John Connolly - The Creeps - A Samuel Johnson Tale

Eventually, after an hour had gone by, and two pencils had been worn down to almost nothing, Crudford was finished.

“I think I may have the answer,” he said.

“We are waiting,” said the Great Malevolence. It came with the unspoken warning: This had better be good .

Crudford turned the notepad to face the Great Malevolence. This is what it contained:

The Great Malevolence looked at the drawing. It then looked at the Watcher. The Watcher shrugged because, unlike Crudford, it could. The Great Malevolence, having nowhere else left to look, looked at Crudford and thought about the many ways in which it could reduce a gelatinous mass to lots of much smaller pieces of jelly.

“It is,” said the Great Malevolence, “a picture of a lady. It is not even a very good picture of a lady.”

Everyone, thought Crudford, is a critic.

“It’s not just a lady,” said Crudford. “It’s Mrs. Abernathy. But see here—”

Crudford pointed at the question mark beside the heart shape.

“The heart is missing.”

The Great Malevolence considered this.

“Ba’al does not have a heart,” it said. “No creature in Hell has a heart. Hearts are not needed.”

“But Ba’al isn’t Ba’al any longer, not really,” said Crudford. “Ba’al is Mrs. Abernathy, and Mrs. Abernathy is Ba’al, and Mrs. Abernathy has a heart because Mrs. Abernathy is, or was, human. Those jars contain bits of every organ in the human body except the heart. The heart is missing. All of it.”

“But what is the heart pumping?” said the Great Malevolence. “Not blood, for Mrs. Abernathy’s body died the moment that Ba’al took it over.”

“I’m just guessing,” said Crudford, “but I’d say that it’s pumping pure evil. What we’re looking for is a big, black, rotten heart-shaped thingy filled with nastiness.”

“Then where is it?” asked the Great Malevolence.

“That,” said Crudford, “is a very good question.”

• • •

Crudford wandered the halls of the Mountain of Despair, alone with his thoughts. Wandered probably wasn’t the right word, strictly speaking: slimed, oozed, or smeared might be closer to the mark, but if Crudford had said that he was just off to slime around the halls for a while, then he would probably have been advised to take his gelatinous self elsewhere, or someone would have been following him with a mop and a bucket.

His search of the Multiverse for bits of Mrs. Abernathy had not been entirely random. He had been able to narrow it down to specific universes, or corners of them, either because he could smell Mrs. Abernathy, or his keen eyesight had been able to pick out the blue atoms in the darkness. There were only two places he had not explored: the Kingdom of Shadows, and Earth.

He had not entered the Kingdom of Shadows because to do so would have been the end of him: the Shadows had no loyalty to the Great Malevolence, and would have snuffed out Hell itself if they could. He had stayed away from Earth simply because he had detected no sign of Mrs. Abernathy there, but now he began to wonder if he might not have been mistaken. Just because he could pick up no trace of her did not mean that she was not there, and it was only recently that he had begun to detect the telltale beating of her heart. Mrs. Abernathy was cunning and wicked. Her dark heart, he realized, must be filled with hatred. And what or, more correctly, who did she hate more than anything else in the Multiverse?

Samuel Johnson.

Crudford snapped his fingers. A small blob of gloop was flicked away by the action and landed on something in the darkness.

“Hey!” said the something.

“Sorry,” said Crudford.

Could it be true? There was only one way to find out.

XXIX

In Which Efforts Are Made to Console Constable Peel

A QUESTION THAT IS SOMETIMES asked by human beings is why bad things happen to good people. It doesn’t seem entirely fair that folk who try to make the world a better, nicer place, who don’t go around scowling at puppies or frightening kittens, or trying to set someone’s shoes on fire when he’s asleep, should suddenly find themselves having a run of bad luck including, but not limited to, feeling a bit poorly, running out of money, having heavy objects fall on their heads, or stumbling off cliffs in the dark.

Equally, one might ask why bad things don’t happen to bad people, which was just what Constable Peel was asking himself at that precise moment. Somehow, against all the odds, the dwarfs had survived in a basement filled with carnivorous eyeballs, bald vampires, and at least one monster with bladder-control issues. If Constable Peel had been stuck in that basement he’d have been food for something within seconds, but Jolly, Angry, Dozy, and Mumbles had waltzed safely through it all as if it were nothing more dangerous than a field of daisies.

“We appear to have upset him,” said Angry as Constable Peel continued to weep and curse the gods from his position on the floor.

“He’s very sensitive for a policeman,” said Jolly. “I think he’s just relieved that nothing bad happened to us.”

“He’s swearing a lot for someone who’s relieved,” said Angry. “He seems to be doing a lot of fist-shaking as well.”

“He’s getting rid of tension, that’s all,” said Jolly. “It can be a very emotional experience when you find out that someone you care about has been in danger. Imagine how much worse he must feel knowing that the four of us—and Dan—were almost killed.”

Constable Peel’s wailing grew louder.

“I mean, think about it: just one little bit of bad luck and we might not have been here at all.”

Constable Peel began banging his head on the floor.

“Constable Peel,” Jolly concluded solemnly, “would never have seen us again.”

Jolly shed a tear at the near tragedy of it all. It fell on Constable Peel’s neck. As it trickled down his back Constable Peel reached for his truncheon, and he might have done to Jolly what the eyeballs and vampires and monster had failed to do had not Sergeant Rowan stepped in and ushered Dan and the dwarfs away.

“Give him a little space, lads,” he said. “Poor old Constable Peel has had a bit of a shock.”

He knelt by his fellow policeman, who was taking deep breaths to try to calm himself.

“Are you going to be okay?” asked Sergeant Rowan.

“It’s not right, Sarge,” said Constable Peel. “Even Hell couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. Every time it looks like we might be about to see the last of them, something terrible happens and they survive.”

“I know, son, I know, but we can’t have you beating them to death with your truncheon. We’d have to find somewhere to hide the bodies, and right now we’re stuck in a toy shop with all kinds of nasties, so we don’t have the time to go stuffing the bodies of dwarfs into closets or under floorboards.”

He handed Constable Peel a handkerchief. Constable Peel blew his nose loudly and wetly in it and tried to hand it back to the sergeant.

“No, you keep it,” said Sergeant Rowan.

“Very kind of you, Sarge.”

“Not really,” said Sergeant Rowan.

Constable Peel folded the handkerchief, stuffed it in his pocket, and got to his feet.

“When all this is finished . . .” said Constable Peel.

“Yes?”

“And if we survive . . .”

“It’s a big ‘if.’ ”

“But if we do . . .”

“Yes?”

“Can I kill them then?”

Sergeant Peel handed Constable Peel his hat.

“We’ll see, Constable, we’ll see . . .”

• • •

High above the Earth, within sneezing distance of the moon, a small hole appeared in the fabric of space and time, and Crudford squeezed through it. He gazed down at the small blue planet below. It was, as planets went, nothing to write home about. It didn’t have spectacular rings. It wasn’t made of diamond. It did not, unlike the planet Cerberus IV in the Dragon Dimensions, have jaws and teeth, and move around the galaxy chewing up smaller worlds. It was just kind of pretty in a blue, watery way.