The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

younger than the universe itself, which made him, oh, about ten billion years old.

“The cake’s only a foot wide!” Mrs. Johnson had pointed out. “He can’t have ten billion candles. They won’t fit, and if we try the whole town will go up in flames.”

So they’d settled on one candle for every billion years, which seemed like a reasonable compromise.

Nurd was seated directly across the table from Wormwood. He was wearing a red paper party hat, and was trying unsuccessfully to blow up a balloon. Nurd had changed a lot in the time that they’d been in Biddlecombe, thought Wormwood. His skin was still green, of course, but not as green as before. He now looked like someone who had just eaten a bad egg. His head, which had formerly been shaped like a crescent moon, had shrunk slightly. It was still long and odd-looking, but he was now able to walk the streets of Biddlecombe without frightening too many children or causing cars to crash, especially if he kept his head covered.

“This balloon appears to be broken,” said Nurd. “If I blow any harder, my eyes will pop out. Again.”

That had been embarrassing. Samuel had used a spoon to retrieve them from Nurd’s glass of lemonade.

Wormwood took a deep breath.

“Make a wish,” said Maria. “But you have to keep it to yourself, or else it won’t come true.”

“Oh, I think I’ve got the hang of the balloon now,” said Nurd.

Wormwood closed his eyes. He made his wish. He blew. There was a loud whoosh, followed by a pop and a distinct smell of burning.

Wormwood opened his eyes. Across the table, Nurd’s head was on fire. In one of his hands, he held the charred, melted remains of a balloon.

“Oh, thank you,” said Nurd as he tried to douse the flames. “Thank you very much.”

“Sorry,” said Wormwood. “I’ve never tried to blow anything out before.”

“Wow,” said Samuel. “You have inflammable breath. I always thought it smelled like petrol.”

“The cake survived,” said Tom. “The icing has just melted a bit.”

“I’m fine,” said Nurd. “Don’t worry about me. I love being set alight. Keeps out the cold.”

Samuel patted Nurd on the back.

“Seriously, I’m okay,” said Nurd.

“I know. Your back was on fire, though.”

“Oh.”

“There’s a hole in your cloak, but I expect Mum will be able to fix it.”

Mrs. Johnson cut the cake and gave everybody a slice.

“What did you wish for, Wormwood?” asked Tom.

“And if you tell me that you wished my head was on fire, we’ll have words,” said Nurd.

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to say,” said Wormwood.

“That’s before you blow,” said Tom. “It’s all right to tell us now.”

“Well, I wished that everything would stay just the way it is,” said Wormwood. “I’m happy here. We all are.”

Shan and Gath nodded.

And in the general hilarity and good cheer that followed, nobody noticed that it was only Nurd who had not agreed.

1. For those of you unfamiliar with mange, it is an ailment that causes a loss of fur. Think of the worst haircut you’ve ever received, and it’s a bit like that, but all over your body.

2. Technically, that sentence should read “if there was one thing for which Mrs. Johnson was a stickler,” as nobody likes a dangling preposition, but I said that Mrs. Johnson was a stickler for good spelling, not good grammar.

3. Such as Augustus the Second (1694–1733), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, also known as Augustus the Strong. He managed to bankrupt his kingdom by spending all of its money on bits of amber and ivory, lost a couple of battles that he really would have been better off winning, and fathered over three hundred children, which suggests that, in between losing battles and collecting trinkets, he had a lot of time on his hands, but his party piece consisted of gripping a horseshoe in his fists and making it straight. He would probably have been very happy just straightening horseshoes and blowing up hot-water bottles for a living, but due to an accident of birth he instead found himself ruling a number of kingdoms. Badly. You should bear this in mind if your dad or mum has a name beginning with the words “His/Her Royal Highness,” and you are known as “Prince/Princess Something-or-Other.” Unless, of course, your name is really “Something-or-Other,” in which case you don’t have anything to worry about (about which to worry—darn it) as your parents didn’t care enough about you to give you a proper name, and you are therefore unlikely to amount to anything. Sorry.

II

In Which Someone Sees a Ghost (Yawn)

AS HAS ALREADY BEEN established, the town of Biddlecombe was a lot odder than it once had been, but the curious thing about Biddlecombe was that it had always been ever so slightly strange, even before the attempted invasion from Hell. It was just that people in Biddlecombe had chosen not to remark upon its strangeness, perhaps in the hope that the strangeness might eventually grow tired of being ignored and just go and be strange somewhere else.

For example, it was well known that if you took a right turn on Machen Street, and then a left turn on Poe Place, you ended up back on the same corner of Machen Street from which you had recently started. The residents of Biddlecombe got round this peculiar geographical anomaly by avoiding that particular corner of Machen Street entirely, instead using the shortcut through Mary Shelley Lane. Visitors to Biddlecombe, though, tended not to know about the shortcut, and thus they had been known to spend a great deal of time moving back and forth between Machen Street and Poe Place until somebody local came along and rescued them.

And then there was the small matter of the statue of Hilary Mould, Biddlecombe’s leading architect. Nobody could remember who had ordered the statue, or how it had come to be in Biddlecombe, but the statue had turned up sometime in the nineteenth century, shortly after Mould disappeared under circumstances that might have been described as mysterious if anyone had cared enough about Mould to miss him when he was gone, which they didn’t because Mould’s buildings were all ugly and awful.

The statue of Hilary Mould wasn’t much lovelier than the buildings he had designed, Mould not being the most handsome of men, and it had often been suggested that it should quietly be taken away and lost. But the statue of Hilary Mould had a habit of moving around, so there was no way of knowing where it might be from one day to the next. It was usually to be found near one of the six buildings in Biddlecombe that Mould had designed, as if the architect couldn’t bear to be separated from his work.

As with so many of the strange things about Biddlecombe, the townsfolk decided that the best thing for it was to ignore the statue and let it go about its business.

Which was, as we shall come to learn, a terrible mistake.

• • •

As it happened, the statue of? Hilary Mould was, at that moment, lurking in a still and silent way near what appeared to be an old sweet factory but which now housed a secret laboratory. Inside the laboratory, Brian, the new tea boy, had just seen a ghost.

The effect this had on Brian was quite considerable. First of all he turned pale, so that he bore something of a resemblance to a ghost himself. Second, he dropped the tray that he was carrying, sending three cups of tea, two coffees, and a plate of assorted biscuits—including some Jammie Dodgers,⁴ of which Professor Stefan, the Head of Particle Physics, was especially fond—crashing to the floor, along with the tray on which they were all being carried. Finally, after tottering on his heels for a bit, Brian followed the tray downwards.

It was only Brian’s second day on the job at the secret Biddlecombe annex of CERN, the advanced research facility in Switzerland that housed the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator which was, at that very moment, trying to uncover the secrets of the universe by re-creating the moments after the Big Bang. The