He tried “doors of Hell,” but didn’t have any more luck. Finally, he just typed in “Hell,” and came up with lots of stuff. Some religions thought that Hell was hot and fiery, and others thought it was cold and gloomy. Samuel didn’t think any of them could know for certain, since by the time someone found out the truth he would be dead and the information would probably be too late to be useful. What he did find interesting was that most of the world’s religions believed in Hell, even if they didn’t always call it that, and lots of them had names for whatever they felt ruled over it: Satan, Yanluo Wang, Yamaraj. The one thing on which everyone seemed to agree was that Hell wasn’t a very pleasant place, and was not somewhere that you wanted to end up.
After an hour, Samuel stopped searching. He was frustrated. He wanted answers. He wanted to know what to do next.
He wanted to stop Mrs. Abernathy before she opened the gates.
Samuel’s mother was trying to work out if two small cans of baked beans were better value than one big can when a figure appeared beside her. It was Mrs. Abernathy.
“Hello, Mrs. Johnson,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “How lovely to see you.”
Mrs. Johnson didn’t know why exactly it was lovely for Mrs. Abernathy to see her. She and Mrs. Abernathy barely knew each other, and had never exchanged more than a polite hello in the past. [18]
“Well, it’s lovely to see you too,” Mrs. Johnson lied. Something about Mrs. Abernathy was making her uneasy. In fact, now that she thought about it, there were lots of things not quite right about the woman standing next to her. She was wearing a lovely black velvet overcoat, which was far too nice to wear for shopping, unless you were shopping for an even lovelier black overcoat and wanted to impress the salesperson. Her skin, although very pale, paler than Mrs. Johnson remembered from their previous brief meetings, had a bluish tinge to it, and the veins beneath her skin were more obvious than before. Her eyes too were very blue. They seemed to burn with a faint flame, like a gas fire. Mrs. Abernathy was wearing lots of strong perfume, but she still smelled a little funny, and not in a ho-ho way.
As Mrs. Johnson looked at Mrs. Abernathy, and inhaled her perfume, she felt herself becoming sleepy. Those eyes drew her in, and the fire within them grew more intense.
“How is your delightful son?” Mrs. Abernathy asked. “Samuel, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, who couldn’t remember anyone calling Samuel “delightful” before. “Samuel.”
“I was wondering if he ever mentioned me to you?”
Mrs. Johnson heard the words emerge from her mouth before she was even aware that she was thinking them.
“Why, yes,” she said. “He was talking about you only this morning.”
Mrs. Abernathy smiled, but the smile died somewhere around her nostrils.
“And what did he say?”
“He seemed to think…”
“Yes?”
“… that you were trying…”
“Go on.”
“… to open…”
By now, Mrs. Abernathy was leaning in very close to Mrs. Johnson. Mrs. Abernathy’s breath stank, and her teeth were yellow. Her lipstick was bright red, and slightly smeared. In fact, thought Mrs. Johnson, it looked a little like blood. Mrs. Abernathy’s tongue flicked out, and for just a moment, Mrs. Johnson could have sworn that it was forked, like a snake’s tongue.
“… gates…”
“What gates?” said Mrs. Abernathy. “What gates?” Her hand reached for Mrs. Johnson, gripping her shoulder. Her nails dug into Mrs. Johnson’s arm, causing her to wince.
The pain was enough to bring Mrs. Johnson out of her daze. She took a step back, and blinked. When she opened her eyes, Mrs. Abernathy was standing farther away from her, a strange, troubled look on her face.
Try as she might, Mrs. Johnson couldn’t remember what it was they had been talking about. Something about Samuel, she thought, but what?
“Are you all right, Mrs. Johnson?” asked Mrs. Abernathy. “You look a little unwell.”
“No, I’m fine,” said Mrs. Johnson, although she didn’t feel fine. She could still smell Mrs. Abernathy’s perfume and, worse, whatever it was the perfume was being used to disguise. She wanted Mrs. Abernathy to go away. In fact, she felt that it was very important for her to stay as far from Mrs. Abernathy as possible.
“Well, take care,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “It was nice talking to you. We should do it more often.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, meaning, “No.”
No, no, no, no, no.
When she arrived home Samuel was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing on a sheet of paper, using crayons. He hid it away when she entered, but she glimpsed a blue circle. Samuel looked at her with concern.
“Are you okay, Mum?”
“Yes, dear. Why?”
“You look sick.”
Mrs. Johnson glanced in the mirror by the sink.
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.” She turned to Samuel. “I met-,” she began to say, then stopped. She couldn’t remember who she had met. A woman? Yes, a woman, but the name wouldn’t come to her. Then she wasn’t certain that it had been a woman at all, and seconds later she wasn’t sure she’d met anyone. It was as though her brain were a big house, and someone was turning off the lights in every room, one by one.
“Met who, Mum?” asked Samuel.
“I… don’t know,” said Mrs. Johnson. “I think I’m going to lie down for a while.”
Mrs. Johnson was beginning to wonder if she might not be coming down with something. The day before, she could have sworn that she’d heard a voice coming from the cupboard beneath the stairs, just as she was putting away the vacuum cleaner on the way out to meet her friends.
She left the kitchen and Samuel heard her go upstairs. When he went to check on her minutes later, his mother was already asleep. Her lips were moving, and Samuel thought she might have been having bad dreams. He wondered if he should call one of her friends, maybe Auntie Betty from up the road, then decided that he would just keep a close eye on his mother. He would let her sleep for now.
Samuel went back downstairs, and finished his drawing. He worked very slowly and carefully, trying to capture exactly what he had seen in the Abernathys’ basement. It was the third such drawing he had done. He had thrown the first two away because they weren’t quite accurate, but this one was better. It was nearly right, or as close to it as he was going to get. From a distance it looked more like a photograph than a drawing, for if there was one thing that Samuel was good at, it was art.
When he was done, he hid it carefully in his big atlas. He would show it to someone. He just had to decide who that someone should be.
Mrs. Johnson didn’t get up until later that evening. Samuel stayed downstairs and watched television, reckoning that his mum wouldn’t mind, despite what she had said earlier. After a time, he got bored and did something else that he wasn’t supposed to do.
He went out to the garage at the back of the house to sit in his dad’s car.
The 1961 Aston Martin DB4 Coupe was his dad’s pride and joy, and Samuel had been for only a handful of trips in it before his dad left, and even then his dad had seemed to resent Samuel’s presence slightly, like a child forced to allow another child to play with his favorite toy. Because his dad was living in an apartment in the north, with no garage, he had decided to leave the car in Biddlecombe for now. In a way Samuel was pleased, because he believed that meant his dad might return home at some point. If he took the car away permanently, though, there would be nothing of him left. It would be a sign, thought Samuel, a sign that the marriage was over and it was now just Samuel and his mum.
[18] Adults say lots of things that they don’t quite mean, usually just to be polite, which is no bad thing. They also say things that are exactly the opposite of what they appear to mean, such as:
1. “To be perfectly honest…,” which means, “I am lying through my teeth.”
2. “I hear what you’re saying…,” which means, “I hear it, but I’m not really listening, and I don’t agree with you anyway.”
and
3. “I don’t mean to be rude…,” which means, “I mean to be rude.”
There are some people who use phrases like this more often than anyone else, and who become very good at using them to avoid answering questions or telling the entire truth. These people are known as “politicians.”