Good Omens

by Terry David John Pratchett

  "Have ye all your own teeth?"

  "Oh yes. Except for fillings."

  "Are ye fit?"

  "I suppose so," Newt stuttered. "I mean, that was why I wanted to join the territorials. Brian Potter in Accounting can bench‑press almost a hundred since he joined. And he paraded in front of the Queen Mother."

  "How many nipples?"

  "Pardon?"

  "Nipples, laddie, nipples," said the voice testily. "How many nip­ples hae ye got?"

  "Er. Two?"

  "Good. Have ye got your ane scissors?"

  "What?"

  "Scissors! Scissors! Are ye deaf?"

  "No. Yes. I mean, I've got some scissors. I'm not deaf."

  – – -

  The cocoa had nearly all solidified. Green fur was growing on the inside of the mug.

  There was a thin layer of dust on Aziraphale, too.

  The stack of notes was building up beside him. The Nice and Accu­rate Prophecies was a mass of improvised bookmarks made of torn strips of Daily Telegraph.

  Aziraphale stirred, and pinched his nose.

  He was nearly there.

  He'd got the shape of it.

  He'd never met Agnes. She was too bright, obviously. Normally Heaven or Hell spotted the prophetic types and broadcast enough noises on the same mental channel to prevent any undue accuracy. Actually that was rarely necessary; they normally found ways of generating their own static in self‑defense against the images that echoed around their heads.

  – – -

  Poor old St. John had his mushrooms, for example. Mother Shipton had her ale. Nostradamus had his collection of interesting oriental prepara­tions. St. Malachi had his still.

  Good old Malachi. He'd been a nice old boy, sitting there, dream­ing about future popes. Complete piss artist, of course. Could have been a real thinker, if it hadn't been for the poteen.

  A sad end. Sometimes you really had to hope that the ineffable plan had been properly thought out.

  Thought. There was something he had to do. Oh, yes. Phone his contact, get things sorted out.

  He stood up, stretched his limbs, and made a phone call.

  Then he thought: why not? Worth a try.

  He went back and shuffled through his sheaf of notes. Apes really had been good. And clever. No one was interested in accurate prophecies.

  Paper in hand, he phoned Directory Enquiries.

  "Hallo? Good afternoon. So kind. Yes. This will be a Tadfield num­ber, I think. Or Lower Tadfield . . . ah. Or possibly Norton, I'm not sure of the precise code. Yes. Young. Name of Young. Sorry, no initial. Oh. Well, can you give me all of them? Thank you."

  Back on the table, a pencil picked itself up and scribbled furiously.

  At the third name it broke its point.

  "Ah," said Aziraphale, his mouth suddenly running on automatic while his mind exploded. "I think that's the one. Thank you. So kind. Good day to you."

  He hung up almost reverentially, took a few deep breaths, and dialed again. The last three digits gave him some trouble, because his hand was shaking.

  He listened to the ringing tone. Then a voice answered. It was a middle‑aged voice, not unfriendly, but probably it had been having a nap and was not feeling at its best.

  It said "Tadfield Six double‑six."

  Aziraphale's hand started to shake.

  "Hallo?" said the receiver. "Hallo."

  Aziraphale got a grip on himself.

  "Sorry," he said, "Right number."

  He replaced the receiver.

  – – -

  Newt wasn't deaf. And he did have his own scissors.

  He also had a huge pile of newspapers.

  If he had known that army life consisted chiefly of applying the one to the other, he used to muse, he would never have joined.

  Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell had made him a list, which was taped to the wall in Shadwell's tiny crowded flat situated over Rajit's Newsagents and Video Rental. The list read:

  1) Witches.

  2) Unexplainable Phenomenons. Phenomenatrices. Phe­nomenice. Things, ye ken well what I mean.

  Newt was looking for either. He signed and picked up another newspaper, scanned the front page, opened it, ignored page two (never anything on there) then blushed crimson as he performed the obligatory nipple count on page three. Shadwell had been insistent about this. "Ye can't trust them, the cunning buggers," he said. "It'd be just like them to come right out in the open, like, defyin' us."

  A couple in black turtleneck sweaters glowered at the camera on page nine. They claimed to lead the largest coven in Saffron Walden, and to restore sexual potency by the use of small and very phallic dolls. The newspaper was offering ten of the dolls to readers who were prepared to write "My Most Embarrassing Moment of Impotency" stories. Newt cut the story out and stuck it into a scrapbook.

  There was a muffled thumping on the door.

  Newt opened it; a pile of newspapers stood there. "Shift yerself, Private Pulsifer," it barked, and it shufed into the room. The newspapers fell to the floor, revealing Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, who coughed, painfully, and relit his cigarette, which had gone out.

  "You want to watch him. He's one o' them, " he said.

  "Who, sir?"

  "Tak yer ease, Private. Him. That little brown feller. Mister so­called Rajit. It's them terrible forn arts. The ruby squinty eye of the little yellow god. Women wi' too many arms. Witches, the lot o' them."

  "He does give us the newspapers free, though, Sergeant," said Newt. "And they're not too old."

  "And voodoo. I bet he does voodoo. Sacrificing chickens to that Baron Saturday. Ye know, tall darkie bugger in the top hat. Brings people back from the dead, aye, and makes them work on the Sabbath day. Voo­doo." Shadwell sniffed speculatively.

  Newt tried to picture Shadwell's landlord as an exponent of voo­doo. Certainly Mr. Rajit worked on the Sabbath. In fact, with his plump quiet wife and plump cheerful children he worked around the clock, never mind the calendar, diligently filling the area's needs in the matter of soft drinks, white bread, tobacco, sweets, newspapers, magazines, and the type of top‑shelf pornography that made Newt's eyes water just to think about. The worst you could imagine Mr. Rajit doing with a chicken was selling it after the "Sell‑By" date.

  "But Mister Rajit's from Bangladesh, or India, or somewhere," he said. "I thought voodoo came from the West Indies."

  "Ah," said Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, and took another drag on his cigarette. Or appeared to. Newt had never actually quite seen one of his superior's cigarettes‑it was something to do with the way he cupped his hands. He even made the ends disappear when he'd finished with them. "Ah."

  "Well, doesn't it?"

  "Hidden wisdom, lad. Inner mili'try secrets of the Witchfinder army. When you're all initiated proper ye'll know the secret truth. Some voodoo may come from the West Indies. I'll grant ye that. Oh yes, I'll grant ye that. But the worst kind. The darkest kind, that comes from, um . . ."

  "Bangladesh?"

  "Errrukh! Yes lad, that's it. Words right out of me mouth. Ban­gladesh. Exactly."

  Shadwell made the end of his cigarette vanish, and managed fur­tively to roll another, never letting papers or tobacco be seen.

  "So. Ye got anything, Witchfinder Private?"

  "Well, there's this." Newton held out the clipping.

  Shadwell squinted at it. "Oh them, " he said. "Load o' rubbish. Call themselves bloody witches? I checked them out last year. Went down with me armory of righteousness and a packet of firelighters, jemmied the place open, they were clean as a whistle. Mail order bee jelly business they're trying to pep up. Load o' rubbish. Wouldn't know a familiar spirit if it chewed out the bottoms o' their trousers. Rubbish. It's not like it used to be, laddie."

  He sat down and poured himself a cup of sweet tea from a filthy thermos.

  "Did I ever tell you how I was recruited to the army?" he asked.

  Newt took this as his cue to sit down. He shook his head.
Shadwell lit his roll‑up with a battered Ronson lighter, and coughed appreciatively.

  "My cellmate, he was. Witchfinder Captain Ffolkes. Ten years for arson. Burning a coven in Wimbledon. Would have got them all too, if it wasn't the wrong day. Good fellow. Told me about the battle‑the great war between Heaven and Hell . . . It was him that told me the Inner Secrets of the Witchfinder Army. Familiar spirits. Nipples. All that . . ."

  "Knew he was dying, you see. Got to have someone to carry on the tradition. Like you is, now . . ." He shook his head.

  "That's what we'm reduced to, lad," he said. "A few hundred years ago, see, we was powerful. We stood between the world and the darkness. We was the thin red line. Thin red line o' fire, ye see."

  "I thought the churches . . ." Newt began.

  "Pah!" said Shadwell. Newt had seen the word in print, but this was the first time he'd ever heard anyone say it. "Churches? What good did they ever do? They'm just as bad. Same line o' business, nearly. You can't trust them to stamp out the Evil One, 'cos if they did, they'd be out o' that line o' business. If yer goin' up against a tiger, ye don't want fellow travellers whose idea of huntin' is tae throw meat at it. Nay, lad. It's up to us. Against the darkness."

  Everything went quiet for a moment.

  Newt always tried to see the best in everyone, but it had occurred to him shortly after joining the WA that his superior and only fellow soldier was as well balanced as an upturned pyramid. "Shortly," in this case, meant under five seconds. The WA's headquarters was a fetid room with walls the color of nicotine, which was almost certainly what they were coated with, and a floor the color of cigarette ash, which was almost certainly what it was. There was a small square of carpet. Newt avoided walking on it if possible, because it sucked at his shoes.

  One of the walls had a yellowing map of the British Isles tacked to it, with homemade flags sticking in it here and there; most of them were within a Cheap Day Return fare of London.

  But Newt had stuck with it the past few weeks because, well, horri­fied fascination had turned into horrified pity and then a sort of horrified affection. Shadwell had turned out to be about five feet high and wore clothes which, no matter what they actually were, always turned up even in your short‑term memory as an old mackintosh. The old man may have had all his own teeth, but only because no one else could possibly have wanted them; just one of them, placed under the pillow, would have made the Tooth Fairy hand in its wand.

  He appeared to live entirely on sweet tea, condensed milk, hand­rolled cigarettes, and a sort of sullen internal energy. Shadwell had a Cause, which he followed with the full resources of his soul and his Pen­sioner's Concessionary Travel Pass. He believed in it. It powered him like a turbine.

  Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, be­cause he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half‑hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to be­come an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock‑hard, self‑satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he'd been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self‑sufficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother's house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the maga­zine was run by a bunch of bib‑overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word "community" too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word "community" were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.

  Then he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.

  To Newt's straightforward mind this was intolerable.

  Newt had not believed in the Cub Scouts and then, when he was old enough, not in the Scouts either.

  He was prepared to believe, though, that the job of wages clerk at United Holdings PLC, was possibly the most boring in the world.

  This is how Newton Pulsifer looked as a man: if he went into a phone booth and changed, he might manage to come out looking like Clark Kent.

  But he found he rather liked Shadwell. People often did, much to Shadwell's annoyance. The Rajits liked him because he always eventually paid his rent and didn't cause any trouble, and was racist in such a glower­ing, undirected way that it was quite inoffensive; it was simply that Shad­well hated everyone in the world, regardless of caste, color, or creed, and wasn't going to make any exceptions for anyone.

  Madame Tracy liked him. Newt had been amazed to find that the tenant of the other flat was a middle‑aged, motherly soul, whose gentlemen callers called as much for a cup of tea and a nice chat as for what little discipline she was still able to exact. Sometimes, when he'd nursed a half pint of Guinness on a Saturday night, Shadwell would stand in the corridor between their rooms and shout things like "hoor of Babylon!" but she told Newt privately that she'd always felt rather gratified about this even though the closest she'd been to Babylon was Torremolinos. It was like free advertising, she said.

  She said she didn't mind him banging on the wall and swearing during her seance afternoons, either. Her knees had been giving her gyp and she wasn't always up to operating the table rapper, she said, so a bit of muffled thumping came in useful.

  On Sundays she'd leave him a bit of dinner on his doorstep, with another plate over the top of it to keep it warm.

  You couldn't help liking Shadwell, she said. For all the good it did, though, she might as well be flicking bread pellets into a black hole.

  Newt remembered the other cuttings. He pushed them across the stained desk.

  "What are these?" said Shadwell, suspiciously.

  "Phenomena," said Newt. "You said to look for phenomena. There's more phenomena than witches these days, I'm afraid."

  "Anyone bin shootin' hares wi' a silver bullet and next day an old crone in the village is walkin' wi' a limp?" Shadwell said hopefully.

  "I'm afraid not."

  "Any cows droppin' dead after some woman has looked at 'em?"

  "No."

  "What is it, then?" said Shadwell. He shuffled across to the sticky brown cupboard and pulled out a tin of condensed milk.

  "Odd things happening," said Newt.

  He'd spent weeks on this. Shadwell had really let the papers pile up. Some of them went back for years. Newt had quite a good memory, per­haps because in his twenty‑six years very little had happened to fill it up, and he had become quite expert on some very esoteric subjects.

  "Seems to be something new every day," said Newt, flicking through the rectangles of newsprint. "Something weird has been happen­ing to nuclear power stations, and no one seems to know what it is. And some people are claiming that the Lost Continent of Atlantis has risen." He looked proud of his efforts.

  Shadwell's penknife punctured the condensed milk tin. There was the distant sound of a telephone ringing. Both men instinctively ignored it. All the calls were for Madame Tracy anyway and some of them were not intended for the ear of man; Newt had conscientiously answered the phone on his first day, listened carefully to the question, said "Marks and Spen­cer's 100% Cotton Y‑fronts, actually," and had been left with a dead receiver.

  Shadwell sucked deeply. "Ach, that's no' proper phenomena," he
said. "Can't see any witches doing that. They're more for the sinking o' things, ye ken."

  Newt's mouth opened and shut a few times.

  "If we're strong in the fight against witchery we can't afford to be sidetracked by this style o' thing," Shadwell went on. "Haven't ye got anything more witchcrafty?"

  "But American troops have landed on it to protect it from things," moaned Newt. "A non‑existent continent . . ."

  "Any witches on it?" said Shadwell, showing a spark of interest for the first time.

  "It doesn't say," said Newt.

  "Ach, then it's just politics and geography," said Shadwell dismissively.

  Madame Tracy poked her head around the door. "Coo‑ee, Mr. Shadwell," she said, giving Newt a friendly little wave. "A gentleman on the telephone for you. Hallo, Mr. Newton."

  "Awa' wi' ye, harlot," said Shadwell, automatically.

  "He sounds ever so refined," said Madame Tracy, taking no notice. "And I'll be getting us a nice bit of liver for Sunday."

  "I'd sooner sup wi' the De'el, wumman."

  "So if you'd let me have the plates back from last week it'd be a help, there's a love," said Madame Tracy, and tottered unsteadily back on three‑inch heels to her flat and whatever it was that had been interrupted.

  Newt looked despondently at his cuttings as Shadwell went out, grumbling, to the phone. There was one about the stones of Stonehenge moving out of position, as though they were iron filings in a magnetic field.

  He was vaguely aware of one side of a telephone conversation.

  "Who? Ah. Aye. Aye. Ye say? Wha' class o' thing wud that be? Aye. Just as you say, sor. And where is this place, then‑?"

  But mysteriously moving stones wasn't Shadwell's cup of tea or, rather, tin of milk.

  "Fine, fine," Shadwell reassured the caller. "We'll get onto it right awa'. I'll put my best squad on it and report success to ye any minute, I ha' no doubt. Goodbye to you, sor. And bless you too, sor." There was the ting of a receiver going back on the hook, and then Shadwell's voice, no longer metaphorically crouched in deference, said, " 'Dear boy'! Ye great southern pansy."[27]