The Creeps

by John Connolly

  The local deer did what local deer do, which was to glance nervously from the stranger to one another before returning to eating grass in the hope that it would go away and stop bothering them.

  “Oh, have it your way, then,” said the demon reindeer. It looked at the grass. It nibbled a bit. Wow, it thought, the grass was rather good. It ate some more. It continued to graze happily until it was joined by a couple of other demon reindeer who’d had no more luck starting the deer revolution than it had.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” asked the leader of the demon reindeer.

  The lone demon reindeer did some quick thinking. “Trying to win their trust?” it suggested.

  “No, you’re just eating grass. Stop it and come with us. We must sow fear and chaos. The Shadows are about to fall.”

  The demon reindeer nibbled one last piece of grass and joined the rest of the demon reindeer herd. It paused only to look back at the local deer and whisper, “Don’t eat it all, right? Save some for me. Seriously. Please. You’re really lovely deer, and very handsome. Sorry I shouted at you.”

  The deer ignored it. After all, it wasn’t fawning season.46

  Fires had broken out in houses and gardens. On Wells Street, a large wolf was trying to blow down a house made of bricks while the lady inside threw pots at it from an upstairs window. A troll had hidden under a canal bridge, hoping to spring out and trap unwary travelers, but that was Bill the Tramp’s bridge, and he wasn’t about to share it with anyone. Bill had tied the unconscious troll to a shopping cart and left it outside the police station with a note attached that read “Possibly from abroad.” Meanwhile, Mr. Thompson the greengrocer, who did not like competition, had found a wicked stepmother going around with a basket of apples for sale and had forced her to hide in a dustbin to escape his wrath, and his well-aimed fruit and vegetables.

  A water main had burst and was already starting to freeze. It was growing colder. Nurd hadn’t noticed before. He looked at Wormwood. The tip of Wormwood’s nose had turned blue.

  “Your nose has turned blue,” Nurd told him.

  “Has it? It was feeling a bit funny.”

  Wormwood scratched at his nose. It fell off in his hand. He peered at it, then shrugged. These things happened, or they happened to Wormwood. He excavated a disturbingly filthy handkerchief from somewhere on his person, carefully wrapped his nose in it, then stuck it in his pocket for safekeeping.

  “Why did you wrap it in a handkerchief?” asked Nurd.

  “In case I sneeze,” said Wormwood. “I don’t want to make a mess.”

  “Ah,” said Nurd. “Very sensible.”

  They walked on, offering Nurd time to think about what Wormwood had just said. Nurd stopped walking, gave Wormwood a hard flick on the ear, and they continued on their way.

  Snow fell on them. Nurd looked up, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight. The night was so clear that the sky was filled with stars, like millions of gemstones scattered across a great swatch of dark cloth. Nurd had never seen so many. They took his breath away, but there was something wrong about this sky. It seemed blacker than he remembered, which made the stars shine brighter. The problem was that they weren’t the right stars. The constellations had changed. No, that wasn’t quite true. Nurd thought that he could still pick out Gemini, and Draco, and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great Bear and the Little Bear, but other stars were overlaid upon them. They were dimmer, but growing in intensity. It was as though one solar system were somehow intruding on another.

  Nurd found Polaris, the North Star, the center of the night sky, which had guided travelers on land and sea ever since the earliest days of exploration. Once Polaris was visible it was hard to be lost, for it marked the way due north. There was consolation in its presence.

  As Nurd watched, the great star blinked once, and disappeared.

  • • •

  Dan and the dwarfs were still being pursued, although not very quickly. The Nosferati, as Dan had dubbed them, were addicted to sneaking along, their long fingers grasping, their shadows stretching ahead of them, almost touching the heels of Dozy, who was bringing up the rear. But they did so very, very slowly, and had a fondness for stopping occasionally and making scary faces.

  And while there was no doubt that they were horrible, and nasty, and smelled of the grave, they might have been more troubling had their every move not been accompanied by music played on an unseen organ. Every footstep, every raised hand, every arch of the eyebrows came with a tune. They were monsters from a silent movie, and in the days of silent movies each cinema would pay an organist to play along with the film. It was part of the deal, and even these Nosferati, liberated from picture frames, had to play by the rules.

  “I wish that music would stop,” said Dan. “It sounds like the ice cream van from Hell.”

  The music was bothering the Nosferati as well. Some of them snatched at the air, as though trying to pull the notes from the ether and grind them into musical dust. It was no good. The unseen organ kept on playing.

  It was Jolly who wondered aloud if the Nosferati had ever even heard the organ music before. By now, Dan and the dwarfs had slowed from a run to a stroll, as it was clear that the Nosferati, though a nuisance, weren’t likely to catch up with them any time soon.

  “I mean, they were in a silent film,” said Jolly, “which was, you know, silent. It was only in the real world, our world, that the music played. Imagine if, every time you took a step, there was someone banging away on an organ behind you. It’d drive you crazy. They’d have to lock you away before you killed him.”

  The Nosferati had stopped making any progress at all. They were now curled up in balls with their coats over their heads, or were trying to jam their fingers in their ears, which didn’t work because their fingernails were too long. One of them was banging his forehead repeatedly against a wall.

  “See?” said Jolly. “There’s only so much of it you can take before—”

  The one-eyed Nosferatu, the one who had had his eye (singular) on Dozy, started to shake. He raised a questioning finger as if to say, “Hang on a minute, this doesn’t feel right,” and then his head exploded. As he had been undead for a very long time, there wasn’t much blood or brain to contend with. His head simply disappeared in a puff of gray dust, and his body quickly followed.

  This began a chain reaction of exploding heads, and bodies collapsing like old pillars, filling the basement with the dust of the undead. When it finally settled, Dan and the dwarfs were all that remained standing, although they were now covered from head to toe in gray bits of vampire. The few surviving Nosferati who had managed to plug their ears beat a hasty retreat.

  Angry coughed up ash.

  “I think I swallowed some,” he said. “That can’t be good for me.”

  “Look,” said Dozy. “It’s a lift.”

  And it was. It was rickety and old and bore an unhappy resemblance to a cage, but it was definitely a lift of sorts. Its floor was made of wood, and its walls were lined with velvet. Instead of a door, it had a metal gate that could be pulled across and secured.

  Dozy poked his head inside.

  “I don’t see any buttons,” he said. “There’s a control lever, though.”

  He stepped into the lift and gave the lever an experimental tug, but nothing happened.

  “You have to close the gate first, I think,” said Dan.

  “Hang on,” said Jolly. “Don’t do anything until we’re all inside.”

  Dan, Jolly, Angry, and Mumbles joined Dozy in the lift.

  “All aboard?” said Dozy. “Right. Up we go!”

  He pulled the lever. There came the groaning of ancient machinery. The lift vibrated, and slowly began to rise.

  • • •

  Samuel, Lucy, and the policemen had just reached the next floor when they heard a rumbling in the basement.

  “What’s that?” said Sergeant Rowan.

  “Sorry,” said Constable Peel. “That’s me. I haven’t be
en feeling very well.”

  “No, not that,” said Sergeant Rowan, although he took a couple of cautious steps back from Constable Peel. “That!”

  They all heard it now. It was the sound of a lift ascending.

  “Over there,” said Samuel.

  To their right was a dark, gated shaft, and above it a panel displaying floor numbers had just lit up.

  “Something’s coming up from the basement!” said Lucy.

  “It has to be something nasty,” said Constable Peel. “There are only nasty things in this shop, present company excepted.”

  The number 1 lit up.

  “It’ll be here in a couple of seconds,” said Constable Peel.

  “Be brave, lad,” said Sergeant Rowan.

  He gripped his cricket bat tightly. He’d had the foresight to grab a weapon as they ran from the spiders. Samuel and Lucy hefted their pool cues threateningly, for they had been wise enough to do the same.

  Constable Peel took his place beside them.

  “What are you holding?” said Sergeant Rowan.

  “Ping-Pong bat,” said Constable Peel. “It was all I could find.”

  “Constable, we need to have a long talk when this is all over.”

  “Yes, Sarge.”

  The lift came into view. The light on the second floor was poor, and the lift itself remained dark, but as it stopped, Samuel and the others could pick out five gray shapes.

  “Ghouls!” whispered Lucy.

  “Wraiths!” said Constable Peel.

  The lift’s gate opened. The five figures emerged and stepped into a small pool of moonlight cast through the murky glass of one of the windows. It was Constable Peel who reacted first.

  “It’s Dan and the dwarfs,” he said. “Look at them! They’re all gray and spooky and sickly. They’re dead, but somehow they’re still upright. Only the shells of them remain! Oh! Oh!”

  He fell to his knees, buried his face in his hands, and began to weep.

  Jolly raised a hand and opened his mouth.

  “Look,” said Sergeant Rowan. “One of them is trying to speak.”

  Constable Peel peered over the tips of his fingers. It was true. He waited to hear the hollow, undead rattle of what had once been Mr. Jolly Smallpants.

  Jolly didn’t speak. He sneezed. The sneeze was so massive that it caused most of the ash to lift from him, and Jolly used the opportunity to step to one side and avoid the dust as it came down again.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just bits of dead vampire.”

  Constable Peel stared at him for a time, then burst into tears again, crying even harder than before.

  “Oh no!” he wailed. “They’re alive. They’re still alive . . .”

  * * *

  45. Chthonic (pronounced “thonic” to rhyme with “sonic”) is a great word of Greek origin, and means of, or relating to, the Underworld. Feel free to drop it into conversations at home, where it has many amusing uses. For example: “Mum, this broccoli is positively chthonic.” Or: “I’m not sure about that tie, Dad. It looks kind of chthonic.” And, of course, the ever-popular “I’d give that bathroom a minute or two. It smells a bit chthonic.”

  46. A very clever joke that plays upon the fact that the word fawn, meaning to gain favor through flattery, and fawn, meaning a young deer, are spelled the same. See? Oh, please yourself. It’s like casting pearls before swine . . .

  XXVII

  In Which Dorothy Seems Slightly Confused

  MARIA AND THE SCIENTISTS, trapped in the sweet factory with a hostile figure apparently made entirely from darkness, had considered their options and done the sensible thing, which was to leave as quickly as possible. They were now in Professor Hilbert’s car, heading in the direction of Wreckit & Sons by taking the shortcut through August Derleth Park. Professor Hilbert was driving, Professor Stefan was in the passenger seat, and Maria, Brian, and Dorothy were crammed in the back. Brian was beginning to recover from his encounter with the dark woman, although his entire body continued to tremble involuntarily, and he would occasionally emit a startled squeak.

  Dorothy, meanwhile, was still wearing her beard. Maria had tried not to notice, but it was difficult as it was quite a big beard.

  Dorothy caught Maria looking at it.

  “It’s the beard, isn’t it?” she said, in her new deep voice.

  Maria nodded.

  “I was just wondering why you were still wearing it.”

  “I like it. It’s warm.”

  “Right,” said Maria. She would have moved over a little to put some space between herself and Dorothy, but there wasn’t room because of the human jelly that was Brian.

  “And I don’t want to be called Dorothy anymore.”

  Professor Hilbert, who had been listening, gave Dorothy a worried look in the rearview mirror. Professor Stefan turned round in his seat. His face wore the confused expression of a builder who has just been handed a glass hammer.

  “What do you mean, you don’t want to be called Dorothy?” he said. “It’s your name, and it’s a perfectly lovely one.”

  “I want to be called Reginald,” said Dorothy—er, Reginald. “Inside, I feel like a Reginald.”

  Professor Stefan frowned.

  “But why Reginald?” he said. “Nobody is called ‘Reginald’ these days. It would be like me announcing that I wanted to be called Elsie, or Boadicea.” 47

  “I like the name Reginald,” said Dorothy, or Reginald. “It was my mother’s name.”

  Even Brian stopped shaking for long enough to look bewildered, then went back to trembling again.

  “Right,” said Professor Hilbert. “I’m glad we cleared that one up.”

  Any further discussion of the matter was postponed by the appearance of a Viking on the road. He wore a metal helmet, but was otherwise entirely naked. This might have been more disturbing had he not been little more than leathery skin and yellowed bone. In his right hand he held a rusty sword, and a shield hung from his left arm.

  “You know, you really don’t see that very often,” said Professor Hilbert.

  Even though he was a physicist, he had a scientist’s general fascination with anything new and unusual in the world, and a naked undead Viking counted as unusual in any world. Issues of personal safety took second place to things that were just plain interesting.

  “How splendid!” said Professor Stefan. “Slow down, Hilbert, so we can take a good look at him.”

  Professor Hilbert slowed the car to a crawl, and rolled down his window.

  “Hello!” he said to the Viking.

  “You look a bit lost,” said Professor Stefan.

  The Viking glared at them. Darkness seethed and roiled in its eyes.

  “Garrrgghhhh,” it said. “Urrurh.”

  “Ah, yes, of course,” said Professor Hilbert. “How true, how true.”

  He looked at Professor Stefan and shrugged. Professor Stefan rolled his eyes.

  “Where. Are. You. From?” said Professor Hilbert. He spoke very slowly and very loudly, which is how English people who don’t speak foreign languages try to communicate with those who do.

  “Harruraruh,” said the Viking.

  “Where is that?” said Professor Stefan. “Could he show us on a map?”

  “Map?” said Professor Hilbert to the Viking.

  He drew squiggles in the air, in the faint hope that the Viking might make the connection. Instead the Viking simply waved his sword and said, “Rarh!”

  “I don’t think we’re going to get much out of him, I’m afraid,” said Professor Hilbert. “His English leaves a lot to be desired.”

  “What a shame,” said Professor Stefan. “You’d think the chap might have brought a phrase book with him so he could communicate a little better. You know, ‘Hello, I come from Norway.’ ‘Where is Buckingham Palace?’ That kind of thing. Hardly seems worth making the trip if you can’t speak the language. Never mind.”

  He waved at the Viking.

  “
Bye, now!” he said. “Thanks for visiting.”

  “Warrghhh,” said the Viking.

  “Ha ha!” said Professor Stefan. “Absolutely, yes.”

  He puffed out his cheeks as Professor Hilbert prepared to drive off.

  “No idea what the chap was saying.”

  He gave the Viking a final wave, just in time to witness a Saxon with one leg dragging brokenly behind him hit the Viking repeatedly on the top of the head with an ax.

  “And they wonder why tourists don’t come here very often,” said Professor Hilbert.

  “It’s the battlefield,” said Maria.

  “What?”

  “We’re close to the site of the Battle of Biddlecombe. Hilary Mould designed and built the visitor center there. It’s one of the points on the pentagram. I’ll bet there’s supernatural activity at the old asylum, too, and the crematorium, and the prison. Which makes me more certain than ever that the center of the activity is here.”

  She tapped her finger on the map, right on the location of Wreckit & Sons.

  A small troop of Christmas elves crossed their path, forcing Professor Hilbert to brake suddenly.

  “You don’t want to try talking to them as well, do you?” said Maria.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Professor Stefan. “They’re elves.”

  “Of course,” said Maria. “Duh.”

  The elves paid them no notice. They were too busy running from something. Seconds later, one of the groundskeepers appeared. He was carrying a heavy rake, but was still making good progress. He caught up with the elves just as they reached the other side of the road, and began beating them to splinters.

  “The sign said,” he screamed, “ ‘KEEP OFF THE GRASS.’ What part of keeping off the grass did you—Bang!—not—Smash!— understand—Thud!?”

  When the elves were no more, the groundskeeper looked up to see five people watching him. He tipped his hat at them.

  “Evening,” he said.

  “Evening,” replied Professor Hilbert.