The International Express delivery man rounded the corner at a careful thirty-five miles an hour, shifted down to second, and pulled up on the grass verge.
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"Shouldn't be allowed, bloody lorries, no respect for other road users, what I always say, what I always say, is remember that without a car, son, you're just a pedestrian too…"
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He got up, picked up his glasses, put them back on, retrieved his parcel and clipboard, brushed the grass and mud from his uniform, and, as an afterthought, shook his fist at the rapidly diminishing lorry.
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It was very early on Saturday morning, on the last day of the world, and the sky was redder than blood.
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He got out of the van, and immediately threw himself into a ditch to avoid an oncoming lorry that had barrelled around the bend at something well in excess of eighty miles an hour.
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He climbed down the grassy verge, clambered over a low fence, and found himself beside the river Uck.
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The International Express delivery man walked along the banks of the river, holding the parcel.
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Farther down the riverbank sat a young man dressed all in white. He was the only person in sight. His hair was white, his skin chalk pale, and he sat and stared up and down the river, as if he were admiring the view. He looked like Victorian Romantic poets looked just before the consumption and drug abuse really started to cut it.
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Times changed, reflected the delivery man.
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The International Express man couldn't understand it. I mean, in the old days, and it wasn't that long ago really, there had been an angler every dozen yards along the bank; children had played there; courting couples had come to listen to the splish and gurgle of the river, and to hold hands, and to get all lovey-dovey in the Sussex sunset. He'd done that with Maud, his missus, before they were married. They'd come here to spoon and, on one memorable occasion, fork.
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Now white and brown sculptures of foam and sludge drifted serenely down the river, often covering it for yards at a stretch. And where the surface of the water was visible it was covered with a molecules-thin petrochemical sheen.
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He had reached the man in white.
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Funny old world, thought the delivery man. Here's the Uck, used to be the prettiest river in this part of the world, and now it's just a glorified industrial sewer. The swans sink to the bottom, and the fishes float on the top.
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Well, that's progress for you. You can't stop progress.
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There was a loud whirring as a couple of geese, thankful to be back in England again after the long, exhausting flight across the Northern Atlantic, landed on the rainbow-slicked water, and sank without trace.
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"So beautiful," he whispered. "It's all so damn beautiful."
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"'Scuse me, sir. Party name of Chalky?"
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The delivery man found himself temporarily devoid of words. Then his automatic systems cut in. "Funny old world isn't it and no mistake I mean you go all over the world delivering and then here you are practically in your own home so to speak, I mean I was born and bred 'round here, sir, and I've been to the Mediterranean, and to Des O' Moines, and that's in America, sir, and now here I am, and here's your parcel, sir."
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The man in white nodded, said nothing. He continued to gaze out at the river, following an impressive sludge and foam sculpture with his eyes.
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Party name of Chalky took the parcel, and took the clipboard, and signed for the parcel. The pen developed a leak as he did so, and his signature obliterated itself as it was written. It was a long word, and it began with a P, and then there was a splodge, and then it ended in something that might have been -- ence and might have been -- ution.
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"Much obliged, sir," said the delivery man.
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He walked back along the river, back toward the busy road where he had left his van, trying not to look at the river as he went.
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White stood up. There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises. It looked like someone had set fire to the sky.
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Behind him the man in white opened the parcel. In it was a crown -- a circlet of white metal, set with diamonds. He gazed at it for some seconds, with satisfaction, then put it on. It glinted in the light of the rising sun. Then the tarnish, which had begun to suffuse its silver surface when his fingers touched it, spread to cover it completely; and the crown went black.
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It was nearly time.
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Perhaps we will set fire to the sky, he thought. And he left that place, almost imperceptibly.
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And a careless match would have set fire to the river, but, alas, there was no time for that now. In his mind he knew where the Four Of Them would be meeting, and when, and he was going to have to hurry to be there by this afternoon.
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Only one more delivery to make, then.
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He read them again, paying particular attention to the address, and the message. The address was one word: Everywhere.
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The delivery man had left his van on the grass verge by the dual carriageway. He walked around to the driver's side (carefully, because other cars and lorries were still rocketing around the bend), reached in through the open window, and took the schedule from the dashboard.
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He read the instructions on the delivery voucher carefully.
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Then he put the schedule back on the dashboard, looked left, looked right, looked left again and began to walk purposefully across the road. He was halfway across when a German juggernaut came around the corner, its driver crazed on caffeine, little white pills, and EEC transport regulations.
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Then, with his leaking pen, he wrote a brief note to Maud, his wife. It read simply, I love you.
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Then he looked down at the gutter.
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"Yes, sir." He wished he still had a throat. He could have swallowed, if he still had a throat. "No package, I'm afraid, Mister… uh, sir. It's a message."
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THANK YOU, it continued. I MUST COMMEND YOUR DEVOTION TO DUTY.
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YES, agreed a voice from behind his left shoulder, or at least from behind the memory of his left shoulder.
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Cor, he thought, that one nearly had me.
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FINALLY. There was a grin on its face, but then, given the face, there couldn't have been anything else.
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He watched its receding bulk.
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Oh, he thought.
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The delivery man turned, and looked, and saw. At first he couldn't find the words, couldn't find anything, and then the habits of a working lifetime took over and he said, "Message for you, sir."
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DELIVER IT, THEN.
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DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.
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"Sir?" The late delivery man was falling through a gray mist, and all he could see were two spots of blue, that might have been eyes, and might been distant stars.
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FOR ME?
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"It's this, sir. Ahem. Come and See."
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Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell stood back with his head on one side. "Right, then," he said. "Ye're all ready. Hae ye' got it all?"
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"Firelighters," said Newt sadly. "And matches."
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"Firelighters?"
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The delivery man had a brief moment to wonder whether his new companion was making a joke, and to decide that he wasn't; and then there was nothing.
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"Pendulum o' discovery?"
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"Pendulum of discovery, yes."
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Newt swallowed, and patted a pocket. "Thumbscrew," he said.
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"Thumbscrew?"
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"I really think, Sergeant, that --"
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"Firelighters?"
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Yes.
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"Yes, sir."
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[Note for Americans and other city-dwelling life-forms: the rural British, having eschewed central heating as being far too complicated and in any case weakening moral fiber, prefer a system of piling small pieces of wood and lumps of coal, topped by large, wet logs, possibly made of asbestos, into small, smoldering heaps, known as "There's nothing like a roaring open fire is there?" Since none of these ingredients are naturally inclined to burn, underneath all this they apply a small, rectangular, waxy white lump, which burns cheerfully until the weight of the fire puts it out. These little white blocks are called firelighters. No one knows why.]
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Red sky in the morning. It was going to rain.
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Newt patted another pocket. It contained a paper bag inside which was a small bell, of the sort that maddens budgerigars, a pink candle of the birthday cake persuasion, and a tiny book called Prayers for Little Hands. Shadwell had impressed upon him that, although witches were the primary target, a good Witchfinder should never pass up the chance to do a quick exorcism, and should have his field kit with him at all times.
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"Bell, book, and candle?"
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"Bell, book, and candle," said Newt.
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"Pin?"
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"Pin."
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Shadwell stood back. Newt noticed with amazement that the old man's eyes had misted over.
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"I wish I was goin' with ye," he said. "O' course, this won't be anything, but it'd be good to get out and about again. It's a tryin' life, ye ken, all this lyin' in the wet bracken spying on their devilish dancin'. It gets into yer bones somethin' cruel."
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"Good lad. Never forget yer pin. It's the bayonet in yer artillery o' light."
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He straightened up, and saluted.
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"Off ye go, then, Private Pulsifer. May the armies o' glorification march wi' ye."
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After Newt had driven off Shadwell thought of something, something that he'd never had the chance to do before. What he needed now was a pin. Not a military issue pin, witches, for the use of. Just an ordinary pin, such as you might stick in a map.
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Shadwell finally found a pin among the debris in an ashtray. He breathed on it, polished it to a shine, squinted at the map until he located Tadfield, and triumphantly rammed the pin home.
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The map was on the wall. It was old. It didn't show Milton Keynes. It didn't show Harlow. It barely showed Manchester and Birmingham. It had been the army's HQ map for three hundred years. There were a few pins in it still, mainly in Yorkshire and Lancashire and a few in Essex, but they were almost rusted through. Elsewhere, mere brown stubs indicated the distant mission of a long-ago witchfinder.
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Shadwell took a step backward, and saluted again. There were tears in his eyes.
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Then he did a smart about turn and saluted the display cabinet. It was old and battered and the glass was broken but in a way it was the WA. It contained the Regimental silver (the Interbattalion Golf Trophy, not competed for, alas, in seventy years); it contained the patent muzzle-loading Thundergun of Witchfinder-Colonel Ye-Shall-Not-Eat-Any-Living-Thing-With-The-Blood-Neither-Shall-Ye-Use-Enchantment-Nor-Observe-Times Dalrymple; it contained a display of what were apparently walnuts but were in reality a collection of shrunken headhunter heads donated by Witchfinder CSM Horace "Get them afore they Get You" Narker, who'd travelled widely in foreign parts; it contained memories.
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It gleamed.
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Then he opened a tin of condensed milk for breakfast.
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It was a mistake to think of Shadwell (Newt never found out if he had a first name) as a lone nut.
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If the armies of glorification had tried to march with Newt, bits of them would have dropped off. This is because, apart from Newt and Shadwell, they had been dead for quite a long time.
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It was just that all the others were dead, in most cases for several hundred years. Once the Army had been as big as it currently appeared in Shadwell's creatively edited bookkeeping. Newt had been surprised to find that the Witchfinder Army had antecedents as long and almost as bloody as its more mundane counterpart.
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You really got to rely on those ninepences. And so times had been a bit hard before Shadwell had gone on the payrolls of Heaven and Hell.
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Shadwell blew his nose, noisily, on his sleeve.
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The rates of pay for witchfinders had last been set by Oliver Cromwell and never reviewed. Officers got a crown, and the General got a sovereign. It was just an honorarium, of course, because you got ninepence per witch found and first pick of their property.
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Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
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Newt's pay was one old shilling per year.
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The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.]
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In return for this, he was charged to keep "glimmer, firelock, firebox, tinderbox or igniferous matches' about his person at all times, although Shadwell indicated that a Ronson gas lighter would do very well. Shadwell had accepted the invention of the patent cigarette lighter in the same way that conventional soldiers welcomed the repeating rifle.
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[NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
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Then he opened the car window, using a pair of pliers for the purpose since the handle had long since fallen off.
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The way Newt looked at it, it was like being in one of those organizations like the Sealed Knot or those people who kept on refighting the American Civil War. It got you out at weekends, and meant that you were keeping alive fine old traditions that had made Western civilization what it was today.
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An hour after leaving the headquarters, Newt pulled into a layby and rummaged in the box on the passenger seat.
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The packet of firelighters was sent winging over the hedge. A moment later the thumbscrew followed it.
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He knew what it was for. He'd done quite a lot of reading. Shadwell had piled him up with pamphlets at their first meeting, but the Army had also accumulated various books and documents which, Newt suspected, would be worth a fortune if they ever hit the market.
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He debated about the rest of the stuff, and then put it back in the box. The pin was Witchfinder military issue, with a good ebony knob on the end like a ladies' hat pin.
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Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he'd enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company.
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The pin was to jab into suspects. If there was a spot on their body where they didn't feel anything, they were a witch. Simple. Some of the fraudulent Witchfinders had used special retracting pins, but this one was honest, solid steel. He wouldn't be able to look old Shadwell in the face if he threw away the pin. Besides, it was probably bad luck.
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He started the engine and resumed his journey.
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Newt's car was a Wasabi. He called it Dick Turpin, in the hope that one day someone would ask him why.
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It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today.
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His friends nodded and agreed and privately decided that if ever it came to buying a Wasabi or walking, they'd invest in a pair of shoes; it came to the same thing anyway, since one reason for the Wasabi's incredible m. p. g. was that fact that it spent a lot of time waiting in garages while crankshafts and things were in the post from the world's only surviving Wasabi agent in Nigirizushi, Japan.
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In vain did he point out its 823cc engine, its three-speed gearbox, its incredible safety devices like the balloons which inflated on dangerous occasions such as when you were doing 45 mph on a straight dry road but were about to crash because a huge safety balloon had just obscured the view. He'd also wax slightly lyrical about the Korean-made radio, which picked up Radio Pyongyang incredibly well, and the simulated electronic voice which warned you about not wearing a seatbelt even when you were; it had been programmed by someone who not only didn't understand English, but didn't understand Japanese either. It was state of the art, he said.
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The art in this case was probably pottery.
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It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty-nine thousand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch-hunting, twenty-nine thousand said "ouch," nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine didn't feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retractable pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.
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In that vague, zen-like trance in which most people drive, Newt found himself wondering exactly how you used the pin. Did you say, "I've got a pin, and I'm not afraid to use it"? Have Pin, Will Travel… The Pinslinger… The Man with the Golden Pin… The Pins of Navarone…
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Her name was Agnes Nutter.
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One of the early entries in The Nice and Accurate Prophecies concerned Agnes Nutter's own death.
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She was the Witchfinder Army's great failure.
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The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe. In Germany the bonfires were built and burned with regular Teutonic thoroughness. Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings. But the English never seemed to have the heart for it.
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One reason for this may have to do with the manner of Agnes Nutter's death, which more or less marked the end of the serious witchhunting craze in England. A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people, arrived at her house one April evening to find her sitting with her coat on, waiting for them.
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Then she got up and hobbled slowly through the suddenly silent crowd, out of the cottage, and to the bonfire that had been hastily thrown together on the village green. Legend says that she climbed awkwardly onto the pyre and thrust her arms around the stake behind her.
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"Ye're tardie," she said to them. "I shoulde have beene aflame ten minutes since."
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"Tye yt well," she said to the astonished witchfinder. And then, as the villagers sidled toward the pyre, she raised her handsome head in the firelight and said, "Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judged, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne deathe be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do none understande."
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There was much subsequent debate as to whether this had been sent by God or by Satan, but a note later found in Agnes Nutter's cottage indicated that any divine or devilish intervention had been materially helped by the contents of Agnes's petticoats, wherein she had with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roofing nails.
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What Agnes also left behind, on the kitchen table beside a note cancelling the milk, was a box and a book. There were specific instructions as to what should be done with the box, and equally specific instructions about what should be done with the book; it was to be sent to Agnes's son, John Device.
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And after that strange blasphemy she said no more. She let them gag her, and stood imperiously as the torches were put to the dry wood.
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And, apparently, she smiled and looked up at the sky over the village and added, "That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole."
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The crowd grew nearer, one or two of its members a little uncertain as to whether they'd done the right thing, now they came to think about it.
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Thirty seconds later an explosion took out the village green, scythed the valley clean of every living thing, and was seen as far away as Halifax.
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The people who found it -- who were from the next village, and had been woken up by the explosion -- considered ignoring the instructions and just burning the cottage, and then looked around at the twinkling fires and nail-studded wreckage and decided not to. Besides, Agnes's note included painfully precise predictions about what would happen to people who did not carry out her orders.
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The man who put the torch to Agnes Nutter was a Witchfinder Major. They found his hat in a tree two miles away.
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If he'd known what was actually going to happen when that descendant met her he would have turned in his grave, except that he had never got one.
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His name, stitched inside on a fairly large piece of tape, was Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer, one of England's most assiduous witchfinders, and it might have afforded him some satisfaction to know that his last surviving descendant was now, even if unawares, heading toward Agnes Nutter's last surviving descendant. He might have felt that some ancient revenge was at last going to be discharged.
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Firstly, however, Newt had to do something about the flying saucer.
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It landed in the road ahead of him just as he was trying to find the Lower Tadfield turning and had the map spread over the steering wheel. He had to brake hard.
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It looked like every cartoon of a flying saucer Newt had ever seen.
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The other two ignored its frantic beeping and walked over to the car quite slowly, in the worldwide approved manner of policemen already compiling the charge sheet in their heads. The tallest one, a yellow toad dressed in kitchen foil, rapped on Newt's window. He wound it down. The thing was wearing the kind of mirror-finished sunglasses that Newt always thought of as Cool Hand Luke shades.
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As he stared over the top of his map, a door in the saucer slid aside with a satisfying whoosh, revealing a gleaming walkway which extended automatically down to the road. Brilliant blue light shone out, outlining three alien shapes. They walked down the ramp. At least, two of them walked. The one that looked like a pepper pot just skidded down it, and fell over at the bottom.
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The toad stared thoughtfully at the skyline.
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"Er. No."
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"Well, yes. I suppose so," he said.
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"Morning, sir or madam or neuter," the thing said. "This your planet, is it?"
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"Could you tell me your planet's albedo, sir?" said the toad, still staring levelly at the horizon as though it was doing something interesting.
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The alien exchanged glances with its colleague. "Been letting the old acid rain build up, haven't we, sir?" it said. "Been letting ourselves go a bit with the old hydrocarbons, perhaps?"
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The other alien, which was stubby and green, had wandered off into the woods by the side of the road. Out of the corner of his eye Newt saw it kick a tree, and then run a leaf through some complicated gadget on its belt. It didn't look very pleased.
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"I'm sorry?"
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"Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir."
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"Had it long, have we, sir?" it said.
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"Er. Not personally. I mean, as a species, about half a million years. I think."
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Newt brightened. "Well, er, I suppose," he flailed, "what with Mankind's, er, harnessing of the atom and --"
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"Oh?"
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"The fact is, sir, that we have been asked to give you a message."
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Newt gabbled. "Oh. Er. I'll see to it -- well, when I say I, I mean, I think Antarctica or something belongs to every country, or something, and --"
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"Have you got any idea why we have been asked to bring you this message, sir?" said the toad.
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"Oh." Newt turned this over in his mind. "Oh. That's very kind."
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"Neither have we, sir." The toad stood up. "One of them phenomena, I expect. Well, we'd better be going." It shook its head vaguely, turned around and waddled back to the saucer without another word.
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"Oh, dear," said Newt. He was wondering who he could tell about this, and realizing that there was absolutely no one who would believe him.
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"Message runs 'We give you a message of universal peace and cosmic harmony an' suchlike.' Message ends," said the toad.
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The toad bent closer. It seemed to be worried about something, insofar as Newt was any judge of the expressions of an alien race he'd never encountered before.
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"We'll overlook it on this occasion, sir."
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The small alien walked past the car.
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Newt waited for a while, in case there were any spectacular light displays, but it just stood there. Eventually he drove up on the verge and around it. When he looked in his rear-view mirror it had gone.
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The Them were sitting on a field gate, watching Dog rolling in cowpats. The little mongrel seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.
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"I've been reading about them," he said, in a slightly louder voice. "Actually, they've been right all along and it's wrong to persecute 'em with British Inquisitions and stuff."
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The two of them righted the third alien, dragged it back up the ramp, and shut the door.
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Newt stuck his head out of the window.
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"Thank you!"
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I must be overdoing something, he thought guiltily. But what?
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And I can't even tell Shadwell, because he'd probably bawl me out for not counting their nipples.
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"Anyway," said Adam, "you've got it all wrong about witches."
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"CO2 level up 0.5 percent," it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. "You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?"
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Pepper's mother lectured at Norton Polytechnic. (During the day. In the evenings she gave Power tarot readings to nervous executives, because old habits die hard.)
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"My mother said they were just intelligent women protesting in the only way open to them against the stifling injustices of a male-dominated social hierarchy," said Pepper.
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"Yes, but your mother's always saying things like that," said Adam, after a while.
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Pepper nodded amiably. "And she said, at worst they were just free-thinking worshippers of the progenerative principle."
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"Who's the progenratty principle?" said Wensleydale.
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"Well, I thought they worshipped the Devil," said Brian, but without automatic condemnation. The Them had an open mind on the whole subject of devil worship. The Them had an open mind about everything. "Anyway, the Devil'd be better than a stupid maypole."
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"That's where you're wrong," said Adam. "It's not the Devil. It's another god, or something. With horns."
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"Dunno. Something to do with maypoles, I think," said Pepper vaguely.
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Adam thought about it.
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"Anyway," said Pepper. "This stupid Pot can't go around complaining if people think he's the Devil. Not with having horns on. People are bound to say, oh, here comes the Devil."
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Adam, who seemed to have a weight on his mind, took a deep breath.
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"No," said Adam patiently. "People just got 'em mixed up. He's just got horns similar. He's called Pan. He's half a goat."
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"The bottom half," he said at length. "Fancy you not knowin' that. I should of thought everyone knew that."
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"Goats haven't got a bottom half," said Wensleydale. "They've got a front half and a back half. Just like cows."
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"The Devil," said Brian.
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"Which half?" said Wensleydale.
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Dog started to dig up a rabbit hole.
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Then Pepper said, "If he's got goat legs, he shouldn't have horns. They belong to the front half."
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"I didn't make him up, did I?" said Adam, aggrieved. "I was just telling you. It's news to me I made him up. No need to go on at me."
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They watched Dog some more, drumming their heels on the gate. It was too hot to think.
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"You don't have to be so lit'ral about everything," he said. "That's the trouble these days. Grass materialism. 's people like you who go round choppin' down rain forests and makin' holes in the ozone layer. There's a great big hole in the ozone layer 'cos of grass materialism people like you."
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"I can't do anythin' about it," said Brian automatically. "I'm still paying off on a stupid cucumber frame."
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"It's in the magazine," said Adam. "It takes millions of acres of rain forest to make one beefburger. And all this ozone is leakin' away because of…" he hesitated, "people sprayin' the environment."
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"And there's whales," said Wensleydale. "We've got to save 'em."
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"There was this program about them," explained Wensleydale.
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"What've we got to save 'em for?" said Adam. He had confused visions of saving up whales until you had enough for a badge.
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Adam looked blank. His plunder of New Aquarian's back issues hadn't included anything about whales. Its editors had assumed that the readers were all for saving whales in the same way they assumed that those readers breathed and walked upright.
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"If they're so clever," said Brian, slowly, "what are they doin' in the sea?"
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A squeal of brakes and a long -- drawn-out crunch interrupted him. They scrambled off the gate and ran up the lane to the crossroads, where a small car lay on its roof at the end of a long skidmark.
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"Oh, I dunno," said Adam, looking thoughtful. "Swimmin' around all day, just openin' their mouths and eating stuff… sounds pretty clever to me --"
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Wensleydale paused and racked his memory. "Because they can sing. And they've got big brains. There's hardly any of them left. And we don't need to kill them anyway 'cos they only make pet food and stuff."
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A little further down the road was a hole. It looked as though the car had tried to avoid it. As they looked at it, a small Oriental-looking head darted out of sight.
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"We shouldn't move him," he said. "Because of broken bones. We ought to get someone."
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The Them dragged the door open and pulled out the unconscious Newt. Visions of medals for heroic rescue thronged Adam's head. Practical considerations of first aid thronged around that of Wensleydale.
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She had been hoping, rather self-consciously, for someone tall, dark, and handsome.
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And in Jasmine Cottage Anathema Device was sitting in front of a table on which some bandages, aspirins, and assorted first-aid items had been laid out for the past hour.
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Anathema had been looking at the clock. He'll be coming around any moment now, she'd thought.
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Adam cast around. There was a rooftop just visible in the trees down the road. It was Jasmine Cottage.
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And then, when he got there, he wasn't what she'd been expecting. More precisely, he wasn't what she'd been hoping for.
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Newt was tall, but with a rolled-out, thin look. And while his hair was undoubtedly dark, it wasn't any sort of fashion accessory; it was just a lot of thin, black strands all growing together out of the top of his head. This was not Newt's fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber's shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he'd carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impressively cool haircut grinning at the camera, and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, allpurpose, short-back-and-sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn't have the face that went with haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair.
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It was the same with suits. The clothing hadn't been invented that would make him look suave and sophisticated and comfortable. These days he had learned to be satisfied with anything that would keep the rain off and give him somewhere to keep his change.
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I suppose I'm meant to feel a wave of warm, tender female something-or-other about this, she thought. I just wish he'd wash them.
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And he wasn't handsome. Not even when he took off his glasses. [Actually, less so when he took of his glasses, because then he tripped over things and wore bandages a lot.] And, she discovered when she took off his shoes to lay him on her bed, he wore odd socks: one blue one, with a hole in the heel, and one gray one, with holes around the toes.
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So… tall, dark, but not handsome. She shrugged. Okay. Two out of three isn't bad.
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The figure on the bed began to stir. And Anathema, who in the very nature of things always looked to the future, suppressed her disappointment and said: "How are we feeling now?"
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Newt opened his eyes.
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He was lying in a bedroom, and it wasn't his. He knew this instantly because of the ceiling. His bedroom ceiling still had the model aircraft hanging from bits of cotton. He'd never got around to taking them down.
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"Car all right?" he said.
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This ceiling just had cracked plaster. Newt had never been in a woman's bedroom before, but he sensed that this was one largely by a combination of soft smells. There was a hint of talcum and lily-of-the-valley, and no rank suggestion of old T-shirts that had forgotten what the inside of a tumble-dryer looked like.
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"You banged your head on the steering wheel," said the voice that had roused him. "Nothing broken, though. What happened?"
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"See?" said Newt, to an invisible audience. "They knew how to build them in those days. That plastic finish hardly takes a dent."
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He tried to lift his head up, groaned, and let it sink back onto the pillow. Pink, he couldn't help noticing.
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Newt opened his eyes again.
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"Apparently. A little voice inside it keeps repeating 'Prease to frasten sleat-bert.'"
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He blinked at Anathema.
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The figure walked around into his line of sight. It had dark hair, and red lips, and green eyes, and it was almost certainly female. Newt tried not to stare. It said, "If you have, no one's going to notice." Then she smiled. "Do you know, I've never met a witchfinder before?"
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"I swerved to avoid a Tibetan in the road," he said. "At least, I think I did. I think I've probably gone mad."
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"I had to look inside," she said.
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"Er --" Newt began. She held up his open wallet.
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"It's really just a hobby," he said wretchedly. "I'm really a… a…," he wasn't going to say wages clerk, not here, not now, not to a girl like this, "a computer engineer," he lied. Want to be, want to be; in my heart I'm a computer engineer, it's only the brain that's letting me down. "Excuse me, could I know --"
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"Anathema Device," said Anathema. "I'm an occultist, but that's just a hobby. I'm really a witch. Well done. You're half an hour late," she added, handing him a small sheet of cardboard, "so you'd better read this. It'll save a lot of time."
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Newt felt extremely embarrassed, a not unusual state of affairs. Shadwell had given him an official witchfinder's warrant card, which among other things charged all beadles, magistrates, bishops, and bailiffs to give him free passage and as much dry kindling as he required. It was incredibly impressive, a masterpiece of calligraphy, and probably quite old. He'd forgotten about it.
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Adam also had a small computer. He used it for playing games, but never for very long. He'd load a game, watch it intently for a few minutes, and then proceed to play it until the High Score counter ran out of zeroes.
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"All you have to do is learn how to play it, and then it's just easy," he said.
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When the other Them wondered about this strange skill, Adam professed mild amazement that everyone didn't play games like this.
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Newt did in fact own a small home computer, despite his boyhood experiences. In fact, he'd owned several. You always knew which ones he owned. They were desktop equivalents of the Wasabi. They were the ones which, for example, dropped to half-price just after he'd bought them. Or were launched in a blaze of publicity and disappeared into obscurity within a year. Or only worked at all if you stuck them in a fridge. Or, if by some fluke they were basically good machines, Newt always got the few that were sold with the early, bug-infested version of the operating system. But he persevered, because he believed.
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Newt kept finding his eye drawn to it.
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"The device."
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Quite a lot of the front parlor in Jasmine Cottage was taken up, Newt noticed with a sinking feeling, with piles of newspapers. Clippings were stuck around the walls. Some of them had bits circled in red ink. He was mildly gratified to spot several he had cut out for Shadwell.
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Anathema owned very little in the way of furniture. The only thing she'd bothered to bring with her had been her clock, one of the family heirlooms. It wasn't a full-cased grandfather clock, but a wall clock with a free-swinging pendulum that E. A. Poe would cheerfully have strapped someone under.
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In the last half hour Newt had heard some pretty unbelievable stuff and was close to believing it, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
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"It was built by an ancestor of mine," said Anathema, putting the coffee cups down on the table. "Sir Joshua Device. You may have heard of him? He invented the little rocking thing that made it possible to build accurate clocks cheaply? They named it after him."
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"The Joshua?" said Newt guardedly.
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"I did my Ph. D. on them," she said. "The people who invented things so simple and universally useful that everyone forgot that they'd ever actually needed to be invented. Sugar?"
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It didn't.
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She'd seemed to think it would explain everything.
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It had a ruled line down the middle. On the left-hand side was a short piece of what seemed to be poetry, in black ink. On the right-hand side, in red ink this time, were comments and annotations. The effect was as follows:
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She looked at Newt's blank expression.
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"Er --"
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"You normally have two," said Anathema sweetly.
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"The device is named after a real person?" he said.
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"-- who devised a gadget that made it possible to pump out flooded mineshafts. Or Pietr Gizmo? Or Cyrus T. Doodad, America's foremost black inventor? Thomas Edison said that the only other contemporary practical scientists he admired were Cyrus T. Doodad and Ella Reader Widget. And --"
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"Oh, yes. Fine old Lancashire name. From the French, I believe. be telling me next you've never heard of Sir Humphrey Gadget --"
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"Oh, now come on --"
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Newt stared back at the card she'd handed him.
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Youre Bedde, achinge his |… willowfine = Aspirin
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"Another fine old Lancashire name," said Anathema coldly. "If you don't believe, read up on the witch trials of the early seventeenth century. She was an ancestress of mine. As a matter of fact, one of your ancestors burned her alive. Or tried to."
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with bruises be upon |… take in…
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"Have you ever heard of Agnes Nutter?" said Anathema.
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Newt's hand went automatically to his pocket. His cigarette lighter had gone.
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to come.
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pyn yette his hart be | witchfinder?? Refers to
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clene, yette seed of myne | Pulsifer (cf. 002) Search
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be, untyl the Ende that is | (cf. 712, 3803, 4004)
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means of flame from | 1990s!
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hedd for willow fine, a | (cf.3757 Pin =
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own undoing, take the | for matches, etc. In the
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himme for to mayk ryght |… hmm…
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chariot inverted be, four | Car smash… not serious
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manne who testeth with a | witchfinder (cf. 102) Good
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wheles in the skye, a man | injury??
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certain, together ye sharle |… less than a day
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3819: When Orient's | Japanese car? Upturned.
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"What's this mean?" he said hoarsely.
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"No," said Newt, taking a desperate defense in sarcasm. "You're going to tell me she invented mad people, I suppose."
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Newt listened in fascinated horror to the story of Agnes Nutter's death.
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"That sort of name was quite common in those days," said Anathema. "Apparently there were ten children and they were a very religious family. There was Covetousness Pulsifer, False-Witness Pulsifer --"
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"I think I understand," said Newt. "Gosh. I thought Shadwell said he'd heard the name before. It must be in the Army records. I suppose if I'd gone around being called Adultery Pulsifer I'd want to hurt as many people as possible."
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"Thanks for taking it so well," said Newt. "I mean, he must have been an ancestor. There aren't many Pulsifers. Maybe… that's why I sort of met up with the Witchfinder Army? Could be Fate," he said hopefully.
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"Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer?" he said, when she'd finished.
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"I think he just didn't like women very much."
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She shook her head. "No," she said. "No such thing."
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"Anyway, witchfinding isn't like it was in those days. I don't even think old Shadwell's ever done more than kick over Doris Stokes's dustbins."
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"But what's it got to do with this?" he said.
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Newt stared at the prophecy again. His mouth opened and shut.
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"She wrote it. Well, the original. It's No. 3819 of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, first published 1655."
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Newt waved the bit of paper.
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"Between you and me, Agnes was a bit of a difficult character," said Anathema, vaguely. "She had no middle gears."
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Most psychic abilities are caused by a simple lack of temporal focus, and the mind of Agnes Nutter was so far adrift in Time that she was considered pretty mad even by the standards of seventeenthcentury Lancashire, where mad prophetesses were a growth industry.
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She used to go on about curing illnesses by using a sort of mold, and the importance of washing your hands so that the tiny little animals who caused diseases would be washed away, when every sensible person knew that a good stink was the only defense against the demons of ill health. She advocated running at a sort of gentle bouncing trot as an aid to living longer, which was extremely suspicious and first put the Witchfinders onto her, and stressed the importance of fiber in diet, although here she was clearly ahead of her time since most people were less bothered about the fiber in their diet than the gravel. And she wouldn't cure warts.
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But she was a treat to listen to, everyone agreed.
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"She knew I'd crash my car?" he said.
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"Yes. No. Probably not. It's hard to say. You see, Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold."
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"Itt is alle in youre Minde," she'd say, "fogett about Itte, ane it wine goe Away."
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It was obvious that Agnes had a line to the Future, but it was an unusually narrow and specific line. In other words, almost totally useless.
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"How do you mean?" said Newt.
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"You mean she predicted videotape recorders?"
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"She managed to come up with the kind of predictions that you can only understand after the thing has happened," said Anathema. "Like 'Do Notte Buye Betamacks.' That was a prediction for 1972."
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"No! She just picked up one little fragment of information," said Anathema. "That's the point. Most of the time she comes up with such an oblique reference that you can't work it out until it's gone past, and then it all slots into place. And she didn't know what was going to be important or not, so it's all a bit hit and miss. Her prediction for November 22, 1963, was about a house falling down in King's Lynn."
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"President Kennedy was assassinated," said Anathema helpfully. "But Dallas didn't exist then, you see. Whereas King's Lynn was quite important."
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"Oh?" Newt looked politely blank.
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"She was generally very good if her descendants were involved."
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"Oh."
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"Oh?"
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"Sometimes you can be lucky," Anathema went on. "My greatgrandfather worked out about the stock market crash of 1929, for example, two days before it actually happened. Made a fortune. You could say we're professional descendants."
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She looked sharply at Newt. "You see, what no one ever realized until about two hundred years ago that The Nice and Accurate Prophecies was Agnes's idea of a family heirloom. Many of the prophecies relate to her descendants and their well-being. She was sort of trying to look after us after she'd gone. That's the reason for the King's Lynn prophecy, we think. My father was visiting there at the time, so from Agnes's point of view, while he was unlikely to be struck by stray rounds from Dallas, there was a good chance he might be hit by a brick."
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"And she wouldn't know anything about the internal combustion engine. To her they were just funny chariots. Even my mother thought it referred to an Emperor's carriage overturning. You see, it's not enough to know what the future i -- You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses.
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"And when is that going to be?" said Newt.
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"What a nice person," said Newt. "You could almost overlook her blowing up an entire village."
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Anathema looked meaningfully at the clock.
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He gave a horrible little laugh that he hoped sounded suave and worldly. After the events so far today, he wasn't feeling very sane. And he could smell Anathema's perfume, which made him uncomfortable.
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Anathema ignored this. "Anyway, that's about it," she said. "Ever since then we've made it our job to interpret them. After all, it averages out at about one prophecy a month -- more now, in fact, as we get closer to the end of the world."
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"Think yourself lucky I don't need a stopwatch," said Anathema. "We've got, oh, about five or six hours."
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Newt turned this over in his mind. Thus far in his life he'd never had the urge to drink alcohol, but something told him there had to be a first time.
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"Do witches keep drink in the house?" he ventured.
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"Oh, yes." She smiled the sort of smile Agnes Nutter probably smiled when unpacking the contents of her lingerie drawer. "Green bubbly stuff with strange Things squirming on the congealing surface. You should know that."
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Newt felt slightly aggrieved. "How did you know they were Tibetan?" he said.
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It turned out to be gin. There was ice. Anathema, who had picked up witchcraft as she went along, disapproved of liquor in general but approved of it in her specific case.
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"Fine. Got any ice?"
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"Oh, I know about them," she said, shuffling the papers on the table. "The two of them came out of the front lawn yesterday. The poor things were quite bewildered, so I gave them a cup of tea and then they borrowed a spade and went down again. I don't think they quite know what they're supposed to be doing."
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"Did I tell you about the Tibetan coming out of a hole in the road?" Newt said, relaxing a bit.
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"If it comes to that, how did you know? Did he go 'Ommm' when you hit him?"
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"One of mine spoke quite good English. It seems that one minute he was repairing radios in Lhasa, next minute he was in a tunnel. He doesn't know how he's going to get home."
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"Well, he -- he looked Tibetan," said Newt. "Saffron robes, bald head… you know… Tibetan."
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"They landed on your lawn too, did they?"
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"Three aliens? One of them a little tin robot?"
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"If you'd sent him up the road, he could probably have got a lift on a flying saucer," said Newt gloomily.
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"She did it all in a card index?" said Newt.
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"I kept meaning to put it all on computer," she said. "Word searches and so forth. You know? It'd make it a lot simpler. The prophecies are arranged in any old order but there are clues, handwriting and so."
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"You're going to tell me she predicted all this too, I suppose?"
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"No. A book. But I've, er, mislaid it. We've always had copies, of course."
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"It's about the only place they didn't land, according to the radio. They keep coming down all over the world delivering a short trite message of cosmic peace, and when people say 'Yes, well?' they give them a blank look and take off again. Signs and portents, just like Agnes said."
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"Lost it, eh?" said Newt, trying to inject some humor into the proceedings. "Bet she didn't foresee that!"
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Agnes leafed through a battered card index in front of her.
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Four arise, upon iron | 3=4? Railways?
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barres quitte the light- | (see cuttings Nos. 798806)
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cometh together and |… South America is green??
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Brazil is vert, then Three |… leviathan=whale (cf.1981)?
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than runneth free, and
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ning castels, and sunken
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"I didn't get all of this one in advance," Anathema admitted. "I filled it in after listening to the news."
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She pushed a sheet of paper in front of Newt.
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Then she went on: "We've built up quite a concordance over the years, though, and my grandfather came up with a useful cross-referencing system… ah. Here we are."
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landes riseth, and Levia- |… Atlantis, cuttings 812819
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frome thee Sky, yette ken |… paratroops?
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"You must be incredibly good at crosswords in your family," said Newt.
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Earth and green manne |… Aliens…??
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not why, and Pluto's |… nuclear power stations
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crocus come frome the
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3988. Whene menne of |… Crocus=saffron (cf.2003)
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horses ride; I tell you the | ('iron road', cf.2675)
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ende draweth nigh.
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Anathema glowered at him. If looks could kill, Newt would have been on a slab.
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"Three hours and ten minutes," said Newt automatically.
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"It wasn't blazing," said Pepper. "It wasn't even very wrecked when we put it back rightside up."
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"I think Agnes is getting a bit out of her depth here, anyway. The bits about leviathan and South America and threes and fours could mean anything." She sighed. "The problem is newspapers. You never know if Agnes is referring to some tiny little incident that you might miss. Do you know how long it takes to go through every daily paper thoroughly every morning?"
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"I expect we'll get a medal or something," said Adam optimistically. "Rescuing a man from a blazing wreck."
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"Could be good fun, going to Tibet," said Brian. "We could learn marital arts and stuff. I saw this old film where there's this valley in Tibet and everyone there lives for hundreds of years. It's called Shangri-La."
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"It could of been," Adam pointed out. "I don't see why we shouldn't have a medal just because some old car doesn't know when to catch fire."
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They stood looking down at the hole. Anathema had called the police, who had put it down to subsidence and put some cones around it; it was dark, and went down a long way.
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Adam snorted.
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"Like what?" said Brian, who enjoyed the diversions available at a good sheep-dipping. He began to empty his pockets of crisp packets and drop them, one by one, into the hole.
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Adam threw a larger stone into the hole, and waited for the thump. It didn't come.
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"What shall we do now?" said Pepper. "They're dipping sheep over at Norton Bottom Farm. We could go and help."
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"Shambala," corrected Adam.
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"I expect it's the same place. Prob'ly got both names," said Pepper, with unusual diplomacy. "Like our house. We changed the name from The Lodge to Norton View when we moved in, but we still get letters addressed to Theo C. Cupier, The Lodge. Perhaps they've named it Shambala now but people still call it The Laurels."
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"'S lot better than Shambles, anyway," said Wensleydale mildly.
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"Not very clever, naming a valley after some ole bungalow," he said. "Might as well call it Dunroamin', or, or The Laurels."
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"Dunno," he said distantly. "I reckon we should do something about whales and forests and suchlike."
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"My aunt's bungalow's called Shangri-La," said Wensleydale.
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Adam flicked a pebble into the hole. He was becoming bored with Tibetans.
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"Huh," said Adam, not really listening.
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Something was happening inside his head. It was aching. Thoughts were arriving there without him having to think them. Something was saying, You can do something, Adam Young. You can make it all better. You can do anything you want. And what was saying this to him was… him. Part of him, deep down. Part of him that had been attached to him all these years and not really noticed, like a shadow. It was saying: yes, it's a rotten world. It could have been great. But now it's rotten, and it's time to do something about it. That's what you're here for. To make it all better.
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He was feeling very odd.
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"Then the Atlantisans'd be the only ones well off," said Pepper cheerfully.
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"They'll be cutting 'em down anyway," said Wensleydale.
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Dog, one last tiny satanic spark of his soul hating himself for it, put his head on one side and whined.
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"We could go into Tadfield this afternoon and not have a hamburger," said Pepper. "If all four of us don't have one, that's millions of acres of rainforest they won't have to cut down."
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The little mongrel, noticing the attention, balanced expectantly on its hind legs.
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"S gonna be a fine ole world to grow up in," Adam said. "No whales, no air, and everyone paddlin' around because of the seas risin'."
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"It's grass materialism again," said Adam. "Same with the whales. It's amazin', the stuff that's goin' on." He stared at Dog.
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"S people like you that's eating all the whales," said Adam severely. "I bet you've used up a nearly a whole whale already."
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"Because they'd be able to go everywhere," Pepper went on, giving him a worried look. "The Atlantisans, I mean. Because --"
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They stared at him. They'd never seen him like this before.
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"I'm fed up with the ole Atlantisans and Tibetans," snapped Adam.
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This wasn't the old Adam the Them knew. The Them avoided one another's faces. With Adam in this mood, the world seemed a chillier place.
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"It's all very well for them," said Adam. "Everyone's goin' around usin' up all the whales and coal and oil and ozone and rainforests and that, and there'll be none left for us. We should be goin' to Mars and stuff, instead of sittin' around in the dark and wet with the air spillin' away."
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"It's like you said the other day," said Adam. "You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's all full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion."
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"Seems to me," said Brian, pragmatically, "seems to me, the best thing you could do about it is stop readin' about it."
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The Them exchanged glances.
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"Seems to me it ought to be rolled up and started all over again," said Adam.
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There was a shadow over the whole world. Storm clouds were building up in the north, the sunlight glowing yellow off them as though the sky had been painted by an enthusiastic amateur.
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That hadn't sounded like Adam's voice.
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The thunder growled again. Pepper shivered. This wasn't the normal Them mobius bickering, which passed many a slow hour. There was a look in Adam's eye that his friend couldn't quite fathom -- not devilment, because that was more or less there all the time, but a sort of blank grayness that was far worse.
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A bitter wind blew through the summer woods.
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Adam looked at Dog, who tried to stand on his head. There was a distant mutter of thunder. He reached down and patted the dog absentmindedly.
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"Serve everyone right if all the nucular bombs went off and it all started again, only prop'ly organized," said Adam. "Sometimes I think that's what I'd like to happen. An' then we could sort everythin' out."
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"But there wouldn't be any people," said Pepper.
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"Well, I dunno about we," Pepper tried. "Dunno about the we, because, if there's all these bombs goin' off, we all get blown up. Speaking as a mother of unborn generations, I'm against it."
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"And then giant ants take over the world," said Wensleydale nervously. "I saw this film. Or you go around with sawn-off shotguns and everyone's got these cars with, you know, knives and guns stuck on --"
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They looked at her curiously. She shrugged.
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"I wouldn't allow any giant ants or anything like that," said Adam, brightening up horribly. "And you'd all be all right. I'd see to that. It'd be wicked, eh, to have all the world to ourselves. Wouldn't it? We could share it out. We could have amazing games. We could have War with real armies an' stuff."
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"Oh, I could make us some people," said Adam airily. "Good enough for armies, at any rate. We could all have a quarter of the world each. Like, you'!… he pointed to Pepper, who recoiled as though Adam's finger were a whitehot poker --"could have Russia because it's red and you've got red hair, right? And Wensley can have America, and Brian can have, can have Africa and Europe, an', an'--"
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"H-huh," stuttered Pepper, as the rising wind whipped at her T-shirt, "I don't s-see why Wensley's got America an' all I've g-got is just Russia. Russia's boring."
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Even in their state of mounting terror the Them gave this the consideration it deserved.
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"That means I've got jus' Africa and a lot of jus' borin' little countries," said Brian, negotiating even on the curl of the catastrophe curve. "I wouldn't mind Australia," he added.
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"Dog's goin' to have Australia," said Adam, his eyes glowing with the fires of creation, "on account of him needin' a lot of space to run about. An' there's all those rabbits and kangaroos for him to chase, an'--"
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"You can have China and Japan and India," said Adam.
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Adam wasn't listening, at least to any voices outside his own head. "It's all too much of a mess," he said. "We should start again. Just save the ones we want and start again. That's the best way. It'd be doing the Earth a favor, when you come to think about it. It makes me angry, seeing the way those old loonies are messing it up…"
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Pepper nudged him and shook her head urgently.
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The clouds spread forwards and sideways like ink poured into a bowl of clear water, moving across the sky faster than the wind.
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"But there won't be any rab --" Wensleydale shrieked.
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"What I'm trying to say," she said patiently, "is that Agnes didn't see the future. That's just a metaphor. She remembered it. Not very well, of course, and by the time it'd been filtered through her own understanding it's often a bit confused. We think she's best at remembering things that were going to happen to her descendants."
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"It's memory, you see," said Anathema. "It works backwards as well as forwards. Racial memory, I mean."
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"But if you're going to places and doing things because of what she wrote, and what she wrote is her recollection of the places you went to and the things you did," said Newt, "then --"
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"I know. But there's, er, some evidence that that's how it works," said Anathema.
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Newt gave her a polite but blank look.
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They looked at the map spread out between them. Beside them the radio murmured. Newt was very aware that a woman was sitting next to him. Be professional, he told himself. You're a soldier, aren't you? Well, practically. Then act like a soldier. He thought hard for a fraction of a second. Well, act like a respectable soldier on his best behavior, then. He forced his attention back to the matter at hand.
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"Why Lower Tadfield?" said Newt. "I just got interested because of the weather. Optimal microclimate, they call it. That means it's a small place with its own personal nice weather."
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He glanced at her notebooks. There was definitely something odd about the place, even if you ignored Tibetans and UFOs, which seemed to be infesting the whole world these days. The Tadfield area didn't only have the kind of weather you could set your calendar by, it was also remarkably resistant to change. No one seemed to build new houses there. The population didn't seem to move much. There seemed to be more woods and hedges than you'd normally expect these days. The only battery farm to open in the area had failed after a year or two, and been replaced by an old-fashioned pig farmer who let his pigs run loose in his apple orchards and sold the pork at premium prices. The two local schools seemed to soldier on in blissful immunity from the changing fashions of education. A motorway which should have turned most of Lower Tadfield into little more than the Junction 18 Happy Porker Rest Area changed course five miles away, detoured in a great semicircle, and continued on its way oblivious to the little island of rural changelessness it had avoided. No one quite seemed to know why; one of the surveyors involved had a nervous breakdown, a second had become a monk, and a third had gone off to Bali to paint nude women.
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It was as if a large part of the twentieth century had marked a few square miles Out of Bounds.
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2315. Sum say It cometh |…4 years early [New
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Hound sharl coom, | Bismark?
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Wronge, for the plase is |… Tardesfield, Devon…
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Yorke, butte they be |… Taddville, Norfolk…
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Taddes Fild, Stronge inne |… Tadfield, Oxon…
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a knight inne the fief, he
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"I had to go and look through a lot of county records," said Anathema
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4 partes, he bringeth the
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"Why's this one 2315? It's earlier than the others."
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divideth the Worlde into
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Anathema pulled another card out of her index and flicked it across the table.
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storme.
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hys powr, he cometh like | --!-- See Revelation, C6, v10
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1111. An the Great. Is this something to do with
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in London Town, or New | Amsterdam till 1664]…
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and the Two Powers sharl | [A F Device, June 8, 1888]
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"Agnes was a bit slapdash about timing. I don't think she always knew what went where. I told you, we've spent ages devising a sort of system for chaining them together."
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Newt looked at a few cards. For example:
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Manne sharl claim his | I concur. We are all human, alas.
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with them, And Three | Brewster, 1782).??
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it, True to Ittes Nature,
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Own Defeat, Yette the | [Quincy Device, Octbr. 15, 1789]
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"She's being unusually obtuse for Agnes," said Anathema.
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Own. | [Miss O J Device, Janry. 5, 1854]
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Goeth where is its Mas…?
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sharl Rise. And Four and
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-- he'd nearly convinced himself about the non-existence of the UFO, which was clearly a figment of his imagination, and the Tibetan could have been a, well, he was working on it, but whatever it was it wasn't a Tibetan, but what he was more and more convinced of was that he was in a room with a very attractive woman, who appeared actually to like him, or at least not to dislike him, which was a definite first for Newt. And admittedly there seemed to be a lot of strange stuff going on, but if he really tried, poling the boat of common sense upstream against the raging current of the evidence, he could pretend it was all, well, weather balloons, or Venus, or mass hallucination.
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bringing the Ende, and | the Man = Pan, The Devil
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3017. I see Four Riding, | The Apocalyptic Horsemen.
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the Angells of Hell ride | The Witch Trials of Lancashire,
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Four Together be Four, | I feel good Agnes had drunk
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"Nice as in exact, or precise," said Anathema, in the weary tones of one who'd explained this before. "That's what it used to mean."
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an the Dark Angel sharl | well this night,
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ter, Where they Wot
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watch in Vane, for it
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and Hell sharl flee it.
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"Why Nice and Accurate?" said Newt.
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"But look," said Newt.
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Notte, and he sharl name | Schleswig-Holstein?
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"But look," he said, "the world isn't really going to end now, is it? I mean, just look around. It's not like there's any international tension… well, any more than there normally is. Why don't we leave this stuff for a while and just go and, oh, I don't know, maybe we could just go for a walk or something, I mean --"
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In short, whatever Newt was now thinking with, it wasn't his brain.
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"Don't you understand? There's something here! Something that affects the area!" she said. "It's twisted all the ley-lines. It's protecting the area against anything that might change it! It's… it's…" There it was again: the thought in her mind that she could not, was not allowed to grasp, like a dream upon waking.
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The windows rattled. Outside, a sprig of jasmine, driven by the wind, started to bang insistently on the glass.
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"Fix?" said Newt.
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"But I can't get a fix on it," said Anathema, twisting her fingers together. "I've tried everything."
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"I've tried the pendulum. I've tried the theodolite. I'm psychic, you see. But it seems to move around."
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"Various prophecies say the Antichrist has to arise first," said Anathema. "Agnes says he. I can't spot him --"
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Newt was still in control of his own mind enough to do the proper translation. When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an over-active but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie"; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.
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"Armageddon moves around?" said Newt.
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"Or her," said Newt.
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"Could be a her," said Newt. "This is the twentieth century, after all. Equal opportunities."
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"I don't think you're taking this entirely seriously," she said severely. "Anyway, there isn't any evil here. That's what I don't understand. There's just love."
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She gave him a helpless look. "It's hard to describe it," she said. "Something or someone loves this place. Loves every inch of it so powerfully that it shields and protects it. A deep-down, huge, fierce love. How can anything bad start here? How can the end of the world start in a place like this? This is the kind of town you'd want to raise your kids in. It's a kids' paradise." She smiled weakly. "You should see the local kids. They're unreal! Right out of the Boys' Own Paper! All scabby knees and 'brilliant!' and bulls-eyes --"
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"What?"
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"Sorry?" said Newt.
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Anathema snorted. "Disused? Don't you believe it. Used to be a wartime fighter base. It's been Upper Tadfield Air Base for about ten years or so. And before you say it, the answer's no. I hate everything about the bloody place, but the colonel's saner than you are by a long way. His wife does yoga, for God's sake."
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"'Disused aerodrome', it says. Just here, look, west of Tadfield itself --"
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New ones.
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Now. What was it she'd said before? The kids round here…
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"What's this place?" said Newt.
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She nearly had it. She could feel the shape of the thought, she was gaining on it.
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"What?" Anathema screamed, as her train of thought was derailed.
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Newt's finger tapped at the map.
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She felt her mental feet slipping away from under her, and she fell back into the more personal thought waiting there to catch her. Newt was okay, really. And the thing about spending the rest of your life with him was, he wouldn't be around long enough to get on your nerves.
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The radio was talking about South American rainforests.
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It began to hail.
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Bullets of ice shredded the leaves around the Them as Adam led them down into the quarry.
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This wasn't right, he was thinking. Just when I was getting the hang of rats. Just when I'd nearly sorted out that bloody German Shepherd across the road. Now He's going to end it all and I'll be back with the ole glowin' eyes and chasin' lost souls. What's the sense in that? They don't fight back, and there's no taste to 'em…
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Wensleydale, Brian, and Pepper were not thinking quite so coherently. All that they were aware of was that they could no more not follow Adam than fly; to try to resist the force marching them forward would simply result in multiply-broken legs, and they'd still have to march.
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Dog slunk along with his tail between his legs, whining.
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He sat them down on the crate.
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Adam wasn't thinking at all. Something had opened in his mind and was aflame.
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"Don't you worry about them," said Adam loftily. "I can make some new ones. There won't be any of this being in bed by half past nine, either. You don't ever have to go to bed ever, if you don't want to. Or tidy your room or anything. You just leave it all to me and it will be great." He gave them a manic smile. "I've got some new friends comin'," he confided. "You'll like 'em."
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"Er," said Wensleydale, "don't you think our mothers and fathers --"
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"We'll all be all right down here," he said.
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"But before all that," said Adam darkly, "We're really goin' to show 'em…"
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"You jus' think of all the amazin' stuff afterwards," said Adam enthusiastically. "You can fill up America with all new cowboys an' Indians an' policemen an' gangsters an' cartoons an' spacemen and stuff. Won't that be fantastic?"
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Wensleydale looked miserably at the other two. They were sharing a thought that none of them would be able to articulate very satisfactorily even in normal times. Broadly, it was that there had once been real cowboys and gangsters, and that was great. And there would always be pretend cowboys and gangsters, and that was also great. But real pretend cowboys and gangsters, that were alive and not alive could be put back in their box when you were tired of them -- this did not seem great at all. The whole point about gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home.
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There was a tree in the plaza. It wasn't very big and the leaves were yellow and the light it got through the excitingly dramatic smoked glass was the wrong sort of light. And it was on more drugs than an Olympic athlete, and loudspeakers nested in the branches. But it was a tree, and if you half-closed your eyes and looked at it over the artificial waterfall, you could almost believe that you were looking at a sick tree through a fog of tears.
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"But --" Wensleydale began.
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But what could you do? Where there were trees now there were big farms, where there were small farms now there were plazas, and where there were plazas there were still plazas, and that's how it went.
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Jaime Hernez liked to have his lunch under it. The maintenance supervisor would shout at him if he found out, but Jaime had grown up on a farm and it had been quite a good farm and he had liked trees and he didn't want to have to come into the city, but what could you do? It wasn't a bad job and the money was the kind of money his father hadn't dreamed of. His grandfather hadn't dreamed of any money at all. He hadn't even known what money was until he was fifteen. But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history.
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He hid his trolley behind the newspaper stand, sat down furtively, and opened his lunchbox.
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It was then that he became aware of the rustling, and a movement of shadows across the floor. He looked around.
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The tree was moving. He watched it with interest. Jaime had never seen a tree growing before.
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The soil, which was nothing more than a scree of some sort of artificial drippings, was actually crawling as the roots moved around under the surface. Jaime saw a thin white shoot creep down the side of the raised garden area and prod blindly at the concrete of the floor.
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Without knowing why, without ever knowing why, he nudged it gently with his foot until it was close to the crack between the slabs. It found it, and bored down.
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The branches were twisting into different shapes.
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Jaime heard the screech of traffic outside the building, but didn't pay it any attention. Someone was yelling something, but someone was always yelling in Jaime's vicinity, often at him.
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Now he could see what was happening outside. The street surface was heaving like a sea. Saplings were pushing up between the cracks.
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The questing root must have found the buried soil. It changed color and thickened, like a fire hose when the water is turned on. The artificial waterfall stopped running; Jaime visualised fractured pipes blocked with sucking fibers.
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You could do this:
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But what could you do?
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The elevators had stopped running because the power was off, but it was only four flights of stairs. Jaime carefully shut his lunchbox and padded back to his cart, where he selected his longest broom.
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Of course, he reasoned; they had sunlight. His tree didn't. All it had was the muted gray light that came through the dome four stories up. Dead light.
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People were pouring out of the building, yelling. Jaime moved amiably against the flow like a salmon going upstream.
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A white framework of girders, which the architect had presumably thought made a dynamic statement about something or other, held up the smoked glass dome. In fact it was some sort of plastic, and it took Jaime, perched on a convenient strip of girder, all his strength and the full leverage of the broom's length to crack it. A couple more swings brought it down in lethal shards.
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The light poured in, lighting up the dust in the plaza so that the air looked as though it was full of fireflies.
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Far below, the tree burst the walls of its brushed concrete prison and rose like an express train. Jaime had never realized that trees made a sound when they grew, and no one else had realized it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves twenty-four hours from peak to peak.
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The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?
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Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vroooom.
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It was the same over all the city, except that you couldn't see the city any more. All you could see was the canopy of green. It stretched from horizon to horizon.
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Jaime watched it come toward him like a green mushroom cloud. Steam was billowing out from around its roots.
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Jaime sat on his branch, clung to a liana, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
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The girders never stood a chance. The remnant of the dome went up like a ping-pong ball on a water spray.
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Except that, today, there weren't any whales. The crew stared at the screens, which by the application of ingenious technology could spot anything larger than a sardine and calculate its net value on the international oil market, and found them blank. The occasional fish that did show up was barreling through the water as if in a great hurry to get elsewhere.
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Presently, it began to rain.
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"What of it?"
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"Ah, sir," he said, "it is shallower already."
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The captain glared at several million yen worth of cutting-edge technology, and thumped it.
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The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research material. He wondered what they did to you. Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honorable thing.
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"What is it?" said the captain testily.
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This was unreal. There ought to be something.
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"We seem to have a miserable instrument failure. Seabed in this area should be two hundred meters."
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"Honorable sir?" he said.
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The navigator gave a nervous smile.
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"I'm reading 15,000 meters, honorable sir. And still falling."
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"That is foolish. There is no such depth."
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The navigator punched up a chart and stared at it.
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Beneath the thunders of the upper deep, as Aziraphale and Tennyson both knew, Far, far beneath in the abyssal sea/The kraken sleepeth.
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"See," said the navigator. "'Three thousand meters already."
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"A hundred meters?"
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Newt and Anathema clung to one another in the space between the overturned table and the wall.
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"Er," said the navigator, "one thousand meters?"
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The kraken is not amused.
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The cottage windows burst inward. This wasn't a storm, it was war. Fragments of jasmine whirled across the room, mingled with the rain of file cards.
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The factory ship rocks on the sudden swell.
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And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.
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"This is a bloody hurricane. Did she say what's supposed to happen next?"
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"Five hundred meters?"
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Millions of tons of deep ocean ooze cascade off its flanks as it rises.
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"Go on," muttered Newt. "Tell me Agnes predicted this."
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There is a tiny metal thing above it. The kraken stirs.
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"She did say he bringeth the storm," said Anathema.
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The kraken doesn't have eyes. There has never been anything for it to look at. But as it billows up through the icy waters it picks up the microwave noise of the sea, the sorrowing beeps and whistles of the whalesong.
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And now it was waking up.
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Courting is always difficult when the one being courted has an elderly female relative in the house; they tend to mutter or cackle or bum cigarettes or, in the worst cases, get out the family photograph album, an act of aggression in the sex war which ought to be banned by a Geneva Convention. It's much worse when the relative has been dead for three hundred years. Newt had indeed been harboring certain thoughts about Anathema; not just harboring them, in fact, but dry-docking them, refitting them, giving them a good coat of paint and scraping the barnacles off their bottom. But the idea of Agnes's second-sight boring into the back of his neck sloshed over his libido like a bucketful of cold water.
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3477. Lette the wheel of. Some mysticism here, one fears.
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join, there are othere
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wynd blowethe the blos
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Newt read it again. There was a sound outside like a sheet of corrugated iron pinwheeling across the garden, which was exactly what it was.
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"Since you mention it, yes," she said. She held out a card.
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cometh when Redde and | Peas/blossoms? [OFD, 1929, Sept 4]
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"You can remember details like that at a time like this?"
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anothere, for the calm
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"2315 is cross-referenced to 3477," said Anathema.
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fyres than mine; when the
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Pale approche to Peas is | Revelations Ch 6 again, I presume.
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Whyte and Blacke and
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Fate turne, let harts en- | [A F Device, Octbr 17, 1889]
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Our Professioune. | [Dr Thos. Device, 1835]
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soms, reach oute one to
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"Is this supposed to mean," he said slowly, "that we're supposed to become an, an item? That Agnes, what a joker."
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He was in the mood in which people burned witches. His life was quite complicated enough without it being manipulated across the centuries by some crazed old woman.
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He had even been entertaining the idea of inviting her out for a meal, but he hated the idea of some Cromwellian witch sitting in her cottage three centuries earlier and watching him eat.
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A thump in the grate sounded like part of the chimney stack coming down.
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And then he thought: my life isn't complicated at all. I can see it as clearly as Agnes might. It stretches all the way to early retirement, a whipround from the people in the office, a bright little neat flat somewhere, a neat little empty death. Except now I'm going to die under the ruins of a cottage during what might just possibly be the end of the world.
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The Recording Angel won't have any trouble with me, my life must have been dittoes on every page for years. I mean, what have I ever really done? I've never robbed a bank. I've never had a parking ticket. I've never eaten Thai food --
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He buried his face in her hair.
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The radio died as the power lines finally gave up.
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He was just signing for Witchfinder Private Table, who got an extra tuppence a year hay allowance, when there was another ping.
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There was a pinging sound.
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I've never been to America. Or France, because Calais doesn't really count. I've never learned to play a musical instrument.
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Shadwell, who had been bringing the Army pay books up to date, looked up in the middle of signing for Witchfinder Lance-Corporal Smith.
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He retrieved the pin, glared at it suspiciously, and pushed it so hard into the map that the plaster behind it gave way. Then he went back to the ledgers.
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He got down from his stool, muttering under his breath, and searched around on the floor until he found it. He gave it another polish and put it back in Tadfield.
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It took him a while to notice that the gleam of Newt's pin was no longer on the map.
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I've never --
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Somewhere another window caved in, with a merry tinkle of breaking glass. Anathema put her arms around him, with a sigh which really didn't sound disappointed at all.
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There was a ping.
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This time the pin was several feet from the wall. Shadwell picked it up, examined its point, pushed it into the map, and watched it.
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After about five seconds it shot past his ear.
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He scrabbled for it on the floor, replaced it on the map, and held it there.
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Ten seconds later Shadwell was rummaging through the WA's cash box, which yielded a handful of copper, a ten-shilling note, and a small counterfeit coin from the reign of James I. Regardless of personal safety, he rummaged in his own pockets. The results of the trawl, even with his pensioners' concessionary travel pass taken into consideration, were barely enough to get him out of the house, let alone to Tadfield.
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The only other people he knew who had money were Mr. Rajit and Madame Tracy. As far as the Rajits were concerned, the question of seven weeks' rent would probably crop up in any financial discussion he instigated at this point, and as for Madame Tracy, who'd only be too willing to lend him a handful of used tenners…
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It moved under his hand. He leaned his weight on it.
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A tiny thread of smoke curled out of the map. Shadwell gave a whimper and sucked his fingers as the red-hot pin ricocheted off the opposite wall and smashed a window. It didn't want to be in Tadfield.
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They'd each been here, just once, spending as little time as possible in the room and, in Aziraphale's case, trying not to touch any flat surface. The other one, the flash southern bastard in the sunglasses, was -- Shadwell suspected -- not someone he ought to offend. In Shadwell's simple world, anyone in sunglasses who wasn't actually on a beach was probably a criminal. He suspected that Crowley was from the Mafia, or the underworld, although he would have been surprised how right he nearly was. But the soft one in the camelhair coat was a different matter, and he'd risked trailing him back to his base once, and he could remember the way. He thought Aziraphale was a Russian spy. He could ask him for money. Threaten him a bit.
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Which left no one else.
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"I'll be swaggit if I'll tak the Wages o' Sin frae the painted jezebel," he said.
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The southern pansy.
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Save one.
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It was terribly risky.
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Shadwell pulled himself together. Even now young Newt might be suffering unimaginable tortures at the hands of the daughters o' night and he, Shadwell, had sent him.
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Aziraphale was dithering. He'd been dithering for some twelve hours. His nerves, he would have said, were all over the place. He walked around the shop, picking up bits of paper and dropping them again, fiddling with pens.
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The weather seemed to be blowing up a bit.
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He ought to tell Crowley.
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No, he didn't. He wanted to tell Crowley. He ought to tell Heaven. He was an angel, after all. You had to do the right thing. It was built-in. You see a wile, you thwart. Crowley had put his finger on it, right enough. He ought to have told Heaven right from the start.
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"We canna leave our people in there," he said, and put on his thin overcoat and shapeless hat and went out into the street.
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But he'd known him for thousands of years. They got along. They nearly understood one another. He sometimes suspected they had far more in common with one another than with their respective superiors. They both liked the world, for one thing, rather than viewing it simply as the board on which the cosmic game of chess was being played.
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Yes. And then everything would be all right.
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Getting in touch with Heaven for two-way communications was far more difficult for Aziraphale than it is for humans, who don't expect an answer and in nearly all cases would be rather surprised to get one.
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There was a knock at the shop door, despite the CLOSED sign. He ignored it.
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Well, of course, that was it. That was the answer, staring him in the face. It'd be true to the spirit of his pact with Crowley if he tipped Heaven the wink, and then they could quietly do something about the child, although nothing too bad of course because we were all God's creatures when you got down to it, even people like Crowley and the Antichrist, and the world would be saved and there wouldn't have to be all that Armageddon business, which would do nobody any good anyway, because everyone knew Heaven would win in the end, and Crowley would be bound to understand.
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He pushed aside the paper-laden desk and rolled up the threadbare bookshop carpet. There was a small circle chalked on the floorboards underneath, surrounded by suitable passages from the Cabala. The angel lit seven candles, which he placed ritually at certain points around the circle. Then he lit some incense, which was not necessary but did make the place smell nice.
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When it came, the voice sounded slightly annoyed.
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"Well?" it said again.
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He said the Words again.
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"We know," said the voice.
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"It's me, Aziraphale."
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"Well done," said the voice, in flat, dead tones.
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"Yes?" said the voice.
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Nothing happened.
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"There doesn't have to be any of that business with one third of the seas turning to blood or anything," said Aziraphale happily.
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He beamed madly into the light.
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Aziraphale felt an icy pit opening under his enthusiasm, and tried to pretend it wasn't happening.
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"But, d'you see, you can ki -- man stop it all happening! In the nick of time! You've only got a few hours! You can stop it all and there needn't be the war and everyone will be saved!"
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There was a pause. The blue light flickered.
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"I've got great news! I've located the Antichrist! I can give you his address and everything!"
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"Yes, he's in a place called Lower Tadfield, and the address --"
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A well-educated voice said, "Well?"
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Eventually a bright blue shaft of light shot down from the ceiling and filled the circle.
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"Why not?" it said.
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And then he stood in the circle and said the Words.
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Aziraphale felt the coldness envelop his mind. He opened his mouth to say, "Do you think perhaps it would be a good idea not to hold the war on Earth?" and changed his mind.
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"Thank you," said Aziraphale. The bitterness in his voice would have soured milk. "I'd forgotten about ineffability, obviously."
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"Yes, but --"
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The voice said, "We are the Metatron." [The Voice of God. But not the voice of God. An entity in its own right. Rather like a Presidential spokesman.]
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"This is not to say you have not performed well," said the voice. "You will receive a commendation. Well done."
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"I see," he said grimly. There was a scraping near the door, and if Aziraphale had been looking in that direction he would have seen a battered felt hat trying to peer over the fanlight.
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"The forces of darkness must be beaten. You seem to be under a misapprehension. The point is not to avoid the war, it is to win it. We have been waiting a long time, Aziraphale."
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"We thought you had."
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"We will win, Aziraphale."
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He plunged on: "Well, you can simply make sure that --"
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"May I ask," said the angel, "to whom have I been speaking?"
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"One other thing," said the voice. "You will of course be joining us, won't you?"
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"Oh. Yes. Very imaginative." Aziraphale's voice was flat and hopeless.
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"We thought a multi-nation nuclear exchange would be a nice start."
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"Well, er, of course it has been simply ages since I've held a flaming sword --" Aziraphale began.
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"Yes, we recall," said the voice. "You will have a lot of opportunity to relearn."
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Aziraphale drew himself up. "I really feel that probity, not to say morality, demands that as a reputable businessman I should --"
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"Ah. Well. I'll just clear up a few business matters, shall I?" said Aziraphale desperately.
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"There hardly seems to be any necessity," said the Metatron.
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"Yes, yes," said the Metatron, a shade testily. "Point taken. We shall await you, then."
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Behind him the letterbox tilted open, revealing a pair of eyes.
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"Good. We will expect you directly, then," said the voice.
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"Ah. Hmm. What sort of initiating event will precipitate the war?" said Aziraphale.
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"Oh, yes. Of course. Oh. Well. Thank you very much. Thank you."
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He took the phone away from his mouth.
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"Shutup! Listen! It was in Tadfield! It's all in that book! You've got to stop --"
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"Stop making noises! It's in Tadfield! That was what I was sensing! You must go there and --"
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Very carefully, he stepped over the circle and crept to the telephone. He opened his notebook and dialed another number.
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BeeeEEeeeEEeee
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"I want to talk to you now --"
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"-- probably not in right now, or asleep, and busy, or something, but --"
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"-- after the tone and I'll get right back to you. Chow."
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"Bugger!" he said. It was the first time he'd sworn in more than four thousand years.
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"Crowley!" Aziraphale tried to hiss and shout at the same time, "Listen! I haven't got much time! The --"
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"Hallo?" he said softly, "Anyone still there?"
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There was silence.
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The light faded, but did not quite vanish. They're leaving the line open, Aziraphale thought. I'm not getting out of this one.
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After four rings it gave a little cough, followed by a pause, and then a voice which sounded so laid back you could put a carpet on it said, "Hi. This is Anthony Crowley. Uh. I --"
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Shadwell was trembling with excitement. He'd seen it all. He'd heard it all. He hadn't understood any of it, but he knew what people did with circles and candlesticks and incense. He knew that all right. He'd seen The Devil Rides Out fifteen times, sixteen times if you included the time he'd been thrown out of the cinema for shouting his unflattering opinions of amateur witchfinder Christopher Lee.
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"Crowley, it's me!"
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He found the other number. He dialed it. It was answered almost immediately, at the same time as the shop's bell tingled gently.
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Hold on. The demon had another line, didn't he? He was that kind of person. Aziraphale fumbled in the book, nearly dropping it on the floor. They would be getting impatient soon.
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"Nuh. Got an old friend here."
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Crowley's voice, getting louder as it neared the mouthpiece, said, "-- really mean it. Hallo?"
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"Ngh." The voice was horribly noncommittal. Even in his present state, Aziraphale sensed trouble.
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"Listen --"
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Very slowly, Aziraphale turned around.
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"Awa' we ye, ye spawn o' hell!"
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"Are you alone?" he said cautiously.
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"No, I mean --"
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"I bet they ain't!" said Shadwell triumphantly.
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"Book," he snarled.
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"I could see what yer were about," snarled Shadwell. There were flecks of foam around his mouth. He was more angry than he could ever remember.
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"Er, things are not what they seem --" Aziraphale began, aware even as he said it that as conversational gambits went it lacked a certain polish.
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"Bell," he said.
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He fumbled in his pocket and produced his trusty Ronson.
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Without taking his eyes off the angel, Shadwell shuffled backwards and grabbed the shop door, slamming it hard so that the bell jangled.
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"I'll have ye, ye evil bastard!" he shouted, advancing like a motheaten avenging angel. "I ken what ye be about, cumin' up here and seducin' wimmen to do yer evil will!"
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He grabbed The Nice and Accurate Prophecies and thumped it down heavily on the table.
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The buggers were using him. They'd been making fools out o' the glorious traditions o' the Army.
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"I think perhaps you've got the wrong shop," said Aziraphale. "I'll call back later," he told the receiver, and hung up.
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"Er," said Aziraphale, "I think it might not be a very good idea to --"
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Shadwell wasn't listening. "By the powers invested in me by virtue o' my office o' Witchfinder," he intoned, "I charge ye to quit from this place --"
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Aziraphale looked down at his feet, and swore for the second time in five minutes. He'd stepped into the circle.
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"-- and return henceforth to the place from which ye came, pausin' not to --"
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"Keep out of the circle, you stupid man!"
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"-- never to come again to vex --"
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"-- and deliver us frae evil --"
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In his path, the circle glowed with a faint blue light.
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There was a melodious twang, and the blue glow vanished. So did Aziraphale.
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"Yes, yes, but please keep out of --"
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"You see, the circle --"
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"-- it would really be unwise for a human to set foot in it without --"
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"-- returning NAE MORE!" Shadwell finished. He pointed a vengeful, black-nailed finger.
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"Oh, fuck," he said.
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Aziraphale ran toward Shadwell, waving his hands urgently.
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"Practically candle!" he shouted, and began to advance.
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Thirty seconds went by. Shadwell didn't move. Then, with a trembling left hand, he reached up and carefully lowered his right hand.
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Shadwell shivered. Then, with his hand held out in front of him like a gun that he didn't dare fire and didn't know how to unload, he stepped out into the street, letting the door slam behind him.
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No one answered.
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"Hallo?" he said. "Hallo?"
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Crowley's London flat was the epitome of style. It was everything that a flat should be: spacious, white, elegantly furnished, and with that designer unlived-in look that only comes from not being lived in.
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It shook the floor. One of Aziraphale's candles fell over, spilling burning wax across the old, dry wood.
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This is because Crowley did not live there.
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It was simply the place he went back to, at the end of the day, when he was in London. The beds were always made; the fridge was always stocked with gourmet food that never went off (that was why Crowley had a fridge, after all), and for that matter the fridge never needed to be defrosted, or even plugged in.
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The lounge contained a huge television, a white leather sofa, a video and a laserdisc player, an ansaphone, two telephones -- the ansaphone line, and the private line (a number so far undiscovered by the legions of telephone salesmen who persisted in trying to sell Crowley double glazing, which he already had, or life insurance, which he didn't need)-- and a square matte black sound system, the kind so exquisitely engineered that it just has the on-off switch and the volume control. The only sound equipment Crowley had overlooked was speakers; he'd forgotten about them. Not that it made any difference. The sound reproduction was quite perfect anyway.
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There was an unconnected fax machine with the intelligence of a computer and a computer with the intelligence of a retarded ant. Nevertheless, Crowley upgraded it every few months, because a sleek computer was the sort of thing Crowley felt that the sort of human he tried to be would have. This one was like a Porsche with a screen. The manuals were still in their transparent wrapping.
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[Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: "Learn, guys…"]
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In fact the only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge and green and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves.
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What he did was put the fear of God into them.
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Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat.
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This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister, spraying the leaves, and talking to the plants.
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He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did.
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The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.
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In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. "Say goodbye to your friend," he'd say to them. "He just couldn't cut it…"
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More precisely, the fear of Crowley.
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The lounge was lit by spotlights and white neon tubes, of the kind one casually props against a chair or a corner.
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He had spent an uncomfortable time in each of these rooms, during the long wait for the End of the world.
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Crowley had a bedroom, and a kitchen, and an office, and a lounge, and a toilet: each room forever clean and perfect.
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He had phoned his operatives in the Witchfinder Army again, to try to get news, but his contact, Sergeant Shadwell, had just gone out, and the dimwitted receptionist seemed unable to grasp that he was willing to talk to any of the others.
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The only wall decoration was a framed drawing -- the cartoon for the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's original sketch. Crowley had bought it from the artist one hot afternoon in Florence, and felt it was superior to the final painting.
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[Leonardo had felt so too. "I got her bloody smile right in the roughs," he told Crowley' sipping cold wine in the lunchtime sun, "but it went all over the place when I painted it. Her husband had a few things to say about it when I delivered it, but, like I tell him, Signor del Giocondo, apart from you, who's going to see it? Anyway… explain this helicopter thing again, will you?"]
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Crowley gave up. He tried to read a novel, but couldn't concentrate. He tried to sort his CDs into alphabetical order, but gave up when he discovered they already were in alphabetical order, as was his bookcase, and his collection of Soul Music.
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"Mr. Pulsifer is out too, love," she told him. "He went down to Tadfield this morning. On a mission."
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"I'll speak to anyone," Crowley had explained.
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Eventually he settled down on the white leather sofa and gestured on the television.
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"I'll tell Mr. Shadwell that," she had said, "when he gets back. Now if you don't mind, it's one of my mornings, and I can't leave my gentleman like that for long or he'll catch his death. And at two I've got Mrs. Ormerod and Mr. Scroggie and young Julia coming over for a sitting, and there's the place to clean and all beforehand. But I'll give Mr. Shadwell your message."
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[He was very proud of his collection. It had taken him ages to put together. This was real Soul music. James Brown wasn't in it.]
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"Reports are coming in," said a worried newscaster, "uh, reports are, well, nobody seems to know what's going on, but reports available to us would seem to, uh, indicate an increase in international tensions that would have undoubtedly been viewed as impossible this time last week when, er, everyone seemed to be getting on so nicely. Er.
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"This would seem at least partly due to the spate of unusual events which have occurred over the last few days.
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"Off the coast of Japan-" CROWLEY?
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"Yes," admitted Crowley.
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THE BOY CALLED WARLOCK. WE HAVE BROUGHT HIM TO THE FIELDS OF MEGGIDO. THE DOG IS NOT WITH HIM. THE CHILD KNOWS NOTHING OF THE GREAT WAR. HE IS NOT OUR MASTER'S SON.
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"How do you mean?" Crowley asked, although he already knew.
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WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON, CROWLEY? WHAT EXACTLY HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?
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IS THAT ALL YOU CAN SAY, CROWLEY? OUR TROOPS ARE ASSEMBLED, THE FOUR BEASTS HAVE BEGUN TO RIDE -- BUT WHERE ARE THEY RIDING TO? SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG, CROWLEY AND IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. AND, IN ALL PROBABILITY, YOUR FAULT. WE TRUST YOU HAYS A PERFECTLY REASONABLE EXPLANATION FOR ALL THIS…
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"Ah," said Crowley.
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"Oh yes," agreed Crowley, readily. "Perfectly reasonable."
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… BECAUSE YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE YOUR CHANCE TO EXPLAIN IT ALL TO US YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE ALL THE TIME THERE IS TO EXPLAIN. AND WE WILL LISTEN WITH GREAT INTEREST TO EVERYTHING YOU HAVE TO SAY. AND YOUR CONVERSATION. AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES THAT WILL ACCOMPANY IT, WILL PROVIDE A SOURCE OF ENTERTAINMENT AND PLEASURE FOR ALL THE DAMNED OF HELL, CROWLEY BECAUSE NO MATTER HOW RACKED WITH TORMENT, NO MATTER WHAT AGONIES THE LOWEST OF THE DAMNED ARE SUFFERING, CROWLEY, YOU WILL HAVE IT WORSE --
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Crowley went to the window and looked out. Something black and car-shaped was moving slowly down the street toward him. It was carshaped enough to fool the casual observer. Crowley, who was observing very carefully, noticed that not only were the wheels not going round, but they weren't even attached to the car. It was slowing down as it passed each house; Crowley assumed that the car's passengers (neither of them would be driving; neither of them knew how) were peering out at the house numbers.
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DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT TRYING TO ESCAPE US, CROWLEY THERE IS NO ESCAPE. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. YOU WILL BE… COLLECTED…
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The Infernal Authorities had ceased communicating. Crowley turned the television to the wall, just in case.
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The dull gray-green screen continued enunciating; the silence formed itself into words.
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He walked over to the Mona Lisa.
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He had a little time. Crowley went into the kitchen, and got a plastic bucket from under the sink. Then he went back into the lounge.
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With a gesture, Crowley turned the set off.
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Inside the safe were a thermos flask, two heavy PVC gloves, of the kind that covered one's entire arms, and some tongs.
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He unlocked it, revealing an inner door with a dial tumble lock. He spun the dial (4--0--0--4 was the code, easy to remember, the year he had slithered onto this stupid, marvelous planet, back when it was gleaming and new).
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Crowley paused. He eyed the flask nervously.
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(There was a crash from downstairs. That had been the front door…)
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Crowley lifted the picture down from the wall, revealing a safe. It was not a wall safe; it had been bought from a company that specialized in servicing the nuclear industry.
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He pulled on the gloves and gingerly took the flask, and the tongs, and the bucket -- and, as an afterthought, he grabbed the plant mister from beside a luxuriant rubber plant -- and headed for his office, walking like a man carrying a thermos flask full of something that might cause, if he dropped it or even thought about dropping it, the sort of explosion that impels graybeards to make statements like "And where this crater is now, once stood the City of Wah-Shing-Ton," in SF B-movies.
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A bead of sweat began to form on Crowley's forehead, and trickled down into one eye. He flicked it away.
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He reached his office, nudged open the door with his shoulder. Then he bent his legs, and slowly put things down on the floor. Bucket… tongs… plant mister… and finally, deliberately, the flask.
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He gripped the flask with the tongs, and taking care not to spill the tiniest drop, he poured the contents into the plastic bucket. One false move was all it would take.
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Then, with care and deliberation, he used the tongs to unscrew the top of the flask… carefully… carefully… that was it…
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(A pounding on the stairs below him, and a muffled scream. That would have been the little old lady on the floor below.)
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He could not afford to rush.
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There.
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Then he opened the office door about six inches, and placed the bucket on top.
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"Crawlee…?" called a guttural voice. Hastur.
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He used the tongs to replace the top of the flask, then (-- a crash from his outer hallway --) pulled off the PVC gloves, picked up the plant mister, and settled himself behind his desk.
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Now, as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren't deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors -- doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operation of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren't paragons of virtue; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it.
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Hastur and Ligur.
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"In here, people," he called.
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"We want a word with you," said Ligur (in a tone of voice intended to imply that "word" was synonymous with "horrifically painful eternity"), and the squat demon pushed open the office door.
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"He's through there," hissed another voice. "I can feel the slimy little creep." Ligur.
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Crowley leaned back in his executive chair. He forced himself to relax and failed appallingly.
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And on the other hand, you got people like Ligur and Hastur, who took such a dark delight in unpleasantness you might even have mistaken them for human.
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Drop a lump of sodium in water. Watch it flame and burn and spin around crazily, flaring and sputtering. This was like that; just nastier.
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The demon peeled and flared and flickered. Oily brown smoke oozed from it, and it screamed and it screamed and it screamed. Then it crumpled, folded in on itself, and what was left lay glistening on the burnt and blackened circle of carpet, looking like a handful of mashed slugs.
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The bucket teetered, then fell neatly on Ligur's head.
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"Hi," said Crowley to Hastur, who had been walking behind Ligur, and had unfortunately not been so much as splashed.
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There are some things that are unthinkable: there are some depths that not even demons would believe other demons would stoop to.
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"… Holy water. You bastard," said Hastur. "You complete bastard. He hadn't never done nothing to you."
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"Yet," corrected Crowley, who felt a little more comfortable, now the odds were closer to even. Closer, but not yet even, not by a long shot. Hastur was a Duke of Hell. Crowley wasn't even a local counsellor.
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"Your fate will be whispered by mothers in dark places to frighten their young," said Hastur, and then felt that the language of Hell wasn't up to the job. "You're going to get taken to the bloody cleaners, pal," he added.
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Crowley raised the green plastic plant mister, and sloshed it around threateningly. "Go away," he said. He heard the phone downstairs ringing. Four times, and then the ansaphone caught it. He wondered vaguely who it was.
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"You don't frighten me," said Hastur. He watched a drip of water leak from the nozzle and slide slowly down the side of the plastic container, toward Crowley's hand.
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"Do you know what this is?" asked Crowley. "This is a Sainsbury's plant mister, cheapest and most efficient plant mister in the world. It can squirt a fine spray of water into the air. Do I need to tell you what's in it? It can turn you into that," he pointed to the mess on the carpet. "Now, go away."
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Then the drip on the side of the plant mister reached Crowley's curled fingers, and stopped. "You're bluffing," said Hastur.
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"Yes," said Hastur. And then he smiled. His teeth were too sharp, and his tongue flickered between them. "Do you?"
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"Maybe I am," said Crowley, in a tone of voice which he hoped made it quite clear that bluffing was the last thing on his mind. "And maybe I'm not. Do you feel lucky?"
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"Ngh," said Crowley. Then he said, "Nuh. Got an old friend here."
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Hastur gestured, and the plastic bulb dissolved like rice paper, spilling water all over Crowley's desk, and all over Crowley's suit.
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"So," hissed Hastur, "time to go, Crowley."
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Aziraphale hung up on him. Crowley wondered what he had wanted.
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"And that is?" smiled Hastur.
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He picked it up, and warned Hastur, "Don't move. There's something very important you should know, and I really mean it. Hallo?
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Then the phone on Crowley's desk rang.
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"I think there's something you ought to know," said Crowley, stalling for time.
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Crowley said nothing. Plan A had worked. Plan B had failed. Everything depended on Plan C, and there was one drawback to this: he had only ever planned as far as B.
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And suddenly Plan C was there, in his head. He didn't replace the handset on the receiver. Instead he said, "Okay, Hastur. You've passed the test. You're ready to start playing with the big boys."
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"Have you gone mad?"
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"Nope. Don't you understand? This was a test. The Lords of Hell had to know that you were trustworthy before we gave you command of the Legions of the Damned, in the War ahead."
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"Crowley, you are lying, or you are insane, or possibly you are both," said Hastur, but his certainty was shaken.
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Crowley began to dial a number. "'S'okay, Duke Hastur. I wouldn't expect you to believe it from me," he admitted. "But why don't we talk to the Dark Council -- I am sure that they can convince you."
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Just for a moment he had entertained the possibility; that was where Crowley had got him. It was just possible that Hell was testing him. That Crowley was more than he seemed. Hastur was paranoid, which was simply a sensible and well-adjusted reaction to living in Hell, where they really were all out to get you.
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The number he had dialed clicked and started to ring.
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In a tiny fraction of a second, Hastur was gone as well.
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Over the years a huge number of theological man-hours have been spent debating the famous question:
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And vanished.
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"So long, sucker," he said.
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How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?
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Firstly, angels simply don't dance. It's one of the distinguishing characteristics that marks an angel. They may listen appreciatively to the Music of the Spheres, but they don't feel the urge to get down and boogie to it. So, none.
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In order to arrive at an answer, the following facts must be taken into consideration:
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So providing the dance was a gavotte, and providing that he had a suitable partner (also able, for the sake of argument, both to gavotte, and to dance it on the head of a pin), the answer is a straightforward one.
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At least, nearly none. Aziraphale had learned to gavotte in a discreet gentlemen's club in Portland Place, in the late 1880s, and while he had initially taken to it like a duck to merchant banking, after a while he had become quite good at it, and was quite put out when, some decades later, the gavotte went out of style for good.
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For those of angel stock or demon breed, size, and shape, and composition, are simply options.
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And if you put it that way, the answer is, quite a lot actually, providing they abandon their physical bodies, which is a picnic for a demon. Demons aren't bound by physics. If you take the long view, the universe is just something small and round, like those water-filled balls which produce a miniature snowstorm when you shake them. [Although, unless the ineffable plan is a lot more ineffable than it's given credit for, it does not have a giant plastic snowman at the bottom.] But if you look from really close up, the only problem about dancing on the head of a pin is all those big gaps between electrons.
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Crowley is currently traveling incredibly fast down a telephone
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Then again, you might just as well ask how many demons can dance on the head of a pin. They're of the same original stock, after all. And at least they dance. [Although it's not what you and I would call dancing. Not good dancing anyway. A demon moves like a white band on "Soul Train."]
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RING.
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Crowley went through two telephone exchanges at a very respectable fraction of light-speed. Hastur was a little way behind him: four or five inches, but at that size it gave Crowley a very comfortable lead. One that would vanish, of course, when he came out the other end.
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Hastur was close behind him. Crowley was going to have to time this whole thing very, very carefully.
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Crowley shot out through the phone line, zapped through the plastic sheathing, and materialized, full-size and out of breath, in his lounge.
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RING.
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RING.
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"Wherever you come out, I'll come out too! You won't get away!"
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Crowley had traveled through over twenty miles of cable in less than a second.
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RING.
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They were too small for sound, but demons don't necessarily need sound to communicate. He could hear Hastur screaming behind him, "You bastard! I'll get you. You can't escape me!"
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click
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That was the third ring. Well, thought Crowley, here goes nothing. He stopped, suddenly, and watched Hastur shoot past him. Hastur turned and --
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The outgoing message tape began to turn on his ansaphone. Then there was a beep, and, as the incoming message tape turned, a voice from the speaker screamed, after the beep, "Right! What?… You bloody snake!"
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He had no time to spare.
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The little red message light began to flash.
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Crowley really wished he had some more holy water and the time to hold the cassette in it until it dissolved. But getting hold of Ligur's terminal bath had been dangerous enough, he'd had it for years just in case, and even its presence in the room made him uneasy. Or… or maybe… yes, what would happen if he put the cassette in the car? He could play Hastur over and over again, until he turned into Freddie Mercury. No. He might be a bastard, but you could only go so far.
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On and off and on and off, like a tiny, red, angry eye.
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There was a rumble of distant thunder.
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He went anyway. He ran down to his Bentley and drove toward the West End as if all the demons of hell were after him. Which was more or less the case.
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He had nowhere to go.
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Madame Tracy heard Mr. Shadwell's slow tread come up the stairs. It was slower than usual, and paused every few steps. Normally he came up the stairs as if he hated every one of them.
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"Why, Mr. Shadwell," she said, "whatever have you done to your hand?"
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She managed to grab his arm. He, Shadwell, scourge of evil, was powerless to resist being drawn into her flat.
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"Why are you holding it out like that?"
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He'd never been in it before, at least in his waking moments. His dreams had furnished it in silks, rich hangings, and what he thought of as scented ungulants. Admittedly, it did have a bead curtain in the entrance to the kitchenette and a lamp made rather inexpertly from a Chianti bottle, because Madame Tracy's apprehension of what was chic, like Aziraphale's, had grounded around 1953. And there was a table in the middle of the room with a velvet cloth on it and, on the cloth, the crystal ball which increasingly was Madame Tracy's means of earning a living.
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"Stand back, I tell ye! I canna be responsible!"
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She opened her door. He was leaning against the landing wall.
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"What on earth has happened to you, Mr. Shadwell?" said Madame Tracy, trying to take his hand.
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Shadwell tried to back into the wall.
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"Nothing on earth! Nothing on earth!"
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"Get away frae me, wumman," Shadwell groaned. "I dinna know my ane powers!"
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"Then I'm sure he'll know what to do about them," said Madame Tracy briskly, whose mental picture of what Newt was going through was probably much closer to reality than was Shadwell's. "And I'm sure he wouldn't like to think of you getting yourself worked up into a state here. Just you lie down, and I'll make us both a nice cup of tea."
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"I think you could do with a good lie-down, Mr. Shadwell," she said, in a voice that brooked no argument, and led him on into the bedroom. He was too bewildered to protest.
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She disappeared in a clacking of bead curtains.
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Madame Tracy's concepts of what was erotic stemmed from the days when young men grew up thinking that women had beach balls affixed firmly in front of their anatomy, Brigitte Bardot could be called a sex kitten without anyone bursting out laughing, and there really were magazines with names like Girls, Giggles and Garters. Somewhere in this cauldron of permissiveness she had picked up the idea that soft toys in the bedroom created an intimate, coquettish air.
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"But young Newt is out there," Shadwell muttered, "in thrall to heathen passions and occult wiles."
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Suddenly Shadwell was alone on what he was just capable of recalling, through the wreckage of his shattered nerves, was a bed of sin, and right at this moment was incapable of deciding whether that was in fact better or worse than not being alone on a bed of sin. He turned his head to take in his surroundings.
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But recollection kept storming back. He really had done it. No one else in the Army had ever exorcised a demon, as far as he knew. Not Hopkins, not Siftings, not Diceman. Probably not even Witchfinder Company Sergeant Major Narker,* who held the all-time record for most witches found. [The WA enjoyed a renaissance during the great days of Empire expansionism. The British army's endless skirmishes frequently brought it up against witch-doctors, bone-pointers, shamans, and other occult adversaries. This was the cue for the deployment of the likes of WA CSM Narker, whose striding, bellowing, six-foot-six, eighteen-stone figure, clutching an armor-plated Book, eight-pound Bell, and specially reinforced Candle, could clear the veldt of adversaries faster than a Gatling gun. Cecil Rhodes wrote of him: "Some remote tribes consider him to be a kind of god, and it is an extremely brave or foolhardy witch-doctor who will stand his ground with CSM Narker bearing down on him. I would rather have this man on my side than two battalions of Gurkhas."] Sooner or later every Army runs across its ultimate weapon and now it existed, Shadwell reflected, on the end of his arm.
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Shadwell stared for some time at a large, threadbare teddy bear, which had one eye missing and a torn ear. It probably had a name like Mr. Buggins.
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"Urg," he said.
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He turned his head the other way. His gaze was blocked by a pajama case shaped like an animal that may have been a dog but, there again, might have been a skunk. It had a cheery grin.
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Although Madame Tracy was by many yardsticks quite stupid, she had an instinct in certain matters, and when it came to dabbling in the occult her reasoning was faultless. Dabbling, she'd realized, was exactly what her customers wanted. They didn't want to be shoved in it up to their necks. They didn't want the multi-planular mysteries of Time and Space, they just wanted to be reassured that Mother was getting along fine now she was dead. They wanted just enough Occult to season the simple fare of their lives, and preferably in portions no longer than forty-five minutes, followed by tea and biscuits.
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When Madame Tracy brought the tea in he was snoring. She tactfully closed the door, and rather thankfully as well, because she had a seance due in twenty minutes and it was no good turning down money these days.
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Well, screw No First Use. He'd have a bit of a rest, seeing as he was here, and then the Powers of Darkness had met their match at last…
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They certainly didn't want odd candles, scents, chants, or mystic runes. Madame Tracy had even removed most of the Major Arcana from her Tarot card pack, because their appearance tended to upset people.
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And she made sure that she had always put sprouts on to boil just before a seance. Nothing is more reassuring, nothing is more true to the comfortable spirit of English occultism, than the smell of Brussels sprouts cooking in the next room.
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It was early afternoon, and the heavy storm clouds had turned the sky the color of old lead. It would rain soon, heavily, blindingly. The firemen hoped the rain would come soon. The sooner the better.
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They had arrived fairly promptly, and the younger firemen were dashing around excitedly, unrolling their hosepipe and flexing their axes; the older firemen knew at a glance that the building was a dead loss, and weren't even sure that the rain would stop it spreading to neighboring buildings, when a black Bentley skidded around the corner and drove up onto the pavement at a speed somewhere in excess of sixty miles per hour, and stopped with a screech of brakes half an inch away from the wall of the bookshop. An extremely agitated young man in dark glasses got out and ran toward the door of the blazing bookshop.
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"Are you the owner of this establishment?" asked the fireman.
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He was intercepted by a fireman.
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"I really wouldn't know about that, sir. Appearances can be very deceptive. For example, I am a fireman. However, upon meeting me socially, people unaware of my occupation often suppose that I am, in fact, a chartered accountant or company director. Imagine me out of uniform, sir, and what kind of man would you see before you? Honestly?"
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This sounds easier than it actually was, since in order to manage it Crowley needed to avoid half a dozen firemen, two policemen, and a number of interesting Soho night people, [In any other place than Soho it is quite possible that spectators at a fire might have been interested.] out early, and arguing heatedly amongst themselves about which particular section of society had brightened up the afternoon, and why.
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Crowley pushed straight through them. They scarcely spared him a glance.
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"Don't be stupid! Do I look like I run a bookshop?"
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"A prat," said Crowley, and he ran into the bookshop.
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No answer. Just the crackle of burning paper, the splintering of glass as the fire reached the upstairs rooms, the crash of collapsing timbers.
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Then he pushed open the door, and stepped into an inferno.
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In the far corner a bookshelf toppled over, cascading flaming books across the floor. The fire was all around him, and Crowley ignored it. His left trouser leg began to smolder; he stopped it with a glance.
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He scanned the shop urgently, desperately, looking for the angel, looking for help.
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"Hello? Aziraphale! For Go --, for Sa --, for somebody's sake! Aziraphale!"
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The whole bookshop was ablaze. "Aziraphale!" he called. "Aziraphale, you -- you stupid Aziraphale? Are you here?"
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His shades flew to a far corner of the room, and became a puddle of burning plastic. Yellow eyes with slitted vertical pupils were revealed. Wet and steaming, face ash-blackened, as far from cool as it was possible for him to be, on all fours in the blazing bookshop, Crowley cursed Aziraphale, and the ineffable plan, and Above, and Below.
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The shop window was smashed from outside. Crowley turned, startled, and an unexpected jet of water struck him full in the chest, knocking him to the ground.
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Outside, the passersby were being herded back by the police, and a fireman was explaining to anyone who would listen, "I couldn't stop him. He must have been mad. Or drunk. Just ran in. I couldn't stop him. Mad. Ran straight in. Horrible way to die. Horrible, horrible. Just ran straight in…
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Then he looked down, and saw it. The book. The book that the girl had left in the car in Tadfield, on Wednesday night. It was slightly scorched around the cover, but miraculously unharmed. He picked it up, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, stood up, unsteadily, and brushed himself off.
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The floor above him collapsed. With a roar and gargantuan shrug the building fell in on itself, in a rain of brick and timber and flaming debris.
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Then Crowley came out of the flames.
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They stared at the car as it sped away. Finally one policeman spoke. "Weather like this, he ought to of put his lights on," he said, numbly.
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The police and the firemen looked at him, saw the expression on his face, and stayed exactly where they were.
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He climbed into the Bentley and reversed back into the road, swung around a fire truck, into Wardour Street, and into the darkened afternoon.
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"Especially driving like that. Could be dangerous," agreed another, in flat, dead tones, and they all stood there in the light and the heat of the burning bookshop, wondering what was happening to a world they had thought they understood.
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It was ten past one in the afternoon and it was dark and humid and wet. The motorway was almost deserted, and the woman in red roared down the road on her red motorbike, smiling lazily.
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There was a flash of lightning, blue-white, strobing across the cloud-black sky, a crack of thunder so loud it hurt, and a hard rain began to fall.
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She rode a red motorbike. Not a friendly Honda red; a deep, bloody red, rich and dark and hateful. The bike was apparently, in every other respect, ordinary except for the sword, resting in its scabbard, set onto the side of the bike.
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Her helmet was crimson, and her leather jacket was the color of old wine. In ruby studs on the back were picked out the words HELL'S ANGELS.
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It had been a good day so far. There was something about the sight of a beautiful woman on a powerful motorbike with a sword stuck on the back that had a powerful effect on a certain type of man. So far four traveling salesmen had tried to race her, and bits of Ford Sierra now decorated the crash barriers and bridge supports along forty miles of motorway.
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The audience were saying things like:
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She pulled up at a service area, and went into the Happy Porker Cafe. It was almost empty. A bored waitress was darning a sock behind the counter, and a knot of black-leathered bikers, hard, hairy, filthy, and huge, were clustered around an even taller individual in a black coat. He was resolutely playing something that in bygone years would have been a fruit machine, but now had a video screen, and advertised itself as TRIVIA SCRABBLE.
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"It's 'D'! Press 'D'-- The Godfather must'vegot more Oscars than Gone With the Wind!"
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"1666!"
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"Puppet on a String! Sandie Shaw! Honest. I'm bleeding positive!"
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"No, you great pillock! That was the fire! The Plague was 1665!"
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"It's 'B'-- the Great Wall of China wasn't one of the Seven Wonders of the world!"
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There were four options: Pop Music, Sport, Current Events, and General Knowledge. The tall biker, who had kept his helmet on, was pressing the buttons, to all intents and purposes oblivious of his supporters. At any rate, he was consistently winning.
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"Twenty? Nah, s'never twenty… Oh. It was. Well, I never."
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"It's random wossit, selection, innit. I mean they do it with microchips. It's probably got, like, millions of different subjects in there, in its RAM." He had FISH across his right-hand knuckle, and CHIP on the left.
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The second-shortest biker, Pigbog (6' 3"), whispered to the shortest, Greaser (6' 2"): "What happened to 'Sport', then?" He had LOVE tattooed on one set of knuckles, HATE on the other.
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"Thass a new one, 'How many times has England been officially at war with France since 1066?"'
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"Ah," she said, biting through some wool. "Well, you're better off waiting in here. It's hell out there."
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She could hear the Trivia Scrabblers in the background.
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The red rider went over to the counter.
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"No," she told her. "Not yet."
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"A cup of tea, please. And a cheese sandwich," she said.
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She picked a window table, with a good view of the parking lot, and she waited.
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"Waiting for friends."
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"American war with Mexico? I know that. It's June 1845. 'D'-- see! I tol' you!"
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"You on your own, then, dear?" asked the waitress, passing the tea, and something white and dry and hard, across the counter.
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"Why?" Greaser had never thought of Pigbog as being a Bible trivia freak.
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"Pop Music, Current Events, General Knowledge, and War. It's just I've never seen 'War' before. That's why I mentioned it." Pigbog cracked his knuckles, loudly, and pulled the ring tab on a can of beer. He swigged back half a can, belched carelessly, then sighed. "I just wish they'd do more bleeding Bible questions."
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"'Cos, well, you remember that bit of bother in Brighton?"
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"Oh, yeah. You was on Crimewatch," said Greaser, with a trace of envy.
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"Well, I had to hang out in that hotel where me mam worked, dinni? Free months. And nothin' to read, only this bugger Gideon had left his Bible behind. It kind of sticks in your mind."
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Another motorbike, jet black and gleaming, drew up in the carpark outside.
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The door to the cafe opened. A blast of cold wind blew through the room; a man dressed all in black leather, with a short black beard, walked over to the table, sat next to the woman in red, and the bikers around the video scrabble machine suddenly noticed how hungry they all were, and deputed Skuzz to go and get them something to eat. All of them except the player, who said nothing, just pressed the buttons for the right answers and let his winnings accumulate in the tray at the bottom of the machine.
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"We don't have birthdays."
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"Funny?"
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"Well, you know. When you've spent all these thousands of years waiting for the big day, and it finally comes. Like waiting for Christmas. Or birthdays."
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"I thought we had some, but we don't," said the woman.)
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"I haven't seen you since Mafeking," said Red. "How's it been going?"
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"Feels funny, all of us finally getting together like this," said Red.
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"I've been keeping pretty busy," said Black. "Spent a lot of time in America. Brief world tours. Just killing time, really."
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("What do you mean, you've got no steak and kidney pies?" asked Skuzz, affronted.
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"I didn't say we do. I just said that was what it was like."
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("Actually," admitted the woman, "it doesn't look like we've got anything left at all. Except that slice of pizza."
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"Has it got anchovies on it?" asked Skuzz gloomily. None of the chapter liked anchovies. Or olives.
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"Yes, dear. It's anchovy and olives. Would you like it?"
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Skuzz shook his head sadly. Stomach rumbling, he made his way back to the game. Big Ted got irritable when he got hungry, and when Big Ted got irritable everyone got a slice.)
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A new category had come up on the video screen. You could now answer questions about Pop Music, Current Events, Famine, or War. The bikers seemed marginally less informed about the Irish Potato Famine of 1846, the English everything famine of 1315, and the 1969 dope famine in San Francisco than they had been about War, but the player was still racking up a perfect score, punctuated occasionally by a whir, ratchet, and chink as the machine disgorged pound coins into its tray.
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Black shrugged. "A few hundred miles."
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"Weather looks a bit tricky down south," said Red.
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"I thought it'd be longer, somehow. All that waiting, just for a few hundred miles."
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Red looked at her nails. "That's good. It wouldn't be the same if we didn't have a good thunderstorm. Any idea how far we've got to ride?"
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"It's not the traveling," said Black. "It's the arriving that matters."
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Black squinted at the darkening clouds. "No. Looks fine to me. We'll have a thunderstorm along any minute."
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There was a roar outside. It was the roar of a motorbike with a defective exhaust, untuned engine, leaky carburetor. You didn't have to see the bike to imagine the clouds of black smoke it traveled in, the oil slicks it left in its wake, the trail of small motorbike parts and fittings that littered the roads behind it.
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"Yeah. Same year as Bing Crosby."
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"And Marc Bolan. He was dead good. Press 'D,' then. Go on."
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The cafe door opened. A young man in dusty white leathers entered, and the wind blew empty crisp packets and newspapers and ice cream wrappers in with him. They danced around his feet like excited children, then fell exhausted to the floor.
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"Four of you, are there, dear?" asked the woman. She was trying to find some clean cups and tea spoons -- the entire rack seemed suddenly to have been coated in a light film of motor oil and dried egg.
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"Four teas, please," he said. "One black."
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"There will be," said the man in black, and he took the teas and went back to the table, where his two comrades waited.
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"Nah. 'D.' 1976. I'm positive."
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"Elvis Presley? 'Sgotta be 'C'-- it was 1977 he snuffed it, wasn't it?"
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Black went up to the counter.
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They shook their heads.
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"Any sign of him?" said the boy in white.
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An argument had broken out around the video screen (current categories showing on the screen were War, Famine, Pollution, and Pop Trivia 1962--1979).
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The tall man walked over to the table, leaving the astonished bikers, and his winnings, behind him. I NEVER WENT AWAY, he said, and his voice was a dark echo from the night places, a cold slab of sound, gray, and dead. If that voice was a stone it would have had words chiseled on it a long time ago: a name, and two dates.
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The bikers around the game were getting progressively baffled by this exchange. Led by Big Ted, they shambled over to the table and stared at the four strangers.
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The three people at the table turned as one. Red spoke. "When did you get here?" she asked.
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The tall figure made no motion to press any of the buttons.
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I DON'T CARE WHAT IT SAYS, said the tall biker in the helmet, I NEVER LAID A FINGER ON HIM.
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"It's been a long time," said War.
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There was a flash of lightning, almost immediately followed by a low rumble of thunder.
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"Woss the matter with you?" asked Big Ted, irritably. "Go on. Press 'D.' Elvis Presley died in 1976."
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"Lovely weather for it," said Pollution.
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"Your tea's getting cold, lord," said Famine.
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YES.
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"You're Hell's Angels, then?" asked Big Ted, sarcastically. If there's one thing real Hell's Angels can't abide, it's weekend bikers. [There are a number of other things real Hell's Angels can't abide. These include the police, soap, Ford Cortinas, and, in Big Ted's case, anchovies and olives.]
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"What chapter are you from, then?"
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The four strangers nodded.
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The Tall Stranger looked at Big Ted. Then he stood up. It was a complicated motion; if the shores of the seas of night had deckchairs, they'd open up something like that.
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It did not escape their notice that all four strangers had HELL'S ANGELS on their jackets. And they looked dead dodgy as far as the Angels were concerned: too clean for a start; and none of the four looked like they'd ever broken anyone's arm just because it was Sunday afternoon and there wasn't anything good on the telly. And one was a woman, too, only not ridin' around on the back of someone's bike but actually allowed one of her own, like she had any right to it.
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He seemed to be unfolding himself forever.
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He wore a dark helmet, completely hiding his features. And it was made of that weird plastic, Big Ted noted. Like, you looked in it, and all you could see was your own face.
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REVELATIONS, he said. CHAPTER SIX.
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"Verses two to eight," added the boy in white, helpfully.
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Big Ted glared at the four of them. His lower jaw began to protrude, and a little blue vein in his temple started to throb. "Wossat mean then?" he demanded.
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"I think He may be along in a minute," said Pigbog urgently. "He's probably looking for somewhere to park his bike. Let's go and, and join a youf club or somethin'…"
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There was a tug at his sleeve. It was Pigbog. He had gone a peculiar shade of gray, under the dirt.
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And then the tall stranger reached up a pale motorbike gauntlet, and raised the visor of his helmet, and Big Ted found himself wishing, for the first time in his existence, that he'd lived a better life.
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"It means we're in trouble," said Pigbog.
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"Jesus Christ!" he moaned.
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But Big Ted's invincible ignorance was his shield and armor. He didn't move.
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"Others promise," he said, "we deliver."
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"That's us, Big Ted," she said. "The real McCoy."
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Big Ted looked at the fourth Horseman. "'Ere, I seen you before," he said. "You was on the cover of that Blue Oyster Cult album. An' I got a ring wif your… your… your head on it."
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Pollution removed his helmet and shook out his long white hair. He had taken over when Pestilence, muttering about penicillin, had retired in 1936. If only the old boy had known what opportunities the future had held…
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The storm raged around the quarry. The rope with the old car tire on it danced in the gale. Sometimes a sheet of iron, relic of an attempt at a tree house, would shake loose from its insubstantial moorings and sail away.
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War flipped him a lazy salute.
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The Them huddled together, staring at Adam. He seemed bigger, somehow. Dog sat and growled. He was thinking of all the smells he would lose. There were no smells in Hell, apart from the sulphur. While some of them here, were, were… well, the fact was, there were no bitches in hell either.
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"Cor." Big Ted's big face screwed up with the effort of thought.
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I GET EVERYWHERE.
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Famine nodded. "The Old Firm," he said.
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"Cor," he said. "Hell's Angels."
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"Wot kind of bike you ridin'?" he said.
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"But -- but who -- who'll do the, you know, all the cooking and washing and suchlike?" quavered Brian.
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"No one'll have to do any of that stuff," said Adam. "You can have all the food you like, loads of chips, fried onion rings, anything you like. An' never have to wear any new clothes or have a bath if you don't want to or anything. Or go to school or anything. Or do anything you don't want to do, ever again. It'll be wicked!"
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The moon came up over the Kookamundi Hills. It was very bright tonight.
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Johnny Two Bones sat in the red basin of the desert. It was a sacred place, where two ancestral rocks, formed in the Dream-time, lay as they had since the beginning. Johnny Two Bones' walkabout was coming to an end. His cheeks and chest were smeared with red ochre, and he was singing an old song, a sort of singing map of the hills, and he was drawing patterns in the dust with his spear.
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Adam was marching about excitedly, waving his hands in the air. "There'll be no end to the fun we can have," he said. "There'll be exploring and everything. I 'spect I can soon get the ole jungles to grow again."
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"Oh. Indubitably, dear boy. Quite indubitably. In a manner of speaking. Now, to get back to my original question. Where am I?"
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He had not eaten for two days; he had not slept. He was approaching a trance state, making him one with the Bush, putting him into communion with his ancestors.
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Johnny scratched, thoughtfully. "I take it you're one of me ancestors, then, mate?"
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"Hello? Hello?" said Johnny Two Bones.
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He sat in the sand, and he waited, and he waited, but he didn't reply.
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Nearly…
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"Who said that?" said Johnny Two Bones.
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"Only if you're one of my ancestors," continued Johnny Two Bones, "why are you talking like a poofter?"
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He was nearly there.
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"Excuse me, dear boy," he said to himself, out loud, in precise, enunciated tones. "But have you any idea where I am?"
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"Ah. Australia," said Johnny Two Bones" mouth, pronouncing the word as though it would have to be properly disinfected before he said it again. "Oh dear. Well, thank you anyway."
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He blinked. Looked around wonderingly.
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His mouth opened. "I did."
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Citron Deux-Chevaux was tonton macoute, a travelling houngan: [Magician, or priest. Voodoun is a very interesting religion for the whole family, even those members of it who are dead.] he had a satchel over his shoulder, containing magical plants, medicinal plants, bits of wild cat, black candles, a powder derived chiefly from the skin of a certain dried fish, a dead centipede, a half-bottle of Chivas Regal, ten Rothmans, and a copy of What's On In Haiti.
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Aziraphale had moved on.
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He hefted the knife, and, with an experienced slicing motion, cut the head from a black cockerel. Blood washed over his right hand.
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"Where am I?" he said.
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"Is that my Gros Bon Ange?" he asked himself.
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"I think that's a rather personal question," he replied. "I mean, as these things go. But one tries as it were. One does one's best."
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"Loa ride me," he intoned. "Gros Bon Ange come to me."
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Citron found one of his hands reaching for the cockerel. "Rather unsanitary place to do your cooking, don't you think? Out here in the jungle. Having a barbecue, are we? What kind of place is this?"
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"Damn! Nowhere near. Still, could be worse. Ah, I must be on my way. Be good."
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"Haitian," he answered.
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And Citron Deux-Chevaux was alone in his head.
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Jesus won't cut you off before you're through
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The surf was loud on the beaches. The palms shook.
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The lights went up. The Power Cable (Nebraska) Evangelical Choir launched into "Jesus is the Telephone Repairman on the Switchboard of My Life," and almost drowned out the sound of the rising wind.
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"Loas be buggered," he muttered to himself He stared into nothing for a while, and then reached for the satchel and its bottle of Chivas Regal. There are at least two ways to turn someone into a zombie. He was going to take the easiest.
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A storm was coming.
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Marvin O. Bagman adjusted his tie, checked his grin in the mirror, patted the bottom of his personal assistant (Miss Cindi Kellerhals, Penthouse Pet of the Month three years ago last July; but she had put that all behind her when she got Career), and he walked out onto the studio floor.
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With him you won't never get a crossed line,
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He's the telephone repairman on the switchboard of my life
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And when your bill comes it'll all be properly itemized
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Despite the fact that the lyrics didn't rhyme, or, as a rule, make any sense, and that Marvin, who was not particularly musical, had stolen all the tunes from old country songs, Jesus Is My Buddy had sold over four million copies.
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the choir sang. Marvin was fond of that song. He had written it himself. Other songs he had written included: "Happy Mister Jesus," "Jesus, Can I Come and Stay at Your Place?" "That OI' Fiery Cross," "Jesus Is the Sticker on the Bumper of My Soul," and "When I'm Swept Up by the Rapture Grab the Wheel of My Pick-Up." They were available on Jesus Is My Buddy (LP, cassette, and CD), and were advertised every four minutes on Bagman's evangelical network. [$12.95 per LP or cassette, $24.95 per CD, although you got a free copy of the LP with every $500 you donated to Marvin Bagman's mission.]
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Marvin had started off as a country singer, singing old Conway Twitty and Johnny Cash songs.
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It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.
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He had done regular live concerts from San Quentin jail until the civil rights people got him under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause.
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He had found the perfect TV mix, on Marvin's Hour of Power ("The show that put the FUN back into Fundamentalist!"). Four threeminute songs from the LP, twenty minutes of Hellfire, and five minutes of healing people. (The remaining twenty-three minutes were spent alternately cajoling, pleading, threatening, begging, and occasionally simply asking for money.) In the early days he had actually brought people into the studio to heal, but had found that too complicated, so these days he simply proclaimed visions vouchsafed to him of viewers all across America getting magically cured as they watched. This was much simpler -- he no longer needed to hire actors, and there was no way anyone could check on his success rate. [It might have surprised Marvin to know there actually was a success rate. Some people would get better from anything.]
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The world is a lot more complicated than most people believe. Many people believed, for example, that Marvin was not a true Believer because he made so much money out of it. They were wrong. He believed with all his heart. He believed utterly, and spent a lot of the money that flooded in on what he really thought was the Lord's work.
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The phone line to the saviour's always free of interference
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He's in at any hour, day or night
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The first song concluded, and Marvin walked in front of the cameras and raised his arms modestly for silence. In the control booth, the engineer turned down the Applause track.
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And when you call J-E-S-U-S you always call toll free
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He's the telephone repairman on the switchboard of my life.
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He became more serious.
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"Brothers and sisters, I've got a message for you all, an urgent message from our Lord, for you all, man and woman and little babes, friends, let me tell you about the Apocalypse. It's all there in your bible, in the Revelation our Lord gave Saint John on Patmos, and in the Book of Daniel. The Lord always gives it to you straight, friends -- your future. So what's goin' to happen?
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"Brothers and sisters, thank you, thank you, wasn't that beautiful? And remember, you can hear that song and others just as edifyin' on Jesus Is My Buddy, just phone 1-800-CASH and pledge your donation now."
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"War. Plague. Famine. Death. Rivers urv blurd. Great earthquakes. Nukyeler missiles. Horrible times are cumin', brothers and sisters. And there's only one way to avoid 'em.
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"When the Rapture comes, brothers and sisters, all the True Believers will be swept up in the air -- it don't mind what you're doin', you could be in the bath, you could be at work, you could be drivin' your car, or just sittin' at home readin' your Bible. Suddenly you'll be up there in the air, in perfect and incorruptible bodies. And you'll be up in the air, lookin' down at the world as the years of destruction arrive. Only the faithful will be saved, only those of you who have been born again will avoid the pain and the death and the horror and the burnin'. Then will come the great war between Heaven and Hell, and Heaven will destroy the forces of Hell, and God shall wipe away the tears of the sufferin', and there shall be no more death, or sorrow, or cryin', or pain, and he shall rayon in glory for ever and ever --"
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"What's the Rapture? I hear you cry.
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"Before the Destruction comes -- before the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out -- before the nukerler missiles rain down on the unbelievers -- there will come The Rapture.
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"Well, nice try," he said, in a completely different voice, "only it won't be like that at all. Not really.
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He stopped, suddenly.
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"I mean, you're right about the fire and war, all that. But that Rapture stuff well, if you could see them all in Heaven-serried ranks of them as far as the mind can follow and beyond, league after league of us, flaming swords, all that, well, what I'm trying to say is who has time to go round picking people out and popping them up in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning earth below them? If that's your idea of a morally acceptable time, I might add.
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"And as for that stuff about Heaven inevitably winning… Well, to be honest, if it were that cut and dried, there wouldn't be a Celestial War in the first place, would there? It's propaganda. Pure and simple. We've got no more than a fifty percent chance of coming out on top. You might just as well send money to a Satanist hotline to cover your bets, although to be frank when the fire falls and the seas of blood rise you lot are all going to be civilian casualties either way. Between our war and your war, they're going to kill everyone and let God sort it out -- right?
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All we need is, Radio Gaga, sang Freddie Mercury.
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"Anyway, sorry to stand here wittering, I've just a quick questionwhere am I?"
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He wanted Bach, but he would settle for The Travelling Wilburys.
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He swung around the Marble Arch Roundabout the wrong way, doing ninety. Lightning made the London skies flicker like a malfunctioning fluorescent tube.
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He reached into the glove compartment for his spare pair of sunglasses, and found only cassettes. Irritably he grabbed one at random and pushed it into the slot.
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All I need is out, thought Crowley.
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There was a pause. Marvin tried to open his mouth, but nothing happened. Whatever was in his head looked around. He looked at the studio crew, those who weren't phoning the police, or sobbing in corners. He looked at the gray-faced cameramen.
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Marvin O. Bagman was gradually going purple.
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"Gosh," he said, "am I on television?"
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"It's the devil! Lord protect me! The devil is speakin' through me!" he erupted, and interrupted himself, "Oh no, quite the opposite in fact. I'm an angel. Ah. This has to be America, doesn't it? So sorry, can't stay…"
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Crowley was doing a hundred and twenty miles an hour down Oxford Street.
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Then he read it one more time, with a slow sinking feeling at the base of his stomach.
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The Bentley headed out of London while Crowley sat back in the driver's seat and thumbed through the singed copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter.
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The cassette finished, activating the car radio.
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A livid sky on London, Crowley thought, And I knew the end was near. Who had written that? Chesterton, wasn't it? The only poet in the twentieth century to even come close to the Truth.
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Near the end of the book he found a folded sheet of paper covered in Aziraphale's neat copperplate handwriting. He unfolded it (while the Bentley's gearstick shifted itself down to third and the car accelerated around a fruit lorry, which had unexpectedly backed out of aside street), and then he read it again.
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Anyway, there wasn't really anywhere else to go.
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"… Gardeners' Question Time coming to you from Tadfield Gardening Club. We were last here in 1953, a very nice summer, and as the team will remember it's a rich Oxfordshire loam in the East of the parish, rising to chalk in the West; the kind of place of say, don't matter what you plant here, it'll come up beautiful Isn't that right, Fred?"
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The car changed direction suddenly. It was now heading for the village of Tadfield, in Oxfordshire. He could be there in an hour if he hurried.
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"Right -- First question for the team, and this comes from Mr. R. P. Tyler, chairman of the local Residents Association, I do believe."
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"Ahem. That's right. Well, I'm a keen rose grower, but my prizewinning Molly McGuire lost a couple of blossoms yesterday in a rain of what were apparently fish. What does the team recommend for this other than place netting over the garden? I mean, I've written to the council…"
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"Yep," said Professor Fred Windbright, Royal Botanical Gardens, "Couldn't of put it better meself."
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"Mr. Tyler, let me ask you a question -- were these fresh fish, or preserved?"
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"Well, you've got no problems, my friend. I hear you've also been having rains of blood in these parts -- and I wish we had these up in the Dales, where my garden is. Save me a fortune in fertilizers. Now, what you do is, you dig them in to your…" CROWLEY?
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"Fresh, I believe."
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"Not a common problem, I'd say. Harry?"
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Crowley said nothing.
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CROWLEY THE WAR HAS BEGUN, CROWLEY WE NOTE WITH INTEREST THAT YOU AVOIDED THE FORCES WE EMPOWERED TO COLLECT YOU.
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JUST OUR LITTLE JOKE.
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MORTALS CAN HOPE FOR DEATH, OR FOR REDEMPTION. YOU CAN HOPE FOR NOTHING. ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS THE MERCY OF HELL.
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Crowley was silent.
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Crowley turned off the radio and bit his lower lip. Beneath the ash and soot that flaked his face, he looked very tired, and very pale, and very scared.
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"Yeah?"
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"… now as keen gardeners know, it goes without sayin' that he's a cunnin' little devil, your Tibetan. Tunnelin' straight through your begonias like it was nobody's business. A cup of tea'll shift him, with rancid yak butter for preference you should be able to get some at any good Bard…"
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"Ngk," said Crowley.
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Wheee. Whizz. Pop. Static drowned out the rest of the program.
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And, suddenly, very angry. It was the way they talked to you. As if you were a houseplant who had started shedding leaves on the carpet.
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"Mm," Crowley agreed.
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CROWLEY… WE WILL WIN THIS WAR. BUT EVEN IF WE LOSE, AT LEAST AS FAR AS YOU ARE CONCERNED, IT WILL MAKE NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL. FOR AS LONG AS THERE IS ONE DEMON LEFT IN HELL, CROWLEY, YOU WILL WISH YOU HAD BEEN CREATED MORTAL.
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But something had happened to the M25. Something that hurt your eyes, if you looked directly at it.
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And then he turned a corner, which was meant to take him onto the slip road to the M25, from which he'd swing off onto the M40 up to Oxfordshire.
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The dreaded sigil Odegra, thought Crowley, as he swung the car around, heading for the North Circular. I did that -- that's my fault. It could have been just another motorway. A good job, I'll grant you, but was it really worthwhile? It's all out of control. Heaven and Hell aren't running things any more, it's like the whole planet is a Third World country that's finally got the Bomb…
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From what had been the M25 London Orbital Motorway came a low chanting, a noise formed of many strands: car horns, and engines, and sirens, and the bleep of cellular telephones, and the screaming of small children trapped by back-seat seat-belts for ever. "Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds," came the chanting, over and over again, in the secret tongue of the Black priesthood of ancient Mu.
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What the hell. If you had to go, why not go with style?
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Then he began to smile. He snapped his fingers. A pair of dark glasses materialized out of his eyes. The ash vanished from his suit and his skin.
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Whistling softly, he drove.
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They weren't going that fast, all things considered. The four of them were holding a steady 105 mph, as if they were confident that the show could not start before they got there. It couldn't. They had all the time in the world, such as it was.
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Just behind them came four other riders: Big Ted, Greaser, Pigbog, and Skuzz.
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They came down the outside lane of the motorway like destroying angels, which was fair enough.
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Around them, they knew, was the roar of the thunderstorm, the thunder of traffic, the whipping of the wind and the rain. But in the wake of the Horsemen there was silence, pure and dead. Almost pure, anyway. Certainly dead.
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They were elated. They were real Hell's Angels now, and they rode the silence.
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It was broken by Pigbog, shouting to Big Ted.
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"What you going to be, then?" he asked, hoarsely.
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"Yeah? So?"
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"I heard what you said. It's not what you said. Everyone heard what you said. What did you mean, tha's what I wanter know?"
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"Course you can't be War. How can you be War? She's War. You've got to be something else."
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If he'd known he was going to be in it, he'd have read it more carefully. "What I mean is, they're the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, right?"
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"So?"
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"Right. Four Bikers of the Apocalypse. War, Famine, Death, and, and the other one. P'lution."
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Big Ted screwed up his face with the effort of thought. "G. B. H.," he said, eventually. "I'm Grievous Bodily Harm. That's me. There. Wott're you going to be?"
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"Bikers," said Greaser.
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"I said, what you --"
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"So they said it was all right if we came with them, right?"
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"So we're the other Four Horse --, um, Bikers of the Apocalypse. So which ones are we?"
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"Can I be War as well?" asked Big Ted.
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There was a pause. The lights of passing cars shot past them in the opposite lane, lightning after-imaged the clouds, and the silence was close to absolute.
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"What?"
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Pigbog wished he'd paid more attention to the Book of Revelation.
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"S'not!" said Pigbog, nettled. "It's like War, and Famine, and that. It's a problem of life, isn't it? Answer phones. I hate bloody answer phones."
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Grievous Bodily Harm, Embarrassing Personal Problems, Pigbog and Greaser.
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"I, uh… I think I'll be them answer phones. They're pretty bad," he said.
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"I hate ansaphones, too," said Cruelty to Animals.
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"Can I be Rubbish?" asked Skuzz. "Or Embarrassing Personal Problems?"
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"Can't be Rubbish," said Grievous Bodily Harm. "He's got that one sewn up, Pollution. You can be the other, though."
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"You can't be ansaphones. What kind of a Biker of the Repocalypse is ansaphones? That's stupid, that is."
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And then it was Pigbog's turn.
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"I wonter be Cruelty to Animals," said Greaser. Pigbog wondered if he was for or against it. Not that it really mattered.
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They rode on in the silence and the dark, the rear red lights of the Four a few hundred yards in front of them.
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"You can shut up," said G. B. H.
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"Can I change mine?" asked Embarrassing Personal Problems, who had been thinking intently since he last spoke. "I want to be Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Thumped Them."
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"All right, you can change. But you can't be ansaphones, Pigbog. Pick something else."
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"Really cool people?" said Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping.
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"Yeah," said Cruelty to Animals. "An' they all wear sunglasses even when they dunt need 'em."
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Pigbog pondered. He wished he'd never broached the subject. It was like the careers interviews he had had as a schoolboy. He deliberated.
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"Yeah. You know. The kind you see on telly, with stupid haircuts, only on them it dun't look stupid 'cos it's them. They wear baggy suits, an' you're not allowed to say they're a bunch of wankers. I mean, speaking for me, what I always want to do when I see one of them is push their faces very slowly through a barbed-wire fence. An' what I think is this." He took a deep breath. He was sure this was the longest speech he had ever made in his life. [Except for one about ten years earlier, throwing himself on the mercy of the court.] "What I think is this. If they get up my nose like that, they pro'lly get up everyone else's."
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"Really cool people," he said at last. "I hate them."
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"Anyway," said Pigbog. "That's why I wonter be Really Cool People."
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"No you bloody can't," said Grievous Bodily Harm. "You've changed once already."
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"Eatin' runny cheese, and that stupid bloody No Alcohol Lager," said Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping. "I hate that stuff. What's the point of drinking the stuff if it dun't leave you puking? Here, I just thought. Can I change again, so I'm No Alcohol Lager?"
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"Don't see why I can't be No bloody Alcohol Lager if I want."
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"Shut your face."
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She had her flowing dress on, and a saucepan full of sprouts on the stove. The room was lit by candlelight, each candle carefully placed in a wax-encrusted wine bottle at the four corners of her sitting room.
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"All right," said his leader.
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And Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Things Not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them A Good Thumping But Secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People traveled with them.
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It was a wet and blustery Saturday afternoon, and Madame Tracy was feeling very occult.
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Death and Famine and War and Pollution continued biking toward Tadfield.
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"Can you link hands?" asked Madame Tracy. "And we must have complete silence. The spirit world is very sensitive to vibration."
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There were three other people at her sitting. Mrs. Ormerod from Belsize Park, in a dark green hat that might have been a flowerpot in a previous life; Mr. Scroggie, thin and pallid, with bulging colorless eyes; and Julia Petley from Hair Today, [Formerly A Cut Above the Rest, formerly Mane Attraction, formerly Cur! Up And Dye, formerly A Snip At the Price, formerly Mister Brian's Art-de-Coiffeur, formerly Robinson the Barber's, formerly Fone-a-Car Taxis.] the hairdressers' on the High Street, fresh out of school and convinced that she herself had unplumbed occult depths. In order to enhance the occult aspects of herself, Julia had begun to wear far too much handbeaten silver jewelry and green eyeshadow. She felt she looked haunted and gaunt and romantic, and she would have, if she had lost another thirty pounds. She was convinced that she was anorexic, because every time she looked in the mirror she did indeed see a fat person.
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She did her shopping list in her head.
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Madame Tracy threw back her head, let it loll on one shoulder, then slowly lifted it again. Her eyes were almost shut.
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"I will, love, but you've got to be quiet while I make contact."
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Madame Tracy had found, through years of Drawing Aside the Veil and Exploring the Mysteries, that two minutes was the right length of time to sit in silence, waiting for the Spirit World to make contact. More than that and they got restive, less than that and they felt they weren't getting their money's worth.
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There was silence, broken only by Mr. Scroggie's stomach rumbling. "Pardon, ladies," he mumbled.
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"Ask if my Ron is there," said Mrs. Ormerod. She had a jaw like a brick.
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"She's going under now, dear," she heard Mrs. Ormerod whisper to Julia Petley. "Nothing to be alarmed about. She's just making herself a Bridge to the Other Side. Her spirit guide will be along soon."
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Eggs. Lettuce. Ounce of cooking cheese. Four tomatoes. Butter. Roll of toilet paper. Mustn't forget that, we're nearly out. And a really nice piece of liver for Mr. Shadwell, poor old soul, it's a shame…
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Time.
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"Is my Ron there, Geronimo?" asked Mrs. Ormerod.
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Then, in a high-pitched, quavery voice, "Are you there, my Spirit Guide?"
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"Is um me, how," she replied.
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Madame Tracy found herself rather irritated at being upstaged, and she let out a low moan. "Oooooooooh."
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"How, Miss Petley?" she said, as Geronimo. She had always understood that Red Indian spirit guides were an essential prop, and she rather liked the name. She had explained this to Newt. She didn't know anything about Geronimo, he realized, and he didn't have the heart to tell her.
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"Oh," squeaked Julia. "Charmed to make your acquaintance."
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She waited a little, to build up the suspense. Washing-up liquid. Two cans of baked beans. Oh, and potatoes.
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"Is that you, Geronimo?" she asked herself.
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"How?" she said, in a dark brown voice.
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"We have a new member of the circle with us this afternoon," she said.
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"How, squaw Beryl," said Madame Tracy. "Oh there are so many um of the poor lost souls um lined up against um door to my teepee. Perhaps your Ron is amongst them. How."
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Madame Tracy had learned her lesson years earlier, and now never brought Ron through until near the end. If she didn't, Beryl Ormerod would occupy the rest of the seance telling the late Ron Ormerod everything that had happened to her since their last little chat. ("… now Ron, you remember, our Eric's littlest, Sybilla, well you wouldn't recognize her now, she's taken up macrame, and our Letitia, you know, our Karen's oldest, she's become a lesbian but that's all right these days and is doing a dissertation on the films of Sergio Leone as seen from a feminist perspective, and our Stan, you know, our Sandra's twin, I told you about him last time, well, he won the darts tournament, which is nice because we all thought he was a bit of a mother's boy, while the guttering over the shed's come loose, but I spoke to our Cindi's latest, who's a jobbing builder, and he'll be over to see to it on Sunday, and ohh, that reminds me…")
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No, Beryl Ormerod could wait. There was a flash of lightning, followed almost immediately by a rumble of distant thunder. Madame Tracy felt rather proud, as if she had done it herself. It was even better than the candles at creating ambulance. Ambulance was what mediuming was all about.
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"Right, well there's somebody here for you." Mr. Scroggie had been coming for a month now, and she hadn't been able to think of a message for him. His time had come. "Do you know anyone named, um, John?"
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"Now," said Madame Tracy in her own voice. "Mr. Geronimo would like to know, is there anyone named Mr. Scroggie here?"
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Scroggie's watery eyes gleamed. "Erm, actually that's my name," he said, hopefully.
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"No," said Mr. Scroggie.
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"I knew a Dave when I was in Hemel Hempstead," said Mr. Scroggie, a trifle doubtfully.
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"Yes, he's saying, Hemel Hempstead, that's what he's saying," said Madame Tracy.
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"Well, there's some celestial interference here. The name could be Tom. Or Jim. Or, um, Dave."
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"But I ran into him last week, walking his dog, and he looked perfectly healthy," said Mr. Scroggie, slightly puzzled.
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"Tell my Ron I've got to tell him about our Krystal's wedding," said Mrs. Ormerod.
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"He says not to worry, and he's happier beyond the veil," soldiered on Madame Tracy, who felt it was always better to give her clients good news.
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"I will, love. Now, hold on a mo', there's something coming through…"
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"Is that you, Ron?" asked Mrs. Ormerod. The reply, when it came, was rather testy.
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"Sprechen sie Deutsch?" it said, using Madame Tracy's mouth. "Parlez-vous Franrais? Wo bu hui jiang zhongwen?"
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And then something came through. It sat in Madame Tracy's head and peered out.
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"No. Definitely not. However, a question so manifestly dim can only have been put in one country on this benighted planet -- most of which, incidentally, I have seen during the last few hours. Dear lady, this is not Ron."
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Mrs. Ormerod and Mr. Scroggie gave each other looks. Nothing like this had happened at Madame Tracy's previous sittings. Julia Petley was rapt. This was more like it. She hoped Madame Tracy was going to start manifesting ectoplasm next.
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"Well, I want to speak to Ron Ormerod," said Mrs. Ormerod, a little testily. "He's rather short, balding on top. Can you put him on, please?"
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There was a pause. "Actually there does appear to be a spirit of that description hovering over here. Very well. I'll hand you over, but you must make it quick. I am attempting to avert the apocalypse."
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"Yes, Buh-Beryl."
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"Shut up," and the spirit was gone. "Wasn't that touching? Right, now, thank you very much, ladies and gentleman, I'm afraid I shall have to be getting on."
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"H-hello?" said Madame Tracy in another voice. Mrs. Ormerod started. It sounded exactly like Ron. On previous occasions Ron had sounded like Madame Tracy.
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"Right. Now I've quite a bit to tell you. For a start I went to our Krystal's wedding, last Saturday, our Marilyn's eldest…"
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"Buh-Beryl. You-you nuh-never let me guh-get a wuh-word in edgewise wuh-while I was alive. Nuh-now I'm duh-dead, there's juh just one thing to suh-say…"
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Beryl Ormerod was a little disgruntled by all this. Previously when Ron had manifested, he had told her that he was happier beyond the veil, and living somewhere that sounded more than a little like a celestial bungalow. Now he sounded like Ron, and she wasn't sure that was what she wanted. And she said what she had always said to her husband when he began to speak to her in that tone of voice.
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"Ron, remember your heart condition."
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"I duh-don't have a huh-heart any longer. Remuhmember? Anyway, Buh-Beryl…?"
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"Ron, is that you?"
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"Yes, Ron."
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"Out!" she said.
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Madame Tracy stood up, went over to the door, and turned on the lights.
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"You haven't heard the last of this, Marjorie Potts," hissed Mrs. Ormerod, clutching her handbag to her breast, and she slammed the door.
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Then her muffled voice echoed from the hallway, "And you can tell our Ron that he hasn't heard the last of this either!"
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Her sitters stood up, more than a little puzzled, and, in Mrs. Ormerod's case, outraged, and they walked out into the hall.
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She lined up the cups on the table in front of her, and took a long sip from the tea-with-sugar.
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Madame Tracy (and the name on her scooters -- only driving license was indeed Marjorie Potts) went into the kitchen and turned off the sprouts.
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She put on the kettle. She made herself a pot of tea. She sat down at the kitchen table, got out two cups, filled both of them. She added two sugars to one of them. Then she paused.
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"Now," she said, in a voice that anyone who knew her would have recognized as her own, although they might not have recognized her tone of voice, which was cold with rage. "Suppose you tell me what this is about. And it had better be good."
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"No sugar for me, please," said Madame Tracy.
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"I told you. They fell from the sky. One minute I'm driving along at sixty, next second, whap! a twelve-pound salmon smashes through the windscreen. So I pulls the wheel over, and I skidded on that," he pointed to the remains of a hammerhead shark under the lorry, "and ran into that." That was a thirty-foot-high heap of fish, of different shapes and sizes.
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"Have you been drinking, sir?" asked the sergeant, less than hopefully.
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"So what I want to know is, where did all the fish come from?" asked the sergeant.
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A lorry had shed its load all over the M6. According to its manifest the lorry had been filled with sheets of corrugated iron, although the two police patrolmen were having difficulty in accepting this.
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On the top of the pile a rather large octopus waved a languid tentacle at them. The sergeant resisted the temptation to wave back.
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"Course I haven't been drinking, you great wazzock. You can see the fish, can't you?"
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The police constable was leaning into the police car, talking on the radio. "… corrugated iron and fish, blocking off the southbound M6 about half a mile north of junction ten. We're going to have to close off the whole southbound carriageway. Yeah."
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Newt raised his voice. "I mean, it was really wonderful. Really really wonderful. I always hoped it was going to be, and it was."
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"That was wonderful," said Newt.
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"What are you doing?" he asked.
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"Good," said Anathema. "The earth moved for everybody." She got up off the floor, leaving her clothes scattered across the carpet, and went into the bathroom.
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There was the sound of running water.
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"Tell you what," said Newt, as Anathema came out of the bathroom swathed in a fluffy pink towel. "We could do it again."
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"Ah." He wondered vaguely if everyone had to shower afterwards, or if it was just women. And he had a suspicion that bidets came into it somewhere.
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The rain redoubled. A small trout, which had miraculously survived the fall, gamely began to swim toward Birmingham.
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"Taking a shower."
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"Nope," she said, "not now." She finished drying herself, and started picking up clothes from the floor, and, unselfconsciously, pulling them on. Newt, a man who was prepared to wait half an hour for a free changing cubicle at the swimming baths, rather than face the possibility of having to disrobe in front of another human being, found himself vaguely shocked, and deeply thrilled.
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Anathema shrugged, not an easy move when you're pulling on a sensible black skirt. "She said we only did it this once."
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"Why not?" said Newt. He was about to point out that it might not take long, but an inner voice counseled him against it. He was growing up quite quickly in a short time.
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Bits of her kept appearing and disappearing, like a conjurer's hands; Newt kept trying to count her nipples and failing, although he didn't mind.
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Newt read it and blushed and gave it back, tight-Tipped.
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It wasn't simply the fact that Agnes had known, and had expressed herself in the most transparent of codes. It was that, down the ages, various Devices had scrawled encouraging little comments in the margin.
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Anathema, fully dressed, walked over to her card index, pulled one out, and passed it to him.
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Newt opened his mouth two or three times, then said, "She didn't. She bloody didn't. She couldn't predict that. I don't believe it."
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She passed him the damp towel. "Here," she said. "Hurry up. I've got to make the sandwiches, and we've got to get ready."
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He looked at the towel. "What's this for?"
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Ah. So it was something men and women both did. He was pleased he'd got that sorted out.
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"But you'll have to make it quick," she said.
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In Shadwell's dream, he is floating high above a village green. In the center of the green is a huge pile of kindling wood and dry branches. In the center of the pile is a wooden stake. Men and women and children stand around on the grass, eyes bright, cheeks pink, expectant, excited.
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A sudden commotion: ten men walk across the green, leading a handsome, middle-aged woman; she must have been quite striking in her youth, and the word "vivacious" creeps into Shadwell's dreaming mind. In front of her walks Witchfinder Private Newton Pulsifer. No, it isn't Newt: The man is older, and dressed in black leather. Shadwell recognizes approvingly the ancient uniform of a Witchfinder Major.
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"Your shower."
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"Oh no. We've got a couple of hours. It's just that I've used up most of the hot water. You've got a lot of plaster in your hair."
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"Why? Have we got to get out of here in the next ten minutes before the building explodes?"
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The storm blew a dying gust around Jasmine Cottage, and holding the damp pink towel, no longer fluffy, in front of him, strategically, Newt edged off to take a cold shower.
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The woman climbs onto the pyre, thrusts her hands behind her, and is tied to the stake. The pyre is lit. She speaks to the crowd, says something, but Shadwell is too high to hear what it is. The crowd gathers around her.
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That was thunder, thought Shadwell, as he woke up, with the unshakable feeling that someone was still staring at him.
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A crash of thunder.
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And then it all goes boom.
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The flames lick higher.
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A witch, thinks Shadwell. They're burning a witch. It gives him a warm feeling. That was the right and proper way of things. That's how things were meant to be.
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And the woman looks up. She is staring straight at him, invisible though he is. And she is smiling.
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Only she is going to die. She is going to burn to death. And, Shadwell realizes in his dream, it is a horrible way to die.
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Only…
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He opened his eyes, and thirteen glass eyes watched from the various shelves of Madame Tracy's boudoir, staring out from a variety of fuzzy faces.
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She looks directly up at him now, and says "That goes for yowe as welle, yowe daft old foole."
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He lit the cigarette. And he saw his right hand: the ultimate weapon. The doomsday device. He pointed one finger at the one-eyed teddy bear on the mantelpiece.
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He looked away, and into the eyes of someone staring intently at him. It was him.
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Och, he thought in terror, I'm havin' one o' them out-o'-yer-body experiences, I can see mah ane self, I'm a goner this time right enough…
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He made frantic swimming motions in an effort to reach his own body and then, as these things do, the perspectives clicked into place.
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He climbed out of the bed, pulled on his boots, and stood up, warily. Something was missing. A cigarette. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets, pulled out a tin, and began to roll a cigarette.
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Shadwell relaxed, and wondered why anyone would want to put a mirror on his bedroom ceiling. He shook his head, baffled.
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"Bang," he said, and chuckled, dustily. He wasn't used to chuckling, and he began to cough, which meant he was back on familiar territory. He wanted something to drink. A sweet can of condensed milk.
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He'd been dreaming, he knew. Shadwell didn't remember the dream, but it made him feel uncomfortable, whatever it was.
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"Ach, ye beldame," muttered Shadwell. She had one of her gentlemen callers in there, obviously.
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Shadwell dropped his cigarette. He stretched out his arm, shaking slightly, and pointed his hand at Madame Tracy.
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"To be frank, dear lady, my plans at this point are perforce somewhat fluid."
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Madame Tracy's mouth opened, and a voice said, "Not just A Southern Pansy, Sergeant Shadwell. THE Southern Pansy."
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"Whom?" asked Madame Tracy.
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Madame Tracy looked up, and smiled at him. There wasn't anyone else in the room.
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Shadwell's blood ran cold. He marched through the bead curtain, shouting, "The sins of Sodom an' Gomorrah! Takin' advantage of a defenseless hour! Over my dead body!"
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"Whurrizee?" asked Shadwell.
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He stomped out of her boudoir, heading toward the kitchen.
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"So what exactly do you want me to do about this?" she was ask ing.
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"Some Southern pansy," he said, "I heard him. He was in here, suggestin' things to yer. I heard him."
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Madame Tracy would have some.
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Outside the little kitchen he paused. She was talking to someone. A man.
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"No," said Madame Tracy, in the voice of the demon. "Now, I know what you're thinking, Sergeant Shadwell. You're thinking that any second now this head is going to go round and round, and I'm going to start vomiting pea soup. Well, I'm not. I'm not a demon. And I'd like you to listen to what I have to say."
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"Daemonspawn, be silent," ordered Shadwell. "I'll no listen to yer wicked lies. Do yer know what this is? It's a hand. Four fingers. One thumb. It's already exorcised one of yer number this morning. Now get ye out of this gud wimmin's head, or I'll blast ye to kingdom come."
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"Demon," he croaked.
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"I'll ne'r listen tae his hellish blandishments, woman," said Shadwell.
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Madame Tracy smiled at him. "You old silly," she said.
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"That's the problem, Mr. Shadwell," said Madame Tracy in her own voice. "Kingdom come. It's going to. That's the problem. Mr. Aziraphale has been telling me all about it. Now stop being an old silly, Mr. Shadwell, sit down, and have some tea, and he'll explain it to you as well."
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He could have handled anything else.
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The swinging overhead signs proclaimed that the southbound carriageway was closed, and a small forest of orange cones had sprung up, redirecting motorists onto a co-opted lane of the northbound carriageway. Other signs directed motorists to slow down to thirty miles per hour. Police cars herded the drivers around like red-striped sheepdogs.
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But he didn't lower his hand.
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He sat down.
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The four bikers ignored all the signs, and cones, and police cars, and continued down the empty southbound carriageway of the M6. The other four bikers, just behind them, slowed a little.
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"Shouldn't we, uh, stop or something?" asked Really Cool People.
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"Yeah. Could be a pile-up," said Treading in Dogshit (formerly All Foreigners Especially The French, formerly Things Not Working Properly Even When You've Given Them a Good Thumping, never actually No Alcohol Lager, briefly Embarrassing Personal Problems, formerly known as Skuzz).
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"We're the other Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," said G. B. H. "We do what they do. We follow them."
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"It'll be a world just for us," said Adam. "Everything's always been messed up by other people but we can get rid of it all an' start again. Won't that be great?"
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"You are, I trust, familiar with the Book of Revelation?" said Madame Tracy with Aziraphale's voice.
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They rode south.
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"The Antichrist is alive on earth at this moment, Sergeant. He is bringing about Armageddon, the Day of Judgement, even if he himself does not know it. Heaven and Hell are both preparing for war, and it's all going to be very messy."
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"Then you have heard of the Antichrist?"
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"Aye," said Shadwell, who wasn't. His biblical expertise began and ended with Exodus, chapter twenty-two, verse eighteen, which concerned Witches, the suffering to live of, and why you shouldn't. He had once glanced at verse nineteen, which was about putting to death people who lay down with beasts, but he had felt that this was rather outside his jurisdiction.
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"Aye," said Shadwell, who had seen a film once which explained it all. Something about sheets of glass falling off lorries and slicing people's heads off, as he recalled. No proper witches to speak of. He'd gone to sleep halfway through.
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"I am not actually permitted to act directly in this matter, Sergeant. But I am sure that you can see that the imminent destruction of the world is not something any reasonable man would permit. Am I correct?"
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Shadwell merely grunted.
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"Then there is only one thing to be done. And you are the only man I can rely on. The Antichrist must be killed, Sergeant Shadwell. And you must do it."
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"Aye. S'pose," said Shadwell, sipping condensed milk from a rusting can Madame Tracy had discovered under the sink.
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Shadwell frowned. "I wouldna know about that," he said. "The witchfinder army only kills witches. 'Tis one of the rules. And demons and imps, o'course."
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"But, but the Antichrist is more than just a witch. He -- he's THE witch. He's just about as witchy as you can get."
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"Wud he be harder to get rid of than, say, a demon?" asked Shadwell, who had begun to brighten.
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"Not much more," said Aziraphale, who had never done other to get rid of demons than to hint to them very strongly that he, Aziraphale, had some work to be getting on with, and wasn't it getting late? And Crowley had always got the hint.
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"Good," said Aziraphale through Madame Tracy.
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Shadwell looked down at his right hand, and smiled. Then he hesitated.
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The end justifies the means, thought Aziraphale. And the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. [This is not actually true. The road to Hell is paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. On weekends many of the younger demons go ice-skating down it.] And he lied cheerfully and convincingly: "Oodles. Pots of them. His chest is covered with them -- he makes Diana of the Ephesians look positively nippleless."
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"This Antichrist -- how many nipples has he?"
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"I wouldna know about this Diana of yours," said Shadwell, "but if he's a witch, and it sounds tae me like he is, then, speaking as a sergeant in the WA, I'm yer man."
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"I'm not sure about this killing business," said Madame Tracy herself. "But if it's this man, this Antichrist, or everybody else, then I suppose we don't really have any choice."
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"Exactly, dear lady," she replied. "Now, Sergeant Shadwell. Have you a weapon?"
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Shadwell rubbed his right hand with his left, clenching and unclenching the fist. "Aye," he said. "I have that." And he raised two fingers to his lips and blew on them gently.
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"Have you anything more, uh, substantial? How about the Golden Dagger of Meggido? Or the Shiv of Kali?"
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"Now, dear lady," said Aziraphale. "Itrust you have a reliable mode of transportation at your disposal."
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Shadwell shook his head. "I've got some pins," he suggested. "And the Thundergun of Witchfinder-Colonel Ye-Shall-Not-Eat-Any-Living-Thing-With-The-Blood-Neither-Shall-Ye-Use-Enchantment-Nor-Observe-Times Dalrymple… I could load it with silver bullets."
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"Garlic?"
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"That's werewolves, I believe," said Aziraphale.
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Shadwell shrugged. "Aye, week I dinna have any fancy bullets anyway. But the Thundergun will fire anything. I'll go and fetch it."
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"Oh yes," said Madame Tracy. She went over to the corner of the kitchen and picked up a pink motorbike helmet, with a yellow sunflower painted on it, and put it on, strapping it under her chin. Then she rummaged in a cupboard, pulled out three or four hundred plastic shopping bags and a heap of yellowing local newspapers, then a dusty day-glo green helmet with EASY RIDER written across the top, a present from her niece Petula twenty years before.
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"Vampires."
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He shuffled out, thinking, why do I need another weapon? I'm a man with a hand.
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"Aye. 'Tis a turrible weapon. It did for ye, daemonspawn, did it not?"
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There was a pause. "Your hand?" asked Aziraphale.
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Shadwell paled, muttered something inaudible, and put on the green helmet.
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Shadwell, returning with the Thundergun over his shoulder, stared at her unbelieving.
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"I said, De'il ding a divot aff yer wame wi' a flaughter spade," said Shadwell.
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"I don't know what you're staring at, Mr. Shadwell," she told him. "It's parked in the road downstairs." She passed him the helmet. "You've got to put it on. It's the law. I don't think you're really allowed to have three people on a scooter, even if two of them are, er, sharing. But it's an emergency. And I'm sure you'll be quite safe, if you hold on to me nice and tight." And she smiled. "Won't that be fun?"
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"That'll be quite enough of that kind of language, Mr. Shadwell," said Madame Tracy, and she marched him out of the hall and down the stairs to Crouch End High Street, where an elderly scooter waited to take the two, well, call it three of them away.
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The lorry blocked the road. And the corrugated iron blocked the road. And a thirty-foot-high pile of fish blocked the road. It was one of the most effectively blocked roads the sergeant had ever seen.
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"What was that, Mr. Shadwell?" Madame Tracy looked at him sharply.
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"Any idea when the bulldozers are likely to get here?" he shouted into his radio.
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He felt something tugging at his trouser cuff, and looked down.
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The rain wasn't helping.
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"Something wrong, Sarge?" asked the police constable, who was taking down the lorry driver's details on the hard shoulder.
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"We're crrrrk doing the best we crrrrk," came the reply.
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"Lobsters?" He gave a little skip, and a jump, and wound up on the top of the police car. "Lobsters," he repeated. There were about thirty of them -- some over two feet long. Most of them were on their way up the motorway; half a dozen had stopped to check out the police car.
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He sat on the top of the car, in the rain, and felt the water seeping into the bottom of his trousers.
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"I just don't like lobsters," said the sergeant, grimly, shutting his eyes. "Bring me out in a rash. Too many legs. I'll just sit up here a bit, and you can tell me when they've all gone."
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There was a low roar. Thunder? No. It was continuous, and getting closer. Motorbikes. The sergeant opened one eye.
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("Did you see that?" asked Really Cool People. "They flew right over it!"
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Whoosh.
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Splat.
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Thud. Thud. Thud.
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Whoosh.
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There were four of them, and they had to be doing over a hundred. He was about to climb down, to wave at them, to shout, but they were past him, heading straight for the upturned lorry.
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And a voice in his head that said, I'LL CATCH UP WITH THE REST OF YOU.
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The police constable said, "They. They actually. They flew righ…"
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"kin'ell!" said G. B. H. "If they can do it, we can too!")
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Jesus Christ!
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There was nothing the sergeant could do. He closed his eyes again, and listened for the collision. He could hear them coming closer. Then:
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There was another rain of fish, although of shorter duration, and more easily explicable. A leather jacketed arm waved feebly from the large pile of fish. A motorbike wheel spun hopelessly.
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Whoosh.
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The sergeant opened his eyes. He turned to the police constable and opened his mouth.
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That was Skuzz, semi-conscious, deciding that if there was one thing he hated even more than the French it was being up to his neck in fish with what felt like a broken leg. He truly hated that.
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"Listen," croaked Skuzz. "Got something important to tell you. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse… they're right bastards, all four of them."
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Later, when they'd dragged him out of the fish pile, and he'd seen the other three bikers, with the blankets over their heads, he realized it was too late to tell them anything.
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That was why they hadn't been in that Book of Revelations Pigbog had been going on about. They'd never made it that far down the motorway.
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Skuzz muttered something. The police sergeant leaned over. "Don't try to speak, son," he said. "The ambulance'll be here soon."
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"I'm sodding not. I'm People Covered In Fish," croaked Skuzz, and passed out.
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He wanted to tell G. B. H. about his new role; but he couldn't move. Something wet and slippery slithered up one sleeve.
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"He's delirious," announced the sergeant.
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This has nothing to do with influences, demonic or angelic. It's more to do with geography, and history, and architecture.
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The London traffic system is many hundreds of times more complex than anyone imagines.
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Mostly this works to people's advantage, although they'd never believe it.
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London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn't designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.
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The latest solution had been the M25: a motorway that formed a rough circle around the city. Up until now the problems had been fairly basic -- things like it being obsolete before they had finished building it, Einsteinian tailbacks that eventually became tailforwards, that kind of thing.
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Cars, in theory, give you a terrifically fast method of traveling from place to place. Traffic jams, on the other hand, give you a terrific opportunity to stay still. In the rain, and the gloom, while around you the cacophonous symphony of horns grew ever louder and more exasperated.
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The current problem was that it didn't exist; not in normal human spatial terms, anyway. The tailback of cars unaware of this, or trying to find alternate routes out of London, stretched into the city center, from every direction. For the first time ever, London was completely gridlocked. The city was one huge traffic jam.
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Crowley was getting sick of it.
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And that was where it all fell apart.
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He might just as well find a nice little restaurant and get completely and utterly pissed out of his mind while he waited for the world to end.
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It was going to happen in Tadfield. Or to begin there, at any rate. After that it was going to happen everywhere.
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His conclusions could be summarized as follows:
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All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel -- or if there was, it was an oncoming train.
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Because, underneath it all, Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times -- he thought briefly of the fourteenth century -- then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.
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He'd taken the opportunity to reread Aziraphale's notes, and to thumb through Agnes Nutter's prophecies, and to do some serious thinking.
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Aziraphale was -- as far as could be estimated -- out of the equation.
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And yet…
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Armageddon was under way.
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There was nothing Crowley could do about this.
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Crowley was in Hell's bad books. [Not that Hell has any other kind.]
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It was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
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Crowley tossed the book into the passenger seat. Desperate times, desperate measures: he had maintained the Bentley without a scratch for sixty years.
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The right place was Tadfield. He was certain of that; partly from the book, partly from some other sense: in Crowley's mental map of the world, Tadfield was throbbing like a migraine.
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The right time was getting there before the end of the world. He checked his watch. He had two hours to get to Tadfield, although probably even the normal passage of Time was pretty shaky by now.
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What the hell.
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Okay, so Hell was down on him. So the world was ending. So the Cold War was over and the Great War was starting for real. So the odds against him were higher than a vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owlsley's Old Original. There was still a chance.
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He turned on his lights, and sounded his horn.
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He reversed suddenly, causing severe damage to the front of the red Renault 5 behind him, and drove up onto the pavement.
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That should give any pedestrians sufficient warning that he was coming. And if they couldn't get out of the way… well, it'd all be the same in a couple of hours. Maybe. Probably.
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The ten people sat there, hour after hour, cajoling, pleading, promising through plastic smiles. Between calls they made notations, sipped coffee, and marvelled at the rain flooding down the windows. They were staying at their posts like the band on the Titanic. If you couldn't sell double glazing in weather like this, you couldn't sell it at all.
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Most of them weren't.
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"Heigh ho," said Anthony Crowley, and just drove anyway.
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There were six women and four men, and each of them had a telephone and a thick wodge of computer printout, covered with names and telephone numbers. By each of the numbers was a penned notation saying whether the person dialed was in or out, whether the number was currently connected, and, most importantly, whether or not anybody who answered the phone was avid for cavity-wall insulation to enter their lives.
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She put down the phone.
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Lisa Morrow was saying, "… Now, if you'll only let me finish, sir, and yes, I understand that, sir, but if you'll only…" and then, seeing that he'd just hung up on her, she said, "Well, up yours, snot-face."
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"I got another bath," she announced to her fellow telephone salespersons. She was well in the lead in the office daily Getting People Out of the Bath stakes, and only needed two more points to win the weekly Coitus Interruptus award.
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She dialed the next number on the list.
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Lisa had never intended to be a telephone salesperson. What she really wanted to be was an internationally glamorous jet-setter, but she didn't have the O-levels.
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Had she been studious enough to be accepted as an internationally glamorous jet-setter, or a dental assistant (her second choice of profession), or indeed, anything other than a telephone salesperson in that particular office, she would have had a longer, and probably more fulfilled, life.
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Perhaps not a very much longer life, all things considered, it being the Day of Armageddon, but several hours anyway.
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But she had dialed. And she had waited while it rang four times. And she had said, "Oh, pout, another ansaphone," and started to put down the handset.
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For that matter, all she really needed to do for a longer life was not ring the number she had just dialed, listed on her sheet as the Mayfair home of, in the best traditions of tenth-hand mail-order lists, Mr. A. J. Cowlley.
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But then something climbed out of the earpiece. Something very big, and very angry.
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It looked a little like a maggot. A huge, angry maggot made out of thousands and thousands of tiny little maggots, all writhing and screaming, millions of little maggot mouths opening and shutting in fury, and every one of them was screaming "Crowley."
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It stopped screaming. Swayed blindly, seemed to be taking stock of where it was.
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Then it went to pieces.
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The thing split into thousands of thousands of writhing gray maggots. They flowed over the carpet, up over the desks, over Lisa Morrow and her nine colleagues; they flowed into their mouths, up their nostrils, into their lungs; they burrowed into flesh and eyes and brains and lights, reproducing wildly as they went, filling the room with a towering mess of writhing flesh and gunk. The whole began to flow together, to coagulate into one huge entity that filled the room from floor to ceiling, pulsing gently.
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Spending half an hour trapped on an ansaphone with only Aziraphale's message for company had not improved his temper.
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A mouth opened in the mass of flesh, strands of something wet and sticky adhering to each of the not-exactly lips, and Hastur said: "I needed that."
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On the plus side, however, he at least knew what Aziraphale's message was. The knowledge could probably buy him his continued existence.
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The room filled with thick, sulphurous smoke. When it cleared, Hastur was gone. There was nothing left in the room but ten skeletons, picked quite clean of meat, and some puddles of melted plastic with, here and there, a gleaming fragment of metal that might once have been part of a telephone. Much better to have been a dental assistant.
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Neither did the prospect of having to report back to Hell, and having to explain why he hadn't returned half an hour earlier, and, more importantly, why he was not accompanied by Crowley.
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And anyway, he reflected, if he were going to have to face the possible wrath of the Dark Council, at least it wouldn't be on an empty stomach.
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Hell did not go a bundle on failures.
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You wouldn't have known it as the same car. There was scarcely an inch of it undented. Both front lights were smashed. The hubcaps were long gone. It looked like the veteran of a hundred demolition derbies.
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But, to look on the bright side, all this only went to prove that evil contains the seeds of its own destruction. Right now, across the country, people who would otherwise have been made just that little bit more tense and angry by being summoned from a nice bath, or having their names mispronounced at them, were instead feeling quite untroubled and at peace with the world. As a result of Hastur's action a wave of low-grade goodness started to spread exponentially through the population, and millions of people who ultimately would have suffered minor bruises of the soul did not in fact do so. So that was all right.
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The pavements had been bad. The pedestrian underpass had been worse. The worst bit had been crossing the River Thames. At least he'd had the foresight to roll up all the windows.
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Still, he was here, now.
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Odegra. Nothing could cross it and survive.
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In a few hundred yards he'd be on the M40; a fairly clear run up to Oxfordshire. There was only one snag: once more between Crowley and the open road was the M25. A screaming, glowing ribbon of pain and dark light. [Not actually an oxymoron. It's the color past ultra-violet. The technical term for it is infrablack. It can be seen quite easily under experimental conditions. To perform the experiment simply select a healthy brick wall with a good run-up, and, lowering your head, charge. The color that flashes in bursts behind your eyes, behind the pain, just before you die, is infra-black.]
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Nothing mortal, anyway. And he wasn't sure what it would do to a demon. It couldn't kill him, but it wouldn't be pleasant.
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There was a police roadblock in front of the flyover before him. Burnt-out wrecks… some still burning -- testified to the fate of previous cars that had to drive across the flyover above the dark road.
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The police did not look happy.
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Crowley shifted down into second gear, and gunned the accelerator.
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Whatever the statistics were, they had just gone up by one.
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Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone's quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there's a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented.
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He went through the roadblock at sixty. That was the easy bit.
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[She had. It read:
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The leather seatcovers began to smoke. Staring ahead of him, Crowley fumbled left-handedly on the passenger seat for Agnes Nutter's Nice and Accurate Prophecies -- moved it to the safety of his lap. He wished she'd prophecied this.
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Most of the family had gone along with Gelatly Device, who wrote a brief monograph in the 1830s explaining it as a metaphor for the banishment of Weishaupt's Illuminati from Bavaria in 1785.]
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A street of light will screem, the black chariot of the Serpente will flayme, and a Queene wille sing quickfilveres songes no moar.
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Then the flames engulfed the car.
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He had to keep driving.
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Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain.
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It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met.
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Thunder didn't just rumble overhead, it tore the air in half.
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On the other side of the flyover was a further police roadblock, to prevent the passage of cars trying to come into London. They were laughing about a story that had just come over the radio, that a motorbike cop on the M6 had flagged down a stolen police car, only to discover the driver to be a large octopus.
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That would do it every time.
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It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour.
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The quarry was the calm center of a stormy world.
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"Well, you divided up the world, right, and we've all of us got to have a bit -- what bit're you going to have?"
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Adam's mouth opened and shut.
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Pepper had been sitting staring at her knees.
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There seemed to be something on her mind.
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"What?" he said.
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The storm was replaced by a sudden, ringing silence.
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"What?" said Adam.
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"Pepper's right," said Wensleydale. "Don't seem to me there's much left, if we've got to have all these countries."
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The silence sang like a harp, high and thin.
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"Yeah," said Brian. "You never told us what bit you're having."
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"I've got some more friends coming," Adam repeated. "They'll be here soon, and then we can really get started."
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Dog started to howl. It was no longer the siren howl of alone wolf, but the weird oscillations of a small dog in deep trouble.
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"What bit're you going to have, Adam?" she said.
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Adam stared at her. Dog had stopped howling and had fixed his master with an intent, thoughtful mongrel stare.
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Finally she looked up and stared Adam in the blank gray eyes.
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"What bit's yours, Adam?" said Pepper.
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"An', an' Lower Tadfield, and Norton, and Norton Woods --"
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They stared at him.
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He stopped, his ears listening in horror to the words his mouth was speaking. The Them were backing away.
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The silence went on and on, one note that could drown out the noises of the world.
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"Oh, if that's all that's worryin' you, don't you worry," said Adam airily, "'cos I could make you all just do whatever I wanted --"
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"Anyway, even if you did we'd all know," said Pepper.
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"M-me?" he said.
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Adam's gaze dragged itself across their faces.
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"They're all I've ever wanted," he said.
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His voice trailed off.
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"And you couldn't make 'em better," said Brian.
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They still stared.
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"I can have 'em if I want," said Adam, his voice tinged with sullen defiance and his defiance edged with sudden doubt. "I can make them better, too. Better trees to climb, better ponds, better…"
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"You can't," said Wensleydale flatly. "They're not like America and those places. They're really real. Anyway, they belong to all of us. They're ours."
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They shook their heads.
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"But I'll have Tadfield," said Adam.
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His body jerked. His head was thrown back. He raised his arms and pounded the sky with his fists.
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It went on and on.
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And then it did.
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"No, I dint mean it --" he began. "You're my friends --"
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Adam's face looked like an impersonation of the collapse of empire.
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Dog put his paws over his head.
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They froze in mid-dash.
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Adam stared.
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Adam's head tilted down again. His eyes opened.
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It resounded around the universe, which is a good deal smaller than physicists would believe. It rattled the celestial spheres.
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It spoke of loss, and it did not stop for a very long time.
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Whatever had been standing in the old quarry before, Adam Young was standing there now. A more knowledgeable Adam Young, but Adam Young nevertheless. Possibly more of Adam Young than there had ever been before.
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"No," he said hoarsely. "No. Come back! I command you!"
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Something drained away.
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His face twisted. The chalk floor cracked under his sneakers.
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Adam opened his mouth and screamed. It was a sound that a merely mortal throat should not have been able to utter; it wound out of the quarry, mingled with the storm, caused the clouds to curdle into new and unpleasant shapes.
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The ghastly silence in the quarry was replaced by a more familiar, comfortable silence, the mere and simple absence of noise.
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The plumbing in Jasmine Cottage heaved and rattled and showered Newt with water that was slightly khaki in color. But it was cold. It was probably the coldest cold shower Newt had ever had in his life.
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"There's a red sky," he said, when he came back. He was feeling slightly manic. "At half past four in the afternoon. In August. What does that mean? In terms of delighted nautical operatives, would you say? I mean, if it takes a red sky at night to delight a sailor, what does it take to amuse the man who operates the computers on a supertanker? Or is it shepherds who are delighted at night? I can never remember."
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"It's all right," said Adam quietly. "Pepper? Wensley? Brian? Come back here. It's all right. It's all right. I know everything now. And you've got to help me. Otherwise it's all goin' to happen. It's really all goin' to happen. It's all goin' to happen, if we don't do somethin'."
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The freed Them cowered against the chalk cliff, their eyes fixed on him.
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It didn't do any good.
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"I saw it on my way down here. And don't snap like that. My head aches. I mean I saw it. They've got it written down outside that air base of yours. It's got nothing to do with peas. It's 'Peace Is Our Profession.' It's the kind of thing they put up on boards outside air bases. You know: SAC 8657745th Wing, The Screaming Blue Demons, Peace Is Our Profession. That sort of thing." Newt clutched his head. The euphoria was definitely fading. "If Agnes is right, then there's probably some madman in there right now winding up all the missiles and cranking open the launch windows. Or whatever they are."
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"I wouldn't say that," said Newt, his train of thought temporarily derailed. "Not actual blood. More pinkish. Probably the storm put a lot of dust in the air."
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"What do you mean, you know what it means?"
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Anathema eyed the plaster in his hair. The shower hadn't got rid of it; it had merely dampened it down and spread it out, so that Newt looked as though he was wearing a white hat with hair in it.
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"What are you doing?" he said.
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"I don't think you need to bother," said Newt. "I know what the rest of 3477 means. It came to me when I --"
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"Yes." Anathema looked quizzically out of the broken window. "Would you say it's blood-colored?" she said. "It's very important."
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"You must have got quite a bump," she said.
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"Trying to cross-reference. I still can't be --"
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Anathema was rummaging through The Nice and Accurate Prophecies
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"No, that was when I hit my head on the wall. You know, when you --"
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"That's just for transport planes and things. All they've got up there is communications gear. Radios and stuff. Nothing explosive at all."
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"Oh, Yes? I've seen films! Name me one good reason why you can be so sure."
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"There aren't any bombs there. Or missiles. Everyone round here knows that."
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"No, there isn't," said Anathema firmly.
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Newt stared at her.
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"But it's an air base! It's got runways!"
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Look at Crowley, doing 110 mph on the M40 heading toward Oxfordshire. Even the most resolutely casual observer would notice a number of strange things about him. The clenched teeth, for example, or the dull red glow coming from behind his sunglasses. And the car. The car was a definite hint.
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Crowley had started the journey in his Bentley, and he was damned if he wasn't going to finish it in the Bentley as well. Not that even the kind of car buff who owns his own pair of motoring goggles would have been able to tell it was a vintage Bentley. Not any more. They wouldn't have been able to tell that it was a Bentley. They would only offer fifty-fifty that it had ever even been a car.
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The atmosphere in the quarry was friendlier now, but still intense.
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There was a thin skin of crusted, melted rubber left around the metal wheel rims, but seeing that the wheel rims were still somehow riding an inch above the road surface this didn't seem to make an awful lot of difference to the suspension.
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"You've got to help me sort it out," said Adam. "People've been tryin' to sort it out for thousands of years, but we've got to sort it out now."
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There was no paint left on it, for a start. It might still have been black, where it wasn't a rusty, smudged reddish-brown, but this was a dull charcoal black. It traveled in its own ball of flame, like a space capsule making a particularly difficult re-entry.
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It was the effort of holding it together that was causing Crowley to grit his teeth, and the biospatial feedback that was causing the bright red eyes. That and the effort of having to remember not to start breathing.
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It should have fallen apart miles back.
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He hadn't felt like this since the fourteenth century.
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"You see, the thing is," said Adam, "this thing is, it's like -- well, you know Greasy Johnson."
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The Them nodded. They all knew Greasy Johnson and the members of the other gang in Lower Tadfield. They were older and not very pleasant. Hardly a week went by without a skirmish.
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"Nearly always," said Adam, "An'--"
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They nodded helpfully.
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"Well," said Adam, "We always win, right?"
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"Nearly always," said Wensleydale.
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"Oh, we're better'n them," said Pepper. "You're right about that. We're better'n them all right. We jus' don't always win."
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"That doesn't count," said Adam. "They got told off just as much as us. Anyway, old folks are s'pposed to like listenin' to the sound of children playin', I read that somewhere, I don't see why we should get told off 'cos we've got the wrong kind of old folks --" He paused. "Anyway… we're better'n them."
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"Just suppose," said Adam, slowly, "that we could beat 'em properly. Get -- get them sent away or somethin'. Jus' make sure there's no more ole gangs in Lower Tadfield apart from us. What do you think about that?"
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"More than half, anyway," said Pepper. "'Cos, you remember, when there was all that fuss over the ole folks' party in the village hall when we --"
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The Them thought about this. Greasy Johnson had been a fact of life ever since they'd been old enough to hit one another with a toy railway engine. They tried to get their minds around the concept of a world with a Johnson-shaped hole in it.
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"No. Jus'-- jus' gone away."
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"What, you mean he'd be… dead?" said Brian.
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Brian scratched his nose. "I reckon it'd be brilliant without Greasy Johnson," he said. "Remember what he did at my birthday party? And I got into trouble about it."
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"I dunno," said Pepper. "I mean, it wouldn't be so interesting without ole Greasy Johnson and his gang. When you think about it. We've had a lot of fun with ole Greasy Johnson and the Johnsonites. We'd probably have to find some other gang or something."
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"Seems to me," said Wensleydale, "that if you asked people in Lower Tadfield, they'd say they'd be better off without the Johnsonites or the Them."
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Even Adam looked shocked at this. Wensleydale went on stoically: "The old folks" club would. An' Picky. An'--"
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"But we're the good ones…" Brian began. He hesitated. "Well, all right," he said, "but I bet they'd think it'd be a jolly sight less interestin' if we all weren't here."
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"One of those blue ones," said Brian, eventually, "saying 'Adam Young Lived Here,' or somethin'?"
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"Yes," said Wensleydale. "That's what I mean."
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"People round here don't want us or the Johnsonites," he went on morosely, "the way they're always goin' on about us just riding our bikes or skateboarding on their pavements and making too much noise and stuff. It's like the man said in the history books. A plaque on both your houses."
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"What you're all sayin'," he summed up, in his best chairman tones, "is that it wouldn't be any good at all if the Greasy Johnsonites beat the Them or the other way round?"
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This met with silence.
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Normally an opening like this could lead to five minutes' rambling discussion when the Them were in the mood, but Adam felt that this was not the time.
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"That's right," said Pepper. "Because," she added, "if we beat them, we'd have to be our own deadly enemies. It'd be me an' Adam against Brian an' Wensley," She sat back. "Everyone needs a Greasy Johnson," she said.
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"Yeah," said Adam. "That's what I thought. It's no good anyone winning. That's what I thought." He stared at Dog, or through Dog.
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Adam appeared to reach a decision.
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"Seems simple enough to me," said Wensleydale, sitting back. "I don't see why it's taken thousands of years to sort out."
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"That's because the people trying to sort it out were men," said Pepper, meaningfully.
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"Don't see why you have to take sides," said Wensleydale.
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"Of course I have to take sides," said Pepper. "Everyone has to take sides in something."
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Putputputputputput, went Madame Tracy's motor scooter down Crouch End High Street. It was the only vehicle moving on a suburban London street jammed with immobile cars and taxis and red London buses.
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"Yes. But I reckon you can make your own side. I think you'd better go and get your bikes," he said quietly. "I think we'd better sort of go and talk to some people."
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"Quite possibly," said Aziraphale. And then, "Mr. Shadwell, unless you put your arms round me you're going to fall off. This thing wasn't built for two people, you know."
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"I've never seen a traffic jam like it," said Madame Tracy. "I wonder if there's been an accident."
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"Well, with just me on, the top speed is about fifteen miles an hour, but with Mr. Shadwell as well, it must be, ooh, about
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"Ye'll have ter stop, then, so as I can adjust me weapon," sighed Shadwell.
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Shadwell sorted himself out, and put two grudging arms around Madame Tracy, while the Thundergun stuck up between them like a chaperon.
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"Because it seems to me that we would go slightly faster walking."
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"Dear lady, how fast would you say we were going?" asked Aziraphale.
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"Mr. Shadwell, I won't tell you again."
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"Three," muttered Shadwell, gripping the seat with one whiteknuckled hand, and his Thundergun with the other.
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"Why?"
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Madame Tracy found her eyes being moved down to the speedometer -- rather foolishly, she thought, since it hadn't worked since 1974, and it hadn't worked very well before that.
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Madame Tracy giggled dutifully, but she pulled over to the curb, and stopped the motor scooter.
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They rode through the rain without talking for another ten minutes, putputputputput, as Madame Tracy carefully negotiated her way around the cars and the buses.
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"Four or five miles per hour," she interrupted.
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There was a cough from behind her. "Can ye no slow down this hellish machine, wumman?" asked an ashen voice. In the infernal pantheon, which it goes without saying Shadwell hated uniformly and correctly, Shadwell reserved a special loathing for speed demons.
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"I suppose so," she agreed.
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"In which case," said Aziraphale, "We will get to Tadfield in something less than ten hours…"
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"About forty miles."
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There was a pause from Madame Tracy, then, "How far away is this Tadfield, anyway?"
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"Um," said Madame Tracy, who had once driven the scooter the few miles to nearby Finchley to visit her niece, but had taken the bus since, because of the funny noises the scooter had started making on the way back.
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"… we should really be going at about seventy, if we're going to get there in time," said Aziraphale. "Hmm. Sergeant Shadwell? Hold on very tightly now."
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Putputputputput and a blue nimbus began to outline the scooter and its occupants with a gentle sort of a glow, like an afterimage, all around them.
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"Don't look down, Sergeant Shadwell," advised Aziraphale.
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"…" said Shadwell, eyes screwed tightly shut, gray forehead beaded with sweat, not looking down, not looking anywhere.
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In every big-budget science fiction movie there's the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it's gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn't have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn't going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput…
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"And off we go, then."
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Putputputputputput and the scooter lifted awkwardly off the ground with no visible means of support, jerking slightly, until it reached a height of five feet, more or less.
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But it was exactly like that anyway.
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Where the M25, now a screaming frozen circle, intersects with the M40 to Oxfordshire, police were clustered around in ever-increasing quantities. Since Crowley crossed the divide, half an hour earlier, their number had doubled. On the M40 side, anyway. No one in London was getting out.
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Everybody was cold and wet, and puzzled, and irritable, with the exception of one police officer, who was cold, wet, puzzled, irritable, and exasperated.
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VROOOOSH.
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One of the senior army technicians interrupted. "It can't have done. According to our instruments the temperature above the M25 is somewhere in excess of seven hundred degrees centigrade."
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In addition to the police there were also approximately two hundred others standing around, and inspecting the M25 through binoculars. They included representatives from her Majesty's Army, the Bomb Disposal Squad, M15, M16, the Special Branch, and the CIA. There was also a man selling hot dogs.
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"Look. I don't care if you believe me or not," he sighed, "all I'm telling you is what I saw. It was an old car, a Rolls, or a Bentley, one of those flash vintage jobs, and it made it over the bridge."
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"Or a hundred and forty degrees below," added his assistant.
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"… or a hundred and forty degrees below zero," agreed the senior technician. "There does appear to be some confusion on that score, although I think we can safely attribute it to mechanical error of some kind, [This was true. There wasn't a thermometer on earth that could have been persuaded to register both 700° C and -140° C at the same time; which was the correct temperature.] but the fact remains that we can't even get a helicopter directly over the M25 without winding up with Helicopter McNuggets. How on earth can you tell me that a vintage car drove over it unharmed?"
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"Do you seriously expect any of us to believe…" began somebody.
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"I didn't say it drove over it unharmed," corrected the policeman, who was thinking seriously about leaving the Metropolitan Police and going into business with his brother, who was resigning his job with the Electricity Board, and was going to start breeding chickens. "It burst into flames. It just kept on going."
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Over their heads it sailed, forty feet in the air, engulfed in a deep blue nimbus which faded to red at the edges: a little white motor scooter, and riding it, a middle-aged woman in a pink helmet, and holding tightly to her, a short man in a mackintosh and a day-glo green crash helmet (the motor scooter was too far up for anyone to see that his eyes were tightly shut, but they were). The woman was screaming. What she was screaming was this: "Gerrrronnnimooooo!"
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One of the advantages of the Wasabi, as Newt was always keen to point out, was that when it was badly damaged it was very hard to tell. Newt had to keep driving Dick Turpin onto the shoulder to avoid fallen branches.
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And Vrooosh.
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"You've made me drop all the cards on the floor!"
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The car thumped back onto the road; a small voice from somewhere under the glove compartment said, "Oil plessure arert."
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A high-pitched keening noise, haunting and strange. Like a thousand glass harmonicas being played in unison, all slightly off-key; like the sound of the molecules of the air itself wailing in pain.
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"Well, if Agnes is right, and we're doing all this because she's predicted it, then any card picked right now has got to be relevant. That's logic."
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"I'll never be able to sort them out now," she moaned.
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"Listen, I know these kinds of places. They have huge guards made out of teak guarding the gates, Anathema, and they have white helmets and real guns, you understand, which fire real bullets made of real lead which can go right into you and bounce around and come out of the same hole before you can even say 'Excuse me, we have reason to believe that World War Three is due any moment and they're going to do the show right here,' and then they have serious men in suits with bulging jackets who take you into a little room without windows and ask you questions like are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a pinko subversive organization such as any British political party? And --"
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"You don't have to," said Newt manically, "Just pick one. Any one. It won't matter."
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"It's nonsense."
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"What do you mean?"
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"Yeah? Look, you're even here because she predicted it. And have you thought what we're going to say to the colonel? If we get to see him, which of course we won't."
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"If we're reasonable --"
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"We're nearly there."
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"I think you're getting rather overexcited," said Anathema quietly, picking the last of the file cards up from the floor of the car.
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"Overexcited? No! I'm getting very calmly worried that someone might shoot me!"
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"I'm sure Agnes would have mentioned it if we were going to be shot. She's very good at that sort of thing." She began absentmindedly to shuffle the file cards.
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"You know," she said, carefully cutting the cards and riffling the two piles together, "I read somewhere that there's a sect that believes that computers are the tools of the Devil. They say that Armageddon will come about because of the Antichrist being good with computers. Apparently it's mentioned somewhere in Revelations. I think I must have read about it in a newspaper recently…"
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"Look, it's got gates and wire fences and everything! And probably the kind of dogs that eat people!"
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"Daily Mail.'Letter From America.' Um, August the third," said Newt. "Just after the story about the woman in Worms, Nebraska, who taught her duck to play the accordion."
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"Is that why it appears to be paved with rubber?"
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The car jerked to a halt.
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3001. Behinde the Eagle's Neste a grate Ash hath fallen.
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"Mm," said Anathema, spreading the cards face down on her lap.
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The air base looked battered. Several large trees had fallen down near the entrance, and some men with a digger were trying to shift them. The guard on duty was watching them disinterestedly, but he half turned and looked coldly at the car.
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"Yes. We always thought it was something to do with the Russian Revolution. Keep going along this road and turn left."
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The turning led to a narrow lane, with the base's perimeter fence on the left-hand side.
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So computers are tools of the Devil? thought Newt. He had no problem believing it. Computers had to be the tools of somebody, and all he knew for certain was that it definitely wasn't him.
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"And now pull in here. There's often cars here, and no one takes any notice," said Anathema.
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"What is this place?"
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"All right," said Newt. "Pick a card."
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"It's the local Lovers' Lane."
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"Is that all?"
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"That's good enough for me. What do you suggest we do, then?"
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"Well, Agnes must have known something. So I suppose we just wait. It's not too bad now the wind's gone down."
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"You know him?" said Newt, with forced nonchalance.
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"Hi, George. Terrible storm, wasn't it."
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"Sure was."
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They walked on. He watched them out of sight.
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"Would he shoot us if we just walked in?" said Newt.
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They walked along the hedge -- shaded lane for a hundred yards until they reached the ash tree. Agnes had been right. It was quite grate. It had fallen right across the fence.
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A guard was sitting on it, smoking a cigarette. He was black. Newt always felt guilty in the presence of black Americans, in case they blamed him for two hundred years of slave trading.
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"Oh, sure. Sometimes a few of them come down to the pub. Pleasant enough in a well-scrubbed way."
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The man stood up when they approached, and then sagged into an easier stance.
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"He might well point a gun at us in a menacing way," Anathema
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"Oh." Newt looked at the clouds piling up on the horizon. "Good old Agnes," he said.
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"Oh, hi, Anathema," he said.
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"I reckon we can cut along Drovers Lane and then up through Roundhead Woods," said Pepper.
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There was a clacking noise and Pepper swung out of her drive. You could always tell Pepper's bike. She thought it was improved by a piece of cardboard cunningly held against the wheel by a clothes peg. Cats had learned to take evasive action when she was two streets away.
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Adam pedalled steadily along the road, Dog running along behind and occasionally trying to bite his back tire out of sheer excitement.
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Brian and Wensleydale pulled in behind them. Wensleydale's bicycle was black, and shiny, and sensible. Brian's might have been white, once, but its color was lost beneath a thick layer of mud.
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"'S all muddy," said Adam.
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"It's stupid calling it a milit'ry base," said Pepper. "I went up there when they had that open day and they had no guns or missiles or anythin'. Just knobs and dials and brass bands playin'."
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"That's right," said Pepper nervously. "It gets all muddy up there. We ort to go along by the chalk pit. 'S always dry because of the chalk. An' then up by the sewage farm."
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"Not much milit'ry about knobs and dials," said Pepper.
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"Yes," said Adam.
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"I got a kit for Christmas," Wensleydale volunteered. "All electric bits. There were a few knobs and dials in it. You could make a radio or a thing that goes beep."
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"I dunno, reely," said Adam. "It's amazin' what you can do with knobs and dials."
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"Cor," said Brian. "That's be wicked."
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"I dunno," said Adam thoughtfully, "I'm thinkin' more of certain people patching into the worldwide milit'ry communications network and telling all the computers and stuff to start fightin'."
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"Sort of," said Adam.
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R. P. Tyler, short, well-fed, satisfied, stomped down a country lane, accompanied by his wife's miniature poodle, Shutzi. R. P. Tyler knew the difference between right and wrong; there were no moral grays of any kind in his life. He was not, however, satisfied simply with being vouchsafed the difference between right and wrong. He felt it his bounden duty to tell the world.
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It is a high and lonely destiny to be Chairman of the Lower Tadfield Residents' Association.
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Sirs,
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Since his retirement last year the letters had increased to the point where not even the Tadfield Advertiser was able to print all of them. Indeed, the letter R. P. Tyler had completed before setting out on his evening walk had begun:
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Not for R. P. Tyler the soapbox, the polemic. verse, the broadsheet. R. P. Tyler's chosen forum was the letter column of the Tadfield Advertiser. If a neighbor's tree was inconsiderate enough to shed leaves into R. P. Tyler's garden, R. P. Tyler would first carefully sweep them all up, place them in boxes, and leave the boxes outside his neighbor's front door, with a stern note. Then he would write a letter to the Tadfield Advertiser. If he sighted teenagers sitting on the village green, their portable cassette players playing, and they were enjoying themselves, he would take it upon himself to point out to them the error of their ways. And after he had fled their jeering, he would write to the Tadfield Advertiser on the Decline of Morality and the Youth of Today.
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I note with distress that the newspapers of today no longer feel obligated to their public, we, the people who pay your wages…
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He surveyed the fallen branches that littered the narrow country road. I don't suppose, he pondered, they think of the cleaning up bill when they send us these storms. Parish Council has to foot the bill to clean it all up. And we, the taxpayers, pay their wages…
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R. P. Tyler looked away, embarrassed. It might be that the sole purpose of his evening constitutional was to allow the dog to relieve itself, but he was dashed if he'd admit that to himself. He stared up at the storm clouds. They were banked up high, in towering piles of smudged gray and black. It wasn't just the flickering tongues of lightning that forked through them like the opening sequence of a Frankenstein movie; it was the way they stopped when they reached the borders of Lower Tadfield. And in their center was a circular patch of daylight; but the light had a stretched, yellow quality to it, like a forced smile.
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The they in this thought were the weather forecasters on Radio Four, whom R. P. Tyler blamed for the weather. [He did not have a television. Or as his wife put it, "Ronald wouldn't have one of those things in the house, would you Ronald?" and he always agreed, although secretly he would have liked to have seen some of the smut and filth and violence that the National Viewers and Listeners Association complained of. Not because he wanted to see it, of course. Just because he wanted to know what other people should be protected from.]
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Shutzi stopped by a roadside beech tree to cock its leg.
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There was a low roaring.
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"Vandals!" called R. P. Tyler after them.
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Down the narrow lane came four motorbikes. They shot past him, and turned the corner, disturbing a cock pheasant who whirred across the lane in a nervous arc of russet and green.
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He jerked Shutzi's lead, and they marched along the road.
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It was so quiet.
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He was about to advance on them sternly, when it came to him that he was outnumbered, four to one, and that they were taller than he was, and that they were undoubtedly violent psychopaths. No one but a violent psychopath rode motorbikes in R. P. Tyler's world.
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The countryside wasn't made for people like them. It was made for people like him.
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R. P. Tyler observed the situation, and leaped effortlessly to a conclusion. These vandals -- he had, of course been right -- had come to the countryside in order to desecrate the War Memorial and to overturn signposts.
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Five minutes later he turned the corner, to find three of the motorcyclists standing around a fallen signpost, a victim of the storm. The fourth, a tall man with a mirrored visor, remained on his bike.
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So he raised his chin and began to strut past them, without apparently noticing they were there, [Although as a member (read, founder) of his local Neighborhood Watch scheme he did attempt to memorize the motorbikes' number plates.] all the while composing in his head a letter (Sirs, this evening I noted with distress a large number of hooligans on motorbicycles infesting Our Fair Village. Why, oh Why, does the government do nothing about this plague of…)
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"The signpost musta blew down," said the motorcyclist.
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"Hi," said one of the motorcyclists, raising his visor to reveal a thin face and a trim black beard. "We're kinda lost."
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"Ah," said R. P. Taylor disapprovingly.
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"Yes, I suppose it must," agreed R. P. Taylor. He noticed with surprise that he was getting hungry.
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"Yeah. Well, we're heading for Lower Tadfield."
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An officious eyebrow raised. "You're Americans. With the air force base, I suppose." (Sirs, when I did national service I was a credit to my country. I notice with horror and dismay that airmen from the Tadfield Air Base are driving around our noble countryside dressed no better than common thugs. While I appreciate their importance in defending the freedom of the western world…).
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Then his love of giving instructions took over. "You go back down that road for half a mile, then first left, it's in a deplorable state of disrepair I'm afraid, I've written numerous letters to the council about it, are you civil servants or civil master. that's what I asked them, after all, who pays your wages? then second right, only it's not exactly right, it's on the left but you'll find it bends round toward the right eventually, it's signposted Porrit's Lane, but of course it isn't Pornt's Lane, you look at the ordinance survey map, you'll see, it's simply the eastern end of Forest Hill Lane, you'll come out in the village, now you go past the Bull and Fiddle -- that's a public house -- then when you get to the church (I have pointed out to the people who compile the ordinance survey map that it's a church with a spire, not a church with a tower, indeed I have written to the Tadfield Advertiser, suggesting they mount a local campaign to get the map corrected, and I have every hope that once these people realize with whom they are dealing you'll see a hasty U-turn from them) then you'll get to a crossroads, now, you go straight across that crossroads and you'll immediately come to a second crossroads, now, you can take either the left-hand fork or go straight on, either way you'll arrive at the air base (although the left-hand fork is almost a tenth of a mile shorter) and you can't miss it."
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Shutzi gave a little yelp and darted behind R. P. Tyler, where it remained, shivering.
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The strangers climbed back onto their bikes. The one in white (a hippie, by the look of him, thought R. P. Tyler) dropped an empty crisp packet onto the grass shoulder.
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R. P. Tyler drew himself up to his full height. [Five foot six] "Young man," he said, "how would you feel if I came over to your house and dropped litter everywhere?"
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Famine stared at him blankly. "I, uh, I'm not sure I got that…" he began.
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"Oh, it's not just mine," said the boy. "It's everybody's."
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Pollution smiled, wistfully. "Very, very pleased," he breathed. "Oh, that would be wonderful."
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I DID. LET US GO.
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Engines revved.
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R. P. Tyler stared after them, until his attention was distracted by the sound of something going clackclackclack He turned. Four figures on bicycles shot past him, closely followed by the scampering figure of a small dog.
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"I missed something," said War. "Now, why are we meant to make a U-turn by the church?"
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"Excuse me," barked Tyler. "Is that your crisp packet?"
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Beneath his bike an oil slick puddled a rainbow on the wet road.
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JUST FOLLOW ME, said the tall one in front, and the four rode off together.
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The Them braked to a halt and looked at him.
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"You! Stop!" shouted R. P. Tyler.
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"Master Young," ordered R. P. Tyler, "please get your -- your mutt away from my Shutzi." Tyler did not trust Dog. When he had first met the dog, three days ago, it had snarled at him, and glowed its eyes red. This had impelled Tyler to begin a letter pointing out that Dog was undoubtedly rabid, certainly a danger to the community, and should be put down for the General Good, until his wife had reminded him that glowing red eyes weren't a symptom of rabies, or, for that matter, anything seen outside of the kind of film that neither of the Tylers would be caught dead at but knew all they needed to know about, thank you very much.
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"I knew it was you, Adam Young, and your little, hmph, cabal. What, might I enquire, are you children doing out at this time of night? Do your fathers know you're out?"
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The leader of the cyclist turned. "I can't see how you can say it's late," he said, "seems to me, seems to me, that if the sun's still out then it's not late."
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There was a commotion on the grass. Shutzi, who was a particularly refined toy French poodle, of the kind only possessed by people who were never able to fit children into their household budgets, was being menaced by Dog.
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"It's past your bedtime, anyway," R. P. Tyler informed them, "and don't stick out your tongue at me, young lady," this was to Pepper, "or I will be writing a letter to your mother informing her of the lamentable and unladylike state of her offspring's manners."
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"Well 'scuse us," said Adam, aggrieved. "Pepper was just looking at you. I didn't know there was any for against looking."
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"Dog," said Adam, ominously. His dog slunk back to his master's bicycle.
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Dog ignored him. He'd got a lot of dog catching-up still to do.
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"You cheeky little monkey," said R. P. Tyler. "When I see your father, Adam Young, I will inform him in no uncertain terms that…"
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Adam looked astounded. "Dog's not a mutt. Dog's a remarkable dog. He's clever. Dog, you get off Mr. Tyler's horrible of poodle."
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"If that's all right with you," said Adam, with what he hoped was bitter and scathing sarcasm. "I mean, we won't want to go there if it wasn't all right with you."
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"To the air base," said Brian.
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But the Them were already pedalling off down the road, in the direction of Lower Tadfield Air Base -- travelling by the Them's route, which was shorter and simpler and more scenic than the route suggested by Mr. Tyler.
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"I don't believe you have answered my question. Where are you four off to?"
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R. P. Tyler had composed a lengthy mental letter on the failings of the youth of today. It covered falling educational standards, the lack of respect given to their elders and betters, the way they always seemed to slouch these days instead of walking with a proper upright bearing, juvenile delinquency, the return of compulsory National Service, birching, flogging, and dog licenses.
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"Excuse me, love," said a warm female voice. "I think we're lost."
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Putputput putputput
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He was very satisfied with it. He had a sneaking suspicion that it would be too good for the Tadfield Advertiser, and had decided to send it to the Times.
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It was an aging motor scooter, and it was being ridden by a middleaged woman. Clutching her tightly, his eyes screwed shut, was a raincoated little man with a bright green crash helmet on. Sticking up between them was what appeared to be an antique gun with a funnelshaped muzzle.
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"Lower Tadfield. I'm not sure of the exact address, but we're looking for someone," said the woman, then, in a totally different voice she said, "His name is Adam Young."
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"Oh. Where are you going?"
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R. P. Tyler boggled. "You want that boy?" he asked. "What's he done now -- no, no, don't tell me. I don't want to know."
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"Boy?" said the woman. "You didn't tell me he was a boy. How old is he?" Then she said, "He's eleven. Well, I do wish you'd mentioned this before. It puts a completely different complexion on things."
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R. P. Tyler just stared. Then he realized what was going on. The woman was a ventriloquist. What he had taken for a man in a green crash helmet, he now saw was a ventriloquist's dummy. He wondered how he could ever have assumed it was human. He felt the whole thing was in vaguely bad taste.
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"I saw Adam Young not five minutes ago," he told the woman. "He and his little cronies were on their way to the American air base."
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"Only on Thursdays," said Madame Tracy, disapprovingly. "And I charge extra. And I wonder if you could direct us to --"
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"Oh dear," said the woman, paling slightly. "I've never really liked the Yanks. They're really very nice people, you know. Yes, but you can't trust people who pick up the ball all the time when they play football."
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"Ahh, excuse me," said R. P. Tyler, "I think it's very good. Very impressive. I'm deputy chairman of the local Rotary club, and I was wondering, do you do private functions?"
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And the little scooter went putputputputputput down the narrow country lane.
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Mr. Tyler had been here before. He wordlessly extended a finger.
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His knowledge of country lore was a little hazy, but he felt fairly sure that if the cows lay down, it meant rain. If they were standing it would probably be fine. These cows were taking it in turns to execute slow and solemn somersaults; and Tyler wondered what it presaged for the weather.
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R. P. Tyler was offended, but also disappointed. He'd hoped it would be more lifelike.
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As it did so, the gray dummy in the green helmet turned around and opened one eye. "Ye great southern pillock," it croaked.
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He sniffed. Something was burning -- there was an unpleasant smell of scorched metal and rubber and leather.
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R. P. Tyler, only ten minutes away from the village, paused, while Shutzi attempted another of its wide range of eliminatory functions. He gazed over the fence.
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"Excuse me," said a voice from behind him. R. P. Tyler turned around.
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There was a large once-black car on fire in the lane and a man in sunglasses was leaning out of one window, saying through the smoke, "I'm sorry, I've managed to get a little lost. Can you direct me to Lower Tadfield Air Base? I know it's around here somewhere."
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"Yes?"
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"That's terrific. Much obliged," said Crowley, as he began to wind up the window.
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Should he ask the man if he wanted him to phone the A. A.?
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No. Tyler just couldn't bring himself to say it. I mean, the man had to know that, didn't he? He was sitting in the middle of it. Possibly it was some kind of practical joke.
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R. P. Tyler had to say something.
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Instead he explained the route carefully, trying not to stare.
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The wind blew towards Tyler, across the car, and he felt his eyebrows frizzle.
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Your car is on fire.
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Excuse me, young man, but your car is on fire and you're sitting in it without burning and incidentally it's red hot in place
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The stranger smiled, "That must be it," he said. The orange flames flickering below him gave him an almost infernal appearance.
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No.
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"Excuse me, young man," he said.
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So instead he said, "I think you must have taken a wrong turn about a mile back. A signpost has blown down."
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"I mean, it's not the kind of thing you don't notice, your car being on fire.
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A tongue of flame licked across the charred dashboard.
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"That's probably because your car is on fire," said R. P. Tyler sharply. He jerked Shutzi's lead, dragged the little dog to heel.
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Mr. Young was in his front garden, sitting on his deck chair, smoking his pipe.
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This had more to do with Deirdre's recent discovery of the menace of passive smoking and banning of smoking in the house than he would care to admit to his neighbors. It did not improve his temper. Neither did being addressed as Young by Mr. Tyler.
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"Is it?" said Crowley. "I honestly hadn't noticed." And he reversed back down the country lane in his burning car.
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I would like to draw your attention to a recent tendency I have noticed for today's young people to ignore perfectly sensible safety precautions while driving. This evening I was asked for directions by a gentleman whose car was…
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No.
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Driving a car that…
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Sir,
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It was on fire…
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No.
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"Funny weather we're having, isn't it?" he said, lamely.
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"Hoy!" shouted R. P. Tyler. "Young!"
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His temper getting worse, R. P. Tyler stomped the final stretch back into the village.
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To The Editor
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Mr. Young sighed. "What's he done now?"
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And he went inside.
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"Do you know where he is?"
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"Hmp," he said. "I see," he said.
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"Good."
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"Right," he said.
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Mr. Young took his pipe out of his mouth and examined the stem thoughtfully.
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"You know how strict they are up there," said Mr. Tyler, in case Mr. Young hadn't got the message.
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"Yes?"
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Mr. Young puffed on his pipe.
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"Your son, Adam."
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Tyler grinned, tightly, triumphantly. "I doubt it. I saw him and his little fiends, and that appalling mongrel, not half an hour ago, cycling towards the air base."
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Mr. Young checked his watch. "Getting ready for bed, I would assume."
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At exactly that same moment, four motorbikes swished to a halt a few hundred yards from the main gate. The riders switched off their engines and raised their helmet visors. Well, three of them did.
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"I was rather hoping we could crash through the barriers," said War wistfully.
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"You know what a one your son is for pressing buttons and things," he added.
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"That'd only cause trouble," said Famine.
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"Weren't we supposed to meet… someone?" said War.
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"This isn't how I imagined it, chaps," said War. "I haven't been waiting for thousands of years just to fiddle around with bits of wire. It's not what you'd call dramatic. Albrecht Durer didn't waste his time doing woodcuts of the Four Button-Pressers of the Apocalypse, I do know that."
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"Look at it like this," said Famine. "It's just groundwork. We get to do the riding forth afterwards. The proper riding forth. Wings of the storm and so on. You've got to be flexible."
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"Trouble for us, I mean. The power and phone lines must be down, but they're bound to have generators and they'll certainly have radio. If someone starts reporting that terrorists have invaded the base then people'll start acting logically and the whole Plan collapses."
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"Huh."
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WE GO IN, WE DO THE JOB, WE GO OUT, WE LET HUMAN NATURE TAKE ITS COURSE, said Death.
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"I thought there'd be trumpets," said Pollution.
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There was no sound but the metallic noises of cooling motorbike engines.
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Then Pollution said, slowly, "You know, I can't say I imagined it'd be somewhere like this, either. I thought it'd be, well, a big city. Or a big country. New York, perhaps. Or Moscow. Or Armageddon itself."
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"I think I went there once," said Pollution. "The old city of Megiddo. Just before it fell down. Nice place. Interesting royal gateway."
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"Funny you should ask," said Famine. "I've always meant to look it up."
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War looked at the greenness around them.
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"There's an Armageddon, Pennsylvania," said Pollution. "Or maybe it's Massachusetts, or one of them places. Lots of guys in heavy beards and seriously black hats."
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"Nah," said Famine. "It's somewhere in Israel, I think."
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MOUNT CARMEL.
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"Is that right? That's one big avocado."
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There was another pause.
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War coughed. "It's just that I thought that… he'd be coming with us…?"
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THE GEOGRAPHY IS IMMATERIAL.
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Then War said, "Where is Armageddon, anyway?"
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"Boy," she said, "did we take a wrong turning."
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LET US GO.
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AND THE END OF THE WORLD.
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IF ARMAGEDDON IS ANYWHERE, IT IS EVERYWHERE.
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"I thought that was where they grow avocados."
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"Sorry, lord?"
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There was another pause.
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"That's right," said Famine, "we're not talking about a few square miles of scrub and goats anymore."
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Four generals got out. Again, the sergeant was a little uncertain of why he had thought this. They had proper identification. What kind of identification, admittedly, he couldn't quite recall, but it was proper. He saluted.
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A large staff car drew up by the gate. It was sleek and officiallooking although, afterwards, he wasn't entirely sure why he had thought this, or why it sounded momentarily as though it were powered by motorbike engines.
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THIS, he said firmly, IS A JOB FOR THE PROFESSIONALS.
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Death adjusted his gauntlets.
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Afterwards, Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger recalled events at the gate as having happened like this:
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To which Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger replied, "Sir, I have not been informated as to the incidence of a surprise inspection at this time, sir."
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And one of them said, "Surprise inspection, soldier."
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The sergeant saluted again.
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"Of course not," said one of the generals. "That's because it's a surprise."
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"Sir, permission to confirmate this intelligence with base command, sir," he said, uneasily.
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One of the others put a friendly arm around the sergeant's shoulders and leaned forward in a conspiratorial way.
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"Now see here --" he squinted at the sergeant's name tag "-- Deisenburger, maybe I'll give you a break. It's a surprise inspection, got that? Surprise. That means no getting on the horn the moment we've gone through, understand? And no leaving your post. Career soldier like you'll understand, am I right?" he added. He winked. "Otherwise you'll find yourself busted so low you'll have to say 'sir' to an imp."
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"What?"
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"Private," hissed one of the other generals. According to her tag, her name was Waugh. Sgt. Deisenburger had never seen a female general like her before, but she was certainly an improvement.
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The tallest and thinnest of the generals strolled a little way from the group, turned his back, and folded his arms.
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Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger stared at him.
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"Yeah. That's what I meant. Yeah. Private. Okay, soldier?"
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"Private. Not imp."
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The sergeant considered the very limited number of options at his disposal.
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"Sir, affirmative, sir," said the sergeant.
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"Provisionatedly classificisioned at this time," said Famine, who had spent years learning how to sell to the federal government and could feel the language coming back to him.
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"Sir, surprise inspection, sir?" he said.
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"Good man," said Famine, as the barrier was raised. "You'll go a long way." He glanced at his watch. "Very shortly."
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Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you're in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.
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No one stopped the four as they purposefully made their way into one of the long, low buildings under the forest of radio masts. No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don't want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages not to see them even when they abound on every side.
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Newt did not smoke, because he did not allow nicotine to gain entry to the temple of his body or, more accurately, the small Welsh Methodist tin tabernacle of his body. If he had been a smoker, he would have choked on the cigarette that he would have been smoking at this time in order to steady his nerves.
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The alarms were totally brainless and thought they saw four people where people shouldn't be, and went off like anything.
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Anathema stood up purposefully and smoothed the creases in her skirt.
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"No. They've got better guns, for one thing," said Newt.
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"Don't worry," she said. "They don't apply to us. Something's probably happening inside."
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She smiled at his pale face. "Come on," she said, "It's not the O. K. Corral."
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It was inevitable that all four of them couldn't contribute equally, War thought. She'd been surprised at her natural affinity for modern weapons systems, which were so much more efficient than bits of sharp metal, and of course Pollution laughed at absolutely foolproof, fail-safe devices. Even Famine at least knew what computers were. Whereas… well, he didn't do anything much except hang around, although he did it with a certain style. It had occurred to War that there might one day be an end to War, an end to Famine, possibly even an end to Pollution, and perhaps this was why the fourth and greatest horseman was never exactly what you might call one of the lads. It was like having a tax inspector in your football team. Great to have him on your side, of course, but not the kind of person you wanted to have a drink and a chat with in the bar afterwards. You couldn't be one hundred percent at your ease.
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She helped him up. "Never mind," she said. "I'm sure you'll think of a way."
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"Seven-segment LED displays," said the boy. He laid loving hands on a bank of relays, which fused under his touch, and then introduced a swathe of self-replicating viruses that whirred away on the electronic ether.
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A couple of soldiers ran through him as he looked over Pollution's skinny shoulder.
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WHAT ARE THOSE GLITTERY THINGS? he said, in the tones of one who knows he won't be able to understand the answer but wants to be seen to be taking an interest.
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War reached inside another metal cabinet. This wasn't the way she'd expected things to be, she had to admit, but when she ran her fingers over and sometimes through the electronics there was a familiar feel. It was an echo of what you got when you held a sword, and she felt a thrill of anticipation at the thought that this sword enclosed the whole world and a certain amount of the sky above it, as well. It loved her.
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"I don't know, I rather liked them," said Pollution.
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Death absentmindedly snapped his fingers. A dozen klaxons gurgled and died.
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"I could really do without those bloody alarms," muttered Famine.
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He'd seen many identity cards in his time -- military, CIA, FBI, KGB even -- and, being a young soldier, had yet to grasp that the more insignificant an organization is, the more impressive are its identity cards.
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A flaming sword.
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Mankind had not been very good at learning that swords are dangerous if left lying around, although it had done its limited best to make sure that the chances of one this size being wielded accidentally were high. A cheering thought, that. It was nice to think that mankind made a distinction between blowing their planet to bits by accident and doing it by design.
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Pollution plunged his hands into another rack of expensive electronics.
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The guard on the hole in the fence looked puzzled. He was aware of excitement back in the base, and his radio seemed to be picking up nothing but static, and his eyes were being drawn again and again to the card in front of him.
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This one was hellishly impressive. His lips moved as he read it again, all the way from "The Lord Protector of the Common Wealth of Britain charges and demands," through the bit about commandeering all kindling, rope, and igniferous oils, right down to the signature of the WA's first Lord Adjutant, Praise-him-all-Ye-works-of-the-Lord-and-Flye-Fornication Smith. Newt kept his thumb over the bit about Nine Pence Per Witch and tried to look like James Bond.
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"Oh, we have to have them," said Newt. "We burn them."
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The guard's face broadened into a grin. And they'd told him England was soft. "Right on!" he said.
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"Say what?"
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"We burn them."
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"What's this here," he said suspiciously, "about us got to give you faggots?"
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Well, it's true, she thought as she saw the man stiffen in terror. If he doesn't drop the gun he'll find out this is a stick, and I shall really regret having to be shot.
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At the main gate, Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger was also having problems. A little man in a dirty mack kept pointing a finger at him and muttering, while a lady who looked slightly like his mother talked to him in urgent tones and kept interrupting herself in a different voice.
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Finally the guard's probing intellect found a word he thought he recognized.
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"Drop your gun," said Anathema, behind him, "or I shall regret what I shall have to do next."
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Something pressed into the small of his back.
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"It really is vitally important that we are allowed to speak to whoever is in charge," said Aziraphale. "I really must ask that he's right, you know, I'd be able to tell if he was lying yes, thank you, I think we'd really achieve something if you kindly allowed me to carry on all right thank you I was only trying to put in a good word Yes! Er. You were asking him to yes all right… now --"
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Sgt. Deisenburger stared at the black and purple nail a few inches from his face. As an offensive weapon it rated quite highly, especially if it was ever used in the preparation of food.
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"D'yer see my finger?" shouted Shadwell, whose sanity was still attached to him but only on the end of along and rather frayed string. "D'yer see it? This finger, laddie, could send ye to meet yer Maker!"
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The telephone gave him nothing but static. He'd been told not to leave his post. His wound from Nam was starting to play up. [He'd slipped and fallen in a hotel shower when he took a holiday there in 1983. Now the mere sight of a bar of yellow soap could send him into near-fatal flashbacks.] He wondered how much trouble he could get into for shooting non-American civilians.
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The four bicycles pulled up a little way from the base. Tire marks in the dust, and a patch of oil, indicated that other travelers had briefly rested there.
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"I'm thinking," said Adam.
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"What're we stopping for?" said Pepper.
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It was hard. The bit of his mind that he knew as himself was still there, but it was trying to stay afloat on a fountain of tumultuous darkness. What he was aware of, though, was that his three companions were onehundred percent human. He'd got them into trouble before, in the way of torn clothes, docked pocket money, and so on, but this one was almost certainly going to involve a lot more than being confined to the house and made to tidy up your room.
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"Hi," he said. "How's it going? Has the world ended yet?"
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Just to make Sgt. Deisenburger's day, a car pulled up and it was floating several inches off the ground because it had no tires. Or paintwork. What it did have was a trail of blue smoke, and when it stopped it made the pinging noises made by metal cooling down from a very high temperature.
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"All right," he said. "We need some stuff, I think. We need a sword, a crown, and some scales."
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They stared at him.
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"What, just here?" said Brian. "There's nothin' like that here."
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It looked as if it had smoked glass windows, although this was just an effect caused by it having ordinary glass windows but a smoke-filled interior.
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The driver's door opened, and a cloud of choking fumes got out. Then Crowley followed it.
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He waved the smoke away from his face, blinked, and then turned the gesture into a friendly wave.
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On the other hand, there wasn't anyone else.
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"He won't let us in, Crowley," said Madame Tracy.
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"I dunno," said Adam. "When you think about the games and that, you know, we've played…"
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They stared at him.
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"You wouldn't get that sort of performance out of one of these modern cars," he said lovingly.
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There was a little electronic click.
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"Aziraphale? Is that you? Nice dress," said Crowley vaguely. He wasn't feeling very well. For the last thirty miles he had been imagining that a ton of burning metal, rubber, and leather was a fully-functioning automobile, and the Bentley had been resisting him fiercely. The hard part had been to keep the whole thing rolling after the all-weather radials had burned away. Beside him the remains of the Bentley dropped suddenly onto its distorted wheel rims as he stopped imagining that it had tires.
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Zip. Zip. Zip. Zip. And a small dog, its legs a blur.
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The gate was rising. The housing that contained the electric motor gave a mechanical groan, and then gave up in the face of the unstoppable force acting on the barrier.
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They stared at the four ferociously pedaling figures that ducked under the barrier and disappeared into the camp.
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He patted a metal surface hot enough to fry eggs on.
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"Hey!" said Sgt. Deisenburger, "Which one of you yo-yos did that?"
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"Then," said Sgt. Deisenburger, "they're in real trouble." He raised his gun. Enough of this pussyfooting around; he kept thinking of soap. "And so," he said, "are you."
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"Well done," said Crowley. "Never thought you had it in you."
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"No," said Aziraphale. "Nor did I, in fact. I do hope I haven't sent him somewhere dreadful."
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"I warns ye --" Shadwell began.
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"Hey," he said, but much more weakly this time, "did any of them kids have some space alien with a face like a friendly turd in a bike basket?"
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"Er," said Aziraphale.
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"This has gone on too long," said Aziraphale. "Sort it out, Crowley, there's a dear chap."
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The sergeant pulled himself together.
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"Don't think so," said Crowley.
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There was a pop like an old-fashioned flashbulb, and Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger disappeared.
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"I'm the nice one," said Aziraphale. "You can't expect me to -- oh, blast it. You try to do the decent thing, and where does it get you?" He snapped his fingers.
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"See?" said Shadwell, who hadn't quite got the hang of Madame Tracy's split personality, "nothing to it. Ye stick by me, yell be all right."
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"Hmm?" said Crowley.
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"Let's get on in," said Crowley. He looked sadly at the wreckage of the Bentley, and then brightened. A jeep was heading purposefully towards the gate, and it looked as though it was crowded with people who were about to shout questions and fire guns and not worry about which order they did this in.
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"You'd better get used to it right now," said Crowley. "You just send 'em. Best not to worry about where they go." He looked fascinated. "Aren't you going to introduce me to your new body?"
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He took his hands out of his pockets and he raised them like Bruce Lee and then he smiled like Lee van Cleef. "Ah," he said, "here comes transport."
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He brightened up. This was more what you might call his area of competence.
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"Oh? Yes. Yes, of course. Madame Tracy, this is Crowley. Crowley, Madame Tracy. Charmed, I'm sure."
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They parked their bikes outside one of the low buildings. Wensleydale carefully locked his. He was that kind of boy.
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"They could look like all sorts," said Adam doubtfully.
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"So what will these people look like?" said Pepper.
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"They're grownups, are they?" said Pepper.
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"Fightin' grownups is never any use," said Wensleydale gloomily. "You always get into trouble."
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"You don't have to fight 'em," said Adam. "You just do what I told you.
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The Them looked at the things they were carrying. As far as tools to mend the world were concerned, they did not look incredibly efficient.
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"How'll we find 'em, then?" said Brian, doubtfully. "I remember when we came to the Open Day, it's all rooms and stuff. Lots of rooms and flashing lights."
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"Yes," said Adam. "More grown-up than you've ever seen before, I reckon."
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"Well," he said, "it seems to me --"
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"Hey, what are you kids doing here?"
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It wasn't a one hundred percent threatening voice, but it was near the end of its tether and it belonged to an officer who'd spent ten minutes trying to make sense of a senseless world where alarms went off and doors didn't open. Two equally harassed soldiers stood behind him, slightly at a loss as to how to deal with four short and clearly Caucasian juveniles, one of them marginally female.
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Adam stared thoughtfully at the buildings. The alarms were still yodelling.
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"Don't you worry about us," said Adam airily. "We're jus' lookin' around."
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The lieutenant stared at him, his eyes trying to focus. Then he pitched forward.
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"Go to sleep," said Adam. "You just go to sleep. All you soldiers here go to sleep. Then you won't get hurt. You all just go to sleep now."
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"Well, it's sort of like that, only now I've found how to do it." He turned back to the communications building.
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"Now you just --" the lieutenant began.
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"Yes?"
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If you took the world away and just left the electricity, it would look like the most exquisite filigree ever made -- a ball of twinkling silver lines with the occasional coruscating spike of a satellite beam. Even the dark areas would glow with radar and commercial radio waves. It could be the nervous system of a great beast.
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"Right," he said.
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He pulled himself together, his body unfolding from its habitual comfortable slouch into an upright bearing Mr. Tyler would have been proud of.
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"Well," said Adam cautiously, "you know that bit about hypnotism in the Boy's Own Book of 101 Things To Dothat we could never make work?"
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"Coo," said Pepper, as the others collapsed, "how did you do that?"
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He thought for a while. Then he said, "Come and see."
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And now it was alive, in the same way that fire is alive. Switches were welding shut. Relays fused. In the heart of silicon chips whose microscopic architecture looked like a street plan of Los Angeles fresh pathways opened up, and hundreds of miles away bells rang in underground rooms and men stared in horror at what certain screens were telling them. Heavy steel doors shut firmly in secret hollow mountains, leaving people on the other side to pound on them and wrestle with fuse boxes which had melted. Bits of desert and tundra slid aside, letting fresh air into air-conditioned tombs, and blunt shapes ground ponderously into position.
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And while it flowed where it should not, it ebbed from its normal beds. In cities the traffic lights went, then the street lights, then all the lights. Cooling fans slowed, flickered, and stopped. Heaters faded into darkness. Lifts stuck. Radio stations choked off, their soothing music silenced.
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Here and there cities make knots in the web but most of the electricity is, as it were, mere musculature, concerned only with crude work. But for fifty years or so people had been giving electricity brains.
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Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not.
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Death straightened up. He appeared to be listening intently. It was anyone's guess what he listened with.
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There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic -- hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.
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It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.
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HE IS HERE, he said.
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The other three looked up. There was a barely perceptible change in the way they stood there. A moment before Death had spoken they, the part of them that did not walk and talk like human beings, had been wrapped around the world. Now they were back.
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There was a strangeness about them. It was as if, instead of illfitting suits, they now had ill-fitting bodies. Famine looked as though he had been tuned slightly off-station, so that the hitherto dominant signal of a pleasant, thrusting, successful businessman -- was beginning to be drowned out by the ancient, horrible static of his basic personality. War's skin glistened with sweat. Pollution's skin just glistened.
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More or less.
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"It's not just the nuclear," Pollution said. "It's the chemical. Thousands of gallons of stuff in…, little tanks all over the world. Beautiful liquids… with eighteen syllables in their names. And the… old standbys. Say what you like. Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever."
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"It's all… taken care of," said War, speaking with some effort. "It'll…, take its course."
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"Chickens coming… home to roost," said War.
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"And then… winter," said Famine. "I like winter. There's something… clean about winter."
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Only Death hadn't changed. Some things don't.
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"No more chickens," said Famine, flatly.
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And this was noticed by Anathema and Newton Pulsifer.
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The Four left the building. It was noticeable that Pollution, while still walking, nevertheless gave the impression of oozing.
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It had been the first building they'd come to. It had seemed much safer inside than out, where there seemed to be a lot of excitement. Anathema had pushed open a door covered in signs that suggested that this would be a terminally dangerous thing to do. It had swung open at her touch. When they'd gone inside, it had shut and locked itself.
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"I think possibly the end of the world," said Anathema. "Did you see their auras?"
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"Yes."
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There hadn't been a lot of time to discuss this after the Four had walked in.
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"That's bad, is it?"
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"I don't think so," said Newt.
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"Negative auras, in fact."
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Anathema glared at the rows of metal cabinets. For once, just now, because it wasn't just for play but was for real, the machinery that was going to bring about the end of the world, or at least that part of it that occupied the layers between about two meters down and all the way to the ozone layer, wasn't operating according to the usual script. There were no big red canisters with flashing lights. There were no coiled wires with a "cut me" look about them. No suspiciously large numeric displays were counting down toward a zero that could be averted with seconds to spare. Instead, the metal cabinets looked solid and heavy and very resistant to last-minute heroism.
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"What were they?" said Newt. "Some kind of terrorists?"
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"Oh?"
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"Like black holes."
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"Not nice at all."
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"In a very nice and accurate sense," said Anathema, "I think you're right."
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"Oh."
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"What was all that weird talk about?"
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"Perhaps there's an off switch?" said Newt helplessly. "I'm sure if we looked around --"
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Once, one of the electronics magazines to which he subscribed had published a joke circuit which was guaranteed not to work. At last, they'd said in an amusing way, here's something all you ham-fisted hams out there can build in the certain knowledge that if it does nothing, it's working. It had diodes the wrong way round, transistors upside down, and a flat battery. Newt had built it, and it picked up Radio Moscow. He'd written them a letter of complaint, but they never replied.
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"What takes its course?" said Anathema. "They've done something, haven't they?"
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"Worldwide communications," he said indistinctly. "You could do practically anything. Modulate the mains power, tap into satellites. Absolutely anything. You could"-zhip --"argh, you could"-- zhap --"ouch, make things do"-- zipt --"uh, just about"-- zzap --"ooh."
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"These sort of things are wired in. Don't be silly. I thought you knew about this sort of thing."
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"How are you getting on in there?"
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Newt sucked his fingers. So far he hadn't found anything that resembled a transistor. He wrapped his hand in his handkerchief and pulled a couple of boards out of their sockets.
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Newt nodded desperately. This was a long way from the pages of Easy Electronics. For the look of the thing, he peered into the back of one of the cabinets.
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"Not just unscrews," said Newt, his temper fraying. "And I'm not"-- zhip --"James Bond. If I was'-- whizzle --"the bad guys would have shown me all the megadeath levers and told me how they bloody well worked, wouldn't they?"-- Fwizzpt --"Only it doesn't happen like that in real life? I don't know what's happening and I can't stop it."
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Clouds churned around the horizon. Overhead the sky was still clear, the air torn by nothing more than a light breeze. But it wasn't normal air. It had a crystallized look to it, so that you might feel that if you turned your head you might see new facets. It sparkled. If you had to find a word to describe it, the word thronged might slip insidiously into your mind. Thronged with insubstantial beings awaiting only the right moment to become very substantial.
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"I really don't know if I'm doing any good," he said.
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"James Bond just unscrews things," said Anathema.
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Adam glanced up. In one sense there was just clear air overhead. In another, stretching off to infinity, were the hosts of Heaven and Hell, wingtip to wingtip. If you looked really closely, and had been specially trained, you could tell the difference.
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Silence held the bubble of the world in its grip.
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"The thing is," said Adam urgently, "they're not really real. They're just like nightmares, really."
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"B-but we're not asleep," said Pepper.
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"There you are, then," said Adam, encouragingly. "It can't be real, can it? It's common sense. Something like that can't be reelly real."
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"That one looks as if he's meltin'," said Brian, pointing at the advancing figure, if such it could still be called, of Pollution.
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The door of the building swung open and the Four stepped out. There was no more than a hint of human about three of them now -- they seemed to be humanoid shapes made up of all the things they were or represented. They made Death seem positively homely. His leather greatcoat and dark-visored helmet had become a cowled robe, but these were mere details. A skeleton, even a walking one, is at least human; Death of a sort lurks inside every living creature.
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IT HAS BEEN DONE, said Death. He leaned forward a little and stared eyelessly at Adam. It was hard to tell if he was surprised.
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The Four halted a few meters away.
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Dog whined and tried to hide behind Adam.
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I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, he said. SURELY YOUR VERY EXISTENCE REQUIRES THE ENDING OF THE WORLD. IT IS WRITTEN.
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"Yes, well," said Adam. "The thing is, I don't want it done. I never asked for it to be done."
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Death looked at the other three, and then back to Adam.
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"I dunt see why anyone has to go an' write things like that," said Adam calmly. "The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven't found out all about it yet, so I don't want anyone messing it about or endin' it before I've had a chance to find out about it. So you can all just go away."
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Behind them a jeep skewed to a halt. They ignored it.
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"You… are part… of us," said War, between teeth like beautiful bullets.
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("That's the one, Mr. Shadwell," said Aziraphale, his words trailing into uncertainty even as he uttered them, "the one with T-shirt…")
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Death stared at Adam.
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"It is done. We make… the… world… anew," said Pollution, his voice as insidious as something leaking out of a corroded drum into a water table.
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"You… lead… us," said Famine.
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You just had to decide who your friends really were.
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Adam looked at the Them. They were his kind of people, too.
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("Ye canna want me to shoot him! He's but a bairn!"
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In tiers above, the hosts of the sky waited for the Word.
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Dog began to growl.
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And Adam hesitated. Voices inside him still cried out that this was true, and that the world was his as well, and all he had to do was turn and lead them out across a bewildered planet. They were his kind of people.
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"Er," said Aziraphale. "Er. Yes. Perhaps we'd just better wait a bit, what do you think?"
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"Until he grows up, do you mean?" said Crowley.)
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He turned back to the Four.
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"Get them," said Adam, quietly.
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The slouch and slur was gone from his voice. It had strange harmonics. No one human could disobey a voice like that.
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War laughed, and looked expectantly at the Them.
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"Little boys," she said, "playing with your toys. Think of all the toys I can offer you… think of all the games. I can make you fall in love with me, little boys. Little boys with your little guns."
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The air between Adam and Death began to vibrate, as in a heatwave.
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Wensleydale raised his head and looked Famine in the sunken eye. He held up something that, with a bit of imagination, could be considered to be a pair of scales made of more string and twigs. Then he whirled it around his head.
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"But, but," said Brian, "she sort of got sucked up the sword --"
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"'Little boys,'" muttered Pepper, disgustedly. Sooner or later everyone has to decide which gang they belong to.
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The Them stared at the sword rocking to a standstill on the concrete path.
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There was a flash as they connected.
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"Don't touch it!" snapped Adam, without moving his head.
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It wasn't much of a sword, but it was about the best you could do with two bits of wood and a piece of string. War stared at it.
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There was a pathetic jingling noise.
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Death stared into Adam's eyes.
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"I see," she said. "Mano a mano, eh?" She drew her own blade and brought it up so that it made a noise like a finger being dragged around a wineglass.
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She laughed again, but the machine-gun stutter died away as Pepper stepped forward and raised a trembling arm.
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He grinned at Adam.
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With a rolling, tinny little sound a blackened silver crown bowled out of the smoke and then spun round with a noise like a settling penny.
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This time the explosion was a red flame inside a billow of black smoke, and it smelled of oil.
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There was a tearing sound. Death's robe split and his wings unfolded. Angel's wings. But not of feathers. They were wings of night, wings that were shapes cut through the matter of creation into the darkness underneath, in which a few distant lights glimmered, lights that may have been stars or may have been something entirely else.
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There was another flash, and then the jingle of a pair of silver scales bouncing on the ground.
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WHERE THEY BELONG, said Death, still holding Adam's gaze. WHERE THEY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN. BACK IN THE MINDS OF MAN.
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Pollution had already started to run, or at least to flow quickly, but Brian snatched the circle of grass stalks from his own head and flung it. It shouldn't have handled like one, but a force took it out of his hands and it whirred like a discus.
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"Don't… touch… them," said Adam.
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At least they needed no warning about touching it. It glistened in a way that metal should not.
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"Where'd they go?" said Wensley.
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Famine stuck out a protective arm.
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THEY'LL BE BACK, he said. THEY'RE NEVER FAR AWAY.
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"You'd think there'd be a manual or something," he said.
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"Anyway, it's going to stop now," he said. "All this stuff with the machines. You've got to do what I say just for now, and I say it's got to stop."
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"We could see if Agnes has anything to say," volunteered Anathema.
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The heat of their stare faded. Adam scratched his nose.
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The wings flapped, just once, like a thunderclap, and the angel of Death vanished.
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Death shrugged. IT IS STOPPING ALREADY, he said. WITHOUT THEM, he indicated the pathetic remnants of the other three Horsepersons, IT CANNOT PROCEED. NORMAL ENTROPY TRIUMPHS. Death raised a bony hand in what might have been a salute.
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"Oh, I don't know," he said. "There might be a way." He grinned back.
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"Right, then," said Adam, to the empty air. "All right. It's not going to happen. All the stuff they started -- it must stop now."
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Newt stared desperately at the equipment racks.
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BUT I, he said, AM NOT LIKE THEM. I AM AZRAEL, CREATED TO BE CREATION'S SHADOW. YOU CANNOT DESTROY ME. THAT WOULD DESTROY THE WORLD.
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"Oh, yes," said Newt bitterly. "That makes sense, does it? Sabotaging twentieth-century electronics with the aid of a seventeenth-century workshop manual? What did Agnes Nutter know of the transistor?"
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Newt groaned.
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"I was speaking rhetorically."
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"You don't have to make it work, anyway. You have to stop it working. You don't need knowledge for that, you need ignorance."
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"'He is Not that Which He Says he Is,"' she read. "It's number 1002. Very simple. Any ideas?"
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Anathema pulled out a card at random.
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"Well, look," said Newt, wretchedly, "this isn't really the time to say it but,"-- he swallowed --"actually I'm not very good with electronics. Not very good at all."
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"Well, my grandfather interpreted prediction 3328 rather neatly in 1948 and made some very shrewd investments," said Anathema. "She didn't know what it was going to be called, of course, and she wasn't very sound about electricity in general, but --"
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"All right," he said wearily. "Let's try it. Give me a prediction."
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"You said you were a computer engineer, I seem to remember."
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"Oh, I wouldn't go that far," said Newt. "Although," he added, "I'm not actually a computer engineer. At all. Quite the opposite."
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"That was an exaggeration. I mean, just about as much of an exaggeration as you can possibly get, in fact, really, I suppose it was more what you might call an an overstatement. I might go so far as to say that what it really was," Newt closed his eyes, "was a prevarication."
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"I don't know," said Newt. "I'm not sure I can." He laid a hand on top of the nearest cabinet.
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"Make it work better," she said.
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"If you must know, every time I try and make anything electronic work, it stops."
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Anathema gave him a bright little smile, and posed theatrically, like that moment in every conjurer's stage act when the lady in the sequins steps back to reveal the trick.
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"A lie, you mean?" said Anathema sweetly.
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"Repair it," she said.
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"Tra-la," she said.
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"What?"
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There was the noise of something he hadn't realized he'd been hearing suddenly stopping, and the descending whine of a distant generator. The lights on the panels flickered, and most of them went out.
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"What's the opposite?"
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In Tadfield, the machines ceased radiating menace. Something that had been in them was gone, quite apart from the electricity.
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The lights came on. Civilization stopped its slide into chaos, and started writing letters to the newspapers about how people got overexcited about the least little thing these days.
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"Gosh," said Newt.
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"He didn't want to do it!" said Aziraphale. "Haven't I always told you, Crowley? If you take the trouble to look, deep down inside anyone, you'll find that at bottom they're really quite --"
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All over the world, people who had been wrestling with switches found that they switched. Circuit breakers opened. Computers stopped planning World War III and went back to idly scanning the stratosphere. In bunkers under Novya Zemla men found that the fuses they were frantically trying to pull out came away in their hands at last; in bunkers under Wyoming and Nebraska, men in fatigues stopped screaming and waving guns at one another, and would have had a beer if alcohol had been allowed in missile bases. It wasn't, but they had one anyway.
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"There you are," said Anathema. "You fixed it good. You can trust old Agnes, take it from me. Now let's get out of here."
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"It's not over," said Crowley flatly.
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Adam turned and appeared to notice them for the first time. Crowley was not used to people identifying him so readily, but Adam stared at him as though Crowley's entire life history was pasted inside the back of his skull and he, Adam, was reading it. For an instant he knew real terror. He'd always thought the sort he'd felt before was the genuine article, but that was mere abject fear beside this new sensation. Those Below could make you cease to exist by, well, hurting you in unbearable amounts, but this boy could not only make you cease to exist merely by thinking about it, but probably could arrange matters so that you never had existed at all.
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Adam's gaze swept to Aziraphale.
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"'Scuse me, why're you two people?" said Adam.
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There were no showy special effects. There was just Aziraphale, sitting next to Madame Tracy.
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"Well," said Aziraphale, "it's a long --"
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"It's not right, being two people," said Adam. "I reckon you'd better go back to being two sep'rate people."
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"Ooh, that felt tingly," she said. She looked Aziraphale up and down. "Oh," she said, in a slightly disappointed voice. "Somehow, I thought you'd be younger."
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Shadwell glowered jealously at the angel and thumbed the Thundergun's hammer in a pointed sort of way.
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Aziraphale looked down at his new body which was, unfortunately, very much like his old body, although the overcoat was cleaner.
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"Well, that's over," he said.
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Now there were clouds overhead, curling like a pot of tagliatelli on full boil.
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"You see," said Crowley, his voice leaden with fatalistic gloom, "it doesn't really work that simply. You think wars get started because some old duke gets shot, or someone cuts off someone's ear, or someone's sited their missiles in the wrong place. It's not like that. That's just, well, just reasons, which haven't got anything to do with it. What really causes wars is two sides that can't stand the sight of one another and the pressure builds up and up and then anything will cause it. Anything at all. What's your name… er… boy?"
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"No," said Crowley. "No. It isn't, you see. Not at all."
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"Well. In the Beginning --"
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"Good effort. You've saved the world. Have a half-holiday," said Crowley. "But it won't really make any difference."
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"Him who?" said Crowley.
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The Them stared.
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The lightning vanished, and a young man made out of golden fire stood there.
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"The Voice of God," said the angel. "The Metatron."
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"That's right. Adam Young," said Adam.
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Then Pepper said, "No, it isn't. The Metatron's made of plastic and it's got laser cannon and it can turn into a helicopter."
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Anathema stuck out her chin. "Go on, then," she said.
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"Oh dear," said Aziraphale. "It's him."
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Aziraphale shrugged. "It's a very long story," he began.
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"I think you're right," said Aziraphale. "I'm sure my people want Armageddon. It's very sad."
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The lightning flashed, struck the ground a few meters from Adam, and stayed there, a sizzling column that broadened at the base, as though the wild electricity was filling an invisible mold. The humans pressed back against the jeep.
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"Would anyone mind telling us what's going on?" said Anathema sternly, folding her arms.
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"That's Adam Young," said Anathema, as she strode up with Newt trailing after her.
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"That's the Cosmic Megatron," said Wensleydale weakly. "I had one, but the head fell off. I think this one is different."
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The beautiful blank gaze fell on Adam Young, and then turned sharply to look at the concrete beside it, which was boiling.
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A figure rose from the churning ground in the manner of the demon king in a pantomime, but if this one was ever in a pantomime, it was one where no one walked out alive and they had to get a priest to burn the place down afterwards. It was not greatly different to the other figure, except that its flames were blood-red.
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It was talking to Adam, who said, "Huh? No. I said already. My name's Adam Young." He looked the figure up and down. "What's yours?"
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"Er," said Crowley, trying to shrink into his seat. "Hi… er."
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It buzzed a word that felt, to those humans who heard it, like a file dragged down the spine.
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The red thing gave him the briefest of glances, as though marking him for future consumption, and then stared at Adam. When it spoke, its voice was like a million flies taking off in a hurry.
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"Er," said Crowley, "well, you see, what happened was --"
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"Beelzebub," Crowley supplied. "He's the Lord of --"
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"Right. Right," said Crowley hurriedly.
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"Silenzz!"
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"Thank you, Crowzley," said Beelzebub. "Later we muzzed have a seriouzz talk. I am sure thou hazzt muzzch to tell me."
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"Now then, Adam Young," said the Metatron, "while we can of course appreciate your assistance at this point, we must add that Armageddon should take place now. There may be some temporary inconvenience, but that should hardly stand in the way of the ultimate good."
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"Azz to what it standz in the way of, that hazz yet to be decided," buzzed Beelzebub. "But it muzzt be decided now, boy. That izz thy deztiny. It is written."
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"Ah," whispered Crowley to Aziraphale, "what he means is, we have to destroy the world in order to save it."
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"I just don't see why everyone and everything has to be burned up and everything," Adam said. "Millions of fish an' whales an' trees an', an' sheep and stuff. An' not even for anything important. Jus' to see who's got the best gang. It's like us an' the Johnsonites. But even if you win, you can't really beat the other side, because you don't really want to. I mean, not for good. You'll just start all over again. You'll just keep on sending people like these two," he pointed to Crowley and Aziraphale, "to mess people around. It's hard enough bein' people as it is, without other people coming and messin' you around."
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Adam took a deep breath. The human watchers held theirs. Crowley and Aziraphale had forgotten to breathe some time ago.
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"Johnsonites?" he whispered.
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Crowley turned to Aziraphale.
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"People bein' messed around," murmured Crowley.
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The angel shrugged. "Early breakaway sect, I think," he said. "Sort of Gnostics. Like the Ophites." His forehead wrinkled. "Or were they the Sethites? No, I'm thinking of the Collyridians. Oh dear. I'm sorry, there were hundreds of them, it's so hard to keep track."
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"It doesn't matter!" snapped the Metatron. "The whole point of the creation of the Earth and Good and Evil --"
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"I don't see what's so triflic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people," said Adam severely. "Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive. If I was in charge, I'd try makin' people live a lot longer, like ole Methuselah. It'd be a lot more interestin' and they might start thinkin' about the sort of things they're doing to all the enviroment and ecology, because they'll still be around in a hundred years' time."
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"I thought about all that an' I don't want to," said Adam, half turning and nodding encouragingly at the Them. "I mean, there's some stuff could do with alt'rin', but then I expect peopled keep comin' up to me and gettin' me to sort out everythin' the whole time and get rid of all the rubbish and make more trees for 'em, and where's the good in all that? It's like havin' to tidy up people's bedrooms for them."
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"Ah," said Beelzebub, and he actually began to smile. "You wizzsh to rule the world. That'z more like thy Fath --"
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Beelzebub and the Metatron looked at one another.
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"You never tidy up even your bedroom," said Pepper, behind him.
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"I never said anythin' about my bedroom," said Adam, referring to a room whose carpet had been lost to view for several years. "It's general bedrooms I mean. I dint mean my personal bedroom. It's an analoggy. That's jus' what I'm sayin'."
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"Anyway," said Adam, "it's bad enough having to think of things for Pepper and Wensley and Brian to do all the time so they don't get bored, so I don't want any more world than I've got. Thank you all the same."
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Adam hesitated.
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"You can't refuse to be who you are," it said eventually. "Listen. Your birth and destiny are part of the Great Plan. Things have to happen like this. All the choices have been made."
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"Rebellion izz a fine thing," said Beelzebub, "but some thingz are beyond rebellion. You muzzt understand!"
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"This makes no sense," said the Metatron. "You can't run counter to the Great Plan. You must think. It's in your genes. Think."
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"I'm not rebelling against anything," said Adam in a reasonable tone of voice. "I'm pointin' out things. Seems to me you can't blame people for pointin' out things. Seems to me it'd be a lot better not to start fightin' and jus' see what people do. If you stop messin' them about they might start thinkin' properly an' they might stop messin' the world around. I'm not sayin' they would," he added conscientiously, "but they might."
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The dark undercurrent was always ready to flow back, its reedy whisper saying yes, that was it, that was what it was all about, you have to follow the Plan because you were part of it --
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The Metatron's face began to take on the look familiar to all those subjected to Adam's idiosyncratic line of reasoning.
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The trio looked at him.
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It had been a long day. He was tired. Saving the world took it out of an eleven-year-old body.
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He was aware that Aziraphale had stood up.
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"It doesn't matter!" snapped the Metatron. "It's the same thing, surely!"
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"It's the Great Plan," said the Metatron flatly. "You are well aware. There shall be a world lasting six thousand years and it will conclude with --"
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There was a moment's silence.
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"This Great Plan," he said, "this would be the ineffable Plan, would it?"
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Crowley stuck his head in his hands. "For a moment there, just for a moment, I thought we had a chance," he said. "He had them worried. Oh, well, it was nice while --"
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"Yes, yes, that's the Great Plan all right," said Aziraphale. He spoke politely and respectfully, but with the air of one who has just asked an unwelcome question at a political meeting and won't go away until he gets an answer. "I was just asking if it's ineffable as well. I just want to be clear on this point."
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"Excuse me," said the angel.
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Surely? thought Crowley. They don't actually know. He started to grin like an idiot.
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Then he said: "I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out."
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"In bigger letters," said Aziraphale.
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"It izz written!" bellowed Beelzebub.
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"Whoop-eee," said Crowley. "Where have you been?"
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"Where you can't read it."
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"Underlined," Crowley added.
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"It's not given to us to understand the ineffable Plan," said the Metatron, "but of course the Great Plan --"
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"But it might be written differently somewhere else," said Crowley.
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"Twice," suggested Aziraphale.
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"Perhaps this isn't just a test of the world," said Crowley. "It might be a test of you people, too. Hmm?"
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"God does not play games with His loyal servants," said the Metatron, but in a worried tone of voice.
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"So you're not one hundred percent clear on this?" said Aziraphale.
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"But the Great Plan can only be a tiny part of the overall ineffability," said Crowley. "You can't be certain that what's happening right now isn't exactly right, from an ineffable point of view."
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Everyone found their eyes turning toward Adam. He seemed to be thinking very carefully.
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Adam stood smiling at the two of them, a small figure perfectly poised exactly between Heaven and Hell.
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There was the kind of silence there might have been on the day before Creation.
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A breeze swept across the airfield. Overhead, the assembled hosts rippled, like a mirage.
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There was a thundering explosion. Shadwell, who had been fidgeting with horrified excitement for some minutes, had finally got enough control of his trembling fingers to pull the trigger.
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Crowley grabbed Aziraphale's arm. "You know what happened?" he hissed excitedly. "He was left alone! He grew up human! He's not Evil Incarnate or Good Incarnate, he's just… a human incarnate --"
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Then:
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"I think," said the Metatron, "that I shall need to seek further instructions."
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"I alzzo," said Beelzebub. His raging face turned to Crowley. "And I shall report of your part in thizz, thou hast better believe it." He glared at Adam. "And I do not know what thy Father will say…"
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The pellets passed through the space where Beelzebub had been. Shadwell never knew how lucky he had been that he'd missed.
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The sky wavered, and then became just sky. Around the horizon, the clouds began to unravel.
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Madame Tracy broke the silence.
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"Is it over, do you think?" said Aziraphale.
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She didn't mean "weren't they odd"; what she did mean she probably could never hope to express, except by screaming, but the human brain has amazing recuperative powers and saying "weren't they odd" was part of the rapid healing process. Within half an hour, she'd be thinking she'd just had too much to drink.
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"Weren't they odd," she said.
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Crowley shrugged. "Not for us, I'm afraid."
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"But you can't just leave it at that!" said Anathema, pushing forward. "Think of all things you could do! Good things."
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"I don't think you need to go worryin'," said Adam gnomically. "I know all about you two. Don't you worry."
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He looked at the rest of the Them, who tried not to back away. He seemed to think for a while, and then he said, "There's been too much messin' around anyway. But it seems to me everyone's goin' to be a lot happier if they forget about this. Not actually forget, just not remember exactly. An' then we can go home."
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"Um," said Crowley.
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He put his head on one side. "An' that'd stop people killing them?"
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"I was thinking that we might take these good people into town," said Aziraphale. "I owe Madame Tracy a meal, I'm sure. And her young man, of course."
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"I think it might need a bit of work," Crowley admitted.
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"That shows a very responsible attitude," said Newt.
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"It's just sense," he said.
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Aziraphale patted Crowley on the back. "We seem to have survived," he said. "Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we'd been at all competent."
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She hesitated. It would have been nice to say yes.
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"Like what?" said Adam suspiciously.
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"Well… you could bring all the whales back, to start with."
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"Is your car operational?"
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Adam raised an eyebrow.
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"An' if people do start killing 'em, what would you ask me to do about 'em?" said Adam. "No. I reckon I'm getting the hang of this now. Once I start messing around like that, there'd be no stoppin' it. Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale."
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"Do you know," she said, "of all the trite sayings I've ever really hated, that comes top?"
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"But what actually happened?" said Pepper. "I mean, there was all this --"
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"I reckon we'll just be gettin' home," he said.
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"Hmm?"
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"Because everywhere I go, I hold up traffic," he mumbled wretchedly.
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"But you could help so much --" Anathema began, as they wandered back to their bikes. Newt took her gently by the arm.
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"It wouldn't be the same," said Crowley.
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"Who's he talking about?" he asked her triumphant expression.
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"I'm sorry about the car," Aziraphale was saying. "I know how much you liked it. Perhaps if you concentrated really hard --"
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"That's not a good idea," he said. "Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of our lives."
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"Amazing, isn't it," said Newt happily.
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"It doesn't matter any more," said Adam.
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"Why've you got 'Dick Turpin' painted on the door of your car?"
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"It's a joke, really," said Newt.
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Crowley looked glumly at the controls of the jeep.
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Shadwell looked over his shoulder, and then up at Madame Tracy.
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Adam rejoined the Them.
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"But it's over," he said. "It can't happen now! The -- the thing, the correct moment or whatever -- it's gone past! It's over!"
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Crowley fumbled madly with the gear shift.
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"That's not Beelzebub!" he shouted, above the noise of the wind. "That's Him. His Father! This isn't Armageddon, this is personal. Start, you bloody thing!"
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"I had it from new, you know. It wasn't a car, it was more a sort of whole body glove."
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"What's burning?" he said.
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"I suppose not."
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He turned his head, and looked into Aziraphale's horrified expression.
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A breeze swept up the dust and dropped it again. The air became hot and heavy, imprisoning those within it like flies in syrup.
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The ground began to shake. The noise was like a subway train, but not one passing under. It was more like the sound of one coming up.
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He sniffed.
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The ground moved under Anathema and Newt, flinging them onto the dancing concrete. Yellow smoke gushed from between the cracks.
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"Whatever it is, it's pretty angry," said Anathema.
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"It feels like a volcano!" shouted Newt. "What is it?"
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"There are humans here," he said.
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"Yes. So what? Lots of people in history have only done their jobs and look at the trouble they caused."
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"We were only doing our jobs," muttered Crowley.
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"Well, what --" Crowley began, and stopped.
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"I mean, when you think about it, we've got them into enough trouble as it is. You and me. Over the years. What with one thing and another."
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In the jeep, Crowley was cursing. Aziraphale laid a hand on his shoulder.
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"I mean we shouldn't let this happen to them."
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"Yes," said Crowley. "And me."
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"You don't mean we should actually try to stop Him?"
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"What have you got to lose?"
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Crowley started to argue, and realized that he hadn't anything. There was nothing he could lose that he hadn't lost already. They couldn't do anything worse to him than he had coming to him already. He felt free at last.
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He also felt under the seat and found a tire iron. It wouldn't be any good, but then, nothing would. In fact it'd be much more terrible facing the Adversary with anything like a decent weapon. That way you might have a bit of hope, which would make it worse.
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Aziraphale held out his hand.
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Aziraphale held up the sword. There was a whoomph as it suddenly flamed like a bar of magnesium.
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Crowley took it.
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"That's right," said Crowley bitterly. "Make my day."
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"Gosh, it's been years since I used this," he murmured.
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Aziraphale picked up the sword lately dropped by War, and hefted its weight thoughtfully.
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"Not really," said Crowley. The noise was growing.
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"Ah. Yes. Too much messin' about?"
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"I'd just like to say," he said, "if we don't get out of this, that… I'll have known, deep down inside, that there was a spark of goodness in you."
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"Yes."
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"Once you've learned how to do it, you never forget," he said.
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"People knew the difference between right and wrong in those days," said Aziraphale dreamily.
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He smiled at Crowley.
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"Yes."
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"My word, yes," said the angel. "What a day that was, and no mistake. Good old days."
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"Here's to the next time," he said. "And… Aziraphale?"
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"About six thousand," said Crowley.
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"Well, yes. Think about it."
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"Nice knowing you," he said.
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"Just remember I'll have known that, deep down inside, you were just enough of a bastard to be worth liking."
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"I wouldna' trust you two Southern nancy boys to kill a lame rat in a barrel," he said. "Who're we fightin' noo?"
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"The Devil," said Aziraphale, simply.
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Shadwell nodded, as if this hadn't come as a surprise, threw the gun down, and took off his hat to expose a forehead known and feared wherever street-fighting men were gathered together.
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There was a scuffing noise, and they were pushed aside by the small but dynamic shape of Shadwell, waving the Thundergun purposefully.
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"Ah reckoned so," he said. "In that case, I'm gonna use mah haid."
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The coats of Aziraphale and Crowley split along the seams. If you were going to go, you might as well go in your own true shape. Feathers unfolded towards the sky.
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Newt and Anathema watched the three of them walk unsteadily away from the jeep. With Shadwell in the middle, they looked like a stylized W.
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"What on earth are they going to do?" said Newt. "And what's happening -- what's happening to them?"
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"What's a Shadwell?"
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"He's my serg -- he's this amazing old man, you'd never believe it… I've got to help him!"
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"Who're those other two, then? Friends of yours --" Anathema began, and stopped. Aziraphale had half turned, and the profile had finally clicked into place.
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"If he's damaged the book, you're bloody well right!"
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"I took an oath and everything." Newt hesitated. "Well, sort of an oath. And he gave me a month's wages in advance!"
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Contrary to popular belief, the wings of demons are the same as the wings of angels, although they're often better groomed.
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"Shadwell shouldn't be going with them!" said Newt, staggering to his feet.
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"I know where I've seen him before!" she shouted, pulling herself upright against Newt as the ground bounced up and down. "Come on!"
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"But something dreadful's going to happen!"
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Newt fumbled in his lapel and found his official pin. He didn't know what they were going up against this time, but a pin was all he had.
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"Help him?" said Anathema.
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They ran…
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Adam looked around. He looked down. His face took on an expression of calculated innocence.
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He moved one hand around in a blurred half circle.
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There was no noise. There were no cracks. There was just that where there had been the beginnings of a volcano of Satanic power, there was just clearing smoke, and a car drawing slowly to a halt, its engine loud in the evening hush.
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… Aziraphale and Crowley felt the world change.
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There was a moment of conflict. But Adam was on his own ground. Always, and ultimately, on his own ground.
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It was an elderly car, but well preserved. Not using Crowley's method, though, where dents were simply wished away; this car looked like it did, you knew instinctively, because its owner had spent every weekend for two decades doing all the things the manual said should be done every weekend. Before every journey he walked around it and checked the lights and counted the wheels. Serious-minded men who smoked pipes and wore mustaches had written serious instructions saying that this should be done, and so he did it, because he was a serious-minded man who smoked a pipe and wore a mustache and did not take such injunctions lightly, because if you did, where would you be? He had exactly the right amount of insurance. He drove three miles below the speed limit, or forty miles per hour, whichever was the lower. He wore a tie, even on Saturdays.
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"What's he been getting up to now?" he sighed, not really expecting an answer.
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"What's going on here?" he said. "Adam? Adam!"
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He could smell apple pie. That was one of the things he'd missed most about spending his Saturday nights a long way from home.
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He could have stood on Mr. Young.
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Mr. Young looked at the shocked assembly. At least Crowley and Aziraphale had had enough self-control left to winch in their wings.
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But the Them were streaking towards the gate.
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The car door opened and Mr. Young emerged.
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Adam seldom did what his father wanted.
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"Where's that boy got to? Adam! Come back here this instant!"
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Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger opened his eyes. The only thing strange about his surroundings was how familiar they were. There was his high school photograph on the wall, and his little Stars and Stripes flag in the toothmug, next to his toothbrush, and even his little teddy bear, still in its little uniform. The early afternoon sun flooded through his bedroom window.
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Archimedes said that with a long enough lever and a solid enough place to stand, he could move the world.
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The van drove slowly up to the gates of the air base. It pulled over. The guard on the midnight shift looked in the window, checked the credentials of the driver, and waved him in.
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"I said, if anyone calls, Mom, I'll be down in the Big Field, with Pop and Chester and Ted."
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"Mom, if any throughput eventuates premising to interface with Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger telephonically, Mom, sir, this individual will --"
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Tom Deisenburger hung his gun on the wall, above his father's battered old rifle.
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Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger nodded.
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"Sorry, Tommy?"
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He walked downstairs.
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His mother was at the stove, taking a huge apple pie out of the oven to cool.
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"Hi, Tommy," she said. "I thought you was in England."
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"Yes, Mom, I am normatively in England, Mom, protecting democratism, Mom, sir," said Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger.
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"That's nice, hon," said his mother. "Your Poppa's down in the Big Field, with Chester and Ted. They'll be pleased to see you."
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He took off his military-issue helmet and his military-issue jacket, and he rolled up his military-issue shirtsleeves. For a moment he looked more thoughtful than he had ever done in his life. Part of his thoughts were occupied with apple pie.
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"Are you saying," said Crowley, "that He planned it this way all along? From the very beginning?"
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Aziraphale conscientiously wiped the top of the bottle and passed it back.
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"And of course that's true," said the angel. "Otherwise, what'd be the point?"
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"From what I remember," replied Crowley, thoughtfully, "-- and we were never actually on what you might call speaking terms -- He wasn't exactly one for a straight answer. In fact, in fact, he'd never answer at all. He'd just smile, as if He knew something that you didn't."
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The van meandered across the concrete.
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The van driver got out of the van, carrying a cardboard box and a pair of tongs.
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It parked on the tarmac of the empty airstrip, near where two men sat, sharing a bottle of wine. One of the men wore dark glasses. Surprisingly, no one else seemed to be paying them the slightest attention.
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"Could have," he said. "Could have. One could always ask Him, I suppose."
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There was a pause, and both beings stared reflectively off into the distance, as if they were remembering things that neither of them had thought of for a long time.
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"Excuse me, gents," he said, "but there's meant to be a sword around here somewhere as well, at least, that's what it says here at any rate, and I was wondering…"
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Lying on the tarmac were a tarnished metal crown and a pair of scales. The man picked them up with the tongs and placed them in the box.
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Then he approached the couple with the bottle.
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The van driver, who wore an International Express cap, said not to mention it, and really it was a godsend them both being there like this, since someone was going to have to sign to say that he'd duly collected what he'd been sent for, and this had certainly been a day to remember, eh?
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Aziraphale and Crowley both agreed with him that it had, and Aziraphale signed the clipboard that the van driver gave him, witnessing that a crown, a pair of balances, and a sword had been received in good order and were to be delivered to a smudged address and charged to a blurred account number.
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Aziraphale seemed embarrassed. He looked around himself, vaguely puzzled, then stood up, to discover that he had been sitting on the sword for the last hour or so. He reached down and picked it up. "Sorry," he said, and put the sword into the box.
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It had a cassette player. This isn't general issue, even for American military vehicles, but Crowley automatically assumed that all vehicles he drove would have cassette players and therefore this one did, within seconds of his getting in.
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"Come on," he said. "I'll drive us back to London."
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Crowley stood up, a little unsteadily. He reached a hand down to Aziraphale.
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The man began to walk back to his van. Then he stopped, and turned.
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"If I was to tell my wife what happened to me today," he told them, a little sadly, "she'd never believe me. And I wouldn't blame her, because I don't either." And he climbed into his van, and he drove away.
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He took a Jeep. No one stopped them.
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The cassette that he put on as he drove was marked Handel's Water Music, and it stayed Handel's Water Music all the way home.
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