Professor Stefan still looked uneasy.
“What are the risks?”
“Five percent. At most.”
“And that five percent contains the threat of invasion, possible consumption by unknown entities, and the potential destruction of the entire planet?”
“Possibly.”
Professor Stefan shrugged. “I can live with that. Anyone for tea?”
Deep in the heart of the Mountain of Despair, the Great Malevolence brooded. The time of his madness had passed. Now his mind was clear again.
“A BOY. A BOY, AND A DEMON.”
The Lord of all Evil spoke as though he could not quite believe his own words. The Watcher stood silently at his feet, awaiting its master’s command. Above it, the great bells, the bells that had pulled its master from his madness, were silent once again. The portal was gone. Mrs. Abernathy was gone. Duke Abigor and his allies were frozen in the Lake of Cocytus, where they would remain for eternity. Only the Great Malevolence prevailed.
“DOES THE COLLIDER STILL RUN?”
The Watcher nodded.
“GOOD.”
The Watcher frowned. The link between Hell and the world of men was no more. Whatever power Mrs. Abernathy had harnessed to create the gateway had vanished with her. It would take time to find a way to access the Collider’s power again, and surely the men and women responsible for it would be more careful this time. As far as the Watcher was concerned, the kingdom was once more isolated.
The Great Malevolence, seeming to read his servant’s thoughts, spoke again.
“THERE IS ANOTHER KINGDOM.”
And the Watcher, almost as ancient as the one it served, understood. There was a kingdom that existed alongside the world through which men walked, a kingdom filled with dark entities, a kingdom of beings who hated men almost as much as the Great Malevolence himself.
The Kingdom of Shadows.
“PREPARE THE WAY.”
The Watcher departed, and the Great Malevolence closed his eyes, allowing his consciousness to roam across universes, touching those who were most like himself, evil creatures intent upon doing harm to others, and in each mind he left a single order.
SEEK THE ATOMS. SEEK THE ATOMS WITH THE BLUE GLOW. FIND HER…
Acknowledgments
THANKS TO MY EDITORS and publishers at Simon & Schuster and Hodder & Stoughton, my agent Darley Anderson and his staff, and to Dr. Colm Stephens, administrator of the School of Physics at Trinity College, Dublin, who was kind enough to read the manuscript of this novel and correct my errors. Any that remain are entirely my own fault. Finally, love and thanks to Jennie, Cameron, and Alistair.
1. Not to be confused with St. Nick’s Place, which is the North Pole. You don’t want to make that mistake, and end up selling your soul to Santa.
2. And by the way, what kind of person are you, reading the second part of a series before the first? I mean, really? Do you put on your shoes before your socks, or put your pants on before your underwear? Now the rest of the readers have to hang around, whistling and examining their fingernails in a bored manner, while I give you special treatment. I bet you’re the sort who arrives halfway through the movie, spilling your popcorn and standing on toes, then taps the bloke next to you on the shoulder and says, “Have I missed anything?” It’s people like you who cause unrest…
3. Duke Kobal was officially the demon of comedians, although only the really unfunny ones, with additional responsibility for the jokes in Christmas crackers. You know, like What’s the longest word in the English language? Smiles, because there’s a “mile” between the first and last letters. A mile. No, a mile. Yes, as in distance. Yes, I know there’s not really a mile, but-okay, stop talking. I’m serious, you’re starting to annoy me. No, I don’t want to wear a paper hat. I don’t care if it’s Christmas, those hats make my head itch. And I don’t want to see what you’ve won. No, I don’t. Seriously. Fine, then. Oh great, a compass. If I take it away, will you get lost? See, that’s funny. Well, I thought it was.
Christmas: Duke Kobal loves it.
4. Actually, the decision on whether to go backward or forward in time might well tell you something important about the person in question. The English writer Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was reputed to have said that “The people who live in the past must yield to the people who live in the future. Otherwise, the world would begin to turn the other way around.” What Bennett was saying is that it’s better to look forward than to look back, because that’s how progress is made. On the other hand, George Santayana (1863-1952), an American writer, said that ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ In other words, it’s a question of balance: the past is a nice country to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
5. There is also the small matter of what is known as the “Grandfather Paradox”: What would happen if you went back in time and killed your grandfather before your mum or dad was born? Would you then cease to exist? But the argument is that you’re already in existence, as you were around to travel back in time, so if you do try to kill your grandfather then you’ll obviously fail. Hang on, though: Is it possible that you might just “pop” out of existence if you did manage to kill your grandfather? No, because that would imply two different realities, one in which you exist and the other in which you don’t exist, which won’t do at all. This has led the eminent physicist Professor Stephen Hawking to come up with the Chronology Protection Conjecture, a kind of virtual ban on time travel. Professor Hawking believes that there must be a rule of physics to prevent time travel, because otherwise we’d have tourists from the future visiting us, and people popping up willy-nilly trying to shoot grandparents in order to prove a point. In the end, though, if you’re the kind of person who, at the first mention of time travel, brings up the possibility of killing your grandfather, then you’re probably not someone who should be allowed near time machines or, for that matter, grandfathers.
6. “What do you mean, you’re giving me a small anesthetic? I want a big anesthetic. I want the kind that they give to elephants before they operate on them. I want my chin to feel like it’s been carved from rock, like it’s part of Mount Rushmore. I don’t want to feel ANY pain at all, otherwise there’ll be trouble, you hear? Why did you become a dentist anyway? Do you like hurting people? Well, do you? You’re a monster, that’s what you are, a monster!”
Sorry about that, but you know what I mean…
7. Just one more thing about time travel, while we’re on the subject. Quantum theory suggests that there is a probability that all possible events, however strange, might occur, and every possible outcome of every event exists in its own world. In other words, all possible pasts and futures, like the one where you didn’t pick up this book but read something else instead, are potentially real, and they all coexist alongside one another. Now, let’s suppose that we invent a time machine that allows us to move between those alternative time lines. Why, then you could set about killing grandfathers to your heart’s content by moving back on one time line, indulging your inexplicably murderous grudge against your granddad, and then proceeding forward on another.
And if you think all of these notions of parallel worlds and other dimensions are nonsense, please note that Jonathon Keats, a San Francisco-based experimental philosopher, has already begun selling real estate in those extra dimensions of space and time. In fact, he sold 172 lots of extradimensional real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area in one day. I’m not sure what that proves, exactly, other than the fact that there are people in San Francisco who will pay good money for things that may not exist, which perhaps says more about San Franciscans than about scientific theory. Also, I’d pay good money to see those people try to enforce their property rights when faced with a ray-gun-wielding monster from another dimension. “Now look here, I paid good money for this piece of land and-” Zap!
8. Lest anyone start getting offended on behalf of women everywhere, let me just stress that vanity is not uniqu
e to the fairer sex. “Vanity,” according to the poet and essayist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), “is the food of fools;/Yet now and then your men of wit/Will condescend to take a bit.” Vanity can best be defined as taking too much pride in yourself, and the opposite of pride is humility, which means seeing yourself as you are, and not comparing yourself to other people, even bad ones or, indeed, other demons in dresses, should you happen to be a dress-wearing demon yourself.
9. The chancellor is the secretary and adviser to a ruler, or a king. It’s a risky profession, as rulers with great power often tend to react badly to people who try to tell them what to do, or who suggest that they may be wrong about something. Thomas Becket (1118-1170), the chancellor to Henry II of England, was hacked to pieces by knights after he and the king differed over how much power the king should have over the church. Famously, Henry VIII of England had his chancellor, Thomas More (1478-1535), beheaded because More didn’t approve of the king’s desire to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry the younger and prettier Anne Boleyn. Eventually, Henry VIII ended up having Anne Boleyn beheaded too. The lesson to be learned here is not to work for any kings named Henry who seem to have a fondness for lopping off heads. It’s a good idea to watch how they take the tops off their boiled eggs: if they do it with too much ferocity, then it might be a good idea to apply for a job somewhere else.
10. Interestingly, this might be viewed as a variation on a principle of physics known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that there is no way to accurately pinpoint the exact position of a subatomic particle-a very small particle indeed-unless you’re willing to be uncertain about its velocity (its speed in a given direction), and there is no way to accurately pinpoint the particle’s exact velocity unless you’re willing to be uncertain about its position. It makes sense, when you think about it: on a very basic level you can’t tell exactly where something very, very small is if it’s moving. To do that, you’d have to interfere with its motion, thus making your knowledge of that motion more unclear. Similarly, observing its velocity means that the precise position will become more uncertain. Actually, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a bit more complex than that, but that’s the essence of it. Still, if you’re asked if you understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, just say that you’re not sure, which will be considered a very good scientific joke at the right party. Incidentally, Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who formulated the principle, was convinced that it was correct, which makes him someone who was not uncertain about certain uncertainties.
11. And if they get too bright and start wondering if they might not make rather good kings themselves, then you can have them killed. That’s pretty much Rule One of being a king. You learn that on the first day.
12. Truculent is a lovely word. It essentially means to be very self-assertive and destructive. This perfectly described Mr. Merryweather’s dwarfs, who could have given lessons in aggression to Vikings.
13. Spiggit’s Old Peculiar had recently been the subject of a number of court cases relating to incidents of temporary blindness, deafness, and undesirable hair growth on the palms of the hands. Due to a loophole in the law, it was allowed to remain on sale but it was required to have a warning label on the bottle, and anyone buying the ale had to sign a one-off agreement promising not to sue in the event of any injury caused by imbibing it, up to and including death. Spiggit’s had decided to make the best of this and its advertising slogan now read: “Spiggit’s-Ask for the Beer with the Biohazard Symbol!”
14. See what I did there? Comedy gold.
15. The English writer Horace Walpole (1717-1797) suggested that “this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” Unfortunately, since most of us both think and feel, we are destined to spend a lot of our time on Earth not being certain whether to laugh or cry. Laughter is probably better, but you don’t want to be one of those people who laugh all of the time (“Look, that chap over there’s just fallen off a cliff! Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”) because you’ll appear uncaring, or insane. Similarly, if you cry all of the time then you’ll look like a sissy, or a professional mourner, and you’ll start to smell damp. Best to settle for a wry smile, then, the kind that suggests you’re able to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with a degree of grace while still being able to shed a discreet tear at sad films and funerals. Incidentally, Horace Walpole looked a bit like a horse in a wig, and was once accused of driving the poet Chatterton to suicide. He was, therefore, probably a “world as tragedy” kind of person.
16. If you’re bored sometime, and want to puzzle your parents:
1) Fill a small plastic glass with a little water.
2) Lift said glass as if to drink from it.
3) Bypass your mouth and instead touch the glass to your forehead.
4) Spill a little of the water down your face.
5) Tell your parents that you thought you were taller.
6) Take a bow. Ask people to tip their waitress. Tell them you’ll be here all week.
7) Leave.
17. Actually, we have a tendency to take our reflection for granted at the best of times, when it’s really quite extraordinary. When you see your reflection in a window at night, perhaps with a city visible through the glass beyond, it’s because 95 percent of the light striking the window has gone straight through while 5 percent has been reflected, hence the ghostly image of your face. This proves the particle nature of light, but what’s troubling is that the 5 percent of particles of energy, or photons, that create your image are reflected for no particularly good reason that we can understand, indicating the possibility of randomness at the heart of the universe. There’s a one-in-twenty chance that a photon will be reflected instead of transmitted, which means that we can’t know for certain how a given photon will behave. This is very troubling for scientists. If you want to give your science teacher a nervous breakdown, ask why this happens.
18. It was the great scientist Albert Einstein who discovered that matter can be changed to energy, and energy to matter, as in an atomic explosion. His discovery was based upon the work of the physicists John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, who produced the world’s first artificial nuclear disintegration in 1932, and their work in turn contributed to the creation of the LHC. Thus, it’s really the law of conservation of energy and matter. But one of the forgotten pioneers in this area is the Frenchman Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), who, in his spare time, became fascinated by the possibility that all of the bits and pieces of stuff on Earth-lions, tigers, budgerigars, trees, slugs, iron, and the like-were parts of a single interconnected whole. He and his wife, Marie Anne, began rusting pieces of metal in a sealed apparatus, then weighing them along with the air that was lost. They found that the rusted metal, rather than weighing less than before, or the same, in fact weighed more, because the oxygen molecules in the air had adhered to the metal. In other words, matter was changing from one form to another, but not disappearing. Lavoisier met a terrible end: he had offended a frustrated scientist, Jean-Paul Marat, and during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794) that followed the French Revolution, Marat, who was prominent in the Reign, got his revenge: Lavoisier was tried, sentenced, and then beheaded, all in one day. When a plea for mercy was entered on his behalf, the judge responded: “The Republic has no need of geniuses.” The next time that you burn a match, spare a thought for Lavoisier.
19. Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), for example, experimented with blood transfusions, possibly in an effort to discover the secret of eternal youth. Unfortunately, some of the blood was infected with malaria and tuberculosis, and he promptly died. Meanwhile Carl Scheele (1742-1786), the discoverer of tungsten and chlorine, among other chemical elements, liked to taste his discoveries. He survived tasting hydrogen cyanide but not, alas, mercury.
20. Actually, the Collider experiment had been plagued by many difficulties in addition to the unfortunate scientists/demons interface, including a mishap
caused by a bird dropping a piece of baguette into the machinery, so that one prominent scientist even suggested it was being sabotaged from the future in order to prevent it from being turned on and sucking the planet into a big black hole, or transforming it to ash. On the other hand, those of us who hadn’t spent too long hanging around with overly imaginative scientists, and who got out of the house occasionally, thought that the idea of sabotage from the future seemed to be pushing it a bit.
21. Actually, as we have established, it was generally considered unwise to drink Spiggit’s at all.
22. Well, I say “experiment,” but his fellow dwarfs simply sat on him and poured the sediment down his throat, then quickly stepped back to watch what happened. While this is still technically an experiment, it also qualifies as torture, as does almost anything involving the involuntary ingestion of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar.
23. There usually isn’t very much to read in The Infernal Times: the weather is always hot with a chance of fireballs; everybody is either miserable, angry, or tormented; and your favorite football team is in the process of losing its most recent match because, in Hell, both teams always lose. And keep losing. To a controversial penalty decision. In extra time. And extra time goes on forever.
The Infernals aka Hell's Bells Page 23