“Lots of things: hygiene, for a start. After tasting that sock, I don’t fancy eating any part of you, to be honest, so it’ll have to be the depths of Hell for you, I’m afraid.”
“But I don’t want to go to the depths of Hell.”
“Nobody wants to go to the depths of Hell. I’m a demon, and even I don’t want to go there. That’s the point, isn’t it? If I told you that I was going to take you for a nice holiday, or on a trip to the zoo, it wouldn’t be much of a threat, would it?”
“But why do you have to drag me off to Hell?”
“Orders.”
“Whose orders?”
“Can’t say.”
“Can’t say, or won’t say?”
“Both.”
“Why not?”
“She wouldn’t want me to.”
“Mrs. Abernathy?”
The demon didn’t reply.
“Oh come on, I know it’s her,” said Samuel. “You’ve already given most of it away.”
“Right then,” said the demon. “It’s her. Happy now?”
“Not really. I still don’t want to be dragged off to Hell.”
“Then we have what’s known as an impasse,” said the demon.
“How long can you stay down there?”
“First sign of daylight, then I have to depart. Them’s the rules, just like I can’t get you unless you step on the floor.”
“So if I just stay up here, then you can’t touch me?”
“I just said that, didn’t I? I don’t make the rules. I wish I did. This whole business would run a lot more smoothly, I can tell you.”
“Then I’ll simply stay here.”
“Great. You do that.”
Samuel folded his arms and stared at the far wall. From under the bed, he heard what sounded like tentacles being folded. Lots of tentacles.
“Not much point in you hanging around, though, is there, if I’m not going to set foot on the floor until you’re gone,” said Samuel.
The demon thought about this. “Suppose not,” it said.
“So why don’t you just leave? It can’t be very comfortable under there.”
“It’s not. Smells funny, too. And there’s something poking into me.”
Samuel heard scuffling from beneath the bed, and moments later a stray toy soldier was tossed against the wardrobe. “You don’t even want to know where that was,” said the demon.
“Whatever,” said Samuel. “Are you going to leave?”
“Not much else I can do, really,” said the demon, “not if you’re going to be difficult about it.”
“Off you go, then,” said Samuel.
“Right. Bye.”
There was a great deal of squelching, then silence.
“You’re still under there, aren’t you?” said Samuel.
“No,” said a small voice, slightly ashamedly.
“Fibber.”
“Fine, I’ll go. Don’t know what I’m supposed to tell her, though.”
“Don’t tell her anything. Just keep a low profile until dawn, then say that I didn’t get up during the night.”
“Might work,” said the demon. “Might work. You promise not to get up to use the bathroom or anything?”
“Cross my heart,” said Samuel.
“Can’t ask for more than that,” said the demon. “Well, pleasure doing business with you. Nothing personal about all this, you know. Just following orders.”
“You’re not going to come back, are you?”
“Oh no, I shouldn’t think so. Took a lot of power for her to summon me up. Can’t imagine she’ll try that one again. She has a lot on her mind, what with keeping the portal open and all. Very unstable, that portal. Someone could do themselves an injury in there if they’re not careful. She might look for another way to get at you, though. Then again she might not. Soon, it won’t matter much either way.”
“Why not?” said Samuel.
“End of the world,” said the demon. “Won’t be any beds left to hide under.”
And with a squish and a pop, it was gone.
XI In Which We Encounter the Scientists Again
NO GOOD EVER COMES of someone sticking his head round his boss’s door, a worried expression on his face and a piece of paper in one hand that, if it could talk, would shout, very loudly, “Bad! This is bad! Run away now!”
But thus it was that when Professor Stefan, CERN’s head of particle physics, saw Professor Hilbert hovering on his doorstep, with both a) a worried expression; and b) a piece of paper that, despite being white and bearing only a series of numbers and a small diagram, also managed to look worried, he began to feel worried too.
“What is it, Hilbert?” said Professor Stefan in the tone of one who would rather not know what “it” is at all, thank you very much.
“It’s the portal,” said Professor Hilbert. He had always liked the sound of that word, which fit in with his theories of the universe. Anyway, since they still didn’t know for certain what it was, he could call it anything he liked.
“So you’ve found out what it is?”
“No, not exactly.”
“Do you know if it’s ongoing?”
“We’re not sure.”
“Have you even found out if that’s actually what opened?”
“Oh, we know it opened,” said Professor Hilbert. “That part’s easy.”
“So you’ve proved that it exists.”
Professor Stefan liked things to be proved before he accepted the fact of their existence. This made him a good scientist, if not a very imaginative one.
“Er, no. But we strongly suspect that it exists. A portal has been opened, and it hasn’t closed, not entirely.”
“How do you know, if you can’t find it?”
A smile of immense satisfaction appeared on Professor Hilbert’s face.
“Because we can hear it speak,” he said.
If you listen hard enough, there’s almost no such thing as silence: there’s just noise that isn’t very loud yet. Oh yes, in space no one can hear you scream, or blow up a big spaceship, because space is a vacuum, and sound can’t travel in a vacuum (although think how dull most science fiction films would be if there were no explosions, so pay no attention to grumps who criticize Star Wars because you can hear the Death Star explode at the end-spoilsports) but otherwise there is noise all around us, even if we can’t hear it terribly well. But noises aren’t the same as sounds: noises are random and disorganized, but sounds are made.
Deep in the LHC’s command center, a group of scientists was clustered around a screen. The screen displayed a visual representation of what had occurred on the night that the collider had apparently malfunctioned. The scientists had painstakingly re-created the circumstances of that evening, restoring lost and rewritten code, and had attempted to trace, without success, the trajectory of the unknown energy particle, which now expressed itself as a slowly revolving spiral.
“So this is what you think happened to our collider,” said Stefan.
“It’s still happening,” said Hilbert.
“What? But we’ve shut down the collider.”
“I know, but I suppose you could say that the damage, if that’s what it is, has been done. I think-and I stress ‘think’- that, somehow, enough energy was harnessed from the collider to blow a hole between our world and, for want of a better term, somewhere else. When we shut down the collider, we took away that energy source. The portal collapsed, but not entirely. There’s a pinhole where there used to be a tunnel, but it’s there nonetheless. Listen.”
Beside the screen was a speaker, currently emitting what sounded like static.
“It’s static,” said Professor Stefan. “I don’t hear anything.”
The static whooshed slightly, its pattern changing as though in response to the professor’s words.
“We wanted you to hear the signal before we cleaned it up,” explained Hilbert.
“Signal?” said Stefan.
“Actually a voice,” said Hilbert, flipping a switch, and instantly the static was replaced by something that Professor Stefan had to admit sounded a great deal like a low voice whispering. The professor didn’t like the sound of that voice at all, even if he had no idea what it was saying. It was like listening to the mutterings of a madman in a foreign tongue, someone who had spent too long locked in a dark place feeling angry with all those responsible for putting him there. It gave the professor, who was, as we have already established, not an imaginative man, a distinct case of the collywobbles. Its effect on the other listeners was less disturbing. Most of them looked excited. In fact, Dr. Carruthers appeared to be having trouble keeping his tea cup from rattling against its saucer, his excitement was so great.