“You hurt my dog!” he shouted. By now he didn’t know if he was more angry than scared, or more scared than angry. It didn’t matter. He hated the thing before him: hated it for hurting Boswell; hated it for what it had done to the Abernathys and their friends; hated it for what it wanted to do to the whole world. Behind it, the portal was visible, and Samuel could see the Great Malevolence approaching, his army parting before him so that he could lead the legions of darkness into this new kingdom.
Ba’al bent down before Samuel, surrounding him with tentacles, those four limbs poised to finish him off. Its skull opened up once more, breathing its stink upon him as it hissed, and Samuel saw himself reflected in those dark, pitiless orbs.
He threw the half brick straight into its mouth.
It was a perfect shot. The lump of stone landed in the demon’s throat. It was too far down to be spat out, and too big to be swallowed. Ba’al staggered back, black blood and drool dripping from its jaws as it began to choke. Around it, the assembled creatures watching the unequal battle, waiting for the boy to be destroyed, gave a collective gasp of shock. Ba’al tried to reach into its mouth with its tentacles to free the blockage, but the gap was too narrow for them to gain purchase. It collapsed to its knees as smaller demons ran to its aid, climbing up its body in an effort to reach its mouth. Carefully three of them entered its jaws and began working at the brick, trying to free it. Samuel felt hands grasp his arms. Two of the figures in gold armor were securing him, their red eyes glaring as he was held in place. He struggled against them, but they were too strong.
There was a thud, and something landed before him. It was the half brick. Samuel looked up to see Ba’al rising from its knees, and in its eyes he saw his doom.
At that moment, a vintage Aston Martin, driven by a moon-headed figure in a blanket, sped behind Ba’al and disappeared into the portal, leaving behind it only exhaust fumes and a fading, “Good-byyyyyyyyye…”
For a second, nothing happened. Everyone, and everything, simply stared at the portal, unsure of what they had just seen. Flashes of white light appeared at its edges, and the portal, which had been spinning in a clockwise direction, reversed its flow and began to move counterclockwise. There was a sense of suction, as though a vacuum cleaner had just been switched on, but it seemed to affect only the demons, not Samuel. First the smaller ones, then the larger, were lifted from their feet and pulled inexorably into the portal. Some struggled against its force, holding on to lampposts, garden gates, even cars, but the portal began to spin faster and faster, and one by one they found themselves wrenched from one world and back to the next until the portal was filled with a mass of legs and tentacles and claws and jaws, demons bouncing off one another as they were drawn toward the center. Two of them, oddly, were desperately trying to hold on to glasses of beer.
At last, only one remained. The thing that had once been Mrs. Abernathy was heavier and stronger than anything else that had passed into this world, and it did not want to leave. Every limb, and every tentacle, was stretched to its limit, each clinging to something, however insubstantial, in an effort to fight against the force of the portal, which was now spinning so fast that it was nothing more than a blue blur. Finally, it proved too much even for the great demon, until at last only one tentacle remained clinging to the bottom of the garden gate, the rest of the demon’s body suspended in midair, its legs pointing to the void.
Samuel stepped forward. He stared into Ba’al’s eyes, and raised his right foot.
“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?”