invitation that had landed on their doorstep a few days earlier had contained the magic words
Shan approached the occult field. He suspected that it was dangerous, but he wasn’t entirely sure. To test his theory he pushed Gath against it. There was a buzzing sound, and the back of Gath’s coat disappeared, leaving only a smoking hole where the material had once been.
“Hurh-hurh.” Shan laughed as Gath put out the last of the flames.
“Hurh-hurh.” Gath laughed before grabbing Shan’s right hand and sticking Shan’s index finger into the field. The finger promptly vanished, leaving only a smoking stump in its place.
“Hurh-hurh.” Gath laughed again.
“No, hurh-
He would have wagged his finger disapprovingly at Gath, who always took a joke too far, but he was still waiting for it to grow back. When it had done so, he looked again at the invitation.
“Beer,” he said, and pointed at the shop.
“Beer,” said Gath.
But between them and the beer stood the barrier.
Sometimes in life you have to lose a battle to win a war. Shan dug into one of the pockets of his coat and removed from it a black bottle. The bottle was encased in a titanium frame that kept its cork in place, and the following warning was written on the glass.
THIS BOTTLE CONTAINS ‘SPIGGIT’S OLD RESENTFUL.’ DO NOT OPEN. SERIOUSLY. EVEN CREATING THIS BEER WAS A MISTAKE, BUT ALL ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY IT HAVE PROVED USELESS. IF YOU DO OPEN THIS BOTTLE, YOU AGREE TO GIVE UP ALL RIGHTS TO YOUR HEALTH, AND POSSIBLY YOUR EXISTENCE. BEFORE OPENING, ASK INNOCENT BYSTANDERS TO STAND WELL BACK, OR SUGGEST THAT THEY MOVE TO ANOTHER COUNTRY. DO NOT OPEN NEAR NAKED FLAME. DO NOT SO MUCH AS THINK OF A NAKED FLAME IN YOUR HEAD. DO NOT EVEN SMILE WARMLY. DO NOT INHALE. IF INHALED, SEEK MEDICAL ASSISTANCE WITHIN FIVE SECONDS. IF CONSUMED, SEEK UNDERTAKER.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE: OPEN. RUN AWAY.
Shan and Gath had often looked longingly at the next-to-last remaining bottle of Spiggit’s Old Resentful. It had been developed by Old Mr. Spiggit shortly before people spotted that he was clearly as nutty as a nut-brown squirrel in a nut factory. How bad could Spiggit’s Old Resentful be? Shan and Gath had wondered. The answer was, Probably very bad. Spiggit’s did not issue such warnings lightly. If your regular beer has a biohazard symbol on it, even one with a smiley face, then the special stuff must be lethal.
And so Shan and Gath had long carried the bottles of Spiggit’s Old Resentful around with them, hoping that the day might come when they would have cause to open them. Now, it seemed, that day was upon them.
Shan typed in the seventeen-digit combination on the bottle’s lock, and the titanium cage sprang open. As if sensing that its time was upon it, something rumbled in the glass. Shan looked a bit worried. He looked even more worried as the cork began to remove itself from the bottle under pressure from whatever was inside. Like a man who suddenly finds himself in possession of a live hand grenade, he did the only sensible thing: he handed it to the bloke standing next to him, which in this case was Gath, and began backing away. Gath, meanwhile, might not have been very bright, but he wasn’t entirely stupid. He tossed the bottle straight back to Shan, who caught it and sent it back to Gath, and so a game of Hot Potato continued until Shan saw that there was barely a finger’s width of cork left in the bottle.
He threw the bottle at the occult field. The bottle didn’t pass through but exploded on impact, showering the field with a dark brown liquid that looked like mud and smelled like low tide at a herring factory. Shan’s eyes watered, and his nasal hairs caught fire. Gath fainted.
The occult field didn’t have feelings, exactly. It was just an energy field generated by Hilary Mould’s great engine, aided by the entities with which Hilary Mould had allied himself, but it did have a kind of awareness, for it was alive with dark forces. When the bottle of Spiggit’s Old Resentful hit it and exploded, that awareness kicked into high gear, and the field made a swift decision to put as much distance between it and whatever was in the bottle as quickly as possible. The occult field vanished, retreating to another dimension where even the foulest of creatures had nothing on Spiggit’s Old Resentful.
Shan slapped Gath on the cheeks to bring him back to consciousness. Once the smell had died down to a manageable level, they approached the shattered bottle. All that was left of the Old Resentful was some thick glass, and a large smoking crater in the ground.
Shan and Gath shook their heads sadly, and went to find their free beer.61
58. Do you need me to explain that joke? No? Good.
59. Barry Perry had tortured crowds throughout the north of England for much of his life, taking innocent songs that had never done anyone any harm and murdering them with his kazoo. When he died and found himself in Hell, he also discovered that his kazoo had come with him, if only because someone had shoved it up his bottom before he was buried. Retrieving it from his bottom proved too difficult, though, so his shows in Hell tended to be a bit muffled, which was no bad thing.
60. In case you think this is an odd name for a company, and are wondering how Spiggit’s could manage to create so many different products, let me set your mind at ease: it was all the same product, with varying amounts of water added. Supplies rarely got mixed up, not since the Goat & Artichoke pub had received a delivery of weapons-grade Spiggit’s by mistake. The pub had since been rebuilt, although some pieces of the landlord had still not been found.
61. To return briefly to the subject of famous last words, which arose earlier in connection with Brian the tea boy, it’s a difficult job, coming up with a memorable farewell to life. If death comes unexpectedly, then last words may be something like “Aaaarrrgggggh!,” or “Ouch!,” or “Of course it isn’t loaded,” or “That bridge will easily support my weight.” It’s hard to be clever under pressure. The last words of the writer H. G. Wells were reputed to have been “Go away, I’m all right,” which was unfortunate as he clearly wasn’t. Arguably the worst last words ever spoken came from Dominique Bouhours, an eighteenth-century French essayist, and a big fan of correct grammar, who announced on his deathbed, “I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is correct.” I’ll bet they were glad to see him go.
XXXIV
In Which the Great Size of the Multiverse Is Revealed
THE FIRST THING THAT struck Samuel as he reached the icy-cold top floor was that he had suddenly developed two phobias: acrophobia, a dreadful fear of heights,62 swiftly followed by astrophobia, the fear of space. Samuel had never been frightened of heights before, and he had always been entranced by the immensity of space. He could spend a happy hour lying on his back in the garden at night, Boswell sleeping beside him, just watching the stars and feeling as though he were adrift among them.
But the top floor of Wreckit & Sons was a different matter entirely, in part because there was no longer really a floor there, or a ceiling. The memory of them remained, the faintest outline of boards beneath his feet and plasterwork above his head, but they resembled little more than chalk marks that were slowly being washed away by rain. Even as fear overtook him, Samuel wondered if this was what it was like to be a ghost: perhaps ghosts felt themselves to be real and substantial, and the world around them seemed pale and faded.
Beyond the near-vanished lines of the old store, and the fading shapes of trees, the Multiverse waited. It was a world of light and dark, of stars being born and stars dying, of clusters of swirling galaxies and gaseous columns of nebulae. Samuel could pick out the colors of the stars, shading from the blue of the new to the red of the old. He saw clouds of asteroids, and meteors turning to fire in the atmosphere of unknown worlds, and quasars, the brightest objects in the universe, their light powered by supermassive black holes. He saw universe layered upon universe, like panes of painted glass separated by distances simultaneously great and small. And he himself was both tiny and vast, for all that he saw seemed to revolve around him: he was suspended at the heart
