day in pill form, and no nasty sharp edges upon which you might bang your knee and hurt yourself.

Similar translations from other areas of life of which you should be aware include: “The check is in the post.” (A check may be in the post, but it’s not your check, and it’s not going to your letter box.) “I’ll think about it.” (I don’t need to think about it, because the answer is no.) “You don’t look a day older.” (You really don’t look a day older-you look ten years older, and that’s in dim light.) “You may feel a small sting.” (Only death will hurt more, and that won’t take as long.) And the ever-popular “It’s perfectly safe. It isn’t even switched on…” usually spoken just before moments of electrocution, the loss of a limb due to incorrect use of a hedge trimmer, and people being blown up by gas ovens.

28.Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.

29.A Scottish proverb says that “Evil doers are evil dreaders.” In other words, those that do ill, or think ill of others, naturally expect others to do ill to them. Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart. Or, as the French writer Voltaire put it, “Fear follows crime, and is its punishment.”

30.Because Hell was huge, and only a fraction of it was occupied, the Great Malevolence had largely given up on trying to decorate every inch of it in a suitable manner. After all, there’s only so much time that you can spend putting up big black mountains that loom menacingly, and building great fiery pits in which demons toil, before you start to think, Well, why bother? Thus most of Hell is like the spare room in your house, the one your dad keeps promising to turn into his den but instead just fills with boxes of unread books, and old bills, and that exercise bike he bought and now claims doesn’t work properly because it’s too hard to cycle, although it’ll be fine once he gets around to fixing it, and anyway, it cost a fortune, that bike.