The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

kind of reflection in a similar, but larger, cluster already contained inside. Crudford removed the cork and carefully added the new atoms to the old before resealing the bottle and placing it safely under his hat. His jellied features split into a deep smile, and he patted his hat happily.

“There you are, Mrs. Abernathy,” he said. “We’ll have all those bits of you back together again in no time.”

With that, he popped out of existence again, and the huge sea creature that had recently swallowed him forgot all about being evil and simply went back to eating things, which was probably for the best.

• • •

There were many advantages to being an entity composed entirely of transparent jelly. Actually, there weren’t, but Crudford, Esq., who was a creature of boundless optimism, tried to find the bright side of any situation, even his own, which was very unbright. Looked at from the outside, he appeared to be on the same level as slime,⁹ and in possession of only a single hat. But in Crudford’s own mind he was a sluglike object on the rise, a wobbling thingummy on the way to greater things. Someday, an opportunity would present itself, and there would be only one gelatinous demon for the job: Crudford, Esq.

Amazingly enough, that day had come when Mrs. Abernathy, the left-hand demon of the Great Malevolence, the most evil being in the Multiverse, had suddenly found herself with each of the billions and billions of individual atoms that made up her body separated from its neighbors and scattered through the Multiverse, all because she had messed with Samuel Johnson, his dog, two policemen, four elves, and an ice-cream salesman.¹⁰ Oh, and four of her own demons, including Nurd the Scourge of Five Deities, who everyone had thought so useless at being a demon that even Crudford was more terrifying than him.

Crudford imagined that being blown apart at the atomic level must have hurt a lot. Unfortunately for Mrs. Abernathy, as Crudford had come to realize, she hadn’t just been blown apart at the atomic level: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that made up her atoms had also become separated from one another, and then the particles within the protons and neutrons, known as quarks, had been scattered for good measure. There were three quarks within each proton and neutron, bound together by other particles called gluons, and all of those various bits and pieces were now scattered throughout the Multiverse. Being blown apart on the subatomic level must have hurt an awful, awful lot, thought Crudford. Still, look on the bright side: at least Mrs. Abernathy was seeing new places.

But cometh the hour, cometh the congealed, hat-wearing jelly being.¹¹ It turned out that Crudford had always been very good at squeezing into small spaces, and oozing through tiny holes. No one in Hell was entirely sure what Crudford was made from, exactly, but it was remarkable stuff, and there was no other creature remotely like him in that awful place.

And Crudford couldn’t just squeeze through cracks in rocks and wood and metal: no, Crudford could ooze through the rips and tears in universes, the holes and flaws between dimensions. It made him the perfect candidate to search for, and gather up, Mrs. Abernathys’s quarks and gluons and occasional reconstituted atoms so that the process of putting her back together again could begin. At last, Crudford had found his purpose. The re-creation of Mrs. Abernathy was his responsibility, and his alone. He was searching for subatomic needles in the universal haystacks of the Multiverse, and he loved it.

He could even explore those spaces between universes, although Crudford didn’t like hanging about there for long. Like everyone else in Hell, he had always felt that the Great Malevolence, the foulest, most vile entity imaginable—but probably a lovely demon once you got to know it, Crudford tried to believe—was the cherry on the cake when it came to beings of which one ought to be frightened.

But Crudford had come to learn that there were things in the gaps between universes that made the Great Malevolence look like a small flowery unicorn that pooed fairy dust. At least you knew where you stood with the Great Malevolence. Admittedly, that was on the edge of an infinite fiery pit or a cold, bottomless lake of ice, into either of which the Great Malevolence might plunge you if the mood took it, but there was no mystery about the old GM: it hated everything that breathed, especially everything that breathed on Earth, and ultimately it wanted to torment the living for eternity and turn the Multiverse into a realm of ash and fire. Fair enough, thought Crudford. Aim high. Everybody needs an ambition.

But between universes there were entities that didn’t feel anything at all, not even hatred. They had no form, and barely a consciousness. They existed only to bring about nonexistence. They put the “thing” in “nothing.” When Crudford came close to their nonkingdoms, he was aware of their nonattention coming to rest upon him, their complete and utter uncaringness, and even his relentless optimism would start to flag somewhat.

But the worst of the unknowable entities dwelt in the Kingdom of Shadows. They had taken the concept of nothingness—the aching absence of absolute emptiness—and added one simple ingredient to the mix.

Darkness.

And not just any old Darkness either, but a dense, suffocating blackness that coated the body and the mind and the soul, a Darkness like eternal drowning, a Darkness from which all hope of light had fled because it came from a place in which light had never been known. Even calling the place in which they lurked the “Kingdom of Shadows” was a kind of mistake because real shadows required light to form. The Great Malevolence, who had seen so much and recorded it all, had shown Crudford the fate of universes invaded by the Darkness, and it had always begun with shadows where no shadows should have been.

So Crudford moved carefully through the spaces between universes, and he watched every shadow. He listened, too, for Crudford could hear the rips widening in the fabric of space and time, just as he could see the light through the new gaps. Now, as he moved through the Multiverse to return to Hell with his shiny blue prizes, he became aware of a rhythmic, pulsing sound coming from somewhere distant. It was familiar to him.

It was a heartbeat.

Crudford’s senses were so keen that he could tell the beating of one heart from another, for each heart had its own unique beat. But this was a very special heart. He alone, sensitive beyond any other demon, had heard its secret rhythm in Hell. It was a human heart through which no blood flowed, only malice.

Somewhere in the Multiverse, Mrs. Abernathy’s heart was beating.

9. Which was probably to be expected, given that the slime was usually his own. “I’ve produced more slime, sludge, glop, gunk, mucus, and mire than you’ve had hot dinners,” he would boast proudly to anyone who might listen. Which would usually be enough to put someone about to sit down to a hot dinner right off the idea.

10. An adventure described in The Infernals, available from all good bookshops and some bad ones. If you haven’t read it, please find a copy and turn to the second footnote in Chapter One, which will wag a finger disapprovingly at you for picking up the later books in a series without first reading the earlier ones.

11. See what I did there?

IV

In Which We Go Shopping, and Rather Wish That We Hadn’t

LET’S DRIFT BACK THROUGH Biddlecombe on this cold dark night, drift like smoke.

Like Shadows.

Wreckit & Sons had once been the largest shop in Biddlecombe. It sold almost everything that anyone could possibly want: pins and pots, breadbaskets and bicycles, televisions and tea trays. It was four stories tall, took up an entire block of the town’s center, and its shelves stretched for miles and miles. Its basement was so huge and poorly lit that a man named Ernest Tuttle had once got lost there while trying to buy a tennis racket and a socket wrench, and promptly vanished. His ghost—a pale, moaning figure—was said to haunt the store, until it was discovered that it was not, in fact, Ernest Tuttle’s ghost but Ernest Tuttle himself. He had spent two years trying to find a way out, and couldn’t understand why people kept running away from him. When they pointed out that he was pale and moaning, he replied that they’d be pale, too, if they’d been trapped in a basement for two years living only on rice cakes, and they’d probably moan a bit as well. His feet hurt, he told reporters, and he believed that the mice had adopted him as their king. He still hadn’t managed to find a tennis racket or a socket wrench either.

The store was another of Hilary Mould’s buildings, but it wasn’t quite as offensively awful as the others.