John Connolly - The Creeps - A Samuel Johnson Tale

Nurd thought about it. He was very competitive and he didn’t like to lose, not even at I-Spy. He had managed to guess mattress, wood, and sheet easily enough. He wasn’t about to be beaten on the final try by Wormwood.

“Eiderdown,” he said.

“Wrong!”

Nurd scratched his ear. It helped him to think. He poked at his ear hole, and kept poking until the tip of his finger came out of the other ear. Nurd wasn’t sure why it sometimes did that. Wormwood had once suggested a possible answer. Nurd had kicked him in the bum for his trouble, but not before putting on his pointiest boots.

“Electric blanket,” said Nurd.

“Wrong again!”

He heard Wormwood sniggering, and wondered where he might have left those pointy boots.

Nurd looked around the room, trying to see it from Wormwood’s angle. Electricity? No, that couldn’t be it. Samuel’s exercise log? Possibly, although it was a bit of a stretch.

Ah, he had it! On the floor by Samuel’s bed was a small, stuffed elephant. It had once been Samuel’s favorite stuffed toy, but was now beloved of Boswell, who liked to sleep with it for company.

Nurd made a trumpeting sound, and prepared for his final triumph.

“It is,” he said grandly, “an elephant.”

“WRONG!” howled Wormwood. “Wrongedy wrong wrong, Mr. Wrongly Wrongington!”

“It has to be an elephant,” said Nurd. “I’ve looked. There’s nothing else around here beginning with the letter e .”

“Ring-ring,” said Wormwood. “Call for you. It has to be for you, because it’s a WRONG number.”

“I’m warning you,” said Nurd, who now remembered where he had left those boots.

“You don’t have a right hand,” continued Wormwood. “You just have a left hand and a WRONG hand.”

“I shall inflict grave pain upon you with a pointy boot,” Nurd warned. “I shall take a very long run-up to do it. It will be such a long run-up that you will have grown old by the time my boot finally reaches you, and I shall kick you so hard that, when you open your mouth, the tip of my boot will be visible at the back of your throat.”

“You lost, you lost . . .”

“Tell me what it was.”

“Don’t have to if I don’t want to.”

“TELL ME!!!!!”

Flames shot out of Nurd’s mouth and ears. His cloak billowed like the wings of a bat. His eyes turned red, and his eyebrows caught fire.

“It was an elf,” said Wormwood in a tiny voice.

“Excuse me?” said Nurd as he regained control of himself.

“An elf,” said Wormwood, a little louder. “I spied an elf.”

Nurd rubbed his finger along his forehead. He could just about feel where his eyebrows used to be.

“Elves don’t exist,” he said. “Dwarfs exist, not elves. You can’t have seen an elf.”

“I did,” said Wormwood. “And I still spy an elf. It’s outside the bedroom window.”

Despite himself, Nurd leaned over the edge of his bed to take a look. Wormwood was right. Standing on the windowsill, wearing a jaunty green hat and a suit of red felt, was an elf. It had unusually sharp teeth, and red dots gave a kind of life to its cheeks. It had very dark eyes. They should have done something about the eyes, thought Nurd. Nobody likes an elf with scary eyes.

“How did that get there?” said Nurd.

“Maybe it climbed up,” said Wormwood.

“It’s a Christmas elf,” said Nurd. “It’s made of wood. You might as well expect a clothes peg to climb up.”

Wormwood left his bunk bed and padded to the window. He peered at the elf. The elf peered back.

“It’s very lifelike,” he said.

“It’s. An. Elf,” said Nurd. “It can’t be lifelike. There’s nothing life to be like.”

Wormwood began to open the window.

“What are you doing?” said Nurd.

“I want to take a closer look at it.”

Nurd suddenly had the sense that this might not be a good idea. He couldn’t have said why except that they were on the second floor of a house and somehow there was an elf on their windowsill, which meant that either the elf had, as Wormwood suggested, managed to climb up, or, as seemed more likely, someone or something had put it there from above. Whatever the case, opening the window didn’t strike Nurd as the wisest of moves.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, “not until—” But the rest of the sentence was drowned out by the creak of the window being opened. There was a blast of cold air. In the distance, Nurd could hear sirens and—

Were those screams?

• • •

At the Biddlecombe Visitor Centre and Battlefield Museum, the caretaker, Mr. Karloff, was closing up for the evening. He wanted to get down to Wreckit’s for the grand unveiling of the new store because very little that was exciting ever happened in Biddlecombe, or very little that didn’t involve people claiming to have seen demons, or the dead coming to life. Mr. Karloff wasn’t sure that he believed all of that nonsense. During the supposed invasion of Biddlecombe by the forces of Hell, Mr. Karloff had been visiting his sister Elsa in Skegness, and had missed the whole affair. Despite the fact that some very trustworthy people claimed it was all true, honest to goodness, would I lie to you, Mr. Karloff regarded it as evidence of some form of mass hysteria.

It had not been a busy day at the visitor center, but then it was rarely a busy day there. For some reason, tourists didn’t want to come to Biddlecombe to stare at a damp field in which, long ago, two small armies led by very cautious men had eventually got around to fighting each other by mistake. The sign above the museum’s door read WE BRING HISTORY TO LIFE!, which was not true in any way, shape, or form. There were stones with more life than the Biddlecombe Battlefield Museum.

Mr. Karloff had tried to make the experience more interesting by creating a reconstruction of the battle using small plastic soldiers which he had carefully painted with his own hands. There weren’t enough Vikings and Saxons to make it look impressive, so he had bulked up the numbers with whatever he had lying around at home. If someone closely examined Mr. Karloff’s version of the Battle of Biddlecombe, they might have spotted some confused-looking German soldiers painted like Vikings, along with half a dozen cowboys and a couple of Indians who had been drafted into the Saxon ranks. The rest of the museum was filled out with some spearheads, broken axes, and the odd bone that had been found poking out of the field after spells of heavy rain.

The center only opened on Saturdays, Sundays, and every second Thursday. During the summer, bus parties on very cheap tours would occasionally stop there. The money gained from their entry fees, along with what they spent on postcards, chocolate, and pictures of themselves dressed up in the Viking and Saxon costumes that Mr. Karloff had put together for the purpose, was just about enough to keep the center open.

But it was now winter, and only seven people had shown up that day. One of them was lost, two of them just wanted to use the bathroom, and the others were visiting Americans who asked some awkward questions about the cowboys and Indians fighting on the Saxon side. Mr. Karloff told them that they’d come over to help the Saxons when they heard about their trouble with the Vikings, and the Americans were happy enough with the answer, but it had been a hairy moment. Still, they had bought lots of postcards, and they got a kick out of dressing up as ancient warriors.

In his little office, Mr. Karloff counted up the day’s takings and put them in an envelope which he folded into his pocket. He would go to the bank with it on Monday once he had added whatever came in on Saturday and Sunday. He was about to turn off the lights when a loud knocking at the front door almost gave him a heart attack.