The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

many perfectly good Jammie Dodgers.

“Two hundred and seventy-five pages!” said Professor Stefan. “Young people and their ideas, eh?”

“Two hundred and seventy-five pages!” said Professor Hilbert. “Dear oh dear, where do we get these kids from? No, Brian, that would just be silly.”

He wiped a tear of mirth from his eye with a handkerchief.

“That’s volume three,” he explained. “We’ve filled one thousand two hundred and seventy-five pages with ghost sightings.”

At which point Brian fell over again. When he eventually recovered himself, he added the sighting to the book, just as he had been told. He noted down everything he had seen, including the hint of black vapor that had hung in the air like smoke after the ghost had disappeared. Had Professors Hilbert and Stefan taken the time to read Brian’s note, they might have found that black vapor very odd.

• • •

Outside, the statue of Hilary Mould stared, solid and unmoving, at the old factory. A cloud passed over the moon, casting the statue in shadow.

When the moon reappeared, the statue was gone.

4. For those of you reading in American instead of English, a Jammie Dodger is a popular English biscuit consisting of two pieces of shortbread with jam in the middle. And a biscuit is what you call a cookie, even though a cookie is just a cookie (a flat biscuity thing) everywhere else, and what you call a biscuit we call a scone, except we use butter and cream, and you use shortening or milk. And, while we’re on the subject, aluminium is spelled with two i’s, not one, although actually your American spelling is arguably the more correct since that’s the one that the British inventor Humphry Davy adopted for it in 1808, although you’re still wrong about changing words ending in –re (centre, spectre) to –er. In fact, even words like minister, monster, and November used to be spelled with an –re at one point, so it’s no use arguing. And it’s pronounced “Wooster” sauce although it’s spelled Worcestershire. Don’t ask me why. I’m Irish.

5. It was, to put it simply, the stuff that made stuff stuff.

6. Again, if you’re reading in American, we call them “sweets” and you call them “candy.” I’m not going to argue about it as long as you let me have one of yours.

7. There is a certain type of shop that just loves sticking the letter e on the end of words in the hope it will make said shop appear older and more respectable. Businesses selling candles, sweeties, Christmas decorations, and models of fairies are particularly prone to this, although in reality the only thing that the e adds is 10 percent extra on to the price of everything. Mr. Pennyfarthinge’s fondness for the “Olde E” was so extreme as to qualifye as a forme of mentale illnesse.

8. Uncle Dabney’s Impossibly Sour Chews were banned in a number of countries after the sheer sourness of them had turned the faces of several small boys inside out. See also: Uncle Dabney’s Dangerously Explosive Spacedust (tooth loss due to explosions), Uncle Dabney’s Glow-in-the-Dark Radiation Gums (hair loss due to radiation poisoning), and Uncle Dabney’s Frog-Shaped Pastilles (mysterious disappearance of entire populations of certain frogs). The late Uncle Dabney was, of course, quite insane, but he made curiously good sweets.

III

In Which We Travel to a Galaxy Far, Far Away, but Since It’s Not a Long Time Ago the Star Wars People Can’t Sue Us

SOME THINGS ARE BETTER left unsaid. Among them are “This situation can’t really get any worse,” which is usually spoken before the loss of a limb, a car going off a cliff, or someone pushing a button marked DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON. EVER. WE’RE NOT JOKING; “Well, he seems like a nice person,” which will shortly be followed by the arrest of the person in question and the removal of bodies from his basement, possibly including your own; and finally, and most better-left-unsaid of all, “You know, I think everything is going to be just fine,” because that means everything is most assuredly not going to be fine, not by a long shot.

So. Everything is going to be fine. Are we clear on that?

Good.

• • •

In another part of the Multiverse, a couple of dimensions from Biddlecombe, a small green planet orbited a slowly dying star. The news that the star was dying might have proved alarming to the inhabitants of the planet had any of them been sufficiently advanced to be capable of understanding the problem, but so far the planet had not produced any form of life that was equipped to do anything more sophisticated than eat while trying not to be eaten itself. Much of the planet was covered by thick coniferous forests, hence its color from space, although it also boasted some very nice oceans, and a mountain that, at some point in the future, representatives of some species might try to climb because it was there, assuming the star didn’t die long before then.

The creature that moved through the depths of one of the planet’s oceans didn’t have a name since, as we have established, there was nobody around with the required intellectual curiosity to give it one. Also, as the creature was very large, very toothy, and very, very hungry, any contact with it would have gone somewhat along the lines of “Look, a new species! I shall name it—AAARRGHHH! My leg! Help, help! No, AAARRGGHH! My other leg!” etc., which doesn’t tend to look good in serious academic journals.

There was very little in the oceans that the creature had not encountered before, and nothing that it had so far not tried, successfully, to eat. But on this particular occasion its attention was caught by a small bright glowing mass, a clump of atoms that vaguely resembled a cluster of blue fish eggs. The creature, always hungry and open to trying new foodstuffs, wolfed the blue mass down and proceeded on its none-too-merry way, already on the lookout for even more tasty and interesting things to eat.

It had been swimming for a mile or so when it began to consider what all of this hunting and eating was about, really. I mean, it swam so it could eat, and it ate so it could keep swimming, and that was the sum of its existence, as far as it could tell. It wasn’t much of a life when you thought about it, which it hadn’t until only moments before, and there had to be more to it all than that. What would happen, it wondered, if it sent other creatures out to hunt on its behalf while it put its fins up and made plans for the future, among which were the enslavement of the planet’s population—hey, we’re on a planet?—followed by the building of spaceships and the further enslavement of lots of other planets’ populations, upon which it could then feed to its belly’s content? That sounded great! Oh, and apparently the star—star?—around which its planet was orbiting was dying, so the sooner it got started on this whole business of building spaceships, whatever they were, the better.

Before it could get to work on the fine print of its grand design, a larger, even toothier, and even hungrier monster bit it in half, and the creature’s brain had barely time enough to think, Oh, well, that’s just great, that is, before its divided body was chomped to mincemeat and began the great journey through the digestive tract of another.

Whereupon that large, hungry creature began to wonder about the nature of good and evil, and how evil seemed much more fun, all things considered, and so this continued for a time until there was an unfamiliar popping sound in the ocean’s depths, and into existence popped a wobbly being with one eye. It was wearing a very fetching top hat tied with a piece of elastic beneath what passed for its chin, just to ensure that its hat didn’t float away, as it was very fond of that hat.

The massive ocean monster, all teeth and gills and eyes and horns and scales, looked at the new arrival, opened its jaws, and prepared to chew, but before it could start chomping, the little hat-wearer shot into its mouth and down its gullet. The monster gave a kind of fishy shrug and swam on, distracted from the peculiar appearance of its latest meal by all of this evil stuff, which sounded just fascinating.

Deep inside the monster’s gut, the gelatinous mass, whose name was Crudford, Esq., began searching through half-digested flesh and bone. It stank something awful in there, but Crudford, cheerful and contented by nature, didn’t mind. In fact, he even whistled a happy tune just to pass the time. Eventually, somewhere in the newly consumed remains of a giant segmented eel, he found what he had been looking for: a small group of atoms that glowed a bright blue. Crudford lifted his hat, the elastic stretching as he did so, and retrieved from the top of his head a glass bottle. The bottle was sealed with a cork, and the blue atoms in the monster’s belly found a