“Go to Hell,” he said, and stamped down hard on the tentacle with his heel.
The demon released its hold on the gate, and was sucked back to the place from which it had come. The portal instantly collapsed to a small pinpoint of blue light, then disappeared entirely.
Samuel knelt by Boswell and cradled the little dog’s head in his arms. A police car pulled up, and people began to emerge from their homes, but Samuel cared only for Boswell.
“Brave Boswell,” he whispered, and despite his pain, Boswell’s tail wagged at the sound of Samuel’s voice speaking his name. “Brave boy.”
Then Samuel looked up at the night sky, and he spoke another name, and his voice was filled with regret, and fondness, and hope.
“Brave Nurd.”
XXXII In Which Everyone Lives Happily Ever After, or So It Seems
IT TOOK A LONG time for Biddlecombe to return to normal. People had died or, like the Abernathys and the Renfields, simply disappeared. For months afterward there were scientists, and television crews, and reporters cluttering up the town and asking all sorts of questions that the townsfolk quickly grew tired of answering. Nutcases, and people with nothing better to do, made journeys to the town to see the place in which, for a time, a gateway between worlds had opened. The problem was that, all damage to people and property aside, and the stories told by those who had encountered the demons, no actual evidence survived of what had occurred, apart from the stone statue of the three old gentlemen with shotguns. There were no physical remains of monsters, and those who had taken cell phone pictures of flying creatures, or who had used video cameras to take shots of demonic entities trampling flowerbeds in the local park, found that there was nothing but static to be seen. Oh, everyone accepted that something had happened in Biddlecombe, but, officially, nobody seemed entirely sure of what that something might have been, not even the scientists responsible for the Large Hadron Collider, who, in the wake of what had occurred, decided that in future they needed to keep a very close eye on their experiments. For now, though, the collider would remain powered off, and Ed and Victor were left to play Battleships in peace, while Professor Hilbert dreamed of traveling to other dimensions, but only ones that didn’t have demons in them.
The collider did have three very special visitors in the weeks that followed. Samuel, Maria, and Tom were treated with a great deal of curiosity and respect as they toured the facility, and they did their best to answer all of the scientists’ questions as politely as possible. Samuel and Maria decided that they quite liked the idea of becoming scientists, although they were pretty certain that, after all they’d seen, they’d be more careful about what they got up to than the CERN people had been.
“I still want to be a professional cricketer,” said Tom after their visit. “At least I can understand cricket. And nobody ever accidentally opened the gates of Hell during a test match…”
Eventually Biddlecombe began to fade from the headlines, and that suited everyone in the town just fine. They wanted their dull, pretty old Biddlecombe back, and that was what they got.
More or less.
Over at Miggin’s Pond, a boy named Robert Oppenheimer was throwing stones at ducks. It wasn’t that he had anything against ducks in particular. Had there been a dog, or a lemur, or a meerkat at which to throw stones instead he would happily have done so, but in the absence of any more exotic creatures, ducks would just have to do.
He had managed to hit a few birds, and was looking for more stones, when he was lifted up into the air by one leg and found himself dangling over the surface of the pond. An eyeball appeared on the end of an arm and, well, eyeballed him. Then a very polite voice said:
“I say, old chap, I do wish you wouldn’t do that. The ducks don’t like it and, frankly, I don’t much care for it either. If you persist, I will have no choice but to disassemble you and put you back together the wrong way. As you can imagine, that will hurt a lot. Do I make myself clear?”
Robert nodded, albeit with some difficulty as he was still upside down. “Yes,” he said. “Perfectly.”
“Now say sorry to the ducks, there’s a good chap.”
“Sorry, ducks,” said Robert.
“Right, then, off you go. Toodle-pip.”
Robert was put back, surprisingly gently, on the bank. He found that all of the ducks were watching him, and quacking. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought that they were laughing.
Over time, other people reported similar odd encounters at Miggin’s Pond, but instead of calling in investigators, or selling tickets, the people of Biddlecombe simply kept quiet about it, and gave Miggin’s Pond a wide berth whenever they could.
In the staff room at Montague Rhodes James Secondary School, Mr. Hume sat staring intently at the head of a pin. During the Halloween disturbances, Mr. Hume had been forced to lock himself in a closet while a band of six-inch-high demons dressed as elves shouted at him through the keyhole. The whole experience had shaken him a great deal, and when he had learned of Samuel Johnson’s involvement in the affair he began to consider that the boy might know something about angels and pins that he didn’t.
So he stared hard at the pin, and wondered.
And on the head of the pin, two angels who had been performing a very nice waltz, surrounded by lots of other waltzing angels, suddenly stopped what they were doing as one turned to the other and said:
“Don’t look now, but that bloke’s back…”
One night, almost a month after the events of Halloween, when everyone was getting ready for December, and Christmas, Samuel was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth. Boswell watched him from the doorway, his leg still encased in plaster but otherwise his clever, contented self. Samuel had just taken a bath, and the mirror was steamed up. He reached out and wiped some of the steam away. He glimpsed his reflection, and, standing behind him, the reflection of another.
It was Mrs. Abernathy.
Samuel looked round in fright. The bathroom was empty, yet Mrs. Abernathy was still visible in the mirror. Her lips moved, speaking words that Samuel could not hear. As he watched, she moved forward. A finger reached out and began to write from behind the glass in the steam of the mirror. When she was finished, there were four words visible. They were:
THIS IS NOT OVER
A blue light flickered in her eyes, and then she was gone.
XXXIII In Which We Bid Farewell to Nurd. For Now.
IN THE GREAT WASTELAND, Wormwood stared at the Aston Martin that had accompanied Nurd back to his kingdom.
“What is it?” asked Wormwood.
“It’s a car,” said Nurd. “It’s called an Aston Martin.”
Nurd was surprised that the car had made it to the Wasteland in one piece, although not as surprised as he was that he himself had done so with only minor injuries. After all, it wasn’t every day that one went the wrong way through an interdimensional portal wearing a blanket and driving a very fast car. He had already decided that if any curious demons asked him how the car had got here, assuming any of them could be bothered to investigate the Wasteland, Hell being a very big place with more interesting areas to explore, he would tell them that it had dropped out of the sky. After all, who would suspect Nurd, that most inept of demons, of being responsible for thwarting the Great Malevolence and his invading army?
“What does it do?” asked Wormwood.
“It moves. It moves very fast.”
“Oh. And we watch it move fast, do we?”
It sounded like fun to Wormwood, although not much fun. Actually, he was quite pleased that Nurd was back. It had been a bit quiet without him, and the throne hadn’t been very comfortable to sit on. Funny, that. For so long Wormwood had desired the throne and then, when he’d had it, it hadn’t been worth desiring after all.