“Now what are we supposed to do?” asked Samuel.
If Boswell could have shrugged, he would have.
The doorbell rang at number 666. It was Mrs. Abernathy who answered. Standing before her was the postman, holding a large parcel. He wasn’t the usual postman, who was on holiday in Spain, and he had never seen Mrs. Abernathy before, but he thought she was very good looking.
“Parcel for Mr. Abernathy,” he said.
“That would be my”-Mrs. Abernathy, unused to talking to someone who wasn’t another demon, had to think for a moment-“husband,” she finished. “He’s not here at the moment.”
“No problem. You can sign for it.”
He handed Mrs. Abernathy a pen, and a form on a clipboard. Mrs. Abernathy looked confused.
“Just sign, er, there,” said the postman, pointing to a line at the bottom of the form.
“I don’t seem to have my glasses,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “Would you mind stepping inside for a moment while I look for them?”
“It’s just a signature,” said the postman. “On a line. That line.” Once again, he pointed helpfully at the line in question.
“I don’t like signing anything that I haven’t read,” said Mrs. Abernathy.
It takes all sorts, thought the postman. “Right you are, then, ma’am. I’ll wait here while you look for your glasses.”
“Oh, please, come inside. I insist. It’s so cold out, and it may take me a moment or two to find them.” She moved farther into the house, still holding the clipboard. The clipboard was very important to the postman. It contained details of all of the parcels and registered letters that he had delivered that day, and he wasn’t supposed to let it out of his sight. Reluctantly he followed Mrs. Abernathy into the house. He noticed that the blinds and curtains were drawn in the rooms adjoining the hall, and there was a funny smell, like rotten eggs and recently struck matches.
“Bit dark in here,” he said.
“Really?” said Mrs. Abernathy. “I happen to like it this way.”
And the postman noticed, for the first time, that there seemed to be a blue glow to Mrs. Abernathy’s eyes.
The door closed behind him.
But Mrs. Abernathy was in front of him, so who could have closed it?
He was turning to find out when a tentacle curled itself round his neck and lifted him off the floor. The postman tried to say something, but the tentacle was very tight. He had a brief glimpse of a huge mouth, and some big teeth, and then everything went dark forever.
Humans were puny, thought Mrs. Abernathy. She had been sent to find out their strengths and weaknesses, but already she could tell that the latter far outweighed the former.
On the other hand, they didn’t taste bad at all.
Mrs. Abernathy licked her lips and went into the dining room, where the curtains were drawn. Three figures sat upon chairs, doing nothing in particular apart from smelling funny. Mr. Abernathy and the Renfields were starting to turn an ugly shade of purple, like meat that was going bad, and their fingernails had begun to drop off. That was the trouble with destroying the life force of another being, and taking on its shape. It was like opening a banana, throwing away the fruit, and then sewing up the skin in the hope that it would continue to look like a banana. It would, but only for a while, and then it would start turning black.
“I’m concerned about the boy,” said Mrs. Abernathy.
Her husband looked at her. His eyes were milky.
“Why?” he asked, his voice little more than a croak as his vocal cords began to decay. “He’s just a child.”
“He will talk.”
“Nobody will believe him.”
“Somebody might.”
“And if they do? We are more powerful than they can ever be.”
Mrs. Abernathy snorted in disgust. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” she said. “The only powerful thing about you is your smell.”
She shook her head and walked away. That was the problem with lower demons: they had no cunning, and no imagination.
Mrs. Abernathy was of the highest order of demons, only a level below the Great Malevolence himself. She had knowledge of humans, for the Great Malevolence had spoken of them to her, and with him she had watched them from afar, as if through a dark window. What he saw fed his hatred and jealousy. He rejoiced when men and women did bad things, and howled with rage when they did good. He wanted to reduce their world to rubble and scarred earth, and destroy every living thing in it that walked, crawled, swam, or flew. It was Mrs. Abernathy who would pave the way for him. The Great Malevolence, and the humans’ machine with its beams and particles, would do the rest.
But there remained the problem of the boy. Children were dangerous, Mrs. Abernathy knew, more so than adults. They believed in things like right and wrong, good and evil. They were persistent. They interfered.
First she would find out what Samuel Johnson knew. If he had been a naughty little boy, one who had been sticking his nose in where he had no business sticking it, he would have to be dealt with.
IX In Which We Learn a Little About the Gates of Hell, None of Which Is Entirely Helpful
AFTER HIS MOTHER LEFT to do her shopping, Samuel spent some time at the kitchen table, his chin cupped in his hands, considering his options. He knew that Mrs. Abernathy, or the entity that now occupied her body, was up to no good, but he was facing a problem encountered by young people the world over: how to convince adults that you were telling the truth about something in which they just did not want to believe.
His mother had told him not to play computer games, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use his computer at all. With Boswell at his heels, Samuel went up to his bedroom, sat at his desk, and began to search the internet. He decided to start with what he knew for certain, so he typed “gates of Hell” into the search engine.
The first reference that came up was to a huge bronze sculpture entitled La Porte de l’Enfer, which in English means The Gate of Hell, by an artist named Auguste Rodin. Apparently, Rodin was asked to create the sculpture in 1880, and promised to deliver it by 1885. Instead Rodin had still been working on it when he died in 1917. Samuel did a small calculation and discovered that Rodin had been thirty-two years late in delivering the sculpture. He wondered if Rodin might have been related to Mr. Armitage, their local painter, who had been supposed to paint their living room and dining room over a single weekend and had in fact taken six months to do it, and even then had left one wall and part of the ceiling unfinished. Samuel’s father and Mr. Armitage had had a big argument about it when they met in the street. “It’s not the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Mr. Armitage had said. “I’ll get round to it when I can. You’ll want me flat on my back painting angels next.” [16]
Samuel’s father had suggested that if Mr. Armitage had been asked to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he would have taken twenty years instead of four, and still would have left God without a beard. At that point, Mr. Armitage had said a rude word and walked away, and Samuel’s father had ended up finishing the ceiling and wall himself.
Badly.
Anyway, while Rodin’s gates looked very impressive, they didn’t seem to have a blue light around them, and Samuel read that they had been inspired by a writer named Dante, and his book The Divine Comedy. Samuel suspected that neither Dante nor Rodin had ever really seen the gates of Hell, and had just taken a guess. [17]
After that, Samuel found some dodgy heavy-metal groups who either had songs named after the gates of Hell, or simply liked putting images of demons on their album covers in order to make themselves seem more terrifying than they really were, since most of them were just hairy chaps from nice families who had spent too much time alone in their bedrooms as teenagers. Samuel did discover that the Romans and Greeks believed the gates were guarded by a three-headed dog called Cerberus, who made sure that nobody who entered could ever leave, but they also believed a boatman took dead people across the River Styx, and Samuel had seen no sign of a river in the Abernathys’ basement.
[16] The artist Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome between 1508 and 1512. He had to use scaffolding to do it, but because the ceiling was so high he couldn’t build the scaffolding from the floor up, so instead he made a special flat wooden platform that hung from bolts beside the windows. Painting the ceiling was a very uncomfortable business, as you can probably imagine, but it’s a myth that Michelangelo had to lie flat on his back to do it. Instead he stood upright, with his head bent back, for four years. By the end of it, he was so sore that he wrote a poem about the experience:
I’VE grown a goiter by dwelling in this den-
As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy,
Or in what other land they hap to be-
Which drives the belly close beneath the chin:
My beard turns up to heaven; my nape falls in
Fixed on my spine: my breastbone visibly
Grows like a harp: a rich embroidery
Bedews my face from brush drips, thick and thin…
And so it goes on for a few more verses, which can be summarized basically as “Owww…”
[17] The Divine Comedy is not funny, but it’s not supposed to be, despite its name. In Dante’s time, a comedy meant a work that reflected a belief in an ordered universe. Also, serious books were written in Latin, and Dante wrote in a new language: Italian. Some of Shakespeare’s comedies are funny, though, but not if you’re being forced to study them in school. In school, everything Shakespeare wrote starts to seem like a tragedy, even the ones that aren’t tragedies, which is a bit unfortunate, but that’s just because of the way they’re taught. Stick with them. In later life, people will be impressed that you can quote Shakespeare, and you will sound very intelligent. It’s harder to quote trigonometry, or quadratic equations, and not half as romantic.