The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale sjvtd-3

by John Connolly

  “But the engine didn’t work, did it?” said Maria. She stood beside Samuel, seemingly fearless. She made Samuel feel braver, too. “Not like you thought it would.”

  “There were, apparently, some problems,” Hilary Mould admitted. “The Shadows still couldn’t enter our world. There wasn’t enough chthonic power, not in an engine designed only by a human. That was why I hid myself away in the basement, waiting for circumstances to change. The Shadows told me to be patient. They said that, in time, humanity’s own inventions would weaken the barriers between dimensions. And they were right: that was precisely what happened, but still, still it was not sufficient. One final ingredient was required: a force greater than the Shadows, greater even than the most advanced machines of men. It was—”

  “A heart,” said Samuel, finishing his sentence for him.

  For the first time, Hilary Mould looked surprised, and a bit disappointed. This was to have been his big revelation, and now a boy had deprived him of it. The dwarfs had been bad enough, but this was just too much. He decided that, once the Shadows had entered the universe, he was going to have a long lie-down and not talk to any dwarfs or children for eternity.

  “Yes, a heart,” he said, making the best of the situation. “A heart of purest evil; a heart capable of pumping its poison into my engine, providing it with the fuel that it required to break down the walls, to shatter the barriers between universes; the heart of a demon with a hatred for the Earth to match the Shadows’ own.”

  He added another “Bwa-ha-ha” for effect, but it came out sounding funny because of the absence of his nose.

  “And what did you and the Shadows say that you would give to Mrs. Abernathy in return?” asked Samuel.

  “We promised,” he said, “to give to her all those on Earth who had conspired against her. Most of all, we promised to give to her . . . Samuel Johnson!”

  “Then let her take me,” said Samuel, “but spare my friends, and spare the Earth and the Multiverse from the Shadows.”

  Maria took Samuel’s right hand and held it tightly.

  “If he goes, then I go.”

  “Look,” said Hilary Mould, “you’re all going. Don’t you understand? You’re doomed, every one of you. She doesn’t want to bargain with you. She doesn’t have to bargain. She gets what she wants, the Shadows get what they want, and I get what I want. I should say, though, that she has a special fate lined up for you, Samuel. Oh, a very special fate.”

  “And what would that be?” asked Samuel. He was glad that his voice didn’t tremble, although he was sorely afraid.

  “She’s going to cut out your heart and replace it with her own,” said Hilary Mould. “You’re going to become her new body, the carrier for her evil. And you’ll know it, and feel it, because she’ll keep your consciousness trapped in there with her like a prisoner locked away in a prison cell. She’ll allow you to watch as she destroys your friends, but she’ll leave your dog until last: your dog, and your demon friend Nurd. She’s going to spend a very long time hurting them. Suns will die, and galaxies will end, but their pain will go on and on, and you’ll be a witness to every moment of it.”

  Boswell barked at Hilary Mould. He’d heard his name mentioned, and sensed that this dry, foul-smelling man meant him and Samuel no good. Boswell was on the verge of attacking him and depriving him of some more limbs, but Samuel held him back.

  Nurd stepped forward.

  “You’re a fool,” said Nurd.

  “And why is that?” said Hilary Mould.

  “Because you trust the Shadows, and you trust Mrs. Abernathy. When the Shadows come through, they’ll smother you along with everything else in this universe, and Mrs. Abernathy won’t protect you. She won’t even be able to protect herself. The Shadows are the only entities in the Multiverse that the Great Malevolence could not bend to its will. They are its enemies as much as ours. If the Great Malevolence could not make them do its bidding, why do you think one of its lieutenants—a lieutenant, by the way, who has twice been defeated by a boy and his dog—would be able to succeed where it has failed?”

  “She is strong,” insisted Hilary Mould.

  “She is weak,” said Nurd. “The Great Malevolence had turned its back on her even before Samuel and the rest of us tore her apart. She had failed the Great Malevolence, and it had no more use for her.”

  An expression of unease flickered on Hilary Mould’s rotted features. Nurd picked up on it immediately.

  “Ah, she didn’t mention that, did she? She didn’t tell you that she’d been cast aside by her master. We are stronger than she is, and we always have been. You’ve been tricked, Mr. Mould. When the Shadows come, your alliance with her won’t save you. If you do get eternal life out of this, you’ll spend it in nothingness with the Shadows pressing down on you, and if I were you, I’d rather have no life at all.”

  Hilary Mould’s confidence was crumbling, just as his body was. He wanted to convince himself that Nurd was telling lies, but he could not. Nurd’s words had the weight of truth to them.

  “She was only ever using you,” said Nurd. “That’s what she does. She’s clever and ruthless. When she’s finished using you—and that should be pretty soon, I think—she’ll cast you to the Shadows, and you’ll wish you had just toddled off and died properly years ago instead of hanging about in old shops in the hope of ruling the world someday.”

  By now, Hilary Mould had no doubts left. Nurd was right.

  “The engine,” said Hilary Mould as the dreadfulness of his fate became clear to him. “The engine must be turned off.”

  “How?” said Nurd.

  But before Hilary Mould could reply, his lower jaw dropped to the floor. He knelt to retrieve it, but his left leg shattered below the knee and he toppled sideways. Samuel ran to him. He was thinking of Crudford. If Crudford could find Mrs. Abernathy’s heart and steal it away, the force powering the engine would be gone, and the Shadows would not be able to escape from their world into this one.

  “Where is the heart, Mr. Mould?” said Samuel. “Tell us, please!”

  Hilary Mould had only one finger left. He slowly unbent it from his fist, but before he could point it the grotto behind him began to fall apart. Samuel barely had time to get out of the way before the heavy stones fell on Hilary Mould, turning him to dust.

  Samuel’s ears rang from the sound of the clashing stones. His eyes and mouth were filled with dry matter, some of it almost certainly bits of Hilary Mould. He spat them out.

  There was a thumping noise in his head: the beating of a heart that was not his own. It was almost as though Mrs. Abernathy had already entered him, just as Hilary Mould had threatened. He tried to find the source of the sound. It was coming from the group of humans and nonhumans nearby.

  It was coming from inside one of them.

  The others seemed to realize it at the same time as Samuel. Slowly they moved away from one another—watching, listening—before grouping together again as they narrowed down the source, until at last a single figure was left standing alone, and the identity of Mrs. Abernathy’s host was revealed.

  XXXVI

  In Which Mrs. Abernathy’s Identity Is Revealed

  THE ISOLATED MEMBER OF their little band said nothing. It was left to Professor Hilbert to break the silence.

  “Dorothy!” he cried. “Er, and/or Reginald, of course. Can this be true?”

  “Turncoat!” said the Polite Monster. “Eight letters,” it added, “ ‘one who abandons one party or group to join another.’ ”

  “No,” said Samuel. “I don’t think Dorothy ever really existed at all.”

  Professor Hilbert turned to Professor Stefan.

  “I thought that you hired her,” he said.

  “I thought that you did.”

  “We need a more careful hiring policy,” said Professor Hilbert.

  Dorothy/Reginald removed her false beard. What was revealed was a chin that had begun to blacken and decay. She tugged at her hair, and it ca
me away from her skull in clumps until only a bald, spotted scalp remained. Her body started to swell, bursting through her clothing. Her arms and legs lengthened, and they could hear the grinding of bone against bone, and the snapping of sinews. She rose above them all as tentacles exploded from her back, their beaklike endings gulping at the air, as her black heart flooded the host body with its poison and transformed it. Her head expanded, horns sprouting from the bone, and her mouth grew larger and larger. Her human teeth were forced from her gums and replaced with row upon row of sharp incisors. She reminded Samuel of a huge black mantis, but there was a hint of Ba’al to her appearance, and more than a little of Mrs. Abernathy. Her skin was slightly translucent, and the bones and muscles were visible beneath it, as was the dark heart that beat at the core of her being, protected by a thick, hard shield of keratinized cells.

  But it was the eyes that drew Samuel’s attention. They were large and still somewhat human in appearance, but any traces of real humanity were long gone: in their place was only absolute madness. Samuel thought that it was like staring into the center of a storm, a thing of pure, relentless destruction.

  “Hello, Samuel,” said the beast, and the voice was Mrs. Abernathy’s, and any lingering doubts were banished.

  “Hello,” said Samuel, for want of anything better to say. From somewhere near his ankles came the sound of Boswell barking. Mrs. Abernathy had once hurt the little dog badly. He had not forgotten, but he was not afraid. Instead, he seemed anxious to inflict some harm of his own upon her in return.

  Above their heads, the Shadows converged, the weight of them pressing down upon the Earth. They sensed their time was near. Soon this world would be theirs, and all other worlds would follow. They would swallow every star in the universe and leave it cold and black before moving on to the rest of the Multiverse. In time they would make their way to Hell itself and put out its fires, for the Shadows wanted no lights left burning. The Shadows wanted only to spread the Darkness.

  “Look at you all,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “Look how easily you were lured to me.”

  She took in Dan and the dwarfs, and Sergeant Rowan and Constable Peel, and Shan and Gath, and Maria, even the Polite Monster, until finally her lunatic eyes fell on Samuel and Boswell, and Wormwood and Nurd.

  “You!” she said to Nurd. “Twice you have been my ruin. Twice you sided with humanity against your own kind. There will not be a third time.”

  A great forked tongue unfurled itself from behind her jaws and coiled around Nurd like a snake. Holes opened on its surface, and each hole was a tiny, sucking mouth lined with teeth. The tongue came close to Nurd, but it did not touch him, and he did not flinch, until at last it was drawn back into her mouth.

  “Not yet,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “That would be too quick, too lacking in agony. Mould was right: there are greater punishments in store for you.”

  “He should never have trusted you,” said Samuel. “If he’d given it even a moment’s thought, he would have known that you’d kill him in the end.”

  “Kill him?” said Mrs. Abernathy. “I didn’t kill him. He was already dead. He just didn’t want to admit it. And I could feel him turning on me. He was weak, like all of your kind. The Shadows would not have been kind with him: about that, at least, you were right.”

  “They won’t be kind with you either,” said Nurd. “They hate demons as much as humans. They’ll destroy you without a thought.”

  “Perhaps,” said Mrs. Abernathy, “but they’ll have to find me first. You know, in a way you did me a favor when you scattered my atoms throughout the Multiverse. Even I had not understood how powerful I was until then, for as my being imploded, as I felt pain beyond that experienced by any being before me, I was given a glimpse of the Multiverse in its totality. For an instant I saw every universe, every dimension, because I was part of them all, and the memory of that moment was absorbed by every atom of my being. I know the Multiverse: I know where it is weakest and where it is strongest. I know the holes between universes. I can stay ahead of the Shadows for eternity, for there will always be new places to hide.”

  “And the Great Malevolence?” said Nurd. “There will be no forgiveness for releasing the Shadows into the Mulitverse. You will have deprived it of its prize, of claiming the conquest of the Multiverse for itself, and the Great Malevolence will hunt you until the last star disappears from the sky.”

  “I can stay ahead of our master, too,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “I have knowledge beyond that of the Great Malevolence. The old demon has lived too long in Hell. It has grown weary, and slow. It knows only its own rage, but I have knowledge of every nook and cranny of the Multiverse. Perhaps, in time, other demons will come to me, and leave the Great Malevolence to its plotting and planning, its endless hurt. There are ways to defeat the Shadows. There are universes of pure light. Their greed will eventually lead them to such places, and there I will be waiting. The wait may be long, but I have time.”

  She turned once more to Samuel.

  “And you will be with me, Samuel: you will keep me company in my exile, and you will live with the knowledge of the hurt that you brought upon your family, your friends, and worlds beyond number because of your meddling.”

  “Then take me,” said Samuel. “I’ll go with you willingly. You can do what you want with me, but spare the others. Spare all of these worlds.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Abernathy.

  “You can take me, too,” said Nurd. “I’ll suffer beside him.”

  “You’ll suffer anyway,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “You should have listened to Mould: you’re not offering me anything that I don’t already have in my grasp.”

  “But why make them all suffer because of me?” said Samuel.

  “Because I want to,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “Because it gives me pleasure.”

  Samuel tried to recall what Crudford had said about playing on Mrs. Abernathy’s vanity.

  “But wouldn’t it display your power more forcefully if you were to hold back the Shadows, and allow so many to go on living?” said Samuel. “Isn’t there more greatness in sparing lives than taking them?”

  Mrs. Abernathy swatted away the possibility as though it were a fly, and a very small fly at that.

  “No,” she said. “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “Frankly,” said Jolly to Angry, “even I didn’t buy that one.”

  “It was a long shot,” agreed Angry. “It would be like telling us that it’s better to pay for stuff than to get it for nothing by stealing it. I mean, it might be true, but you’re not going to get anywhere by believing it.”

  “You know,” said the Polite Monster to Mrs. Abernathy, shaking with the kind of suppressed rage of which only the nicest people are capable, “you really are a very, very rude—four letters, ‘ill-mannered or impolite’—demon.”

  Mrs. Abernathy roared, and foul-smelling spittle shot from her jaws.

  “Enough!” she said. “It begins.”

  The stones from the collapsed grotto ascended slowly into the air, revealing the dusty remains of Hilary Mould, but also a very old, very battered wooden door. It hung suspended just a foot off the ground, and at its center was a single lock.

  “This is the last barrier, the doorway between the Kingdom of Shadows and this world,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “It needs only the key to open it.”

  Her gaze flicked dangerously from one face to the next, until it came to rest on Maria.

  “You,” she said. “I feel Samuel’s fondness for you. You will provide the key.”

  As she spoke, two of the tentacles on her back lashed out, wrapping themselves around Maria and lifting her off the ground.

  “You are the key,” said Mrs. Abernathy, “and the key is blood.”

  The surface of the door rippled. Great splinters protruded from the ancient wood, each capable of spearing a human being like an insect on a pin. The keyhole changed shape, becoming a red-lipped mouth waiting to be fed. The last of the stars disappeared from above their h
eads as the Shadows merged into a single mass of blackness, a great face composed of many entities in one, and galaxies were swallowed in its jaws.

  The dwarfs rushed at Mrs. Abernathy, and she struck back with her tentacles and her long, spindly arms, each ending in claws of spurred bone. Nurd and Wormwood went for her legs, trying vainly to overbalance her and pull her down. The policemen joined in the attack, supported by Dan and the Polite Monster. Even Lucy came out of her sulk and joined the fray. They hit her with truncheons and fists, with cricket bats and tennis rackets, but the demon was too strong for them. All they managed to do was distract Mrs. Abernathy, but at least they were preventing her from drawing closer to the door, and impaling Maria on its waiting spikes.

  Samuel’s voice sounded loudly, even amid the chaos.

  “Everybody get back!” he cried.

  Without thinking, the attackers did as he commanded, creating space around Mrs. Abernathy.

  “You put my girlfriend down!” said Samuel.

  A single black object soared through the air toward Mrs. Abernathy, its cork already popping as its contents struggled to escape. The newly-arrived Shan and Gath watched it go with great sorrow.

  The dwarfs saw it, too.

  “Is that—?” said Angry, diving for cover.

  “It can’t be,” said Jolly, already trying to hide behind Sergeant Rowan.

  “I thought it was just a myth,” said Dozy, who had decided that, if someone had to go, it might as well be the Polite Monster, as he would probably be too polite to object, and so had chosen to use him for cover.

  “Spiggit’s Old Resentful,” said Mumbles, and there was awe in his voice, as well as fear for his safety, for he seemed to be left with nowhere to hide at all. As a last resort, he curled himself into a small ball and prayed.

  The bottle struck Mrs. Abernathy in the chest and exploded into shards. The yeasty weapon of war sprayed her skin and immediately went to work on it like acid, burning through the shield that surrounded her heart. Mrs. Abernathy screamed in pain and dropped Maria. Her tentacles and arms instinctively went for the growing wound as she tried to wipe the fluid from her skin. Instead it simply spread to her other limbs and began to scald them as well. Her screaming grew in pitch and volume, and then turned to a sound so agonized as to be barely audible, for the first of the Spiggit’s had found her heart.