First Among Sequels

28. The Discreet Charm of the Outland

The stupidity surplus had been beaten into second place by the news that the militant wing of the no-choice movement had been causing trouble in Manchester. Windows were broken, cars overturned, and there were at least a dozen arrests. With a nation driven by the concept of choice, a growing faction of citizens who thought life was simpler when options were limited had banded themselves together into what they called the “no-choicers” and demanded the choice to have no choice. Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste condemned the violence but explained that the choice of choice over “just better services” was something the previous administration had chosen and was thus itself a no-choice principle for the current administration. Alfredo Traficcone, MP, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, was quick to jump on the bandwagon, proclaiming that it was the inalienable right of all citizens to have the choice over whether they have choice or not. The no-choicers had suggested that there should be a referendum to settle the matter once and for all, something that the opposition “choice” faction had no option but to agree with. More sinisterly, the militant wing known only as NOPTION was keen to go further and demanded that there should be only one option on the ballot paper-the no-choice one.

It was eight-thirty, and the girls had already gone to school.

“Jenny didn’t eat her toast again,” I said, setting the plate with its uneaten contents next to the sink. “That girl hardly eats a thing.”

“Leave it outside Friday’s door,” said Landen. “He can have it for lunch when he gets up-if he gets up.”

The front doorbell had rung, and I checked on who it might be through the front-room windows before opening the door to reveal…Friday. The other Friday.

“Hello!” I said cheerily. “Would you like to come in?”

“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” he replied. “I just wondered whether you’d thought about my offer of replacement yesterday. Hi, Dad!”

Landen had joined us at the door. “Hello, son.”

“This,” I said by way of introduction, “is the Friday I was telling you about-the one we were supposed to have.”

“At your ser vice,” said Friday politely. “And your answer? I’m sorry to push you on this, but time travel has still to be invented and we have to look very carefully at our options.”

Landen and I glanced at each other. We’d already made up our mind.

“The answer’s no, Sweetpea. We’re going to keep our Friday.”

Friday’s face fell, and he glared at us. “This is so typical of you. Here I am a respected member of the ChronoGuard, and you’re still treating me like I’m a kid!”

“Friday!”

“How stupid can you both be? The history of the world hangs in the balance, and all you can do is worry about your lazy shitbag of a son.”

“You talk like that to your mother and you can go to your room.”

“He is in his room, Land.”

“Right. Well…you know what I mean.”

Friday snorted, glared at us both, told me that I really shouldn’t call him “Sweetpea” anymore and walked off, slamming the garden gate behind him.

I turned to Landen. “Are we doing the right thing?”

“Friday told us to dissuade him from joining the ChronoGuard, and that’s what we’re doing.”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember.

“He did? When?”

“At our wedding bash? When Lavoisier turned up looking for your father?”

“Shit,” I said, suddenly remembering. Lavoisier was my least favorite ChronoGuard operative, and on that occasion he had a partner with him-a lad of about twenty-five who’d looked vaguely familiar. We figured it out several years later. It was Friday himself, and his advice to us was unequivocal: “If you ever have a son who wants to be in the ChronoGuard, try to dissuade him.” Perhaps it wasn’t just a complaint-perhaps it had been…a warning.

Landen placed a hand on my waist and said, “I think we should follow his best advice and see where it leaves us.”

“And the End of Time?”

“Didn’t your father say that the world was always five minutes from total annihilation? Besides, it’s not until Friday evening. It’ll work itself out.”

I took the tram into work and was so deep in thought I missed my stop and had to walk back from MycroTech. Without my TravelBook I was effectively stuck in the real world, but instead of feeling a sense of profound loss as I had expected, I felt something more akin to relief. In my final day as the LBOCS, I had scotched any chance of book interactivity or the preemptive strike on Speedy Muffler and the ramshackle Racy Novel, and the only worrying loose end was dealing with slutty bitchface Thursday1-4. That was if she hadn’t been erased on sight for making an unauthorized trip to the Outland. Well, I could always hope. Jurisfiction had gotten on without me for centuries and would doubtless continue to do so. There was another big plus point, too: I wasn’t lying to Landen quite as much. Okay, I still did a bit of SpecOps work, but at least this way I could downgrade my fibs from “outrageous” to a more manageable “whopping.” All of a sudden, I felt really quite happy-and I didn’t often feel that way. If there hadn’t been a major problem with Acme’s overdraft and the potential for a devastating chronoclasm in two and a half days, everything might be just perfect.

“You look happy,” said Bowden as I walked into the office at Acme.

“Aren’t I always?”

“No,” he said, “hardly at all.”

“Well, this is the new me. Have you noticed how much the birds are singing this morning?”

“They always sing like that.”

“Then…the sky is always that blue, yes?”

“Yes. May I ask what’s brought on this sudden change?”

“The BookWorld. I’ve stopped going there. It’s over.”

“Well,” said Bowden, “that’s excellent news!”

“It is, isn’t it? More time for Landen and the kids.”

“No,” said Bowden, choosing his words carefully, “I mean excellent news for Acme-we might finally get rid of the backlog.”

“Of undercover SpecOps work?”

“Of carpets.”

“You mean you can make a profit selling carpets?” I asked, having never really given it a great deal of thought.

“Have you seen the order books? They’re full. More work than we can handle. Everyone needs floor coverings, Thurs-and if you can give some of your time to get these orders filled, then we won’t need the extra cash from your illegal-cheese activities.”

He handed me a clipboard.

“All these customers need to be contacted and given the best deal we can.”

“Which is?”

“Just smile, chat, take the measurements, and I’ll do the rest.”

“Then you go.”

“No, the big selling point for Acme is that Thursday Next-the Z-4 celebrity Thursday Next-comes and talks to you about your floor-covering needs. That’s how we keep our heads above water. That’s how we can support all these ex-SpecOps employees.”

“C’mon,” I said doubtfully, “ex-celebrities don’t do retail.”

“After the disaster of the Eyre Affair movie, Lola Vavoom started a chain of builders’ merchants.”

“She did, didn’t she?”

I took the clipboard and stared at the list. It was long. Business was good. But Bowden’s attention was suddenly elsewhere.

“Is that who I think it is?” he asked, looking toward the front of the store. I followed his gaze. Standing next to the cushioned-linoleum display was a man in a long dark coat. When he saw us watching him, he reached into his pocket and flashed a badge of some sort.

“Shit,” I murmured under my breath. “Flanker.”

“He probably wants to buy a carpet,” said Bowden with a heavy helping of misplaced optimism.

Commander Flanker was our old nemesis from SO-1, the SpecOps department that policed other SpecOps departments. Flanker had adapted well to the disbanding of the ser vice. Before, he made life miserable for SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt, and now he made life miserable for ex-SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt. We had crossed swords many times in the past, but not since the disbandment. We regarded it as a good test of our discretion and secrecy that we had never seen him at Acme Carpets. Then again, perhaps we were kidding ourselves. He might know all about us but thought flushing out renegade operatives just wasn’t worth his effort-especially when we were actually doing a ser vice that no one else wanted to do.

I walked quickly to the front of the shop.

“Good morning, Ms. Next,” he said, glancing with ill-disguised mirth at my name embroidered above the company logo on my jacket. “Literary Detective at SO-27 to carpet layer? Quite a fall, don’t you think?”

“It depends on your point of view,” I said cheerfully. “Everyone needs carpets-but not everyone needs SpecOps. Is this a social call?”

“My wife has read all your books.”

“They’re not my books,” I told him in an exasperated tone. “I had absolutely no say in their content-for the first four anyway.”

“Those were the ones she liked. The violent ones full of sex and death.”

“Did you come all this way to give me your wife’s analysis of my books?”

“No,” he said, “that was just the friendly breaking-the-ice part.”

“It isn’t working. Is there a floor covering I could interest you in?”

“Axminster.”

“We can certainly help you with that,” I replied professionally. “Living room or bedroom? We have some very hard-wearing wool/acrylic at extremely competitive prices-and we’ve a special this week on underlayment and free installation.”

“It was Axminster Purple I was referring to,” he said slowly, staring at me intently. My heart jumped but I masked it well. Axminster Purple wasn’t a carpet at all, of course, although to be honest there probably was an Axminster in purple, if I looked. No, he was referring to the semi-exotic cheese, one that I’d been trading in only a couple of days ago. Flanker showed me his badge. He was CEA-the Cheese Enforcement Agency.

“You’re not here for the carpets, are you?”

“I know you have form for cheese smuggling, Next. There was a lump of Rhayder Speckled found beneath a Hispano-Suiza in ’86, and you’ve been busted twice for possession since then. The second time you were caught with six kilos of Streaky Durham. You were lucky to be fined only for possession and not trading without a license.”

“Did you come here to talk about my past misdemeanors?”

“No. I’ve come to you for information. While cheese smuggling is illegal, it’s considered a low priority. The CEA has always been a small department more interested in collecting duty than banging up harmless cheeseheads. That’s all changed.”

“It has?”

“I’m afraid so,” replied Flanker grimly. “There’s a new cheese on the block. Something powerful enough to make a user’s head vanish in a ball of fire.”

“That’s a figure of speech for ‘really powerful,’ right?”

“No,” said Flanker with deadly seriousness. “The victim’s head really does vanish in a ball of fire. It’s a killer, Next-and addictive. It’s apparently the finest and most powerful cheese ever designed.”

This was worrying. I never regarded my cheese smuggling as anything more than harmless fun, cash for Acme and to supply something that should be legal anyway. If a cheese that I’d furnished had killed someone, I would face the music. Mind you, I’d tried most of what I’d flogged, and it was, after all, only cheese. Okay, so the taste of a particularly powerful cheese might render you unconscious or make your tongue numb for a week, but it never killed anyone-until now.

“Does this cheese have a name?” I asked, wondering if there’d been a bad batch of Machynlleth Wedi Marw.

“It only has a code name: X-14. Rumor says it’s so powerful that it has to be kept chained to the floor. We managed to procure a half ounce. A technician dropped it by mistake, and this was the result.”

He showed me a photograph of a smoking ruin.

“The remains of our central cheese-testing facility.”

He put the photograph away and stared at me. Of course, I had seen some X-14. It’d been chained up in the back of Pryce’s truck the night of the cheese buy. Owen had declined to even show it to me. I’d traded with him every month for over eight years, and I never thought he was the sort of person to knowingly peddle anything dangerous. He was like me: someone who just loved cheese. I wouldn’t snitch on him, not yet-not before I had more information.

“I don’t know anything,” I said at length, “but I can make inquiries.”

Flanker seemed to be satisfied with this, handed me his card and said in a stony voice, “I’ll expect your call.”

He turned and walked out of the store to a waiting Range Rover and drove off.

“Trouble for us?” asked Bowden as soon as I returned.

“No,” I replied thoughtfully, “trouble for me.”

He sighed. “That’s a relief.”

I took a deep breath and thought for a moment. Communications into the Socialist Republic of Wales were nonexistent-when I wanted to contact Pryce, I had to use a shortwave wireless transmitter at prearranged times. There was nothing I could do for at least forty-eight hours.

“So,” continued Bowden, handing me the clipboard with the list of people wanting quotes on it, “how about some Acme Carpets stuff?”

“What about SpecOps work?” I asked. “How’s that looking?”

“Stig’s still on the case of the Diatrymas and has at least a half dozen outstanding chimeras to track down. Spike has a few biters on the books, and there’s talk of another SEB over in Reading.”

It was getting desperate. I loved Acme, but only insofar as it was excellent cover and I never actually had to do anything carpet-related.

“And us? The ex-Literary Detectives?”

“Still nothing, Thursday.”

“What about Mrs. Mattock over in the Old Town? She still wants us to find her first editions, surely?”

“No,” said Bowden. “She called yesterday and said she was selling her books and replacing them with cable TV-she wanted to watch En gland’s Funniest Chain-Saw Mishaps.”

“And I felt so good just now.”

“Face it,” said Bowden sadly, “books are finished. No one wants to invest the time in them anymore.”

“I don’t believe you,” I replied, an optimist to the end. “I reckon if we went over to the Booktastic! megastore, they’d tell us that books are still being sold hand over fist to hard-core story aficionados. In fact, I’ll bet you that jar of cookies you’ve got hidden under your desk that you think no one knows about.”

“And if they’re not?”

“I’ll spend a day installing carpets and pressing flesh as the Acme Carpets celebrity saleswoman.”

It was a deal. Acme was on a trading estate with about twenty or so outlets, but, unusually, it was the only carpet showroom-we always suspected that Spike might have a hand in scaring off the competition, but we never saw him do it. Between us and Booktastic! there were three sporting-goods outlets all selling exactly the same goods at exactly the same price and, since they were three branches of the same store, with the same sales staff, too. The two discount electrical shops actually were competitors but still spookily managed to sell the same goods at the same price, although “sell” in this context actually meant “serve as brief custodian between outlet and landfill.”

“Hmm,” I said as we stood inside the entrance of Booktastic! and stared at the floor display units liberally stacked with CDs, DVDs, computer games, peripherals and special-interest magazines. “I’m sure there was a book in here last time I came in. Excuse me?”

A shop assistant stopped and stared at us in a vacant sort of way.

“I was wondering if you had any books.”

“Any what?”

“Books. Y’know-about so big and full of words arranged in a specific order to give the effect of reality?”

“You mean DVDs?”

“No, I mean books. They’re kind of old-fashioned.”

“Ah!” she said. “What you mean are videotapes.”

“No, what I mean are books.”

We’d exhausted the sum total of her knowledge, so she went into default mode. “You’ll have to see the manager. She’s in the coffee shop.”

“Which one?” I asked, looking around. There appeared to be three-and this wasn’t Booktastic!’s biggest outlet either.

“That one.”

We thanked her and walked past boxed sets of obscure sixties TV series that were better-and safer-within the rose-tinted glow of memory.

“This is all so wrong,” I said, beginning to think I might lose the bet. “Less than five years ago, this place was all books and nothing else. What the hell’s going on?”

We arrived at the coffee shop and couldn’t see the manager, until we noticed that they had opened a smaller branch of the coffee shop actually inside the existing one, and named it “X-press” or “On-the-Go” or “More Profit” or something.

“Thursday Next,” I said to the manager, whose name we discovered was Dawn.

“A great plea sure,” she replied. “I did so love your books-especially the ones with all the killing and gratuitous sex.”

“I’m not really like that in real life,” I replied. “My friend Bowden and I wondered if you’d sold many books recently or, failing that, if you have any or know what one is?”

“I’m sure there are a few somewhere,” she said, and with a “woman on a mission” stride led us around most of the outlet. We walked past computer peripherals, stationery, chocolate, illuminated world globes and pretty gift boxes to put things in until we found a single rack of long-forgotten paperbacks on a shelf below the boxed set of Hale& Pace Outtakes Volumes 1-8 and The Very Best of Little and Large, which Bowden said was an oxymoron.

“Here we are!” she said, wiping away the cobwebs and dust. “I suppose we must have the full collection of every book ever written!”

“Very nearly,” I replied. “Thanks for your help.”

And that was how I found myself in an Acme van with Spike, who had been coerced by Bowden to do an honest day’s carpeting in exchange for a week’s washing for him and Betty. I hadn’t been out on the road with Spike for a number of years, either for the weird shit we used to do from time to time or for any carpet-related work, so he was particularly talkative. As we drove to our first installation, he told me about a recent assignment.

“…so I says to him, ‘Yo, Dracula! Have you come to watch the eclipse with us?’ You should have seen his face. He was back in his coffin quicker than shit from a goose, and then when he heard us laughing, he came back out and said with his arms folded, ‘I suppose you think that’s funny?’ and I said that I thought it was perhaps the funniest thing I’d seen for years, especially since he’d tripped and fallen headfirst into his coffin, and then he got all shitty and tried to bite me, so I rammed a sharpened stake through his heart and struck his head from his body.”

He laughed and shook his head. “Oh, man, did that crease us up.”

“My amusement might have ended with the sharpened-stake thing,” I confessed, “but I like the idea of Dracula falling flat on his face.”

“He did that a lot. Clumsy as hell. That biting-the-neck thing? He was going for the breast and missed. Now he pretends that’s what he was aiming for all along. Jerk. Is this number eight?”

It was. We parked, got out and knocked at the door.

“Major Pickles?” said Spike as a very elderly man with a pleasant expression answered the door. He was small and slender and in good health. His snow white hair was immaculately combed, a pencil mustache graced his upper lip, and he was wearing a blazer with a regimental badge sewn on the breast.

“Yes?”

“Good morning. We’re from Acme Carpets.”

“Jolly good!” said Major Pickles, who hobbled into the house and ushered us to a room that was devoid of any sort of floor covering. “It’s to go down there,” he said, pointing at the floor.

“Right,” said Spike, who I could tell was in a mischievous mood. “My associate here will begin carpeting operations while I view the selection of tea and cookies on offer. Thursday-the carpet.”

I sighed and surveyed the room, which was decorated with stripy green wallpaper and framed pictures of Major Pickles’s notable war time achievements-it looked as if he’d been quite a formidable soldier. It seemed a shame that he was in a rather miserable house in one of the more rundown areas of Swindon. On the plus side, at least he was getting a new carpet. I went to the van and brought in the toolbox, vacuum cleaner, grippers and a nail gun. I was just putting on my knee pads when Spike and Pickles came back into the room.

“Jaffa cakes!” exclaimed Major Pickles, placing a tray on the windowsill. “Mr. Stoker here said that you were allergic to anything without chocolate on it.”

“You’re very kind to indulge my partner’s bizarre and somewhat disrespectful sense of humor,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Well,” he said in a kindly manner, “I’ll leave you to get along, then.”

And he tottered out the door. As soon as he had gone, Spike leaned close to me and said, “Did you see that!?!”

“See what?”

He opened the door a crack and pointed at Pickles, who was limping down the corridor to the kitchen. “His feet.”

I looked, and the hair on the back of my neck rose. There was a reason Major Pickles was hobbling-just visible beneath the hems of his trouser legs were hooves.

“Right,” said Spike as I looked up at him. “The cloven one.”

“Major Pickles is the devil?”

“Nah!” said Spike, sniggering as if I were a simpleton. “If that was Mephistopheles, you’d really know about it. Firstly, the air would be thick with the choking stench of brimstone and decay, and we’d be knee-deep in the departed souls of the damned, writhing in perpetual agony as their bodies were repeatedly pierced with the barbed spears of the tormentors. And secondly, we’d never have got Jaffa cakes. Probably rich tea or graham crackers.”

“Yeah, I hate them, too. But listen, if not Satan, then who?”

Spike closed the door carefully. “A demi-devil or Junior demon or something, sent to precipitate mankind’s fall into the eternal river of effluent that is the bowels of hell. Let’s see if we can’t get a make on this guy. Have a look in the backyard and tell me if you see anything unusual.”

I peered out the window as Spike looked around the room.

“I can see the old carpet piled up in the carport,” I said, “and an almost-brand-new washing machine.”

“How does the carpet look?”

“It seems perfect.”

“Figures. Look here.”

He pointed to an old cookie jar that was sitting on the mantelpiece. The lid was half off, and clearly visible inside was a wad of banknotes.

“Bingo!” said Spike, drawing out the hefty wad. They were all fifty-pound notes-easily a grand. “This is demi-demon Raum, if I’m not mistaken. He tempts men to eternal damnation by the sin of theft.”

“Come on!” I said, mildly skeptical. “If Lucifer has everyone that had stolen something, he’d have more souls than he’d know what to deal with.”

“You’re right,” agreed Spike. “The parameters of sin have become blurred over the years. A theft worthy of damnation has to be deceitful, cowardly and loathsome-like from a charming and defenseless pensioner war veteran. So what Raum does is stash the real Major Pickles in a closet somewhere, assume his form, leaves the cash in plain sight, and some poor boob chances his luck. He counts his blessings, has a good few evenings out and forgets all about it until Judgment Day. And then-shazam! He’s having his eyeballs gouged out with a spoon. And then again. And again…and again.”

“I…get the picture. So this Raum guy’s a big deal, right?”

“Nah-pretty much a small-timer,” said Spike, replacing the money. “First sphere, tenth throne-any lower and he’d be in the second hierarchy and confined to hell rather than doing the cushy number up here, harvesting souls for Lucifer and attempting to engineer the fall of man.”

“Is there a lot of this about?” I asked. “Demons, I mean-hanging around ready to tempt us?”

Spike shrugged. “In Swindon? No. And there’ll be one less if I can do anything about it.”

He flipped open his cell phone and dialed a number, then pointed at the floor. “You better get those grippers down if we’re to finish by lunchtime. I’m kidding. He doesn’t want a carpet; we’re only here to be tempted-remember all that stuff in the backyard? Hi, Betty? It’s Dad. I’ve got a five-five in progress with a tenth-throner name of Raum. Will you have a look in Wheatley’s and see how to cast him out? Thanks.” He paused for a moment, looked at me and added, “Perhaps it wasn’t Felix8 at all. Perhaps he was…Felix9. After all, the linking factor between the Felixes was only ever his face, yes?”

“Good point,” I said, wondering quite how Spike might be so relaxed about the whole demon thing that he could be thinking about the Felix problem at the same time.

“Betty?” said Spike into his phone. “I’m still here… Cold steel? No problem. Have you done your homework?…Well, you’d better get started. One more thing: Bowden said he’d do the washing for us, so get all the curtains down… Love you, too. Bye.”

He snapped his phone shut and looked around the room for something made of steel. He picked up the nail gun, muttered, “Damn, galvanized” then rummaged in the toolbox. The best he could find was a long screwdriver, but he rejected this because it was chrome-plated.

“Can’t we just go away and deal with Raum later?”

“Doesn’t work like that,” he said, peering out the window to see if there was anything steel within reach, which there wasn’t. “We deal with this clown right now or not at all.”

He opened the door a crack and peeked out.

“Okay, he’s in the front room. Here’s the plan: You gain his attention while I go into the kitchen and find something made of steel. Then I send him back to the second sphere.”

“What if you’re mistaken?” I asked. “He might be suffering from some-I don’t know-rare genetic disorder that makes him grow hooves.”

Spike fixed me with a piercing stare. “Have you even heard of such a thing?”

“No.”

“Then let’s do it. I hope there’s a Sabatier or a tire iron or something-it’ll be a pretty messy job with an eggbeater.”

So while Spike slipped into the kitchen, I went to the door of the front room where Major Pickles was watching TV. He was seated on a floral-patterned settee with a cup of tea and a slice of fruitcake on a table nearby.

“Hello, young lady,” he said amiably. “Done already?”

“No,” I said, trying to appear unflustered, “but we’re going to use the nail gun, and it might make some noise.”

“Oh, that’s quite all right,” he said. “I was at Tobruk, you know.”

“Really? What was it like?”

“My dear girl, the noise-and you couldn’t get a decent drink anywhere.”

“So a nail gun is no problem?”

“Nostalgic, my dear-fire away.”

Spike hadn’t yet reappeared, so I carried on. “Good. Right, well-Hey, is that Bedazzled you’re watching?”

“Yes,” he replied, “the Brendan Fraser version-such a broad head, but very funny.”

“I met him once,” I said, stalling for time, “at the launch party for the Eyre Affair movie. He played the part of-”

“Thursday?”

It was Spike, calling from the kitchen. I smiled and said to Major Pickles, “Would you excuse me for just one moment?”

Pickles nodded politely, and I walked to the kitchen, which was, strangely enough, empty. Not a sign of Spike anywhere. It had two doors, and the only other entrance, the back door, had a broom leaned up against it. I was about to open the fridge to look for him when I heard a voice.

“I’m up here.”

I glanced up. Spike was pinned to the ceiling with thirty or so knives, scissors and other sharp objects, all stuck through the periphery of his clothing and making him look like the victim of an overenthusiastic circus knife thrower.

“What are you doing?” I hissed. “We’re supposed to be dealing with the Raum guy.”

“What am I doing? Oh, just admiring the view-why, what do you think I’m doing?”

I shrugged.

“Thursday,” added Spike in a quiet voice, “I think he’s on to us.”

I turned to the door and jumped in fright because Major Pickles had crept up without my realizing. But it wasn’t the little old gent I’d a seen a few moments ago; this Pickles had two large horns sticking out of his head, yellow eyes like a cat’s, and he was dressed in a loincloth. He was lean and muscular and had shiny, bright red skin-a bit like those ducks that hang in Chinese-restaurant windows. He also smelled strongly of sewage.

“Well,” said Raum in a guttural, rasping voice that sounded like a box of rusty nails, “Thursday Next. What a surprise!” He looked up. “And Mr. Stoker, I presume-believe me, you are very unpopular from where I come from!”

I made a move to thump him, but he was too quick, and a moment later I was thrown to the ceiling with a force so hard it cracked the plaster. I didn’t drop; I was held, face pointing down, not by any knives or scissors but the action of an unearthly force that felt as if I were being sat upon by a small walrus.

“Thursday,” added Spike in a quiet voice, “I think he’s onto us.”

“Two unsullied souls,” growled Raum sadly. “To His Infernal Majesty, worthless.”

“I’m warning you,” said Spike in a masterful display of misplaced optimism, “give yourself up and I’ll not be too hard on you.”

“SILENCE!” roared Raum, so loudly that two of the kitchen windows shattered. He laughed a deep, demonic cackle, then carried on. “Just so this morning hasn’t been a complete waste, I am prepared to offer a deal: Either you both die in an exceptionally painful manner and I relinquish all rights to your souls, or one of you gives yourself to me-and I free the other!”

“How about a game of chess?” suggested Spike.

“Oh, no!” said Raum, wagging a reproachful finger. “We don’t fall for that one anymore. Now, who’s it going to be?”

“You can take me,” said Spike.

“No!” I cried, but Raum merely laughed. He laughed long and loud. He laughed again. Then some more. He laughed so long, in fact, that Spike and I looked at each other. But still Raum laughed. The plates and cups smashed on the dresser, and glasses that were upside down on the drainer broke into smithereens. More laughter. Louder, longer, harder, until suddenly and quite without warning he exploded into a million tiny fragments that filled the small kitchen like a red mist. Released from the ceiling, I fell to the floor via the kitchen table, which was luckily a bit frail and had nothing on it. I was slightly dazed but got up to see…the real Major Pickles, standing where Raum had been, still holding the steel bayonet that had dispatched the demon back to hell.

“Hah!” said the elderly little gent with an aggressive twinkle in his eye. “They don’t like the taste of cold steel up ’em!”

He had several days of stubble and was dressed in torn pajamas and covered in soil.

“Are you okay?” I asked him.

“He thought he could keep me prisoner in the garden shed,” replied the pensioner resolutely, “but it was only fifteen yards nornoreast under the patio to the geranium bed.”

“You dug your way out?”

“Yes, and would have been quicker, too, if I’d had a soup spoon instead of this.”

He showed me a very worn and bent teaspoon.

“Or a spade?” I ventured.

“Hah!” he snorted contemptuously. “Spades are for losers.” He looked up and noticed Spike. “I say, you there, sir-get off my ceiling this minute.”

“Nothing I’d like better.”

So we got Spike down and explained as best we could to the sprightly nonagenarian just who Raum was, something that he seemed to have very little trouble understanding.

“Good Lord, man!” he said at last. “You mean I killed a demon? There’s a notch for the cricket bat, and no mistake.”

“Sadly, no,” replied Spike. “You just relegated him to the second sphere-he’ll not reappear on earth for a decade or two and will get a serious lashing from the Dark One into the bargain.”

“Better than he deserves,” replied Major Pickles, checking the cookie jar. “The rotten blighter has pigged all my Jaffa cakes.”

“Spike,” I said, pointing at a desk diary I’d found on the counter, “we’re not the only people who have had an appointment this morning.”

He and Major Pickles bent over to have a look, and there it was. This morning was the first of three days of soul entrapment that Raum had planned for the house-call professionals of Swindon, and we had been the third potential damnees. The first, an electrician, Raum had crossed out and made a note: “sickeningly pleasant.” The next, however, was for a new washing machine, and Raum had made three checks next to the name of the company: Wessex Kitchens. I rummaged through the papers on the counter-top and found a job sheet-the workman had been someone called Hans Towwel.

“Blast!” said Spike. “I hate it when Satan obtains a soul. Don’t get me wrong, some people deserve to be tortured for all eternity, but damnation without the possibility of salvation-it’s like a three-strike life sentence without the possibility of parole.”

I nodded in agreement. Obscene though the crime was, eternal damnation was several punishments too far.

“All this defeatist claptrap is making me sick to the craw,” growled Major Pickles. “No one is going to hell on my account-what happens if we get the money back?”

Spike snapped his fingers.

“Pickles, you’re a genius! Mr. Towwel doesn’t join the legion of the damned until he actually makes use of his ill-gotten gains. Thursday, call Wessex Kitchens and find out where he is-we need to get to him before he spends any of the cash.”

Ten minutes later we were heading at high speed toward the Greasy Monk, a popular medieval-themed eatery not far from the rebuilt cathedral of St. Zvlkx. I had tried to call Towwel’s cell phone, but it was switched off, and when I explained that there was a substantial sum of money missing from Major Pickles’s house, the boss of Wessex Kitchens said he was horrified-and promised to meet us there.

The restaurant was filled to capacity, as the cathedral of St. Zvlkx had just been nominated as the first GSD drop-around-if-you-want-but-hey-no-one’s-forcing-you place of worship/contemplation/meditation, and the many followers/adherents/vaguely interested parties of the single unified faith were having lunch and discussing ways in which they could best use the new multi-faith for overwhelming good.

As soon as we pushed open the doors Spike yelled, “Hans Towwel?” in his most commanding voice, and in the silence that followed, a man in a navy blue coverall signaled to us from behind a wooden plate of bread and dripping.

“Problems?” he said as we walked up.

“Could be,” said Spike. “Did you pay for that meal with the money you pinched from Major Pickles?”

“Did I what?”

“You heard him,” I said. “Did you pay for that meal with the money you stole from Major Pickles?”

“Ballocks to you!” he said, getting up. Spike, who was pretty strong, pushed the man hard back down into his seat.

“Listen,” said Spike in a quiet voice, “we’re not cops, and we don’t give a shit about the money, and we don’t give a shit about you-but we do give a shit about your soul. Now, just tell us: Have you spent any of the cash or not?”

“That’s well sweet, isn’t it?” growled Towwel. “Some cash is missing so you blame the workingman.”

“Towwel?” said a crumpled and untidy-looking man in a crumpled and untidy-looking suit, who had just arrived. “Is what they say true?”

“Who are you?” asked Spike.

“Mr. Hedge Moulting of Wessex Kitchens,” said the untidy man, offering us a business card. “I must say I am shocked and appalled by our employee’s behavior-how much was taken?”

“Now, look here!” said Towwel, growing angrier by the second, which caused Mr. Moulting of Wessex Kitchens to flinch and hide behind Spike. “I don’t steal from people. Not from customers, not from pensioners, not from you, not from anyone!”

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” said Moulting, still half hidden behind Spike. “You’re fired-and don’t expect a reference.”

“How do we know you didn’t take it?” demanded Towwel.

“Me?” exclaimed Moulting. “How dare you!”

“you made a random inspection of my work this morning, and you’re a sleazy piece of crap-I say you took it.”

“An outrageous accusation!” yelled Moulting, waving a threatening finger in Towwel’s direction. “You’ll never install a washing machine in this town again, and what’s more I will make it my duty-nay, pleasure-to see you convicted of this heinous crime. A thousand pounds? From a war veteran? You deserve all you’re going to get!”

There was silence for a moment.

“Mr. Moulting,” said Spike, “we never said how much was stolen. As I said to Mr. Towwel here, we don’t give a shit about the money. We’re here to save a soul from the torment of eternal damnation. It was a diabolical entrapment from one of Old Scratch’s accomplices. If you’ve got the money and haven’t spent any of it, then just drop it in the nearest poor box, and your soul is clear. If you have spent some of the cash, then there’s nothing anyone can do for you.”

I turned to Mr. Towwel. “Sorry to have accused you unjustly, sir. If you need a job, call me anytime at Acme Carpets.”

And we walked out, bumping aside Moulting as we went. His shaking hand reached for a chair back to steady himself. He had turned pale and was sweating, trembling with the fear of the man who is condemned to eternal hellfire and knows it.

We recarpeted Major Pickles’s entire house with the finest carpet we had. We also did his shopping, his washing and bought him two dozen packets of Jaffa cakes. After that, the three of us sat down and nattered all afternoon, drinking tea and telling stories. We parted the best of friends and left our phone numbers on his fridge so he could call us if he needed anything. I even suggested he give Polly a call if he wanted some company.

“I never realized carpet laying could be so much fun,” I said as we finally drove away.

“Me neither,” replied Spike. “Do you think Bowden will be pissed off that we’ve done this one for free and it took us all day?”

“Nah,” I replied with a smile, “I’m sure he’ll be just fine about it.”