John Connolly - The Gates

He moved to the kitchen door. “I’m going to talk to him.”

“Are you sure about this, Samuel?” asked Mrs. Johnson. Dr. Planck tried to protest, but the others shushed him.

“It’s worth a try. If he looks like he’s about to turn nasty, we can just lock the door again, or Tom can wave his bat at him, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. To be honest, I rather like him.”

Samuel opened the door and put his head to the crack.

“Psssst!”

Nurd, who was already somewhat tense, almost wet himself at the sound. He looked around to see the head of a small boy wearing glasses poking through a gap in a doorway.

“What are you doing in my garden?” said Samuel.

“What does it look like?” replied Nurd. “I’m hiding. Go away, Samuel, it’s dangerous.”

“Why are you hiding? Aren’t they your friends out there?”

“That lot?” said Nurd, gesturing with a big thumb. “They’re no friends of mine. In fact, if some of them found out I was here, I’d be in terrible trouble.”

“Which brings us back to the whole hiding thing,” said Samuel.

“Exactly,” said Nurd.

“Look,” said Samuel, “if we let you hide in here, will you help stop all this?”

Nurd risked another glance through the hedge. He clearly didn’t like what he saw, because he nodded briskly.

“I’ll do my best,” he said. “I really would just like to go home.”

“Well, come on then,” said Samuel. He opened the door wider, and stepped aside as Nurd shuffled across the lawn and shot through the gap. Once the door had closed behind him, Nurd took a relieved breath and looked around. He saw Samuel, looking thoughtful; Tom, holding a bat as though he were aching for an excuse to use it; Maria, who was sucking on a pencil and wrinkling her nose at the faint smell of pond that was coming off Nurd, and, um, was that poo?; and Mrs. Johnson, who was clutching a frying pan determinedly. In one corner of the kitchen a man with a beard was trying to hide under a blanket. Nurd knew exactly how he felt.

“Hello,” said Nurd. “I’m Nurd. Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities. Actually, just plain old Nurd will be fine. I don’t think I want to be the scourge of deities anymore. If I never see a demonic deity again, it will be too soon. Mind if I get up from the floor?”

The people in the kitchen looked dubiously at him, except for Samuel, who said, “Honestly, everyone, we can trust him.”

Eventually, Tom said, “Okay, but do it slowly.”

Nurd did do it slowly because he had hurt his knee while diving into the kitchen. He took a seat at the table and rested his chin in his hands. He seemed very miserable, and entirely unthreatening. While Samuel and the others watched, a single big tear trickled down one of his cheeks.

“I’m really sorry,” said Nurd, wiping it away in embarrassment. “It’s been a funny old evening.”

Everyone looked sympathetic, even if he was a demon. Mrs. Johnson put down her frying pan and pointed to a kettle that was currently simmering on a camping gas stove.

“Perhaps you’d like a cup of tea?” she said. “Everything feels better after a cup of tea.”

Nurd didn’t know what tea was, but it couldn’t taste any worse than the stuff in the sewer.

“That would be very nice,” he said. “Thank you.”

Mrs. Johnson poured him a cup of strong tea, and added a digestive biscuit to the saucer. Nurd sipped carefully, if noisily, and nibbled at the biscuit. He was pleasantly surprised by both.

“It’s nicer if you dunk it,” said Samuel, demonstrating with his fingers.

Nurd dipped the biscuit into the tea.

“That is good, actually,” he said. He dunked the biscuit a second time, but on this occasion he left it in for too long, and half of it fell into his cup. He looked like he was about to cry again.

“Just my luck,” he said.

“Never mind,” said Mrs. Johnson, rescuing the soggy biscuit with a spoon. “Plenty more where that came from.”

“So,” said Samuel. “Perhaps you could tell us what’s happening.”

“Well, it’s Hell on Earth, isn’t it?” said Nurd. “Gates have opened, demons are pouring out. End of the world, and all that.”

“Can we stop it?”

“Dunno. If you’re going to do something, you’d best do it quickly because this lot are just the advance guard. As soon as the Great Malevolence himself comes through, it’ll be too late. He’ll be too strong for anyone to stop.” Nurd chewed glumly on his second biscuit. “He really isn’t very friendly at all.”

“But you came through the gates with the others, didn’t you?” said Samuel.

“No, that’s just it,” said Nurd. “I came on my own. Like I told you before, I keep popping from one dimension into the next. One minute I was sitting on my throne in the Wasteland, hitting Wormwood on the head and minding my own business, and the next moment I was here. Now I appear to have ended up here permanently. I tried to make the best of it. In fact”- Nurd coughed slightly ashamedly into his hand- “I had hoped to rule the world. Oh, I’d have been very decent about it. None of this terrorizing and demonic nonsense. All I really wanted was a bit of adoration and a nice car. Apart from that, I’d hardly have bothered anybody. Unfortunately I think there’s going to be some competition for the position, so I’ve decided to abandon my hopes and go home.”

“So you just sort of teleported [26]here?” asked Tom, who was a big fan of Star Trek and quite fancied the idea of being transferred from one place to another instantly.

Nurd shrugged, not entirely understanding the question, then looked at Maria, who was still sucking her pencil and regarding him with an intense gaze.

“Why’s she looking at me like that?” said Nurd. “What’ve I done?”

“Apart from being a demon, and planning to rule the world, you mean?” said Tom.

“Yep, apart from all that,” said Nurd.

“Maria?” asked Samuel. “What are you thinking?”

“Nurd here said that he flipped back and forth between worlds. I’m just wondering what that might mean for our plan. It may be that we’re wrong about the nature of the portal.”

“Plan?” said Nurd. “What plan?”

Nobody spoke.

“Oh, I see,” said Nurd. “Don’t trust the demon.” He sighed. “Well, can’t say I blame you with that lot outside. And for your information, I didn’t just flip back and forth, happy as a demon with two tails. The first time I got crushed, and found myself back in the Wasteland, and the second time a big truck hit me, and the same thing happened. The third time I was with Samuel, and then I wasn’t with him. That was the only time that something bad didn’t happen.”

He gave Samuel a little embarrassed smile.

Maria looked pleased. “Oh, so the rest of the time you died. Sort of. That’s all right then.”

“Thanks very much,” said Nurd. “It wasn’t all right for me. You should try dying some time. I guarantee that you won’t care much for it.”

But now Maria was really interested. “What’s it like, traveling through a portal?” she asked Nurd.

“It hurts,” said Nurd, with feeling. “It’s like being stretched for miles, and then squeezed into a tiny little ball.”

“That’s because of this,” said Maria, pointing at a drawing she had made of an hourglass shape, her pencil poised where the hourglass was at its narrowest. “That’s the point of compression. You shouldn’t have been able to pass through it at all, because you should have been torn apart, or squashed to almost nothing. It sounds like this portal has some of the qualities of a black hole, and some of a wormhole. Theoretically, again, it shouldn’t exist, but then demons shouldn’t exist either, and yet one is drinking tea with us at this precise moment.”