The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

“I hate this project. I have to look at old buildings and try to find something to say about them other than that they’re a bit gloomy and should probably have been demolished a long time ago. Yesterday I nearly got knocked out by a piece of brick that dropped off one of them. I’m lucky to be alive. Whose idea was it to write about Hilary Mould anyway?”

“It was mine,” said Maria icily. “And you really will be lucky to stay alive if you don’t stop complaining. We either studied the Mould buildings or spent our Saturdays wandering around shopping centers counting shoe shops. At least Mould is interesting.”

“Only if you’re a depressed pigeon with no friends,” said Tom. “And then there’s that business with his statue.”

They all agreed that the statue was odd. Nobody ever saw it moving around. It would be in one place for an hour, or a day, or a week, and then it would be somewhere else. Some weeks earlier, Maria had suggested that their science class should do a study of the statue, but Mr. Lugosi, the science teacher, didn’t believe it was a good idea.

“Who knows what might happen if we start paying attention to it?” he said, a statement which led Maria to suspect that Mr. Lugosi wasn’t really cut out to teach science.

“Perhaps it’s a quantum statue,” Tom had suggested, “so that it’s in every possible place in Biddlecombe until someone observes it.”

“Very clever, Hobbes,” said Mr. Lugosi, “except that the statue appears to have only six known preferred locations.”

“Sir?” called Mooch, who always sat at the back of the class and walked with a slight stoop, as though auditioning for the role of bell ringer in an old cathedral.

“Yes, Mooch?”

“Seven, sir.”

“Seven what?”

“Seven places the statue seems to prefer.”

“Why do you say that, Mooch?”

“Sir, it’s outside the window.”

And it was.

“Don’t look at it,” said Mr. Lugosi. “Ignore it and it will go away.”

Everybody ignored Mr. Lugosi instead and looked at the statue, but after a while it began to give them the creeps, so they looked away again. Seconds later, the statue had gone.

“If anyone asks, that never happened,” said Mr. Lugosi.

But Maria in particular continued to be intrigued, and when Mr. Franklin, the geography teacher, had told them to form groups of three and come up with a project on buildings and public spaces in Biddlecombe, she had twisted the arms of Samuel and Tom until they’d agreed to look at the work of Hilary Mould. The subject was now quite topical due to the reopening of Wreckit & Sons.

“This bloke Grimly will have to do something pretty spectacular with Wreckit’s if he doesn’t want to send little kids home crying and wondering what the point of life is,” said Tom.

“It is a strange building to turn into a toy store,” said Samuel. “I know it’s right in the center of town, but it still looks like it should be used for something else.”

“Storing dead bodies,” Tom suggested.

“Storing undead bodies,” Samuel offered.

“A rest home for retired vampires.”

“Kennels for werewolves.”

“Will you two shut up!” said Maria. “Look, I’ve printed off a map of Biddlecombe. I thought we could use it as the centerpiece for the project, and mark the Mould buildings on it. Then we could add a picture of each building, and a little potted history of it. Now that Samuel is going to the grand opening, maybe he can find a way to interview Mr. Grimly. Samuel might have more luck than the local paper has had. How does that sound?”

It was certainly better than anything Samuel or Tom had come up with. There were six Mould buildings in total in Biddlecombe, and they had taken two each to study. Samuel and Tom hadn’t done much more than walk by their buildings, which in Samuel’s case included Wreckit’s, and then move along as quickly as possible, but Maria had already completed her histories and taken her photos. Now, as they sat around the table, she placed dots on the map indicating the locations of the six Mould buildings.

Maria sat back. She appeared troubled.

“What is it?” asked Samuel. “Did you make a mistake?”

“She doesn’t make mistakes,” said Tom, which was kind of true. What Maria did, she did well.

“Don’t you see it?” said Maria.

Samuel and Tom didn’t see anything at all, apart from the names of streets and buildings, and six black dots. Maria picked up her pen again, grabbed a ruler, and began drawing lines on the map, connecting the dots.

“Now do you see it?” she asked.

They did. It might have been a coincidence, but if it was, then it was a very large one. The dots, when joined by lines, made a very distinct pattern. It looked like this, with Wreckit & Sons at the center:

“I could be wrong,” said Maria, “but that looks very like a pentagram.”²⁹

Samuel, Maria, and Tom talked for a long time about the pentagram. Maria was the most worried about it, and Tom the least. Samuel was stranded somewhere in the middle. It was unusual, he had to admit, but so what if weird Hilary Mould had set out to position his awful buildings in the shape of a pentagram? It just confirmed what everyone had always thought: he was as odd as two left shoes.

“Maybe you shouldn’t go to the grand reopening,” said Maria, “not until we know more. In fact, we should try to have the reopening postponed.”

“Are you mad?” said Tom. “The reopening is tomorrow, and it’s the biggest thing to have happened to Biddlecombe in years. Everybody is looking forward to it. Do you really think they’re going to call it off just because you’ve made the shape of a star on a map?”

“Tom’s right,” said Samuel. “It doesn’t mean anything, beyond the fact that Hilary Mould had an unusual sense of humor.”

“But what if it’s more than that?” said Maria. “What if it’s dangerous?”

“How can it be?” said Samuel. “Those buildings have been around for more than a century and they’ve done nothing worse than make the town look a bit uglier. Why should they start being dangerous now?”

And that was how things ended, because Maria had no answer to Samuel’s question. She had only her instincts to go on, and they told her that something was very wrong here. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to the people of Biddlecombe, and especially not to Samuel and Boswell. She didn’t even want any harm to befall Lucy Highmore.

Or not much harm, anyway.

27. No matter how great your job is, there will be days when you might wish that you were doing something else. Everybody feels the need to have a bit of a moan once in a while. Your job could be knocking baseballs through the windows of buildings and every so often you’d still feel the urge to complain that your arm was tired.

28. Which is, in a way, the story of life.

29. It was only in the nineteenth century that the pentagram—a five-pointed star—came to be regarded as a symbol for evil, and its use in old manuscripts of the supernatural is rare. Just to be clear, if it has one point at the top, then it’s a symbol of good, and if there are two points at the top, like the one Maria found, it’s a symbol for evil. Then again, like most things in life, it rather depends upon how one looks at it, doesn’t it?

XIV

In Which the Worst Date in the History of Dating Begins