“You may not pass,” said Ozymuth. A long pink tongue poked from his beak and licked at something invisible upon his skin.
“Who are you to tell me what I may or may not do?” said Mrs. Abernathy, disdain dripping like acid from her tongue. “You are our master’s dog, and nothing more. If you don’t show me some respect, I will have you taken to pieces, cell by cell, atom by atom, and then reassembled just so I can start over again.”
Ozymuth sniggered. “Each day you come here, and each day your threats sound emptier and emptier. You were our master’s favorite once, but that time is gone. You had your chance to please him and you threw it away. If I were you, I would find a hole in which to hide myself, and there I would remain in the hope that our master might forget I had ever existed. For when his grief ceases, and he remembers the torment that you have caused him, being taken to pieces will seem like a gentle massage compared to what he will visit upon you. Your days of glory are over, ‘Mrs. Abernathy.’ Look at you! Look at what you have become!”
Mrs. Abernathy’s eyes blazed. She snarled and raised her hand as if to strike Ozymuth down. Ozymuth cowered and hid his face beneath his cloak. For a moment they stayed like that, these two old adversaries, until a strange sound emerged from under Ozymuth’s cloak. It was laughter, a hissing demonstration of mirth like gas escaping from a hole in a pipe, or bacon sizzling in a pan.
“Tsssssssssss,” laughed Ozymuth. “Tssssssssssssssssssssss. You have no power here, and if you strike me, then you strike our master, for I am his voice, and I speak for him. Leave now, and give up this senseless pilgrimage. If you come here again, I will have you taken away in chains.”
He raised his staff, and the small skull glowed a sickly yellow. From behind him, two enormous winged beasts appeared. In the dim light they had looked like the images of dragons carved into the walls, so still were they, but now they towered above the two beings on the walkway. One of them leaned down, revealing its reptilian skull, its lips curling back to expose long sharp teeth of diamond. It growled low and threateningly at Mrs. Abernathy, who responded by smacking it on the nose with her bag. The dragon whimpered and looked embarrassed, then turned to its companion as if to say, “Well, you see if you can do any better.” The other dragon just shrugged and found something interesting to stare at on the nearest wall. That bag, it thought, was a lot heavier than it looked.
“You have not heard the last of this, Ozymuth,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “I will rise again, and I will not forget your insolence.”
She spun on her heel and began to walk away. Once again, she was aware of the sound of the Great Malevolence’s cries, and the whispers from demons, seen and unseen, and the hissing of Ozymuth’s laughter. She endured the long walk through the bowels of the Mountain of Despair, seething with hurt and humiliation. As she passed through the entrance and back into the desolate landscape of Hell, a voice spoke from somewhere around the level of her shoe.
“Have a nice day, now,” said Edgefast’s detached head.
Mrs. Abernathy ignored him, and moved on.
As Ozymuth watched the retreating figure, his laughter slowly ceased. A second form appeared from the shadows, tall and regal. The torches cast light upon his pale features, imperious and cruel. His long black hair was braided with gold, and his clothing was of rich, red velvet, as though blood had been woven into cloth. His cloak, also red, billowed behind him even when the air was still, like a living extension of its wearer. He reached out a bejeweled claw and stroked absentmindedly at one of the dragons, which purred contentedly like a large, scaly cat.
“My lord Abigor,” said Ozymuth, lowering his head in a gesture of utter subjection, which was a very wise idea when in Duke Abigor’s presence, as people who forgot to lower their heads around Duke Abigor often found their heads being lowered for them, usually by having them removed from their shoulders with a large blade.
It is said that Nature abhors a vacuum, but so too does power. When someone falls out of favor with a leader, a line will quickly form to take that person’s place. Thus it was that when Mrs. Abernathy failed the Great Malevolence, a number of powerful demons began to wonder how they might take advantage of her misfortune to promote themselves. Of these, the most ambitious and conniving was Duke Abigor.
“What say you, Ozymuth?” said Abigor.
“She is stubborn, my lord.”
“Stubborn, and dangerous. Her persistence troubles me.”
“Our master will not see her. I have made sure of it. With every chance I get, I whisper words against her into his ear. I remind him of how she failed him. I stoke the fires of his madness, just as you asked of me.”
“You are a loyal and faithful servant,” said Abigor, his voice heavy with sarcasm. Abigor made a note to himself to have Ozymuth banished at the first opportunity once he achieved his goal, for anyone who betrays one master cannot be trusted not to betray another.
“I am loyal to the Great Malevolence, my lord,” replied Ozymuth carefully, as though Duke Abigor had spoken his doubts aloud. “It is better for our master if his lieutenants do not fail him. Or dress in inappropriate women’s clothing,” he added.
Abigor stared at the predatory visage of the chancellor. Abigor was not used to being corrected, however gently. It made him even more intent upon disposing of Ozymuth as soon as he could.
“I will remember you when I come to power,” said Abigor, and he let the double meaning hang in the air. “Our time draws near. Soon, Ozymuth, soon…”
Abigor faded back into the shadows, and then disappeared. Ozymuth released a long, ragged breath. He was playing a dangerous game, and he knew it, but if he distrusted Duke Abigor, then he hated Mrs. Abernathy more. He gripped his staff and headed deeper into the Mountain of Despair, wincing as the howls of his master grew louder. At the entrance to the inner chamber, he paused. In the gloom, his keen eyes espied the massive shape of the Great Malevolence, curled in upon himself in grief.
“It is I, my master,” he said, poison dripping from every word. “I bear you sad tidings: your faithless lieutenant, Mrs. Abernathy, continues to speak ill of you…”
IV
In Which We Reacquaint Ourselves with Nurd, formerly “Nurd, The Scourge of Five Deities,” Which Was All Something of a Misunderstanding, Really
FROM A PERFECTLY MODEST cave in the base of a Not Terribly Interesting mountain in a Nothing to See Here, Move Along Now part of Hell, there came the sound of tinkering. Tinkering, as you may be aware, is essentially a male pursuit. Women, by and large, do not tinker, which is why it was a man who originally invented the garden shed and the garage, both of which are basically places to which men can retreat in order to perform tasks that serve no particularly useful purpose other than to give them something to do with their hands that does not involve eating, drinking, or fiddling with the remote control for the television. Very occasionally, a useful invention may result from tinkering, but for the most part tinkering involves trying to improve pieces of machinery that work perfectly well already, with the result that they stop doing what they were supposed to do and instead do nothing at all, hence requiring more tinkering to fix them, and even then they never work quite as well as they did before, so they have to be tinkered with some more, and so on and so on, until eventually the man in question dies, often after being severely beaten by his wife with a malfunctioning kettle, or a piece of a fridge.
Inside the cave was a car. At one point, the car had been a pristine Aston Martin, perfectly maintained by Samuel Johnson’s father, who had kept it in the garage behind their house and only drove it on sunny days. Unfortunately the car had been one of the casualties of the demonic assault on Biddlecombe. Without it, though, there might not have been a Biddlecombe at all, or not one that wasn’t overrun by Hellish entities. Samuel’s dad hadn’t seen things that way, though, once he found out that his car was missing.
“You mean it was stolen by a demon?” he had asked, staring at the empty space in his garage that had until
recently been occupied by his pride and joy. Samuel had watched his dad as he searched behind stacks of old paint and bits of lawn mower, as though expecting the car to jump out from behind a tin of white emulsion and shout “Surprise!”
“That’s right.”
It was Samuel’s mum who had answered. She seemed quite pleased that her husband was upset at the loss of his car, mainly because Samuel’s dad had left them to go and live with another woman while expecting his abandoned wife and son to look after his car for him, which Mrs. Johnson regarded as being more than a little selfish.
It wasn’t quite true that the car had been stolen. In fact, Samuel had given the keys to the demon Nurd so that he could drive it straight down the mouth of the portal between Hell and Biddlecombe, thus collapsing it and preventing the Great Malevolence from escaping into our world. Samuel had nevertheless been grateful to his mother for clouding the truth, even if he felt that it was unfair to Nurd to describe him as a thief.
That same Nurd was now standing with his arms folded, staring at what had once been Mr. Johnson’s Aston Martin but was now Nurd’s. The car had passed through the portal relatively unscathed, which came as a nice surprise to Nurd, who had half expected that he and the car would be ripped into lots of little pieces and then crushed into something the size of a gnat’s eyeball. He had also been relieved to find that the pools of viscous, bubbling black liquid dotted throughout Hell were wells of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds: or, to put it another way, every one of those pools was a miniature petrol station waiting to be put to use.
Unfortunately the petroleum mix was somewhat crude, and the landscape of Hell had not been designed with vintage cars in mind. Doubly unfortunately, Nurd knew next to nothing about how internal combustion engines worked, so he was ill-equipped to deal with any problems that might arise. Nurd fancied himself a good driver, but since driving in Hell required him to do little more than point the car in a given direction, put his foot down, and avoid rocks and pools of crude oil, Nurd was not as expert behind the wheel as he liked to think.
But sometimes fortune can smile unexpectedly on the most unlikely of faces, and Nurd’s, being green and shaped like a crescent moon, was unlikelier than most. For being particularly annoying, Nurd had been banished to one of Hell’s many wildernesses by the Great Malevolence. To keep Nurd company, the Great Malevolence had sent with him Nurd’s assistant, Wormwood, who looked like a big ferret that had recently been given a haircut by a blind barber with a pair of blunt scissors. Now, Wormwood was many things-irritating, funny-smelling, not terribly bright-but, most unexpectedly, he had proved to have an aptitude for all things mechanical. Thus, aided by a manual that he had found in the trunk of the Aston Martin, he had taken responsibility for the maintenance and care of the car. It went faster than before, drove more smoothly, and could turn on a penny.
Oh, and it now looked like a big rock.
Nurd knew that Mrs. Abernathy and her master, the Great Malevolence, would not exactly be pleased that their plan to create Hell on Earth had been foiled. Neither of them seemed like the forgiving type, which meant that they’d be looking for someone to blame. The Great Malevolence would blame Mrs. Abernathy, because that was the kind of demon he was, and she was supposed to have been in charge. Mrs. Abernathy, in turn, would be searching for someone else to blame, and that someone had last been seen hiding under a blanket and driving a vintage car into Hell. Nurd wasn’t sure what would happen if Mrs. Abernathy ever got her claws on him, but he imagined that it might involve every atom in his body being separated from the next, and then each one being prodded with a little pin for eternity, which didn’t appeal to him in the slightest.
So he had made two decisions. The first was that it would be a very good idea to stay on the move, because a moving object was harder to target. 10 It might also, he felt, be wise to disguise the car, which is why they had acquired a frame made from bits of wood and gauze and metal, and painted it to resemble a big boulder, albeit a boulder that could go from naught to sixty in under seven seconds.
At the moment, though, Wormwood was peering beneath the hood of the car and fiddling with some part of the engine that only he could name. Nurd could probably have named it too, if he was bothered, which he wasn’t, or so he told himself. After all, he was the brains of the operation, and therefore couldn’t be going around worrying about carburetors and spark plugs and getting his hands dirty. It never struck him that Wormwood, as the individual who actually understood something of how the car worked, might have had more of a claim to being the brains than Nurd, but that’s often the way with people who don’t like getting their hands dirty. You don’t necessarily get to be king by being bright, but it does help to have bright people around you. 11
“Have you worked out the problem yet?” asked Nurd.
“It’s the ignition coil,” said Wormwood.
“Is it really?” said Nurd, who tried not to sound too bored, and failed even at that.
“You don’t even know what an ignition coil is, do you?” said Wormwood.
“Is it a coil that has something to do with the ignition?”
“Er, yes.”
“Then I do. Do you know what a big stick capable of leaving a lump on your head is?”
“Yes.”
“Good. If you need to be reminded, just continue giving me lip.”
Wormwood emerged from beneath the hood and wiped his hands on his overalls. That was another thing: on the front of the car manual there had been a photograph of a man wearing overalls and holding a tool of some kind in a vaguely threatening manner. On the left breast was written his name: “Bob.” Wormwood had decided that this was the kind of uniform worn by people who knew stuff about engines, and had managed to make himself a set of patchwork overalls from the contents of his meager bag of clothes. He had even stitched his name on them, or a version of it: “Wromwood.”
“It’s the copper wire on the windings,” said Wromwood-er, Wormwood. “It’s taken a bit of a battering. It would be good if we could find some replacements.”
Nurd turned and stared out from the mouth of the cave. Before them stretched a huge expanse of black volcanic rock, which made a change from the huge expanse of gray volcanic rock that had until recently been the site of their banishment. The sky was dark with clouds, but tinged permanently with a hint of red, for there were always fires burning in Hell.
“We’re a long way from copper wire, Wormwood,” said Nurd.
Wormwood joined his master. “Where are we, exactly?”
Nurd shook his head. “I don’t know, but”-he pointed to his right, where the fires seemed to be burning brighter, the horizon lost to clouds and mists-“I’d guess that right over there is the Mountain of Despair, which means that we want to go-”
“Somewhere else?” suggested Wormwood.
“Anywhere else,” agreed Nurd.
“Are we going to have to keep running forever?” asked Wormwood, and there was something in his voice that almost caused Nurd to hug him, until he thought better of it and settled for patting Wormwood halfheartedly on the back. He wasn’t sure what one might catch from hugging Wormwood, but whatever it was he didn’t want it.
“We’ll keep on the move for now,” he said. He was about to add something more when a shadow passed over the stones before him. It grew smaller and smaller as whatever was above them commenced a circling descent.
“Douse the light!” said Nurd, and instantly Wormwood quenched the flame of the torch, leaving the cave in darkness.
A red figure dropped to the ground within a stone’s throw of the cave, its great bat wings raised above its back. It was eight feet tall and had the body of a man, but a forked tail curled from the base of its spine, and two twisted horns emerged from its bald head. It knelt and ran its claws over the rocks before it, then raised them to its nose and sniffed warily. A long bifurcated tongue unrolled from its mouth and licked the ground.
“Oh no,” said Wormwood. He thought that
he could almost see the marks of rubber upon the rocks where Nurd had been forced to give the car a little too much gas in order to get them closer to the cave.
The creature on the rocks grew very still. It had no ears, merely a hole on either side of its head, but it was clearly listening. Then it turned its head, and they glimpsed its face for the first time.
It had eight black eyes, like those of some great spider, and mandibles at its jaws. Its nostrils were ragged perforations set in a snout of sharp bone. Nurd saw them widen and contract, glistening with mucus. For a moment the creature stared straight at the mouth of the cave in which they were hiding, and they saw the muscles in its legs tighten as it prepared to spring. Its mandibles clicked, and its jaws made a sucking noise as though it could already taste them, but instead of exploring further, it unfolded its wings to their fullest expanse and it shot into the air. The sound of flapping reached their ears, but slowly began to fade as the creature moved away, heading north in the direction of the bright flames.
“Did it see us?” asked Wormwood.
“I think it found the rubber from the tires,” said Nurd. “I don’t know if it realized we were nearby. If it did, why didn’t it come after us? Anyway, we have to go.”
“Was it-?”
“Yes,” said Nurd. “It was one of hers.”
He sounded tired, and frightened, even to himself. They had been running and hiding for so long that sometimes he thought it might almost be a relief if they were caught, at least until he began thinking about what might happen to them after they were caught, for the prospect of being slowly disassembled at the atomic level and then prodded for a very long time usually dispelled such thoughts of giving up. But eventually they would make a serious mistake, or some misfortune would befall them, and then Mrs. Abernathy’s wrath would rain down upon them. The only consolation for Nurd was that Samuel Johnson was safe on Earth. He missed his friend terribly, but Nurd would willingly have sacrificed himself to keep Samuel safe. He just hoped that it wouldn’t come to that, for Nurd liked all of his atoms just where they were.
The Infernals aka Hell's Bells Page 3