The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

by John Connolly

  And why would somebody design Christmas elves with such sharp teeth?

  But by then the four humans, along with one small dog, had crossed over the threshold of Wreckit & Sons. As soon as they were inside, Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley vanished, and the darkness of the store closed so tightly around them that they could not see their own hands in front of their faces, and they were only vaguely aware of the sounds from outside of glass breaking and people screaming.

  “Sarge?” said Constable Peel to the blackness.

  “Yes, Constable.”

  “Maybe we should have told the man that we didn’t want to be special after all.”

  “It’s a little late for that, Constable, don’t you think?”

  But Constable Peel didn’t get to reply, because the darkness swallowed his words, and then his breath.

  And, finally, it swallowed him.

  XX

  In Which History Comes Alive

  NURD WAS LYING ON the top bunk, staring at the ceiling. Mrs. Johnson had gone out to bingo again. Nurd suspected that Mrs. Johnson was a bingo addict. Whenever anyone mentioned a number in conversation, Mrs. Johnson would instinctively try to cross it out.

  Nurd was sulking, although it was hard to tell because Nurd’s face naturally formed a kind of sulk, even when he was happy.

  “I spy with my little eye—” said the voice of Wormwood from the lower bunk.

  “I’m not playing anymore,” said Nurd.

  “Come on. It’s fun.”

  “No, it’s not. I-Spy is only ever fun for the person doing the spying. I hate I-Spy. Anyway, you’re on the bottom bunk staring up at the top bunk. So far you’ve spied a mattress, some wood, and a sheet. You’re unlikely to spot a camel, are you, or a spaceship? There’s a limit to how interesting it can be.”

  “I’ll look somewhere else, then.”

  “No.”

  “Please, just one more? Oooh! Oooh! I’ve just spotted something. It’s great. Seriously. Please? Oh, please?”

  Nurd sulked even more. While he really did understand the reason why Samuel hadn’t wanted him to go along to the grand reopening of Wreckit’s store, he remained hurt. Once again, Nurd recalled that he had once been a demon with high hopes. He’d even had ambitions to take over the Earth. They hadn’t worked out very well because Nurd was useless at being properly demonic, and a squirrel with a nut allergy had a better chance of ruling the world, but at least it had been something to aim for.

  Now here he was, sharing a small room with Wormwood, and Wormwood wasn’t meant for small rooms. Wormwood could have made a cathedral smell a bit funny. Nurd had grown fond of Wormwood in the way a dog might grow fond of a particularly friendly flea, but he really did wish that they could see a little less of each other.

  A lot less of each other.

  “Go on, then,” said Nurd. “But this is absolutely, positively the last time, and I’m only taking three guesses.”

  “Understood,” said Wormwood. “You’re the best demonic master I’ve ever had!”

  “I’m the only demonic master you’ve ever had.”

  “You have a point,” admitted Wormwood. “Now, I spy with my little eye something beginning with e.”

  Nurd thought about it. He was very competitive and he didn’t like to lose, not even at I-Spy. He had managed to guess mattress, wood, and sheet easily enough. He wasn’t about to be beaten on the final try by Wormwood.

  “Eiderdown,” he said.

  “Wrong!”

  Nurd scratched his ear. It helped him to think. He poked at his ear hole, and kept poking until the tip of his finger came out of the other ear. Nurd wasn’t sure why it sometimes did that. Wormwood had once suggested a possible answer. Nurd had kicked him in the bum for his trouble, but not before putting on his pointiest boots.

  “Electric blanket,” said Nurd.

  “Wrong again!”

  He heard Wormwood sniggering, and wondered where he might have left those pointy boots.

  Nurd looked around the room, trying to see it from Wormwood’s angle. Electricity? No, that couldn’t be it. Samuel’s exercise log? Possibly, although it was a bit of a stretch.

  Ah, he had it! On the floor by Samuel’s bed was a small, stuffed elephant. It had once been Samuel’s favorite stuffed toy, but was now beloved of Boswell, who liked to sleep with it for company.

  Nurd made a trumpeting sound, and prepared for his final triumph.

  “It is,” he said grandly, “an elephant.”

  “WRONG!” howled Wormwood. “Wrongedy wrong wrong, Mr. Wrongly Wrongington!”

  “It has to be an elephant,” said Nurd. “I’ve looked. There’s nothing else around here beginning with the letter e.”

  “Ring-ring,” said Wormwood. “Call for you. It has to be for you, because it’s a WRONG number.”

  “I’m warning you,” said Nurd, who now remembered where he had left those boots.

  “You don’t have a right hand,” continued Wormwood. “You just have a left hand and a WRONG hand.”

  “I shall inflict grave pain upon you with a pointy boot,” Nurd warned. “I shall take a very long run-up to do it. It will be such a long run-up that you will have grown old by the time my boot finally reaches you, and I shall kick you so hard that, when you open your mouth, the tip of my boot will be visible at the back of your throat.”

  “You lost, you lost . . .”

  “Tell me what it was.”

  “Don’t have to if I don’t want to.”

  “TELL ME!!!!!”

  Flames shot out of Nurd’s mouth and ears. His cloak billowed like the wings of a bat. His eyes turned red, and his eyebrows caught fire.

  “It was an elf,” said Wormwood in a tiny voice.

  “Excuse me?” said Nurd as he regained control of himself.

  “An elf,” said Wormwood, a little louder. “I spied an elf.”

  Nurd rubbed his finger along his forehead. He could just about feel where his eyebrows used to be.

  “Elves don’t exist,” he said. “Dwarfs exist, not elves. You can’t have seen an elf.”

  “I did,” said Wormwood. “And I still spy an elf. It’s outside the bedroom window.”

  Despite himself, Nurd leaned over the edge of his bed to take a look. Wormwood was right. Standing on the windowsill, wearing a jaunty green hat and a suit of red felt, was an elf. It had unusually sharp teeth, and red dots gave a kind of life to its cheeks. It had very dark eyes. They should have done something about the eyes, thought Nurd. Nobody likes an elf with scary eyes.

  “How did that get there?” said Nurd.

  “Maybe it climbed up,” said Wormwood.

  “It’s a Christmas elf,” said Nurd. “It’s made of wood. You might as well expect a clothes peg to climb up.”

  Wormwood left his bunk bed and padded to the window. He peered at the elf. The elf peered back.

  “It’s very lifelike,” he said.

  “It’s. An. Elf,” said Nurd. “It can’t be lifelike. There’s nothing life to be like.”

  Wormwood began to open the window.

  “What are you doing?” said Nurd.

  “I want to take a closer look at it.”

  Nurd suddenly had the sense that this might not be a good idea. He couldn’t have said why except that they were on the second floor of a house and somehow there was an elf on their windowsill, which meant that either the elf had, as Wormwood suggested, managed to climb up, or, as seemed more likely, someone or something had put it there from above. Whatever the case, opening the window didn’t strike Nurd as the wisest of moves.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” he said, “not until—” But the rest of the sentence was drowned out by the creak of the window being opened. There was a blast of cold air. In the distance, Nurd could hear sirens and—

  Were those screams?

  • • •

  At the Biddlecombe Visitor Centre and Battlefield Museum, the caretaker, Mr. Karloff, was closing up for the evening. He wanted to get down
to Wreckit’s for the grand unveiling of the new store because very little that was exciting ever happened in Biddlecombe, or very little that didn’t involve people claiming to have seen demons, or the dead coming to life. Mr. Karloff wasn’t sure that he believed all of that nonsense. During the supposed invasion of Biddlecombe by the forces of Hell, Mr. Karloff had been visiting his sister Elsa in Skegness, and had missed the whole affair. Despite the fact that some very trustworthy people claimed it was all true, honest to goodness, would I lie to you, Mr. Karloff regarded it as evidence of some form of mass hysteria.

  It had not been a busy day at the visitor center, but then it was rarely a busy day there. For some reason, tourists didn’t want to come to Biddlecombe to stare at a damp field in which, long ago, two small armies led by very cautious men had eventually got around to fighting each other by mistake. The sign above the museum’s door read WE BRING HISTORY TO LIFE!, which was not true in any way, shape, or form. There were stones with more life than the Biddlecombe Battlefield Museum.

  Mr. Karloff had tried to make the experience more interesting by creating a reconstruction of the battle using small plastic soldiers which he had carefully painted with his own hands. There weren’t enough Vikings and Saxons to make it look impressive, so he had bulked up the numbers with whatever he had lying around at home. If someone closely examined Mr. Karloff’s version of the Battle of Biddlecombe, they might have spotted some confused-looking German soldiers painted like Vikings, along with half a dozen cowboys and a couple of Indians who had been drafted into the Saxon ranks. The rest of the museum was filled out with some spearheads, broken axes, and the odd bone that had been found poking out of the field after spells of heavy rain.

  The center only opened on Saturdays, Sundays, and every second Thursday. During the summer, bus parties on very cheap tours would occasionally stop there. The money gained from their entry fees, along with what they spent on postcards, chocolate, and pictures of themselves dressed up in the Viking and Saxon costumes that Mr. Karloff had put together for the purpose, was just about enough to keep the center open.

  But it was now winter, and only seven people had shown up that day. One of them was lost, two of them just wanted to use the bathroom, and the others were visiting Americans who asked some awkward questions about the cowboys and Indians fighting on the Saxon side. Mr. Karloff told them that they’d come over to help the Saxons when they heard about their trouble with the Vikings, and the Americans were happy enough with the answer, but it had been a hairy moment. Still, they had bought lots of postcards, and they got a kick out of dressing up as ancient warriors.

  In his little office, Mr. Karloff counted up the day’s takings and put them in an envelope which he folded into his pocket. He would go to the bank with it on Monday once he had added whatever came in on Saturday and Sunday. He was about to turn off the lights when a loud knocking at the front door almost gave him a heart attack.

  “We’re closed,” he shouted. “Come back on Saturday.”

  He thought that he heard muttered words, and then the knocking came again.

  “Oh, really!” said Mr. Karloff. “Some people have no manners.”

  He popped his head round the doorframe.

  “I said we’re closed. You’ll have to come back at the weekend.”

  There was a full moon that night. It shone on the two small glass panels of the door, or would have if most of its light hadn’t been blocked by a huge shape holding a large stick. The figure’s head was slightly misshapen by what appeared to be a thick feather sticking out of its hair.

  The knocking started a third time. It was clear from the movements of the figure that whoever was outside was using the stick to bang on the door. It was probably some young rascal making mischief. No decent, self-respecting person would go round banging on museum doors with a stick.

  “He’ll have all the paint off, and I only gave it a new coat this summer!” said Mr. Karloff aloud. He spent so much time alone at the museum that he had grown used to having conversations with himself.

  “Well, I won’t have it,” he continued as he marched to the door. “I simply won’t. Young people these days. There’s nothing wrong with them that a spell in the army wouldn’t cure.”

  Mr. Karloff yanked open the door. His first thought was that perhaps a spell in the army wouldn’t solve this chap’s problems at all because joining the army was probably what had caused his problems to begin with. Those problems included, but were not limited to, having:

  1. No lower jaw in a face that was largely bone and some apologetic gray skin.

  2. One completely empty eye socket and one eye socket that was filled by the business end of an arrow, and last but most certainly not least . . .

  3. Most of an ax buried in the top of his skull.

  In his right hand the unwanted visitor held not a stick, but a spear, a spear that still looked useful in a potentially fatal way despite having spent over a thousand years in the ground alongside its owner.

  Mr. Karloff had worked long enough at the museum to recognize a Viking when he saw one, especially a dead one. Under other circumstances, such as encountering the dead Viking laid out in a thick glass case, he might even have been pleased. He was slightly less pleased to find a dead Viking standing upright on his doorstep and apparently giving serious thought to abandoning the whole business of being dead and trying out being undead for a while.

  The spearhead moved. Instead of pointing straight up in the air, it was now moving in a direction that suggested it fancied making friends with Mr. Karloff’s insides, although it wasn’t planning on staying long because it would very soon pop out of his back, possibly with some of Mr. Karloff’s insides still attached to it.

  “Oh dear,” said Mr. Karloff.

  Those might have been the last words that he ever said, and they wouldn’t have been very memorable, as last words go. He was saved by a whistling sound from the embarrassment of dying without having something witty to say. The whistling sound was followed by a very solid thunk, and suddenly the Viking was relieved of the difficulties posed by the ax in his skull and the arrow in his eye by the removal of his head at the neck. His body remained vertical for a second or two, then appeared to think, Actually, why bother?, and collapsed on the doorstep.

  Mr. Karloff was now staring into the undead face of a Saxon who was holding a sword almost as big as he was. Behind him, Mr. Karloff could see more undead Vikings and Saxons digging themselves out of their graves. Those that were aboveground were already fighting among themselves.

  Mr. Karloff gave the undead Saxon his biggest and best smile.

  “I’m on your side,” he said. “Keep up the good work.”

  He closed the front door, grabbed his hat, and ran to the back door. That one he didn’t bother closing after him. After all, as soon as he heard the front door explode behind him, there really didn’t seem to be much point.

  XXI

  In Which the Dwarfs Make a New Friend. Sort of.

  DAN AND THE DWARFS had discovered that getting out of the basement was harder than it looked. To begin with, the basement now seemed much bigger than it had when they arrived, which couldn’t be right yet somehow was. They had been walking around for half an hour and still hadn’t found the stairs. This development might have worried ordinary people, but the dwarfs were far from ordinary. They were seasoned drinkers of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar, and so were well used to walking around small spaces for long periods of time without being able to find the door, often while singing loudly and seeing small multicolored elephants flying around their heads.

  On this occasion, though, the dwarfs were 99 percent sure that they hadn’t been drinking. Dan had been very clear on that point: they needed this job. It was a steady earner until Christmas. Plus, if they made enough money, Dan would be able to have the van repainted, and they would no longer have to go around advertising themselves as Dan’s Sods.

  “Maybe we should split up,” said Dan.

&nbs
p; “Why?” said Jolly.

  “Because we can cover more ground that way. Two groups: if one group finds the door, it keeps shouting until the other group arrives.”

  The dwarfs thought about this.

  “That sounds like a great suggestion,” said Jolly after a while. “Nobody ever got into trouble by separating from his friends in a dark basement and hoping for the best.”

  “Absolutely,” said Angry. “It can’t fail.”

  So they split into groups, Dan, Jolly, and Angry in one, and Mumbles and Dozy in the other.

  “Lucky for us that Dan is in charge, eh?” said Dozy to Mumbles as the footsteps of the others faded away. “We’d be lost without him.”

  Which was literally true. Seconds after Dan had left them, Dozy and Mumbles were completely lost.

  • • •

  “Are we there yet?”

  “No.”

  Pause.

  “Are we there yet now?”

  “No.”

  Pause.

  “Are we there—”

  “No!” said Dan. “No, no, no! We’re not there. We’re here. I don’t know where there is. I’m not even sure where here is.”

  He stomped off to look around the next corner, leaving Jolly and Angry behind.

  “I love doing that,” said Jolly. “Never fails.”

  “It’s a classic,” admitted Angry. “Still, I wish we were out of this basement. I’m getting a bit tired of looking at walls and boxes. And I could be wrong, but it does seem to be getting darker down here. I thought your eyes were supposed to get used to the darkness the longer you spent in it, but my eyesight is getting worse.”