The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

by John Connolly

  “Thank you, Wormwood,” said Nurd. “Well done. Indeed, they’re probably very well done now, come to think of it.”

  Wormwood stopped blowing. Nurd dislodged the remaining pieces of charred elf from his tail, and lifted the tip to examine it. It, too, was on fire. He gave a little puff of breath, and the fire went out.

  “What now?” said Wormwood.

  “We go to Wreckit & Sons,” said Nurd.

  “Why there?”

  Nurd picked up an elf foot that had survived the blaze and pointed to the sole of its little painted boot. On it were written the words PROPERTY OF WRECKIT & SONS.

  * * *

  40. You should not play with fire. You are about to discover why.

  XXV

  In Which Battle Commences

  DOZY AND MUMBLES COLLIDED with Angry, Jolly, and Dan, who had just been reunited. They came together next to a pile of old yellow boxes marked, peculiarly enough, ODD SHOES, although nothing could have been odder than what they’d already encountered in that basement.

  “You won’t believe what happened to us!” said Jolly, then remembered that, not too long before, they’d all been trapped in Hell together. “Hang on, you probably will believe it.”

  “You won’t believe what’s still happening to us,” Dozy managed to gasp as the first of the running eyeballs rounded the corner and pulled up short. It had been expecting to encounter two dwarfs, but was now facing four, and a human. If it had been gifted with hands, it would have rubbed itself just to be sure that it wasn’t seeing things.

  “Is that an eyeball on legs?” said Angry.

  “One of many,” said Dozy. “The rest are on their way. Oh, look, here they are.”

  More eyeballs appeared, and paused to consider Dan and the dwarfs.

  “They’ve got teeth,” said Jolly. “That can’t be right. Why are they chasing you?”

  “Because I stood on one of them,” said Dozy. “I stamped on it hard, to be honest, but it was an accident.”

  “Messy,” said Jolly.

  “I think I still have some of it stuck to my heel,” said Dozy.

  “Nasty,” said Angry. “Just so we’re clear, you stood on one, and then the others got angry, so you ran away from them?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why didn’t you just stamp on the rest of them?”

  “Well, they have teeth.”

  “Not much they can do with them though, really, is there?” said Angry. “Bite your feet, maybe, but then you are wearing big boots, which is where the trouble started to begin with, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Dozy looked at his boots, and back at the eyeballs.

  “Are you suggesting—?”

  “I am.”

  “They squish,” said Dozy. “It made my tummy feel funny.”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I think I’m almost over it already.”

  “There you are, then,” said Angry.

  Slowly, deliberately, meaningfully, the dwarfs and Dan advanced on the eyeballs. The eyeballs eyeballed each other. They may not have had ears, but they could see perfectly well, and what they saw was trouble advancing on them in big boots. As one, the eyeballs turned tail and headed back in the direction from which they’d come. Dan and the dwarfs watched them as they scarpered into the shadows.

  “See?” said Angry. “How hard was that?”

  “Not very,” said Dozy.

  “Bet you feel a bit silly now, don’t you?”

  “A bit,” Dozy admitted.

  “Where did all those eyeballs come from anyway?” asked Jolly.

  “Well,” said Dozy, “there were all these pictures of a bloke with big ears and teeth—a bit vampirish he was—and I said that the eyes seemed to follow you around the room, and the next minute the eyes were following us around the room. Very unsettling it was, so—”

  “Uh,” said Mumbles. He tapped Dozy on the arm.

  “Not now,” said Dozy. “I’m explaining. Anyway—”

  Mumbles tapped him on the arm again.

  “Really,” said Dozy, turning to give Mumbles a piece of his mind, “you have to learn some . . .”

  What Mumbles had to learn was destined to remain undiscovered. Organ music was coming from somewhere nearby, and a shape was emerging from the murk. It was hunched, and wore a long, dark coat. The parts of it that were not covered by the coat were very pale. They included its hands, which had long fingers ending in even longer nails. Its head was entirely bald, and its ears were big and pointed like those of a bat. Its two front teeth, to reference the famous song,41 were not the kind that anyone would want for Christmas. They extended over its lower lip and resembled the fangs of a snake. As for its eyes, when last Dan and the dwarfs had seen them they’d been running along on two little feet and brandishing teeth of their own. They looked more at home in that awful face, and considerably more threatening.

  “Oh,” said Dozy.

  He had seen many horrible things in his time. He had seen demons. He had seen Hell itself. He had even, due to an unlocked bathroom door, seen Jolly without any pants on. But he believed that he had never seen, and never would see, anything more terrifying than the figure standing before him.

  Until he saw the one that appeared next to it, because, unlike its nearly identical twin, it had only one eye. The remains of the other, Dozy guessed, were still stuck in the treads of one of his boots.

  “Eh, Dozy,” said Jolly. “I think there’s a gentleman here who’d like a word with you.”

  “Should we start running again?” said Dozy.

  “I believe,” said Jolly, “that would be a very good idea.”

  • • •

  Above the dwarfs, in the store itself, Samuel, Lucy, and the policemen were fighting a rearguard action against ranks of dolls that had been reinforced by assorted cuddly toys. The humans had retreated to the first floor, where Samuel had equipped them with guns capable of firing plastic darts and foam bullets. They were having some effect on the demented dolls and threatening teddy bears and yapping demon dogs with large jaws, most of whom struggled to get back on their feet once they’d been knocked over. Some, though, were made of sterner stuff, so Samuel and Lucy, their relationship problems temporarily set aside in the fight for survival, had begun to collect footballs, basketballs, toy cars, and various heavy objects instead. Now, like soldiers in a castle raining down boulders on the besieging forces, they tossed their ammunition with maximum force at their attackers, and watched with satisfaction as dolls lost heads and teddy bears lost limbs.

  “I never liked dolls anyway,” said Lucy as a particularly well-aimed rugby ball fragmented a Sally Salty Tears. “They represent the imposition of outdated gender roles on girls too young to know better.”

  Samuel looked at Constable Peel, who shrugged. Samuel thought that Constable Peel might have been almost as frightened of Lucy as he was of the attacking dolls.

  “Have you noticed anything funny about those dolls?” asked Sergeant Rowan.

  Constable Peel goggled at him. He looked like a goose trying to cough up a feather.

  “Funny, Sarge? Funny? You mean, apart from the fact that they’ve come alive and seem intent upon killing us, or isn’t that funny enough for you?”

  “Now, now, son,” said Sergeant Rowan, “panicking won’t do us any good. No, what I mean is that they seem to have stopped trying to get up the stairs. It’s as if they’re happy enough just to have forced us up here.”

  The sergeant was right. The initial assault had petered out, helped in part by the fact that so many dolls and soft toys were no longer in a position to do much assaulting because of a lack of legs, arms, and heads. Reinforcements continued to arrive, but instead of attempting to scale the stairs they were retreating to positions of cover, from which they were happy just to bare teeth or wave sharp items of cutlery. There had been a worrying moment when the giant twenty-foot teddy on the ground floor had begun moving and seemed abo
ut to join in the conflict, but it turned out to be too big and heavy to get to its feet. It had instead remained slumped in a corner growling, like a fat man who had eaten too many pies.

  Samuel took a moment to get his bearings. They were in the games department, and it didn’t look like any of the board games, tennis rackets, or cricket bats were about to come to murderous life. The walls, he saw, were decorated with life-size cardboard models of characters from nursery rhymes. He recognized Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet, Humpty Dumpty on his wall, and Little Bo Peep along with assorted sheep. At the very rear of the floor was another flight of stairs. A thin figure watched them from halfway up it.

  “Look!” said Samuel. “It’s that Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley.”

  “He doesn’t look very happy,” said Constable Peel. “Then again, half of his doll department is in pieces on the ground floor.”

  Sergeant Rowan stood up. He unbuttoned the top left-hand pocket of his jacket and from it removed his notebook.

  “Oh, he’s in trouble now,” said Constable Peel to Samuel. “Once that notebook comes out it’s not going back in the pocket without someone’s name being written down.”

  Sergeant Rowan coughed and licked his pencil. It hung poised over the notebook like the Sword of Damocles.42

  “Right you are, Mr. St. John-Cholmondley,” said Sergeant Rowan. “I’d appreciate it if you’d join me here for a moment and explain just what’s going on.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley. “The answer you seek can only be found by moving higher into the store. The truth lies on the top floor.”

  “Well, sir, we don’t have time to be running around chasing answers and truth. We’re policemen, not philosophers. I think you should come down with us to the station and we’ll have a chat about it all over a nice cup of tea in one of the cells. Why don’t you just open the doors and stop all of this nonsense, there’s a good gentleman. In the meantime, I’m going to write your name in my notebook as a ‘person of interest.’ ”

  Sergeant Rowan was just about to do that when he noticed that his pencil was gone.

  “Here, who’s made off with my pencil?” he asked as his notebook was yanked from his hand and disappeared into the shadows on the ceiling, leaving only a sticky residue on Sergeant Rowan’s fingers. He pulled at it, and saw that it was spiderweb. He looked again at the ceiling, and noticed that the shadows on it appeared to be moving.

  “Ah,” he said. “Right.”

  Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley smiled at them from the stairs, then skipped up to the next floor. Samuel barely noticed him go because another figure was moving toward them. It was coming from where the cardboard model of Miss Muffet used to be, except the model was no longer on the wall.

  What appeared before them was not Miss Muffet, the beloved figure of nursery-rhyme fame.43 Either this one loved spiders an awful lot or she hadn’t run away fast enough when the first one appeared, and it had brought lots of friends along with it for company. She was dressed entirely in black, and wore a veil over her face, a veil that, as she drew closer, was revealed to be made, not from fabric, but from spider silk. The little black spiders that crawled across it, and the dead flies trapped in it, gave the game away on that front. More spiders poured from her sleeves and from beneath her skirts: brown ones, black ones, red ones, yellow ones. There were webs between her fingers, and webs under her arms. Beneath her veil of black spider silk her features were almost entirely concealed by sticky white strands, with only the vaguest of holes torn in them for her eyes and her mouth.

  A small black spider descended from the ceiling and dropped onto Sergeant Rowan’s shoulder. He quickly brushed it away, but another fell, and another. He got rid of them, too. One of them scuttled toward Lucy. She stamped on it. When she lifted her foot, it was still there. It looked slightly flatter but was otherwise unharmed. Lucy tried again, but was still unsuccessful in killing it. This was clearly no ordinary spider.

  “Ugh!” said Lucy loudly. “How horrid!”

  Little Miss Muffet’s head turned in her direction. It was one thing trying to crush her pets, but obviously quite another entirely to describe them as horrid.

  “Not horrid,” said a soft voice from somewhere behind the silk. “Beautiful.”

  Miss Muffet was having trouble speaking properly. She sounded like she had hairballs caught in her throat. The spider strands around her mouth trembled, and a fat brown spider emerged from between what might have been her lips. It was quickly followed by another, and another, and another.44

  Sergeant Rowan backed away. Above them, ranks of spiders moved across the ceiling, forcing the humans and Boswell to retreat farther to avoid having the spiders drop on them. More of the nasty creatures were spreading across the floor. There was a sense of purpose to their approach. The spiders were herding Samuel and the others, moving them closer and closer to the stairs.

  In case they needed any more convincing, a massive shape disengaged itself from the darkest corner of the room and moved steadily toward them. A beam of moonlight caught it, causing the eight black eyes in its head to gleam. It was the size of a small car, except small cars didn’t have eight legs and long poisonous fangs that dripped venom as the enormous spider detected the presence of prey.

  “My pretty,” said Miss Muffet, stroking the dense hairs on the spider’s head. “Pretty is hungry.”

  “You know,” said Sergeant Rowan, “perhaps we should see what’s upstairs after all.”

  So they ascended to the next floor, and the spiders, thankfully, did not follow.

  * * *

  41. “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” was written in 1944, although why anyone would want to wake up in the early hours of Christmas Day to find Santa Claus performing some makeshift implant dentistry on them remains to be seen, and would be likely to result in long-term trauma. What next? “All I Want for Christmas Is My Appendix Removed” or “. . . My Nose Broken and Reset”? What’s wrong with a train set, or a doll? Some people are very complicated.

  42. Damocles was reputed to have been a courtier in the court of Dionysius II, a tyrant ruler of Syracuse in the fourth century B.C. Perhaps unwisely, Damocles suggested that Dionysius was quite the lucky fellow to have such a nice throne, and lots of gold, and all of that power, so Dionysius invited Damocles to take a turn on the throne, just to try it out for size. Unfortunately, as with most tyrants, there was a catch, for Dionysius arranged for a big sword to be hung over the throne, held in place by a single hair from the tail of a horse. Not surprisingly, Damocles didn’t care much for sitting in a throne under a sharp blade that might, at any moment, drop on his head with unpleasant consequences, and after a while he politely asked Dionysius if he might be allowed to sit somewhere else instead. Dionysius, having had his fun, agreed. The moral is that those in power are always in peril, too, especially if they’re tyrants whom nobody likes. The Sword of Damocles is thus very famous, much more so than the lesser-known Onion of Unhappiness and the Custard Tart of Doom.

  43. You know the one:

  Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet

  Eating her curds and whey,

  Along came a spider,

  Who sat down beside her

  And frightened Miss Muffet away.

  Or alternatively:

  Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet

  Eating her curds and whey,

  Along came a spider,

  Who sat down beside her

  We lose lots of Miss Muffets that way.

  44. If swallowing a spider sounds unpleasant, it should be noted that most of us consume bits of spiders and insects every day. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has even published a guide to the level of insect fragments permitted in food. Frozen spinach is allowed fifty aphids or mites per one hundred grams, peanut butter can have thirty insect fragments per one hundred grams, and chocolate is allowed to have sixty. Don’t worry, though: insects are an excellent source of pro
tein. So eat up, they’re good for you.

  Incidentally, in 1911 a scientist named C. F. Hodge calculated that if a pair of houseflies started breeding in April and continued until August, their offspring, if they all survived, would cover the Earth forty-seven feet deep by August. So by accidentally eating the odd fly here and there, you’re saving the Earth from being buried in them. Well done, you! Try them with ketchup. They’re tasty. (Warning: May not actually be tasty.)

  XXVI

  In Which Constable Peel Is Reduced to Tears of Unhappiness

  NURD DECIDED THAT THE scenes of Christmas chaos in Biddlecombe were very inventive, even for someone who had previously witnessed an invasion by the forces of Hell itself. It was one thing to encounter people being attacked by, and fighting against, assorted demons, ghouls, and chthonic45 forces, which were, by and large, simply terrifying, and therefore capable of being understood on those terms. It was quite another to witness a running battle in August Derleth Park between the Biddlecombe Ladies’ Football Team and a half-dozen very rough-looking fairies that had climbed down from the tops of various Christmas trees with murder on their minds. So far, the Biddlecombe Ladies seemed to have the upper hand, mainly because the Biddlecombe Ladies were bigger than some of the Biddlecombe Gentlemen, and had such a reputation for violence on the pitch that opposing teams had been known to injure themselves at first sight of them, just to save the ladies the effort. The fairies were doing some damage with their wands, though, which had been weaponized by the addition of chains and spiked metal balls.

  “Those fairies are walking a bit funny,” said Wormwood.

  “You’d walk a bit funny, too, if someone stuck a Christmas tree up you,” said Nurd.

  A large troop of elves crossed their path, struggling beneath the weight of a tree trunk that they were hoping to use to break down the door of the post office. It was quite clear to Nurd and Wormwood that the tree trunk, while heavy enough to use as a battering ram, was too heavy for even a great many elves to carry for any distance.