The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

XVIII

In Which Crudford Proves to Be the Smartest Gelatinous Blob in the Room

THE GREAT MALEVOLENCE, THE Watcher by his side, had been spending a very long time staring at the bits and pieces of what had once been Ba’al, the most fearsome of its allies, its second-in-command, its left-hand demon, and considering the problem presented by them.

It had seemed like such a good idea to allow Ba’al to travel to Earth, exploiting the gap in space and time created by the experiments with the Large Hadron Collider. Ba’al was an entity of pure awfulness, but Ba’al was also completely loyal to the Great Malevolence, and there weren’t many beings in Hell who could be trusted entirely. This was one of the problems with running a business based entirely around evil, destructiveness, and rage. It attracted bad sorts.

Unfortunately, the successful planning of the invasion of Earth had required Ba’al to take on human form, and the particular human form that Ba’al had chosen to inhabit was that of Mrs. Abernathy. But Mrs. Abernathy had turned out (a) to have a strong personality of her own; and (b) to be horrible even before she became possessed by a demon. And so the personalities of Ba’al and Mrs. Abernathy had become mixed up in one body, and much of Mrs. Abernathy had come out on top. This had left the Great Malevolence with a demonic lieutenant who liked to dress up in a lady’s skin and clothing. Ba’al didn’t even like being called Ba’al anymore. It was “Mrs. Abernathy” or nothing. Not that this was a huge problem, but it was unusual.

The Great Malevolence missed Ba’al—sorry, Mrs. Abernathy. It wasn’t as though they had ever played draughts or tiddlywinks or Twister together, or gone for long walks with a picnic at the end. No, it was simply that, without her, the whole business of trying to take over the Multiverse was a lot harder, and the Great Malevolence, in addition to being great and malevolent, was also more than a little lazy. It came with being in charge: if you can find someone else to do the hard work, then why would you do it yourself?

But now all that was left of Mrs. Abernathy were various body parts in jars, and those body parts weren’t doing much at all. Quite often, when it came to the residents of Hell, you could disassemble them into all kinds of small pieces, and each bit would do its best to continue being evil. Fingers would crawl across floors and try to poke the nearest eye; jawbones would try to bite; and intestines would slither like snakes and coil themselves around the nearest neck. Really, there was never a dull moment in Hell when it came to tearing things apart.

“Why does she not react more strongly?” asked the Great Malevolence. “Why does this chamber not vibrate with the force of her evil?”

If Crudford could have shrugged, then he would have. Instead, he lifted his hat and scratched his head in puzzlement. He scratched slightly too hard, though, and his fingers appeared inside his head somewhere behind his eyeball. He pulled them out, thought about wiping them clean, and decided, well, why bother? Slowly, he examined each jar in turn, taking note of its contents on a small notepad that he kept in his hat. When he had finished, he went to work on his notepad. He scribbled and drew. He crossed things out, and did a lot of sucking on his pencil. The Watcher tried to peer over his shoulder to see what was being produced, but Crudford shielded the notepad from view like a small boy worried that his homework was about to be copied by the student next to him.

Eventually, after an hour had gone by, and two pencils had been worn down to almost nothing, Crudford was finished.

“I think I may have the answer,” he said.

“We are waiting,” said the Great Malevolence. It came with the unspoken warning: This had better be good.

Crudford turned the notepad to face the Great Malevolence. This is what it contained:

The Great Malevolence looked at the drawing. It then looked at the Watcher. The Watcher shrugged because, unlike Crudford, it could. The Great Malevolence, having nowhere else left to look, looked at Crudford and thought about the many ways in which it could reduce a gelatinous mass to lots of much smaller pieces of jelly.

“It is,” said the Great Malevolence, “a picture of a lady. It is not even a very good picture of a lady.”

Everyone, thought Crudford, is a critic.

“It’s not just a lady,” said Crudford. “It’s Mrs. Abernathy. But see here—”

Crudford pointed at the question mark beside the heart shape.

“The heart is missing.”

The Great Malevolence considered this.

“Ba’al does not have a heart,” it said. “No creature in Hell has a heart. Hearts are not needed.”

“But Ba’al isn’t Ba’al any longer, not really,” said Crudford. “Ba’al is Mrs. Abernathy, and Mrs. Abernathy is Ba’al, and Mrs. Abernathy has a heart because Mrs. Abernathy is, or was, human. Those jars contain bits of every organ in the human body except the heart. The heart is missing. All of it.”

“But what is the heart pumping?” said the Great Malevolence. “Not blood, for Mrs. Abernathy’s body died the moment that Ba’al took it over.”

“I’m just guessing,” said Crudford, “but I’d say that it’s pumping pure evil. What we’re looking for is a big, black, rotten heart-shaped thingy filled with nastiness.”

“Then where is it?” asked the Great Malevolence.

“That,” said Crudford, “is a very good question.”

• • •

Crudford wandered the halls of the Mountain of Despair, alone with his thoughts. Wandered probably wasn’t the right word, strictly speaking: slimed, oozed, or smeared might be closer to the mark, but if Crudford had said that he was just off to slime around the halls for a while, then he would probably have been advised to take his gelatinous self elsewhere, or someone would have been following him with a mop and a bucket.

His search of the Multiverse for bits of Mrs. Abernathy had not been entirely random. He had been able to narrow it down to specific universes, or corners of them, either because he could smell Mrs. Abernathy, or his keen eyesight had been able to pick out the blue atoms in the darkness. There were only two places he had not explored: the Kingdom of Shadows, and Earth.

He had not entered the Kingdom of Shadows because to do so would have been the end of him: the Shadows had no loyalty to the Great Malevolence, and would have snuffed out Hell itself if they could. He had stayed away from Earth simply because he had detected no sign of Mrs. Abernathy there, but now he began to wonder if he might not have been mistaken. Just because he could pick up no trace of her did not mean that she was not there, and it was only recently that he had begun to detect the telltale beating of her heart. Mrs. Abernathy was cunning and wicked. Her dark heart, he realized, must be filled with hatred. And what or, more correctly, who did she hate more than anything else in the Multiverse?

Samuel Johnson.

Crudford snapped his fingers. A small blob of gloop was flicked away by the action and landed on something in the darkness.

“Hey!” said the something.

“Sorry,” said Crudford.

Could it be true? There was only one way to find out.

XXIX

In Which Efforts Are Made to Console Constable Peel

A QUESTION THAT IS SOMETIMES asked by human beings is why bad things happen to good people. It doesn’t seem entirely fair that folk who try to make the world a better, nicer place, who don’t go around scowling at puppies or frightening kittens, or trying to set someone’s shoes on fire when he’s asleep, should suddenly find themselves having a run of bad luck including, but not limited to, feeling a bit poorly, running out of money, having