Good Omens

This was now.

Now a deep religio‑political divide, concerning which of four small mainland countries they weren't actually a part of, had split the country into three factions, destroyed the statue of Santa Maria in the town square, and done for the tourist trade.

Red Zuigiber sat in the bar of the Hotel de Palomar del Sol, drink­ing what passed for a cocktail. In one corner a tired pianist played, and a waiter in a toupee crooned into a microphone:

"AAAAAAAAAAAonce‑pon‑a‑time‑dere‑was

LITTLE WHITE BOOOL

AAAAAAAAAAAvery‑sad‑because‑e‑was

LITTLE WHITE BOOL . . ."

A man threw himself through the window, a knife between his teeth, a Kalashnikov automatic rifle in one hand, a grenade in the other.

"I glaim gis oteg id der gaing og der‑" he paused. He took the knife out of his mouth and began again. "I claim this hotel in the name of the pro‑Turkish Liberation Faction!"

The last two holidaymakers remaining on the island ^[19]climbed un­derneath their table. Red unconcernedly withdrew the maraschino cherry from her drink, put it to her scarlet lips, and sucked it slowly off its stick in a way that made several men in the room break into a cold sweat.

The pianist stood up, reached into his piano, and pulled out a vintage sub‑machine gun. "This hotel has already been claimed by the pro-­Greek Territorial Brigade!" he screamed. "Make one false move, and I shoot out your living daylight!"

There was a motion at the door. A huge, black‑bearded individual with a golden smile and a genuine antique Gatling gun stood there, with a cohort of equally huge although less impressively armed men behind him.

"This strategically important hotel, for years a symbol of the fascist imperialist Turko‑Greek running dog tourist trade, is now the property of the Italo‑Maltese Freedom Fighters!" he boomed affably. "Now we kill everybody!"

"Rubbish!" said the pianist. "Is not strategically important. Just has extremely well‑stocked wine cellar!"

"He's right, Pedro," said the man with the Kalashnikov, "That's why my lot wanted it. 11 General Ernesto de Montoya said to me, he said, Fernando, the war'll be over by Saturday, and the lads'll be wanting a good time. Pop down to the Hotel de Palomar del Sol and claim it as booty, will you?"

The bearded man turned red. "Is bloddy important strategically, Fernando Chianti! I drew big map of the island and is right in the middle, which makes it pretty bloddy strategically important, I can tell you."

"Ha!" said Fernando. "You might as well say that just because Little Diego's house has a view of the decadent capitalist topless private beach, that it's strategically important!"

The pianist blushed a deep red. "Our lot got that this morning," he admitted.

There was silence.

In the silence was a faint, silken rasping. Red had uncrossed her legs.

The pianist's Adam's apple bobbed up and down. "Well, it's pretty strategically important," he managed, trying to ignore the woman on the bar stool. "I mean, if someone landed a submarine on it, you'd want to be somewhere you could see it all."

Silence.

"Well, it's a lot more strategically important than this hotel any­way," he finished.

Pedro coughed, ominously. "The next person who says anything.Anything at all. Isdead." He grinned. Hefted his gun. "Right. Now­ everyone against far wall."

Nobody moved. They weren't listening to him any more. They were listening to a low, indistinct murmuring from the hallway behind him, quiet and monotonous.

There was some shuffling among the cohort in the doorway. They seemed to be doing their best to stand firm, but they were being inexorably edged out of the way by the muttering, which had begun to resolve itself into audible phrases. "Don't mind me, gents, what a night, eh? Three times round the island, nearly didn't find the place, someone doesn't be­lieve in signposts, eh? Still, found it in the end, had to stop and ask four times, finally asked at the post office, they always know at the post office, had to draw me a map though, got it here somewhere . . ."

Sliding serenely past the men with guns, like a pike through a trout pond, came a small, bespectacled man in a blue uniform, carrying a long, thin, brown paper‑wrapped parcel, tied with string. His sole concession to the climate were his open‑toed brown plastic sandals, although the green woolen socks he wore underneath them showed his deep and natural dis­trust of foreign weather.

He had a peaked cap on, with International Expresswritten on it in large white letters.

He was unarmed, but no one touched him. No one even pointed a gun at him. They just stared.

The little man looked around the room, scanning the faces, and then looking back down at his clipboard; then he walked straight over to Red, still sitting on her bar stool. "Package for you, miss," he said.

Red took it, and began to untie the string.

The International Express man coughed discreetly and presented the journalist with a well‑thumbed receipt pad and a yellow plastic ballpoint pen attached to the clipboard by a piece of string. "You have to sign for it, miss. Just there. Print your full name over here, signature down there."

"Of course." Red signed the receipt pad, illegibly, then printed her name. The name she wrote was not Carmine Zuigiber. It was a much shorter name.

The man thanked her kindly, and made his way out, muttering lovely place you've got here, gents, always meant to come out here on holiday, sorry to trouble you, excuse me, sir . . . And he passed out of their lives as serenely as he had come.

Red finished opening the parcel. People began to edge around to get a better look. Inside the package was a large sword.

She examined it. It was a very straightforward sword, long and sharp; it looked both old and unused; and it had nothing ornamental or impressive about it. This was no magical sword, no mystic weapon of power and might. It was very obviously a sword created to slice, chop, cut, preferably kill, but, failing that, irreparably maim, a very large number of people indeed. It had an indefinable aura of hatred and menace.

Red clasped the hilt in her exquisitely manicured right hand, and held it up to eye level. The blade glinted.

"Awwwright!" she said, stepping down from the stool. "Finally."

She finished the drink, hefted the sword over one shoulder, and looked around at the puzzled factions, who now encircled her completely. "Sorry to run out on you, chaps," she said. "Would love to stay and get to know you better."

The men in the room suddenly realized that they didn't want to know her better. She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.

And she held her sword, and she smiled like a knife.

There were a number of guns in that room, and slowly, trem­blingly, they were focused on her chest, and her back, and head.

They encircled her completely.

"Don't move!" croaked Pedro.

Everybody else nodded.

Red shrugged. She began to walk forward.

Every finger on every trigger tightened, almost of its own accord. Lead and the smell of cordite filled the air. Red's cocktail glass smashed in her hand. The room's remaining mirrors exploded in lethal shards. Part of the ceiling fell down.

And then it was over.

Carmine Zuigiber turned and stared at the bodies surrounding her as if she hadn't the faintest idea of how they came to be there.

She licked a spatter of blood‑someone else's‑from the back of her hand with a scarlet, cat‑like tongue. Then she smiled.

And she walked out of the bar, her heels clicking on the tiles like the tapping of distant hammers.

The two holidaymakers climbed out from under the table and sur­veyed the carnage.

"This wouldn't of happened if we'd of gone to Torremolinos like we usually do," said one of them, plaintively.

"Foreigners," sighed the other. "They're just not like us, Patricia."

"That settles it, then. Next year we go to Brighton," said Mrs. Threlfall, completely missing the significance of what had just happened.

It meant there wouldn't be any next year.

It rather lowered the odds on there being any next week to speak of.

Thursday

T here was a newcomer in the village.

New people were always a source of interest and speculation among the Them, ^[20]but this time Pepper had impressive news.

"She's moved into Jasmine Cottage and she's a witch," she said. "I know, because Mrs. Henderson does the cleaning and she told my mother she gets a witches' newspaper. She gets loads of ordinary newspapers, too, but she gets this special witches' one."

"My father says there's no such thing as witches," said Wensley­dale, who had fair, wavy hair, and peered seriously out at life through thick black‑rimmed spectacles. It was widely believed that he had once been christened Jeremy, but no one ever used the name, not even his parents, who called him Youngster. They did this in the subconscious hope that he might take the hint; Wensleydale gave the impression of having been born with a mental age of forty‑seven.

"Don't see why not," said Brian, who had a wide, cheerful face, under an apparently permanent layer of grime. "I don't see why witches shouldn't have their own newspaper. With stories about all the latest spells and that. My father gets Anglers' Mail,and I bet there's more witches than anglers."

"It's called Psychic News," volunteered Pepper.

"That's not witches," said Wensleydale. "My aunt has that. That's just spoon‑bending and fortune‑telling and people thinking they were Queen Elizabeth the First in another life. There's no witches any more, actually. People invented medicines and that and told 'em they didn't need 'em any more and started burning 'em."

"It could have pictures of frogs and things," said Brian, who was reluctant to let a good idea go to waste. "An'‑an' road tests of broom­sticks. And a cats' column."

"Anyway, your aunt could be a witch," said Pepper. "In secret. She could be your aunt all day and go witching at night."

"Not my aunt," said Wensleydale darkly.

"An' recipes," said Brian. "New uses for leftover toad."

"Oh, shut up," said Pepper.

Brian snorted. If it had been Wensley who had said that, there'd have been a half‑hearted scuffle, as between friends. But the other Them had long ago learned that Pepper did not consider herself bound by the informal conventions of brotherly scuffles. She could kick and bite with astonishing physiological accuracy for a girl of eleven. Besides, at eleven years old the Them were beginning to be bothered by the dim conception that laying hands on good ole Pep moved things into blood‑thumping categories they weren't entirely at home with yet, besides earning you a snake‑fast blow that would have floored the Karate Kid.

But she was good to have in your gang. They remembered with pride the time when Greasy Johnson and hisgang had taunted them for playing with a girl. Pepper had erupted with a fury that had caused Greasy's mother to come round that evening and complain. ^[21]

Pepper looked upon him, a giant male, as a natural enemy.

She herself had short red hair and a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin.

Pepper's given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. She had been given them in a naming ceremony in a muddy valley field that contained three sick sheep and a number of leaky polythene teepees. Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant‑y‑Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent‑trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune's mari­juana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper's mother returned to Pepper's surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociol­ogy course with a deep sigh of relief.)

There are only two ways a child can go with a name like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, and Pepper had chosen the other one: the three male Them had learned this on their first day of school, in the playground, at the age of four.

They had asked her her name, and, all innocent, she had told them.

Subsequently a bucket of water had been needed to separate Pippin Galadriel Moonchild's teeth from Adam's shoe. Wensleydale's first pair of spectacles had been broken, and Brian's sweater needed five stitches.

The Them were together from then on, and Pepper was Pepper forever, except to her mother, and (when they were feeling especially cou­rageous, and the Them were almost out of earshot) Greasy Johnson and the Johnsonites, the village's only other gang.

Adam drummed his heels on the edge of the milk crate that was doing the office of a seat, listening to this bickering with the relaxed air of a king listening to the idle chatter of his courtiers.

He chewed lazily on a straw. It was a Thursday morning. The holidays stretched ahead, endless and unsullied. They needed filling up.

He let the conversation float around him like the buzzing of grass­hoppers or, more precisely, like a prospector watching the churning gravel for a glint of useful gold.

"In our Sunday paper it said there was thousands of witches in the country," said Brian. "Worshiping Nature and eating health food an' that. So I don't see why we shouldn't have one round here. They were floodin' the country with a Wave of Mindless Evil, it said."

"What, by worshipin' Nature and eatin' health food?" said Wens­leydale.

"That's what it said."

The Them gave this due consideration. They had once‑at Adam's instigation‑tried a health food diet for a whole afternoon. Their verdict was that you could live very well on healthy food provided you had a big cooked lunch beforehand.

Brian leaned forward conspiratorially.

"And it said they dance round with no clothes on," he added. "They go up on hills and Stonehenge and stuff, and dance with no clothes on."

This time the consideration was more thoughtful. The Them had reached that position where, as it were, the roller coaster of Life had almost completed the long haul to the top of the first big humpback of puberty so that they could just look down into the precipitous ride ahead, full of mystery, terror, and exciting curves.

"Huh," said Pepper.

"Not my aunt," said Wensleydale, breaking the spell. "Definitely not my aunt. She just keeps trying to talk to my uncle."

"Your uncle's dead," said Pepper.

"She says he still moves a glass about," said Wensleydale defen­sively. "My father says it was moving glasses about the whole time that made him dead in the first place. Don't know why she wants to talk to him," he added, "they never talked much when he was alive."

"That's necromancy, that is," said Brian. "It's in the Bible. She ought to stop it. God's dead against necromancy. And witches. You can go to Hell for it."

There was a lazy shifting of position on the milk crate throne. Adam was going to speak.

The Them fell silent. Adam was always worth listening to. Deep in their hearts, the Them knew that they weren't a gang of four. They were a gang of three, which belonged to Adam. But if you wanted excitement, and interest, and crowded days, then every Them would prize a lowly position in Adam's gang above leadership of any other gang anywhere.

"Don't see why everyone's so down on witches," Adam said.

The Them glanced at one another. This sounded promising.

"Well, they blight crops," said Pepper. "And sink ships. And tell you if you're going to be king and stuff. And brew up stuff with herbs."

"My mother uses herbs," said Adam. "So does yours."

"Oh, thoseare all right," said Brian, determined not to lose his position as occult expert. "I expect God said it was all right to use mint and sage and so on. Stands to reason there's nothing wrong with mint and sage."

"And they can make you be ill just by looking at you," said Pepper. "It's called the Evil Eye. They give you a look, and then you get ill and no one knows why. And they make a model of you and stick it full of pins and you get ill where all the pins are," she added cheerfully.

"That sort of thing doesn't happen any more," reiterated Wensley­dale, the rational thinking person. "'Cos we invented Science and all the vicars set fire to the witches for their own good. It was called the Spanish Inquisition."

"Then I reckon we should find out if her at Jasmine Cottage is a witch and if she is we should tell Mr. Pickersgill," said Brian. Mr. Pickers­gill was the vicar. Currently he was in dispute with the Them over subjects ranging from climbing the yew tree in the churchyard to ringing the bells and running away.

"I don't reckon it's allowed, going round setting fire to people," said Adam. "Otherwise peopled be doin' it all the time."

"It's all right if you're religious," said Brian reassuringly. "And it stops the witches from goin' to Hell, so I expect they'd be quite grateful if they understood it properly."

"Can't see Picky setting fire to anyone," said Pepper.

"Oh, I dunno," said Brian, meaningfully.

"Not actually setting them on actual fire," sniffed Pepper. "He's more likely to tell their parents, and leave it up to them if anyone's goin' to be set on fire or not."

The Them shook their heads in disgust at the current low standards of ecclesiastical responsibility. Then the other three looked expectantly at Adam.

They always looked expectantly at Adam. He was the one that had the ideas.

"P'raps we ought to do it ourselves," he said. "Someone ought to be doing somethingif there's all these witches about. It's‑it's like that Neighborhood Watch scheme."

"Neighborhood Witch," said Pepper.

"No," said Adam coldly.

"But we can't be the Spanish Inquisition," said Wensleydale. "We're not Spanish."

"I bet you don't have to be Spanish to be the Spanish Inquisition," said Adam. "I bet it's like Scottish eggs or American hamburgers. It just has to look Spanish. We've just got to make it look Spanish. Then everyone would know it's the Spanish Inquisition."

There was silence.

It was broken by the crackling of one of the empty crisp packets that accumulated wherever Brian was sitting. They looked at him.

"I've got a bullfight poster with my name on it," said Brian, slowly.

– – -

Lunchtime came and went. The new Spanish Inquisition reconvened.

The Head Inquisitor inspected it critically.

"What're those?" he demanded.

"You click them together when you dance," said Wensleydale, a shade defensively. "My aunt brought them back from Spain years ago. They're called maracas, I think. They've got a picture of a Spanish dancer on them, look."

"What's she dancing with a bull for?" said Adam.

"That's to show it's Spanish," said Wensleydale. Adam let it pass.

The bullfight poster was everything Brian had promised.

Pepper had something rather like a gravy boat made out of raffia.

"It's for putting wine in," she said defiantly. "My mother brought it back from Spain."

"It hasn't got a bull on it," said Adam severely.

"It doesn't have to," Pepper countered, moving just ever so slightly into a fighting stance.

Adam hesitated. His sister Sarah and her boyfriend had also been to Spain. Sarah had returned with a very large purple toy donkey which, while definitely Spanish, did not come up to what Adam instinctively felt should be the tone of the Spanish Inquisition. The boyfriend, on the other hand, had brought back a very ornate sword which, despite its tendency to bend when picked up and go blunt when asked to cut paper, proclaimed itself to be made of Toledo steel. Adam had spent an instructive half‑hour with the encyclopedia and felt that this was just what the Inquisition needed. Subtle hints had not worked, however.

In the end Adam had taken a bunch of onions from the kitchen. They might well have been Spanish. But even Adam had to concede that, as decor for the Inquisitorial premises, they lacked that certain something. He was in no position to argue too vehemently about raffia wine holders.

"Very good," he said.

"You certain they're Spanishonions?" said Pepper, relaxing.

"'Course," said Adam. "Spanish onions. Everyone knows that."

"They could be French," said Pepper doggedly. "France is famous for onions."

"It doesn't matter," said Adam, who was getting fed up with on­ions. "France is nearlySpanish, an' I don't expect witches know the differ­ence, what with spendin' all their time flyin' around at night. It all looks like the Continong to witches. Anyway, if you don't like it you can jolly well go and start your own Inquisition, anyway."

For once, Pepper didn't push it. She'd been promised the post of Head Torturer. No one doubted who was going to be Chief Inquisitor.

Wensleydale and Brian were less enthralled with their roles of Inquisitorial Guards.

"Well, you don't know any Spanish," said Adam, whose lunch hour had included ten minutes with a phrase book Sarah had bought in a haze of romanticism in Alicant6.

"That doesn't matter, because actuallyyou have to talk in Latin," said Wensleydale, who had also been doing some slightly more accurate lunchtime reading.

"And Spanish," said Adam firmly. "That's why it's the Spanish Inquisition."

"I don't see why it shouldn't be a British Inquisition," said Brian. "Don't see why we should of fought the Armada and everything, just to have their smelly Inquisition."

This had been slightly bothering Adam's patriotic sensibilities as well.

"I reckon," he said, "that we should sort of start Spanish, and then make it the British Inquisition when we've got the hang of it. And now," he added, "the Inquisitorial Guard will go and fetch the first witch, por favor. "

The new inhabitant of Jasmine Cottage would have to wait, they'd decided. What they needed to do was start small and work their way up.

– – -

"Art thou a witch, ohlay?" said the Chief Inquisitor.

"Yes," said Pepper's little sister, who was six and built like a small golden‑haired football.

"You mustn't say yes, you've got to say no," hissed the Head Tor­turer, nudging the suspect.

"And then what?" demanded the suspect.

"And then we torture you to make you say yes," said the Head Torturer. "I told you. It's good fun, the torturin'. It doesn't hurt. Hastar lar visa,"she added quickly.

The little suspect gave the decor of the Inquisitorial headquarters a disparaging look. There was a decided odor of onions.

"Huh," she said. "I wantto be a witch, wiv a warty nose an' a green skin an' a lovely cat an' I'd call it Blackie, an' lots of potions an'‑"

The Head Torturer nodded to the Chief Inquisitor.

"Look," said Pepper, desperately, "no one's saying you can'tbe a witch, you jus' have to sayyou're nota witch. No point in us taking all this trouble," she added severely, "if you're going to go round saying yes the minute we ask you."

The suspect considered this.

"But I wantsto be a witch," she wailed. The male Them exchanged exhausted glances. This was out of their league.

"If you just say no,"said Pepper, "You can have my Sindy stable set. I've never ever used it," she added, glaring at the other Them and daring them to make a comment.

"You have used it," snapped her sister, "I've seenit and it's all worn out and the bit where you put the hay is broke and‑"

Adam gave a magisterial cough.

"Art thou a witch, viva espana?"he repeated.

The sister took a look at Pepper's face, and decided not to chance it.

"No," she decided.

– – -

It was a very good torture, everyone agreed. The trouble was get­ting the putative witch off it.

It was a hot afternoon and the Inquisitorial guards felt that they were being put upon.

"Don't see why me and Brother Brian should have to do all the work," said Brother Wensleydale, wiping the sweat off his brow. "I reckon it's about time she got off and we had a go. Benedictine ina decanter."

"Why have we stopped?" demanded the suspect, water pouring out of her shoes.

It had occurred to the Chief Inquisitor during his researches that the British Inquisition was probably not yet ready for the reintroduction of the Iron Maiden and the choke‑pear. But an illustration of a medieval ducking stool suggested that it was tailor‑made for the purpose. All you needed was a pond and some planks and a rope. It was the sort of combi­nation that always attracted the Them, who never had much difficulty in finding all three.

The suspect was now green to the waist.

"It's just like a seesaw," she said. "Whee!"

"I'm going to go home unless I can have a go," muttered Brother Brian. "Don't see why evil witches should have all the fun."

"It's not allowed for inquisitors to be tortured too," said the Chief Inquisitor sternly, but without much real feeling. It was a hot afternoon, the Inquisitorial robes of old sacking were scratchy and smelled of stale barley, and the pond looked astonishingly inviting.

"All right, all right," he said, and turned to the suspect. "You're a witch, all right, don't do it again, and now you get off and let someone else have a turn. Oh lay,"he added.

"What happens now?" said Pepper's sister.

Adam hesitated. Setting fire to her would probably cause no end of trouble, he reasoned. Besides, she was too soggy to burn.

He was also distantly aware that at some future point there would be questions asked about muddy shoes and duckweed‑encrusted pink dresses. But that was the future, and it lay at the other end of along warm afternoon that contained planks and ropes and ponds. The future could wait.

– – -

The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do, although Mr. Young had other things on his mind apart from muddy dresses and merely banned Adam from watching television, which meant he had to watch it on the old black and white set in his bedroom.

"I don't see why we should have a hosepipe ban," Adam heard Mr. Young telling Mrs. Young. "I pay my rates like everyone else. The garden looks like the Sahara desert. I'm surprised there was any water leftin the pond. I blame it on the lack of nuclear testing, myself. You used to get proper summers when I was a boy. It used to rain all the time."

Now Adam slouched alone along the dusty lane. It was a good slouch. Adam had a way of slouching along that offended all right‑think­ing people. It wasn't that he just allowed his body to droop. He could slouch with inflections,and now the set of his shoulders reflected the hurt and bewilderment of those unjustly thwarted in their selfless desire to help their fellow men.

Dust hung heavy on the bushes.

"Serve everyone right if the witches took over the whole country and made everyone eat health food and not go to church and dance around with no clothes on," he said, kicking a stone. He had to admit that, except perhaps for the health food, the prospect wasn't too worrying.

"I bet if they'd jus' let us get started properly we could of found hundredsof witches," he told himself, kicking a stone. "I bet ole Tor­turemada dint have to give up jus' when he was getting started just because some stupid witch got her dress dirty."

Dog slouched along dutifully behind his Master. This wasn't, inso­far as the hell‑hound had any expectations, what he had imagined life would be like in the last days before Armageddon, but despite himself he was beginning to enjoy it.

He heard his Master say: "Bet even the Victoriansdidn't force people to have to watch black and white television."

Form shapes nature. There are certain ways of behavior appropri­ate to small scruffy dogs which are in fact welded into the genes. You can't just become small‑dog‑shaped and hope to stay the same person; a certain intrinsic small‑dogness begins to permeate your very Being.

He'd already chased a rat. It had been the most enjoyable experi­ence of his life.

"Serve 'em right if we're all overcome by Evil Forces," his Master grumbled.

And then there were cats, thought Dog. He'd surprised the huge ginger cat from next door and had attempted to reduce it to cowering jelly by means of the usual glowing stare and deep‑throated growl, which had always worked on the damned in the past. This time they earned him a whack on the nose that had made his eyes water. Cats, Dog considered, were clearly a lot tougher than lost souls. He was looking forward to a further cat experiment, which he'd planned would consist of jumping around and yapping excitedly at it. It was a long shot, but it might just work.

"They just better not come running to me when ole Picky is turned into a frog, that's all," muttered Adam.

It was at this point that two facts dawned on him. One was that his disconsolate footsteps had led him past Jasmine Cottage. The other was that someone was crying.

Adam was a soft touch for tears. He hesitated a moment, and then cautiously peered over the hedge.

To Anathema, sitting in a deck chair and halfway through a packet of Kleenex, it looked like the rise of a small, dishevelled sun.

Adam doubted that she was a witch. Adam had a very clear mental picture of a witch. The Youngs restricted themselves to the only possible choice amongst the better class of Sunday newspaper, and so a hundred years of enlightened occultism had passed Adam by. She didn't have a hooked nose or warts, and she was young . . . well, quiteyoung. That was good enough for him.

"Hallo," he said, unslouching.

She blew her nose and stared at him.

What was looking over the hedge should be described at this point. What Anathema saw was, she said later, something like a prepubescent Greek god. Or maybe a Biblical illustration, one which showed muscular angels doing some righteous smiting. It was a face that didn't belong in the twentieth century. It was thatched with golden curls which glowed. Mi­chelangelo should have sculpted it.

He probably would not have included the battered sneakers, frayed jeans, or grubby T‑shirt, though.

"Who're you?" she said.

"I'm Adam Young," said Adam. "I live just down the lane."

"Oh. Yes. I've heard of you," said Anathema, dabbing at her eyes. Adam preened.

"Mrs. Henderson said I was to be sure to keep an eye out for you," she went on.

"I'm well known around here," said Adam.

"She said you were born to hang," said Anathema.

Adam grinned. Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.

"She said you were the worst of the lot of Them," said Anathema, looking a little more cheerful. Adam nodded.

"She said, 'You watch out for Them, Miss, they're nothing but a pack of ringleaders. That young Adam's full of the Old Adam,' " she said.

"What've you been cryin' for?" said Adam bluntly.

"Oh? Oh, I've just lost something," said Anathema. "A book."

"I'll help you look for it, if you like," said Adam gallantly. "I know quite a lot about books, actually. I wrote a book once. It was a triffic book. It was nearly eight pages long. It was about this pirate who was a famous detective. And Idrew the pictures." And then, in a flash of largess, he added, "If you like I'll let you read it. I bet it was a lot more excitin' than any book you've lost. 'Specially the bit in the spaceship where the dinosaur comes out and fights with the cowboys. I bet it'd cheer you up, my book. It cheered up Brian no end. He said he'd never been so cheered up."

"Thank you, I'm sure your book is a very good book," she said, endearing herself to Adam forever. "But I don't need you to help look for my book‑I think it's too late now."

She looked thoughtfully at Adam. "I expect you know this area very well?" she said.

"For miles an' miles, " said Adam.

"You haven't seen two men in a big black car?" said Anathema.

"Did they steal it?" said Adam, suddenly full of interest. Foiling a gang of international book thieves would make a rewarding end to the day.

"Not really. Sort of. I mean, they didn't mean to. They were look­ing for the Manor, but I went up there today and no one knows anything about them. There was some sort of accident or something, I believe."

She stared at Adam. There was something odd about him, but she couldn't put her finger on it. She just had an urgent feeling that he was important and shouldn't be allowed to drift away. Something about him . . .

"What's the book called?" said Adam.

"The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch," said Anathema.

"Which what?"

"No. Witch. Like in Macbeth,"said Anathema.

"I saw that," said Adam. "It was really interesting, the way them kings carried on. Gosh. What's nice about 'em?"

"Nice used to mean, well, precise. Or exact." Definitely something strange. A sort of laid‑back intensity. You started to feel that if he was around, then everyone else, even the landscape, was just background.

She'd been here a month. Except for Mrs. Henderson, who in the­ory looked after the cottage and probably went through her things given half a chance, she hadn't exchanged more than a dozen real words with anyone. She let them think she was an artist. This was the kind of country­side that artists liked.

Actually, it was bloody beautiful. Just around this village it was superb. If Turner and Landseer had met Samuel Palmer in a pub and worked it all out, and then got Stubbs to do the horses, it couldn't have been better.

And that was depressing, because this was where it was going to happen. According to Agnes, anyway. In a book which she, Anathema, had allowed to be lost. She had the file cards, of course, but they just weren't the same.

If Anathema had been in full control of her own mind at that moment‑and no one around Adam was ever in full control of his or her own mind‑she'd have noticed that whenever she tried to think about him beyond a superficial level her thoughts slipped away like a duck off water.

"Wicked!" said Adam, who had been turning over in his mind the implications of a book of nice and accurate prophecies. "It tells you who's going to win the Grand National, does it?"

"No," said Anathema.

"Any spaceships in it?"

"Not many," said Anathema.

"Robots?" said Adam hopefully.

"Sorry."

"Doesn't sound very nice to me,then," said Adam. "Don't see what the future's got in it if there's no robots and spaceships."

About three days, thought Anathema glumly. That's what it's got in it.

"Would you like a lemonade?" she said.

Adam hesitated. Then he decided to take the bull by the horns.

"Look, 'scuse me for askin', if it's not a personal question, but are you a witch?" he said.

Anathema narrowed her eyes. So much for Mrs. Henderson poking around.

"Some people might say so," she said. "Actually, I'm an occultist."

"Oh. Well. That's all right, then," said Adam, cheering up.

She looked him up and down.

"You know what an occultist is, do you?" she said.

"Oh, yes," said Adam confidently.

"Well, so long as you're happier now," said Anathema. "Come on in. I could do with a drink myself. And . . . Adam Young?"

"Yes?"

"You were thinking 'Nothin' wrong with my eyes, they don't need examining,' weren't you?"

"Who, me?" said Adam guiltily.

– – -

Dog was the problem. He wouldn't go in the cottage. He crouched on the doorstep, growling.

"Come on, you silly dog," said Adam. "It's only old Jasmine Cot­tage." He gave Anathema an embarrassed look. "Normally he does every­thing I say, right off."

"You can leave him in the garden," said Anathema.

"No," said Adam. "He's got to do what he's tole. I read it in a book. Trainin' is very important. Any dog can be trained, it said. My father said I can only keep him if he's prop'ly trained. Now, Dog. Go inside."

Dog whined and gave him a pleading look. His stubby tail thumped on the floor once or twice.

His Master's voice.

With extreme reluctance, as if making progress in the teeth of a gale, he slunk over the doorstep.

"There," said Adam proudly. "Good boy."

And a little bit more of Hell burned away . . .

Anathema shut the door.

There had always been a horseshoe over the door of Jasmine Cot­tage, ever since its first tenant centuries before; the Black Death was all the rage at the time and he'd considered that he could use all the protection he could get.

It was corroded and half covered with the paint of centuries. So neither Adam nor Anathema gave it a thought, or noticed how it was now cooling from a white heat.

– – -

Aziraphale's cocoa was stone cold.

The only sound in the room was the occasional turning of a page.

Every now and again there was a rattling at the door when prospec­tive customers of Intimate Books next door mistook the entrance. He ignored it.

Occasionally he would very nearly swear.

– – -

Anathema hadn't really made herself at home in the cottage. Most of her implements were piled up on the table. It looked interesting. It looked, in fact, as though a voodoo priest had just had the run of a scien­tific equipment store.

"Brilliant!" said Adam, prodding at it. "What's the thing with the three legs?"

"It's a theodolite," said Anathema from the kitchen. "It's for track­ing ley‑lines."

"What are they, then?" said Adam.

She told him.

"Cor," he said. "Are they?"

"Yes."

"All over the place?"

"Yes."

"I've never seen 'em. Amazin', there bein' all these invisible lines of force around and me not seeing 'em."

Adam didn't often listen, but he spent the most enthralling twenty minutes of his life, or at least of his life that day. No one in the Young household so much as touched wood or threw salt over their shoulder. The only nod in the direction of the supernatural was a half‑hearted pretense, when Adam had been younger, that Father Christmas came down the chimney. ^[22]

He'd been starved of anything more occult than a Harvest Festival. Her words poured into his mind like water into a quire of blotting paper.

Dog lay under the table and growled. He was beginning to have serious doubts about himself.

Anathema didn't only believe in ley‑lines, but in seals, whales, bi­cycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn't compartmentalize her be­liefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. On any scale of mountain moving it shifted at least point five of an alp. ^[23]

No one had even used the word "environment" in Adam's hearing before. The South American rain forests were a closed book to Adam, and it wasn't even made of recycled paper.

The only time he interrupted her was to agree with her views on nuclear power: "I've been to a nucular power station. It was boring.There was no green smoke and bubbling stuff in tubes. Shouldn't be allowed, not having proper bubbling stuff when people have come all the way to see it, and having just a lot of men standin' around not even wearin' space suits."

"They do all the bubbling after visitors have gone home," said Anathema grimly.

"Huh," said Adam.

"They should be done away with this minute."

"Serve them right for not bubblin'," said Adam.

Anathema nodded. She was still trying to put her finger on what was so odd about Adam, and then she realized what it was.

He had no aura.

She was quite an expert on auras. She could see them, if she stared hard enough. They were a little glow of light around people's heads, and according to a book she'd read the color told you things about their health and general well‑being. Everyone had one. In mean‑minded, closed‑in peo­ple they were a faint, trembling outline, whereas expansive and creative people might have one extending several inches from the body.

She'd never heard of anyone without one, but she couldn't see one around Adam at all. Yet he seemed cheerful, enthusiastic, and as well­balanced as a gyroscope.

Maybe I'm just tired, she thought.

Anyway, she was pleased and gratified to find such a rewarding student, and even loaned him some copies of New Aquarian Digest,a small magazine edited by a friend of hers.

It changed his life. At least, it changed his life for that day.

To his parents' astonishment he went to bed early, and then lay under the blankets until after midnight with a torch, the magazines, and a bag of lemon drops. The occasional "Brilliant!" emerged from his fero­cious‑chewing mouth.

When the batteries ran out he emerged into the darkened room and lay back with his head pillowed in his hands, apparently watching the squadron of X‑wing®fighters that hung from the ceiling. They moved gently in the night breeze.

But Adam wasn't really watching them. He was staring instead into the brightly lit panorama of his own imagination, which was whirling like a fairground.

This wasn't Wensleydale's aunt and a wineglass. This sort of oc­culting was a lot more interesting.

Besides, he liked Anathema. Of course, she was very old, but when Adam liked someone he wanted to make them happy.

He wondered how he could make Anathema happy.

It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast popu­lation movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old­-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.

Somewhere in Adam's sleeping head, a butterfly had emerged.

It might, or might not, have helped Anathema get a clear view of things if she'd been allowed to spot the very obvious reason why she couldn't see Adam's aura.

It was for the same reason that people in Trafalgar Square can't see England.

– – -

Alarms went off.

Of course, there's nothing special about alarms going off in the control room of a nuclear power station. They do it all the time. It's because there are many dials and meters and things that something impor­tant might not get noticed if it doesn't at least beep.

And the job of Shift Charge Engineer calls for a solid, capable, unflappable kind of man, the kind you can depend upon not to make a beeline for the car‑park in an emergency. The kind of man, in fact, who gives the impression of smoking a pipe even when he's not.

It was 3:00 A.M. in the control room of Turning Point power station, normally a nice quiet time when there is nothing much to do but fill in the log and listen to the distant roar of the turbines.

Until now.

Horace Gander looked at the flashing red lights. Then he looked at some dials. Then he looked at the faces of his fellow workers. Then he raised his eyes to the big dial at the far end of the room. Four hundred and twenty practically dependable and very nearly cheap megawatts were leav­ing the station. According to the other dials, nothing was producing them.

He didn't say "That's weird." He wouldn't have said "That's weird" if a flock of sheep had cycled past playing violins. It wasn't the sort of thing a responsible engineer said.

What he did say was: "Alf, you'd better ring the station manager."

Three very crowded hours went past. They involved quite a lot of phone calls, telexes, and faxes. Twenty‑seven people were got out of bed in quick succession and they got another fifty‑three out of bed, because if there is one thing a man wants to know when he's woken up in a panic at 4:00 A.M., it's that he's not alone.

Anyway, you need all sorts of permissions before they let you un­screw the lid of a nuclear reactor and look inside.

They got them. They unscrewed it. They had a look inside.

Horace Gander said, "There's got to be a sensible reason for this. Five hundred tons of uranium don't just get up and walk away."

A meter in his hand should have been screaming. Instead, it let out the occasional halfhearted tick.

Where the reactor should have been was an empty space. You could have had quite a nice game of squash in it.

Right at the bottom, all alone in the center of the bright cold floor, was a lemon drop.

Outside in the cavernous turbine hall the machines roared on.

And, a hundred miles away, Adam Young turned over in his sleep.

Friday

R aven Sable, slim and bearded and dressed all in black, sat in the back of his slimline black limousine, talking on his slim­line black telephone to his West Coast base.

"How's it going?" he asked.

"Looking good, chief," said his marketing head. "I'm doing break­fast with the buyers from all the leading supermarket chains tomorrow. No problem. We'll have MEALS in all the stores this time next month."

"Good work, Nick."

"No problem. No problem. It's knowing you're behind us, Rave. You give great leadership, guy. Works for me every time."

"Thank you," said Sable, and he broke the connection.

He was particularly proud of MEALS®.

The Newtrition corporation had started small, eleven years ago. A small team of food scientists, a huge team of marketing and public rela­tions personnel, and a neat logo.

Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW. CHOW® contained spun, plaited, and woven protein mole­cules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no‑cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nu­tritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn't matter how much you ate, you lost weight. ^[24]

Fat people had bought it. Thin people who didn't want to get fat had bought it. CHOW® was the ultimate diet food‑carefully spun, woven, textured, and pounded to imitate anything, from potatoes to veni­son, although the chicken sold best.

Sable sat back and watched the money roll in. He watched CHOW® gradually fill the ecological niche that used to be filled by the old, untrademarked food.

He followed CHOW® with SNACKS® junk food made from real junk.

MEALS® was Sable's latest brainwave.

MEALS® was CHOW®) with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS® you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.

The paradox delighted Sable.

MEALS® were currently being tested all over America. Pizza MEALS, Fish MEALS, Szechuan MEALS, macrobiotic rice MEALS. Even Hamburger MEALS.

Sable's limousine was parked in the lot of a Des Moines, Iowa, Burger Lord‑a fast food franchise wholly owned by his organization. It was here they'd been piloting Hamburger MEALS for the last six months. He wanted to see what kind of results they'd been getting.

He leaned forward, tapped the chauffeur's glass partition. The chauffeur pressed a switch, and the glass slid open.

"Sir?"

"I'm going to take a look at our operation, Marlon. I'll be ten minutes. Then back to L.A."

Sir.

Sable sauntered in to the Burger Lord. It was exactly like every other Burger Lord in America. ^[25]McLordy the Clown danced in the Kiddie Korner. The serving staff had identical gleaming smiles that never reached their eyes. And behind the counter a chubby, middle‑aged man in a Burger Lord uniform slapped burgers onto the griddle, whistling softly, happy in his work.

Sable went up to the counter.

"Hello‑my‑name‑is‑Marie," said the girl behind the counter. "How‑can‑I‑help‑you?"

"A double blaster thunder biggun, extra fries, hold the mustard," he said.

"Anything‑to‑drink?"

"A special thick whippy chocobanana shake."

She pressed the little pictogram squares on her till. (Literacy was no longer a requirement for employment in these restaurants. Smiling was.) Then she turned to the chubby man behind the counter.

"DBTB, E F, hold mustard," she said. "Choc‑shake."

"Uhnnhuhn," crooned the cook. He sorted the food into little pa­per containers, pausing only to brush the graying cowlick from his eyes.

"Here y'are," he said.

She took them without looking at him, and he returned cheerfully to his griddle, singing quietly, "Loooove me tender, looooove me long, neeever let me go . . ."

The man's humming, Sable noted, clashed with the Burger Lord background music, a tinny tape loop of the Burger Lord commercial jin­gle, and he made a mental note to have him fired.

Hello‑my‑name‑is‑Marie gave Sable his MEALS and told him to have a nice day.

He found a small plastic table, sat down in the plastic seat, and examined his food.

Artificial bread roll. Artificial burger. Fries that had never even seen potatoes. Foodless sauces. Even (and Sable was especially pleased with this) an artificial slice of dill pickle. He didn't bother to examine his milkshake. It had no actual food content, but then again, neither did those sold by any of his rivals.

All around him people were eating their unfood with, if not actual evidence of enjoyment, then with no more actual disgust than was to be found in burger chains all over the planet.

He stood up, took his tray over to the PLEASE DISPOSE OF YOUR REFUSE WITH CARE receptacle, and dumped the whole thing. If you had told him that there were children starving in Africa he would have been flattered that you'd noticed.

There was a tug at his sleeve. "Party name of Sable?" asked a small, bespectacled man in an International Express cap, holding a brown paper parcel.

Sable nodded.

"Thought it was you. Looked around, thought, tall gent with a beard, nice suit, can't be that many of them here. Package for you, sir."

Sable signed for it, his real name‑one word, six letters. Sounds like examine.

"Thank you kindly, sir," said the delivery man. He paused. "Here," he said. "That bloke behind the counter. Does he remind you of anyone?"

"No," said Sable. He gave the man a tip‑five dollars‑and opened the package.

In it was a small pair of brass scales.

Sable smiled. It was a slim smile, and was gone almost instantly.

"About time," he said. He thrust the scales into his pocket, unheed­ing of the damage being done to the sleek line of his black suit, and went back to the limo.

"Back to the office?" asked the chauffeur.

"The airport," said Sable. "And call ahead. I want a ticket to En­gland."

"Yessir. Return ticket to England."

Sable fingered the scales in his pocket. "Make that a single," he said. "I'll be making my own way back. Oh, and call the office for me, cancel all appointments."

"How long for, sir?"

"The foreseeable future."

And in the Burger Lord, behind the counter, the stout man with the cowlick slid another half‑dozen burgers onto the grill. He was the happiest man in the whole world and he was singing, very softly.

". . . y'ain't never caught a rabbit," he hummed to himself, "and y'ain't no friend of mine . . ."

– – -

The Them listened with interest. There was a light drizzle which was barely kept at bay by the old iron sheets and frayed bits of lino that roofed their den in the quarry, and they always looked to Adam to think up things to do when it was raining. They weren't disappointed. Adam's eyes were agleam with the joy of knowledge.

It had been 3:00 A.m. before he'd gone to sleep under a pile of New Aquarians.

"An' then there was this man called Charles Fort," he said. "He could make it rain fish and frogs and stuff."

"Huh," said Pepper. "I bet.Alive frogs?"

"Oh, yes," said Adam, warming to his subject. "Hopping around and croaking and everything. People paid him money to go away in the end an', an' . . ." He racked his brains for something that would satisfy his audience; he'd done, for Adam, a lot of reading in one go. ". . . And he sailed off in the Mary Celesteand founded the Bermuda Triangle. It's in Bermuda," he added helpfully.

"No, he couldn't of done that," said Wensleydale sternly, "because I've read about the Mary Celeste,and there was no one on it. It's famous for having no one on it. They found it floating around all by itself with no one on it."

"I din't say he was on it when they foundit, did I?" said Adam scathingly. "Course he wasn't on it. 'Cos of the UFOs landin' and takin' him off. I thought everyone knewabout that."

The Them relaxed a bit. They were on firmer ground with UFOs. They weren't entirely certain about New Age UFOs, though; they'd lis­tened politely to Adam on the subject, but somehow modern UFOs lacked punch.

"If I was an alien," said Pepper, voicing the opinion of them all, "I wouldn't go round telling people all about mystic cosmic harmony. I'd say," her voice became hoarse and nasal, like someone hampered by an evil black mask, "'Thish ish a lasher blashter, sho you do what you're told, rebel swine."'

They all nodded. A favorite game in quarry had been based on a highly successful film series with lasers, robots, and a princess who wore her hair like a pair of stereo headphones. (It had been agreed without a word being said that if anyone was going to play the part of any stupid princesses, it wasn't going to be Pepper.) But the game normally ended in a fight to be the one who was allowed to wear the coal scuttle® and blow up planets. Adam was best at it‑when he was the villain, he really sounded as if he could blow up the world. The Them were, anyway, temperamen­tally on the side of planet destroyers, provided they could be allowed to rescue princesses at the same time.

"I s'pect that's what they usedto do," said Adam. "But now it's different. They all have this bright blue light around 'em and go around doing good. Sort of g'lactic policemen, going round tellin' everyone to live in universal harmony and stuff."

There was a moment's silence while they pondered this waste of perfectly good UFOs.

"What I've always wondered," said Brian, "is why they call 'em UFOs when they know they're flying saucers. I mean, they're IdentifiedFlying Objects then."

"It's 'cos the goverment hushes it all up," said Adam. "Millions of flying saucers landin' all the time and the goverment keeps hushing it up."

"Why?" said Wensleydale.

Adam hesitated. His reading hadn't provided a quick explanation for this; New Aquarianjust took it as the foundation of belief, both of itself and its readers, that the government hushed everything up.

"'Cos they're the goverment,"said Adam simply. "That's what goverments do. They've got this great big building in London full of books of all the things they've hushed up. When the Prime Minister gets in to work in the morning, the first thing he does is go through the big list of everything that's happened in the night and put this big red stamp on them."

"I bet he has a cup of tea first, and then reads the paper," said Wensleydale, who had on one memorable occasion during the holidays gone unexpectedly into his father's office, where he had formed certain impressions. "And talks about what was on TV last night."

"Well, orlright, but after thathe gets out the book and the big stamp."

"Which says 'Hush It Up,"' said Pepper.

"It says Top Secret," said Adam, resenting this attempt at biparti­san creativity. "It's like nucular power stations. They keep blowin' up all the time but no one ever finds out 'cos the goverment hushes it up."

"They don't keep blowing allthe time," said Wensleydale severely. "My father says they're dead safe and mean we don't have to live in a greenhouse. Anyway, there's a big picture of one in my comic* and it doesn't say anything about it blowing up." ^[26]

"Yes," said Brian, "But you lent me that comic afterwards and I know what typeof picture it was."

Wensleydale hesitated, and then said in a voice heavy with badly tried patience, "Brian, just because it says Exploded Diagram‑"

There was the usual brief scuffle.

"Look," said Adam severely. "Do you want me to tell you about the Aquarium Age, or not?"

The fight, never very serious amongst the siblinghood of the Them, subsided.

"Right," said Adam. He scratched his head. "Now you've made me forget where I've got to," he complained.

"Flyin' saucers," said Brian.

"Right. Right. Well, if you dosee a flying UFO, these government men come and tell you off," said Adam, getting back into his stride. "In a big black car. It happens all the time in America."

The Them nodded sagely. Of this at least they had no doubt. Amer­ica was, to them, the place that good people went to when they died. They were prepared to believe that just about anything could happen in Amer­ica.

"Prob'ly causes traffic jams," said Adam, "all these men in black cars, going about telling people off for seeing UFOs. They tell you that if you go on seeing 'em, you'll have a Nasty Accident."

"Prob'ly get run over by a big black car," said Brian, picking at a scab on a dirty knee. He brightened up. "Do you know," he said, "my cousin said that in America there's shops that sell thirty‑nine different flavors of ice cream?"

This even silenced Adam, briefly.

"There aren't thirty‑nine flavors of ice cream," said Pepper. "There aren't thirty‑nine flavors in the whole world."

"There could be, if you mixed them up," said Wensleydale, blinking owlishly. "You know. Strawberry andchocolate. Chocolate andvanilla." He sought for more English flavors. "Strawberry andvanilla andchoco­late," he added, lamely.

"And then there's Atlantis," said Adam loudly.

He had their interest there. They enjoyed Atlantis. Cities that sank under the sea were right up the Them's street. They listened intently to a jumbled account of pyramids, weird priesthoods, and ancient secrets.

"Did it just happen sudden, or slowly?" said Brian.

"Sort of sudden an'slowly,"said Adam, "'cos a lot of 'em got away in boats to all the other countries and taught 'em how to do maths an' English an' History an' stuff."

"Don't see what's so great about that," said Pepper.

"Could of been good fun, when it was sinking," said Brian wist­fully, recalled the one occasion when Lower Tadfield had been flooded. "People deliverin' the milk and newspapers by boat, no one having to go to school."

"If I was an Atlantisan, I'd of stayed," said Wensleydale. This was greeted with disdainful laughter, but he pressed on. "You'd just have to wear a diver's helmet, that's all. And nail all the windows shut and fill the houses with air. It would be great."

Adam greeted this with the chilly stare he reserved for any of Them who came up with an idea he really wished he'd thought of first.

"They could of done," he conceded, somewhat weakly. "After they'd sent all the teachers off in the boats. Maybe everyone else stayed on when it went down."

"You wouldn't have to wash," said Brian, whose parents forced him to wash a great deal more than he thought could possibly be healthy. Not that it did any good. There was something basically ground inabout Brian. "Because everything would stay clean. An', an' you could grow seaweed and stuff in the garden and shoot sharks. And have pet octopuses and stuff. And there wouldn't be any schools and stuff because they'd of got rid of all the teachers."

"They could still be down there now," said Pepper.

They thought about the Atlanteans, clad in flowing mystic robes and goldfish bowls, enjoying themselves deep under the choppy waters of the ocean.

"Huh," said Pepper, summing up their feelings.

"What shall we do now?" said Brian. "It's brightened up a bit."

In the end they played Charles Fort Discovering Things. This con­sisted of one of the Them walking around with the ancient remains of an umbrella, while the others treated him to a rain of frogs or, rather, frog. They could only find one in the pond. It was an elderly frog, who knew the Them of old, and tolerated their interest as the price it paid for a pond otherwise free of moorhens and pike. It put up with things good‑naturedly for a while before hopping off to a secret and so‑far‑undiscovered hideout in an old drainpipe.

Then they went home for lunch.

Adam felt very pleased about the morning's work. He'd always knownthat the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist any more.

Whereas this Aquarium Age stuff was reallyreal. Grown‑up people wrote lots of books about it (New Aquarianwas full of adverts for them) and Bigfoots and Mothmen and Yetis and sea monsters and Surrey pumas reallyexisted. If Cortez, on his peak in Darien, had had slightly damp feet from efforts at catching frogs, he'd have felt just like Adam at that mo­ment.

The world was bright and strange and he was in the middle of it.

He bolted his lunch and retired to his room. There were still quite a few New Aquarianshe hadn't read yet.

– – -

The cocoa was a congealed brown sludge half filling the cup.

Certain people had spent hundreds of years trying to make sense of the prophecies of Agnes Nutter. They had been very intelligent, in the main. Anathema Device, who was about as close to beingAgnes as genetic drift would allow, was the best of the bunch. But none of them had been angels.

Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he wasintelligent. And it was an angelic intelligence which, while not being particularly higher than human intelligence, is much broader and has the advantage of having thousands of years of practice.

Aziraphale was the first angel ever to own a computer. It was a cheap, slow, plasticky one, much touted as ideal for the small business­man. Aziraphale used it religiously for doing his accounts, which were so scrupulously accurate that the tax authorities had inspected him five times in the deep belief that he was getting away with murder somewhere.

But these other calculations were of a kind no computer could ever do. Sometimes he would scribble something on a sheet of paper by his side. It was covered in symbols which only eight other people in the world would have been able to comprehend; two of them had won Nobel prizes, and one of the other six dribbled a lot and wasn't allowed anything sharp because of what he might do with it.

– – -

Anathema lunched on miso soup and pored over her maps. There was no doubt the area around Tadfield was rich in ley lines; even the famous Rev. Watkins had identified some. But unless she was totally wrong, they were beginning to shift position.

She'd spent the week taking soundings with theodolite and pendu­lum, and the Ordinance Survey map of the Tadfield area was now covered with little dots and arrows.

She stared at them for some time. Then she picked up a felt‑tip pen and, with occasional references to her notebook, began to join them up.

The radio was on. She wasn't really listening. So quite a lot of the main news item passed right by her unheeding ears, and it wasn't until a couple of key words filtered down into her consciousness that she began to take notice.

Someone called A Spokesman sounded close to hysteria.

". . . danger to employees or the public," he was saying.

"And precisely how much nuclear material has escaped?" said the interviewer.

There was a pause. "We wouldn't say escaped," said the spokes­man. "Not escaped. Temporarily mislaid."

"You mean it is still on the premises?"

"We certainly cannot see how it could have been removed from them," said the spokesman.

"Surely you have considered terrorist activity?"

There was another pause. Then the spokesman said, in the quiet tones of someone who has had enough and is going to quit after this and raise chickens somewhere, "Yes, I suppose we must. All we need to do is find some terrorists who are capable of taking an entire nuclear reactor out of its can while it's running and without anyone noticing. It weighs about a thousand tons and is forty feet high. So they'll be quite strongterrorists. Perhaps you'd like to ring them up, sir, and ask them questions in that supercilious, accusatory way of yours."

"But you said the power station is still producing electricity," gasped the interviewer.

"It is."

"How can it still be doing that if it hasn't got any reactors?"

You could see the spokesman's mad grin, even on the radio. You could see his pen, poised over the "Farms for Sale" column in PoultryWorld. "We don't know," he said. "We were hoping you clever buggers at the BBC would have an idea."

Anathema looked down at her map.

What she had been drawing looked like a galaxy, or the type of carving seen on the better class of Celtic monolith.

The ley‑lines were shifting. They were forming a spiral.

It was centered‑loosely, with some margin for error, but neverthe­less centered‑on Lower Tadfield.

– – -

Several thousand miles away, at almost the same moment as Anathema was staring at her spirals, the pleasure cruiser Morbilliwas aground in three hundred fathoms of water.

For Captain Vincent, this was just another problem. For example, he knew he should contact the owners, but he never knew from day to day ‑or from hour to hour, in this computerized world‑actually who the current owners were.

Computers, that was the bloody trouble. The ship's papers were computerized and it could switch to the most currently advantageous flag of convenience in microseconds. Its navigation had been computerized as well, constantly updating its position by satellites. Captain Vincent had explained patiently to the owners, whoever they were, that several hundred square meters of steel plating and a barrel of rivets would be a better investment, and had been informed that his recommendation did not ac­cord with current cost/benefit flow predictions.

Captain Vincent strongly suspected that despite all its electronics the ship was worth more sunk than afloat, and would probably go down as the most perfectly pinpointed wreck in nautical history.

By inference, this also meant that he was more valuable dead than alive.

He sat at his desk quietly leafing through International Maritime Codes,whose six hundred pages contained brief yet pregnant messages designed to transmit the news of every conceivable nautical eventuality across the world with the minimum of confusion and, above all, cost.

What he wanted to say was this: Was sailing SSW at position 33°N 47° 72'W. First Mate, who you may recall was appointed in New Guinea against my wishes and is probably a head‑hunter, indicated by signs that something was amiss. It appears that quite a vast expanse of seabed has risen up in the night. It contains a large number of buildings, many of which appeared pyramid‑like in structure. We are aground in the court­yard of one of these. There are some rather unpleasant statues. Amiable old men in long robes and diving helmets have come aboard the ship and are mingling happily with the passengers, who think we organized this. Please advise.

His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Codes.They'd been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep.

He picked up his pen and wrote down: "XXXV QVVX."

Translated, it meant: "Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest has just won quoits contest."

– – -

"It jolly well isn't!"

"It jolly well is!"

"It isn't, you know!"

"It jolly well is!"

"It isn't‑all right, then, what about volcanoes?" Wensleydale sat back, a look of triumph on his face.

"What about 'em?" said Adam.

"All that lather comes up from the center of the Earth, where it's all hot," said Wensleydale. "I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it's true."

The other Them looked at Adam. It was like watching a tennis match.

The Hollow Earth Theory was not going over well in the quarry. A beguiling idea that had stood up to the probings of such remarkable think­ers as Cyrus Read Teed, Bulwer‑Lytton, and Adolf Hitler was bending dangerously in the wind of Wensleydale's searingly bespectacled logic.

"I dint say it was hollow all the way through," said Adam. "No one said it was hollow all the way through. It prob'ly goes down miles and miles to make room for all the lather and oil and coal and Tibetan tunnels and suchlike. But then it's hollow after that. That's what people think. And there's a hole at the North Pole to let the air in."

"Never seen it on an atlas," sniffed Wensleydale.

"The goverment won't let them put it on a map in case people go and have a look in," said Adam. "The reason being, the people livin' inside don't want people lookin' down on 'em all the time."

"What do you mean, Tibetan tunnels?" said Pepper. "You said Tibetan tunnels."

"Ah. Dint I tell you about them?"

Three heads shook.

"It's amazing. You know Tibet?"

They nodded doubtfully. A series of images had risen in their minds: yaks, Mount Everest, people called Grasshopper, little old men sitting on mountains, other people learning kung fu in ancient temples, and snow.

"Well, you know all those teachers that left Atlantis when it sunk?"

They nodded again.

"Well, some of them went to Tibet and now they run the world. They're called the Secret Masters. On account of being teachers, I suppose. An' they've got this secret underground city called Shambala and tunnels that go all over the world so's they know everythin' that goes on and control everythin'. Some people reckon that they really live under the Gobby Desert," he added loftily, "but mos' competent authorities reckon it's Tibet all right. Better for the tunnelling, anyway."

The Them instinctively looked down at the grubby, dirt‑covered chalk beneath their feet.

"How come they know everything?" said Pepper.

"They just have to listen, right?" hazarded Adam. "They just have to sit in their tunnels and listen. You know what hearin' teachers have. They can hear a whisper right across the room."

"My granny used to put a glass against the wall," said Brian. "She said it was disgustin', the way she could hear everything that went on next door."

"And these tunnels go everywhere, do they?" said Pepper, still staring at the ground.

"All over the world," said Adam firmly.

"Must of took a long time," said Pepper doubtfully. "You remem­ber when we tried digging that tunnel out in the field, we were at it all afternoon, and you had to scrunch up to get all in."

"Yes, but they've been doin' it for millions of years. You can do really good tunnels if you've got millions of years."

"I thought the Tibetans were conquered by the Chinese and the Daily Llama had to go to India," said Wensleydale, but without much conviction. Wensleydale read his father's newspaper every evening, but the prosaic everydayness of the world always seemed to melt under the power­house of Adam's explanations.

"I bet they're down there now," said Adam, ignoring this. "They'd be all over the place by now. Sitting underground and listenin'."

They looked at one another.

"If we dug down quickly‑" said Brian. Pepper, who was a lot quicker on the uptake, groaned.

"What'd you have to go an' say that for?" said Adam. "Fat lot of good us trying to surprise them now, isn't it, with you shoutin' out some­thing like that. I was just thinkin' we could dig down, an' you jus' have to go an' warn 'em!"

"I don't think they'd dig all those tunnels," said Wensleydale dog­gedly. "It doesn't make any sense.Tibet's hundreds of miles away."

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes. An' I s'pose you know more about it than Ma­dame Blatvatatatsky?" sniffed Adam.

"Now, if I was a Tibetan," said Wensleydale, in a reasonable tone of voice, "I'd just dig straight down to the hollow bit in the middle and then run around the inside and dig straight up where I wanted to be."

They gave this due consideration.

"You've got to admit that's more sensible than tunnels," said Pepper.

"Yes, well, I expect that's what they do," said Adam. "They'd be bound to of thought of something as simple as that."

Brian stared dreamily at the sky, while his finger probed the con­tents of one ear.

"Funny, reely," he said. "You spend your whole life goin' to school and learnin' stuff, and they never tell you about stuff like the Bermuda Triangle and UFOs and all these Old Masters running around the inside of the Earth. Why do we have to learn boring stuff when there's all this brilliant stuff we could be learnin', that's what I want to know."

There was a chorus of agreement.

Then they went out and played Charles Fort and the Atlantisans versus the Ancient Masters of Tibet, but the Tibetters claimed that using mystic ancient lasers was cheating.

– – -

There was a time when witchfinders were respected, although it didn't last very long.

Matthew Hopkins, for example, the Witchfinder General, found witches all over the east of England in the middle of the seventeenth century, charging each town and village nine pence a witch for every one he discovered.

That was the trouble. Witchfinders didn't get paid by the hour. Any witchfinder who spent a week examining the local crones and then told the mayor, "Well done, not a pointy hat among the lot of them," would get fulsome thanks, a bowl of soup and a meaningful goodbye.

So in order to turn a profit Hopkins had to find a remarkable number of witches. This made him more than a little unpopular with the village councils, and he was himself hanged as a witch by an East Anglian village who had sensibly realized that they could cut their overheads by eliminating the middleman.

It is thought by many that Hopkins was the last Witchfinder General.

In this they would, strictly speaking, be correct. Possibly not in the way they imagine, however. The Witchfinder Army marched on, just slightly more quietly.

There is no longer a real Witchfinder General.

Nor is there a Witchfinder Colonel, a Witchfinder Major, a Witchfinder Captain, or even a Witchfinder Lieutenant (the last one was killed falling out of a very tall tree in Caterham, in 1933, while attempting to get a better view of something he believed was a satanic orgy of the most degenerate persuasion, but was, in fact, the Caterham and Whyteleafe Market Traders' Association annual dinner and dance).

There is, however, a Witchfinder Sergeant.

There is also, now, a Witchfinder Private. His name is Newton Pulsifer.

It was the advertisement that got him, in the Gazette,between a fridge for sale and a litter of not‑exactly dalmatians:

JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS. PART TIME ASSISTANT REQUIRED TO COMBAT THE FORCES OF DARKNESS. UNIFORM, BASIC TRAINING PROVIDED. FIELD PROMOTION CERTAIN. BE A MAN!

In his lunch hour he phoned the number at the bottom of the ad. A woman answered.

"Hello," he began, tentatively. "I saw your advert."

"Which one, love?"

"Er, the one in the paper."

"Right, love. Well, Madame Tracy Draws Aside the Veil every af­ternoon except Thursdays. Parties welcome. When would you be wanting to Explore the Mysteries, love?"

Newton hesitated. "The advert says 'Join the Professionals,' " he said. "It didn't mention Madame Tracy."

"That'll be Mister Shadwell you'll be wanting, then. Just a sec, I'll see if he's in."

Later, when he was on nodding terms with Madame Tracy, Newt learned that if he had mentioned the other ad, the one in the magazine, Madame Tracy would have been available for strict discipline and intimate massage every evening except Thursdays. There was yet another ad in a phone box somewhere. When, much later, Newt asked her what this one involved, she said "Thursdays." Eventually there was the sound of feet in uncarpeted hallways, a deep coughing, and a voice the color of an old raincoat rumbled:

"Aye?"

"I read your advert. 'Join the professionals.' I wanted to know a bit more about it."

"Aye. There's many as would like to know more about it, an' there's many . . ." the voice trailed off impressively, then crashed back to full volume, ". . . there's many as WOULDN'T."

"Oh," squeaked Newton.

"What's your name, lad?"

"Newton. Newton Pulsifer."

"LUCIFER? What's that you say? Are ye of the Spawn of Dark­ness, a tempting beguiling creature from the pit, wanton limbs steaming from the fleshpots of Hades, in tortured and lubricious thrall to your stygian and hellish masters?"

"That's Pulsifer," explained Newton. "With a P. I don't know about the other stuff, but we come from Surrey."

The voice on the phone sounded vaguely disappointed.

"Oh. Aye. Well, then. Pulsifer. Pulsifer. I've seen that name afore, maybe?"

"I don't know," said Newton. "My uncle runs a toy shop in Houns­low," he added, in case this way any help.

"Is that sooo?" said Shadwell.

Mr. Shadwell's accent was unplaceable. It careered around Britain like a milk race. Here a mad Welsh drill sergeant, there a High Kirk elder who'd just seen someone doing something on a Sunday, somewhere be­tween them a dour Daleland shepherd, or bitter Somerset miser. It didn't matter where the accent went; it didn't get any nicer.

"Have ye all your own teeth?"

"Oh yes. Except for fillings."

"Are ye fit?"

"I suppose so," Newt stuttered. "I mean, that was why I wanted to join the territorials. Brian Potter in Accounting can bench‑press almost a hundred since he joined. And he paraded in front of the Queen Mother."

"How many nipples?"

"Pardon?"

"Nipples, laddie, nipples," said the voice testily. "How many nip­ples hae ye got?"

"Er. Two?"

"Good. Have ye got your ane scissors?"

"What?"

"Scissors! Scissors! Are ye deaf?"

"No. Yes. I mean, I've got some scissors. I'm not deaf."

– – -

The cocoa had nearly all solidified. Green fur was growing on the inside of the mug.

There was a thin layer of dust on Aziraphale, too.

The stack of notes was building up beside him. The Nice and Accu­rate Prophecieswas a mass of improvised bookmarks made of torn strips of Daily Telegraph.

Aziraphale stirred, and pinched his nose.

He was nearly there.

He'd got the shape of it.

He'd never met Agnes. She was too bright, obviously. Normally Heaven or Hell spotted the prophetic types and broadcast enough noises on the same mental channel to prevent any undue accuracy. Actually that was rarely necessary; they normally found ways of generating their own static in self‑defense against the images that echoed around their heads.

– – -

Poor old St. John had his mushrooms, for example. Mother Shipton had her ale. Nostradamus had his collection of interesting oriental prepara­tions. St. Malachi had his still.

Good old Malachi. He'd been a nice old boy, sitting there, dream­ing about future popes. Complete piss artist, of course. Could have been a real thinker, if it hadn't been for the poteen.

A sad end. Sometimes you really had to hope that the ineffable plan had been properly thought out.

Thought. There was something he had to do. Oh, yes. Phone his contact, get things sorted out.

He stood up, stretched his limbs, and made a phone call.

Then he thought: why not? Worth a try.

He went back and shuffled through his sheaf of notes. Apes really had been good. And clever. No one was interested in accurate prophecies.

Paper in hand, he phoned Directory Enquiries.

"Hallo? Good afternoon. So kind. Yes. This will be a Tadfield num­ber, I think. Or Lower Tadfield . . . ah. Or possibly Norton, I'm not sure of the precise code. Yes. Young. Name of Young. Sorry, no initial. Oh. Well, can you give me all of them? Thank you."

Back on the table, a pencil picked itself up and scribbled furiously.

At the third name it broke its point.

"Ah," said Aziraphale, his mouth suddenly running on automatic while his mind exploded. "I think that's the one. Thank you. So kind. Good day to you."

He hung up almost reverentially, took a few deep breaths, and dialed again. The last three digits gave him some trouble, because his hand was shaking.

He listened to the ringing tone. Then a voice answered. It was a middle‑aged voice, not unfriendly, but probably it had been having a nap and was not feeling at its best.

It said "Tadfield Six double‑six."

Aziraphale's hand started to shake.

"Hallo?" said the receiver. "Hallo."

Aziraphale got a grip on himself.

"Sorry," he said, "Right number."

He replaced the receiver.

– – -

Newt wasn't deaf. And he did have his own scissors.

He also had a huge pile of newspapers.

If he had known that army life consisted chiefly of applying the one to the other, he used to muse, he would never have joined.

Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell had made him a list, which was taped to the wall in Shadwell's tiny crowded flat situated over Rajit's Newsagents and Video Rental. The list read:

1) Witches.

2) Unexplainable Phenomenons. Phenomenatrices. Phe­nomenice. Things, ye ken well what I mean.

Newt was looking for either. He signed and picked up another newspaper, scanned the front page, opened it, ignored page two (never anything on there) then blushed crimson as he performed the obligatory nipple count on page three. Shadwell had been insistent about this. "Ye can't trust them, the cunning buggers," he said. "It'd be just like them to come right out in the open, like, defyin' us."

A couple in black turtleneck sweaters glowered at the camera on page nine. They claimed to lead the largest coven in Saffron Walden, and to restore sexual potency by the use of small and very phallic dolls. The newspaper was offering ten of the dolls to readers who were prepared to write "My Most Embarrassing Moment of Impotency" stories. Newt cut the story out and stuck it into a scrapbook.

There was a muffled thumping on the door.

Newt opened it; a pile of newspapers stood there. "Shift yerself, Private Pulsifer," it barked, and it shufed into the room. The newspapers fell to the floor, revealing Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, who coughed, painfully, and relit his cigarette, which had gone out.

"You want to watch him. He's one o' them," he said.

"Who, sir?"

"Tak yer ease, Private. Him. That little brown feller. Mister so­called Rajit. It's them terrible forn arts. The ruby squinty eye of the little yellow god. Women wi' too many arms. Witches, the lot o' them."

"He does give us the newspapers free, though, Sergeant," said Newt. "And they're not too old."

"And voodoo. I bet he does voodoo. Sacrificing chickens to that Baron Saturday. Ye know, tall darkie bugger in the top hat. Brings people back from the dead, aye, and makes them work on the Sabbath day. Voo­doo." Shadwell sniffed speculatively.

Newt tried to picture Shadwell's landlord as an exponent of voo­doo. Certainly Mr. Rajit worked on the Sabbath. In fact, with his plump quiet wife and plump cheerful children he worked around the clock, never mind the calendar, diligently filling the area's needs in the matter of soft drinks, white bread, tobacco, sweets, newspapers, magazines, and the type of top‑shelf pornography that made Newt's eyes water just to think about. The worst you could imagine Mr. Rajit doing with a chicken was selling it after the "Sell‑By" date.

"But Mister Rajit's from Bangladesh, or India, or somewhere," he said. "I thought voodoo came from the West Indies."

"Ah," said Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, and took another drag on his cigarette. Or appeared to. Newt had never actually quite seen one of his superior's cigarettes‑it was something to do with the way he cupped his hands. He even made the ends disappear when he'd finished with them. "Ah."

"Well, doesn't it?"

"Hidden wisdom, lad. Inner mili'try secrets of the Witchfinder army. When you're all initiated proper ye'll know the secret truth. Some voodoo maycome from the West Indies. I'll grant ye that. Oh yes, I'll grant ye that. But the worstkind. The darkest kind, that comes from, um . . ."

"Bangladesh?"

"Errrukh! Yes lad, that's it. Words right out of me mouth. Ban­gladesh. Exactly."

Shadwell made the end of his cigarette vanish, and managed fur­tively to roll another, never letting papers or tobacco be seen.

"So. Ye got anything, Witchfinder Private?"

"Well, there's this." Newton held out the clipping.

Shadwell squinted at it. "Oh them," he said. "Load o' rubbish. Call themselves bloody witches? I checked them out last year. Went down with me armory of righteousness and a packet of firelighters, jemmied the place open, they were clean as a whistle. Mail order bee jelly business they're trying to pep up. Load o' rubbish. Wouldn't know a familiar spirit if it chewed out the bottoms o' their trousers. Rubbish. It's not like it used to be, laddie."

He sat down and poured himself a cup of sweet tea from a filthy thermos.

"Did I ever tell you how I was recruited to the army?" he asked.

Newt took this as his cue to sit down. He shook his head. Shadwell lit his roll‑up with a battered Ronson lighter, and coughed appreciatively.

"My cellmate, he was. Witchfinder Captain Ffolkes. Ten years for arson. Burning a coven in Wimbledon. Would have got them all too, if it wasn't the wrong day. Good fellow. Told me about the battle‑the great war between Heaven and Hell . . . It was him that told me the Inner Secrets of the Witchfinder Army. Familiar spirits. Nipples. All that . . ."

"Knew he was dying, you see. Got to have someone to carry on the tradition. Like you is, now . . ." He shook his head.

"That's what we'm reduced to, lad," he said. "A few hundred years ago, see, we was powerful. We stood between the world and the darkness. We was the thin red line. Thin red line o' fire, ye see."

"I thought the churches . . ." Newt began.

"Pah!" said Shadwell. Newt had seen the word in print, but this was the first time he'd ever heard anyone say it. "Churches? What good did they ever do? They'm just as bad. Same line o' business, nearly. You can't trust them to stamp out the Evil One, 'cos if they did, they'd be out o' that line o' business. If yer goin' up against a tiger, ye don't want fellow travellers whose idea of huntin' is tae throw meat at it. Nay, lad. It's up to us. Against the darkness."

Everything went quiet for a moment.

Newt always tried to see the best in everyone, but it had occurred to him shortly after joining the WA that his superior and only fellow soldier was as well balanced as an upturned pyramid. "Shortly," in this case, meant under five seconds. The WA's headquarters was a fetid room with walls the color of nicotine, which was almost certainly what they were coated with, and a floor the color of cigarette ash, which was almost certainly what it was. There was a small square of carpet. Newt avoided walking on it if possible, because it sucked at his shoes.

One of the walls had a yellowing map of the British Isles tacked to it, with homemade flags sticking in it here and there; most of them were within a Cheap Day Return fare of London.

But Newt had stuck with it the past few weeks because, well, horri­fied fascination had turned into horrified pity and then a sort of horrified affection. Shadwell had turned out to be about five feet high and wore clothes which, no matter what they actually were, always turned up even in your short‑term memory as an old mackintosh. The old man may have had all his own teeth, but only because no one else could possibly have wanted them; just one of them, placed under the pillow, would have made the Tooth Fairy hand in its wand.

He appeared to live entirely on sweet tea, condensed milk, hand­rolled cigarettes, and a sort of sullen internal energy. Shadwell had a Cause, which he followed with the full resources of his soul and his Pen­sioner's Concessionary Travel Pass. He believed in it. It powered him like a turbine.

Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, be­cause he quite wantedto believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half‑hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. He'd sat in all sorts of churches, waiting for that single flash of blue light, and it hadn't come. And then he'd tried to be­come an official Atheist and hadn't got the rock‑hard, self‑satisfied strength of belief even for that. And every single political party had seemed to him equally dishonest. And he'd given up on ecology when the ecology magazine he'd been subscribing to had shown its readers a plan of a self‑sufficient garden, and had drawn the ecological goat tethered within three feet of the ecological beehive. Newt had spent a lot of time at his grandmother's house in the country and thought he knew something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the maga­zine was run by a bunch of bib‑overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word "community" too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word "community" were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.

Then he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.

To Newt's straightforward mind this was intolerable.

Newt had not believed in the Cub Scouts and then, when he was old enough, not in the Scouts either.

He was prepared to believe, though, that the job of wages clerk at United Holdings PLC, was possibly the most boring in the world.

This is how Newton Pulsifer looked as a man: if he went into a phone booth and changed, he might manage to come out looking like Clark Kent.

But he found he rather liked Shadwell. People often did, much to Shadwell's annoyance. The Rajits liked him because he always eventually paid his rent and didn't cause any trouble, and was racist in such a glower­ing, undirected way that it was quite inoffensive; it was simply that Shad­well hated everyone in the world, regardless of caste, color, or creed, and wasn't going to make any exceptions for anyone.

Madame Tracy liked him. Newt had been amazed to find that the tenant of the other flat was a middle‑aged, motherly soul, whose gentlemen callers called as much for a cup of tea and a nice chat as for what little discipline she was still able to exact. Sometimes, when he'd nursed a half pint of Guinness on a Saturday night, Shadwell would stand in the corridor between their rooms and shout things like "hoor of Babylon!" but she told Newt privately that she'd always felt rather gratified about this even though the closest she'd been to Babylon was Torremolinos. It was like free advertising, she said.

She said she didn't mind him banging on the wall and swearing during her seance afternoons, either. Her knees had been giving her gyp and she wasn't always up to operating the table rapper, she said, so a bit of muffled thumping came in useful.

On Sundays she'd leave him a bit of dinner on his doorstep, with another plate over the top of it to keep it warm.

You couldn't help liking Shadwell, she said. For all the good it did, though, she might as well be flicking bread pellets into a black hole.

Newt remembered the other cuttings. He pushed them across the stained desk.

"What are these?" said Shadwell, suspiciously.

"Phenomena," said Newt. "You said to look for phenomena. There's more phenomena than witches these days, I'm afraid."

"Anyone bin shootin' hares wi' a silver bullet and next day an old crone in the village is walkin' wi' a limp?" Shadwell said hopefully.

"I'm afraid not."

"Any cows droppin' dead after some woman has looked at 'em?"

"No."

"What is it, then?" said Shadwell. He shuffled across to the sticky brown cupboard and pulled out a tin of condensed milk.

"Odd things happening," said Newt.

He'd spent weeks on this. Shadwell had really let the papers pile up. Some of them went back for years. Newt had quite a good memory, per­haps because in his twenty‑six years very little had happened to fill it up, and he had become quite expert on some very esoteric subjects.

"Seems to be something new every day," said Newt, flicking through the rectangles of newsprint. "Something weird has been happen­ing to nuclear power stations, and no one seems to know what it is. And some people are claiming that the Lost Continent of Atlantis has risen." He looked proud of his efforts.

Shadwell's penknife punctured the condensed milk tin. There was the distant sound of a telephone ringing. Both men instinctively ignored it. All the calls were for Madame Tracy anyway and some of them were not intended for the ear of man; Newt had conscientiously answered the phone on his first day, listened carefully to the question, said "Marks and Spen­cer's 100% Cotton Y‑fronts, actually," and had been left with a dead receiver.

Shadwell sucked deeply. "Ach, that's no' proper phenomena," he said. "Can't see any witches doing that. They're more for the sinking o' things, ye ken."

Newt's mouth opened and shut a few times.

"If we're strong in the fight against witchery we can't afford to be sidetracked by this style o' thing," Shadwell went on. "Haven't ye got anything more witchcrafty?"

"But American troops have landed on it to protect it from things," moaned Newt. "A non‑existent continent . . ."

"Any witches on it?" said Shadwell, showing a spark of interest for the first time.

"It doesn't say," said Newt.

"Ach, then it's just politics and geography," said Shadwell dismissively.

Madame Tracy poked her head around the door. "Coo‑ee, Mr. Shadwell," she said, giving Newt a friendly little wave. "A gentleman on the telephone for you. Hallo, Mr. Newton."

"Awa' wi' ye, harlot," said Shadwell, automatically.

"He sounds ever so refined," said Madame Tracy, taking no notice. "And I'll be getting us a nice bit of liver for Sunday."

"I'd sooner sup wi' the De'el, wumman."

"So if you'd let me have the plates back from last week it'd be a help, there's a love," said Madame Tracy, and tottered unsteadily back on three‑inch heels to her flat and whatever it was that had been interrupted.

Newt looked despondently at his cuttings as Shadwell went out, grumbling, to the phone. There was one about the stones of Stonehenge moving out of position, as though they were iron filings in a magnetic field.

He was vaguely aware of one side of a telephone conversation.

"Who? Ah. Aye. Aye. Ye say? Wha' class o' thing wud that be? Aye. Just as you say, sor. And where is this place, then‑?"

But mysteriously moving stones wasn't Shadwell's cup of tea or, rather, tin of milk.

"Fine, fine," Shadwell reassured the caller. "We'll get onto it right awa'. I'll put my best squad on it and report success to ye any minute, I ha' no doubt. Goodbye to you, sor. And bless you too, sor." There was the ting of a receiver going back on the hook, and then Shadwell's voice, no longer metaphorically crouched in deference, said, " 'Dear boy'! Ye great southern pansy." ^[27]

He shuffled back into the room, and then stared at Newt as if he had forgotten why he was there.

"What was it ye was goin' on about?" he said.

"All these things that are happening‑" Newt began.

"Aye." Shadwell continued to look through him while thoughtfully tapping the empty tin against his teeth.

"Well, there's this little town which has been having some amazing weather for the last few years," Newt went on helplessly.

"What? Rainin' frogs and similar?" said Shadwell, brightening up a bit.

"No. It just has normal weather for the time of year."

"Call that a phenomena?" said Shadwell. "I've seen phenomenas that'd make your hair curl, laddie." He started tapping again.

"When do you remember normal weather for the time of year?" said Newt, slightly annoyed. "Normal weather for the time of year isn't normal, Sergeant. It has snow at Christmas. When did you last see snow at Christmas? And long hot Augusts? Every year? And crisp autumns? The kind of weather you used to dream of as a kid? It never rained on Novem­ber the Fifth and always snowed on Christmas Eve?"

Shadwell's eyes looked unfocussed. He paused with the condensed milk tin halfway to his lips.

"I never used to dream when I was a kid," he said quietly.

Newt was aware of skidding around the lip of some deep, unpleas­ant pit. He mentally backed away.

"It's just very odd," he said. "There's a weatherman here talking about averages and norms and microclimates and things like that."

"What's that mean?" said Shadwell.

"Means he doesn't know why," said Newt, who hadn't spent years on the littoral of business without picking up a thing or two. He looked sidelong at the Witchfinder Sergeant.

"Witches are well known for affecting the weather," he prompted. "I looked it up in the Discouverie."

Oh God, he thought, or other suitable entity, don't let me spend another evening cutting newspapers to bits in this ashtray of a room. Let me get out in the fresh air. Let me do whatever is the WA's equivalent of going waterskiing in Germany.

"It's only forty miles away," he said tentatively. "I thought I could just sort of nip over there tomorrow. And have a look around, you know. I'll pay my own petrol," he added.

Shadwell wiped his upper lip thoughtfully.

"This place," he said, "it wouldna be called Tadfield, would it?"

"That's right, Mr. Shadwell," said Newt. "How did you know that?"

"Wonder what the Southerners is playing at noo?" said Shadwell under his breath.

"Weeell," he said, out loud. "And why not?"

"Who'll be playing, Sergeant?" said Newt.

Shadwell ignored him. "Aye. I suppose it can't do any harm. Yell pay yer ane petrol, ye say?"

Newt nodded.

"Then yell come here at nine o' the clock in the morning," he said, "afore ye go."

"What for?" said Newt.

"Yer armor o' righteousness."

– – -

Just after Newt had left the phone rang again. This time it was Crowley, who gave approximately the same instructions as Aziraphale. Shadwell took them down again for form's sake, while Madame Tracy hovered delightedly behind him.

"Two calls in one day, Mr. Shadwell," she said, "Your little army must be marching away like anything!"

"Ach, awa' wi' ye, ye murrain plashed berrizene," muttered Shad­well, and slammed the door. Tadfield, he thought. Och, weel. So long as they paid up on time . . .

Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley ran the Witchfinder Army, but they both approved of it, or at least knew that it would be approved of by their superiors. So it appeared on the list of Aziraphale's agencies because it was, well, a Witchfinder Army, and you had to support anyone calling themselves witchfinders in the same way that the U.S.A. had to support anyone calling themselves anti‑communist. And it appeared on Crowley's list for the slightly more sophisticated reason that people like Shadwell did the cause of Hell no harm at all. Quite the reverse, it was felt.

Strictly speaking, Shadwell didn't run the WA either. According to Shadwell's pay ledgers it was run by Witchfinder General Smith. Under him were Witchfinder Colonels Green and Jones, and Witchfinder Majors Jackson, Robinson, and Smith (no relation). Then there were Witchfinder Majors Saucepan, Tin, Milk, and Cupboard, because Shadwell's limited imagination had been beginning to struggle at this point. And Witchfinder Captains Smith, Smith, Smith, and Smythe and Ditto. And five hundred Witchfinder Privates and Corporals and Sergeants. Many of them were called Smith, but this didn't matter because neither Crowley nor Aziraphale had ever bothered to read that far. They simply handed over the pay.

After all, both lots put together only came to around £60 a year.

Shadwell didn't consider this in any way criminal. The army was a sacred trust, and a man had to do something. The old ninepences weren't coming in like they used to.

Saturday

I t was very early on Saturday morning, on the last day of the world, and the sky was redder than blood.

The International Express delivery man rounded the corner at a careful thirty‑five miles an hour, shifted down to second, and pulled up on the grass verge.

He got out of the van, and immediately threw himself into a ditch to avoid an oncoming lorry that had barrelled around the bend at some­thing well in excess of eighty miles an hour.

He got up, picked up his glasses, put them back on, retrieved his parcel and clipboard, brushed the grass and mud from his uniform, and, as an afterthought, shook his fist at the rapidly diminishing lorry.

"Shouldn't be allowed, bloody lorries, no respect for other road users, what I always say, what I always say, is remember that without a car, son, you're just a pedestrian too . . ."

He climbed down the grassy verge, clambered over a low fence, and found himself beside the river Uck.

The International Express delivery man walked along the banks of the river, holding the parcel.

Farther down the riverbank sat a young man dressed all in white. He was the only person in sight. His hair was white, his skin chalk pale, and he sat and stared up and down the river, as if he were admiring the view. He looked like Victorian Romantic poets looked just before the con­sumption and drug abuse really started to cut it.

The International Express man couldn't understand it. I mean, in the old days, and it wasn't that long ago really, there had been an angler every dozen yards along the bank; children had played there; courting couples had come to listen to the splish and gurgle of the river, and to hold hands, and to get all lovey‑dovey in the Sussex sunset. He'd done that with Maud, his missus, before they were married. They'd come here to spoon and, on one memorable occasion, fork.

Times changed, reflected the delivery man.

Now white and brown sculptures of foam and sludge drifted se­renely down the river, often covering it for yards at a stretch. And where the surface of the water was visible it was covered with a molecules‑thin petrochemical sheen.

There was a loud whirring as a couple of geese, thankful to be back in England again after the long, exhausting flight across the Northern Atlantic, landed on the rainbow‑slicked water, and sank without trace.

Funny old world, thought the delivery man. Here's the Uck, used to be the prettiest river in this part of the world, and now it's just a glorified industrial sewer. The swans sink to the bottom, and the fishes float on the top.

Well, that's progress for you. You can't stop progress.

He had reached the man in white.

"'Scuse me, sir. Party name of Chalky?"

The man in white nodded, said nothing. He continued to gaze out at the river, following an impressive sludge and foam sculpture with his eyes.

"So beautiful," he whispered. "It's all so damn beautiful."

The delivery man found himself temporarily devoid of words. Then his automatic systems cut in. "Funny old world isn't it and no mistake I mean you go all over the world delivering and then here you are practi­cally in your own home so to speak, I mean I was born and bred 'round here, sir, and I've been to the Mediterranean, and to Des O' Moines, and that's in America, sir, and now here I am, and here's your parcel, sir."

Party name of Chalky took the parcel, and took the clipboard, and signed for the parcel. The pen developed a leak as he did so, and his signature obliterated itself as it was written. It was a long word, and it began with a P, and then there was a splodge, and then it ended in some­thing that might have been ‑enceand might have been ‑ution.

"Much obliged, sir," said the delivery man.

He walked back along the river, back toward the busy road where he had left his van, trying not to look at the river as he went.

Behind him the man in white opened the parcel. In it was a crown ‑a circlet of white metal, set with diamonds. He gazed at it for some seconds, with satisfaction, then put it on. It glinted in the light of the rising sun. Then the tarnish, which had begun to suffuse its silver surface when his fingers touched it, spread to cover it completely; and the crown went black.

White stood up. There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises. It looked like someone had set fire to the sky.

And a careless match would have set fire to the river, but, alas, there was no time for that now. In his mind he knew where the Four Of Them would be meeting, and when, and he was going to have to hurry to be there by this afternoon.

Perhaps we will set fire to the sky, he thought. And he left that place, almost imperceptibly.

It was nearly time.

The delivery man had left his van on the grass verge by the dual carriageway. He walked around to the driver's side (carefully, because other cars and lorries were still rocketing around the bend), reached in through the open window, and took the schedule from the dashboard.

Only one more delivery to make, then.

He read the instructions on the delivery voucher carefully.

He read them again, paying particular attention to the address, and the message. The address was one word: Everywhere.

Then, with his leaking pen, he wrote a brief note to Maud, his wife. It read simply, I love you.

Then he put the schedule back on the dashboard, looked left, looked right, looked left again and began to walk purposefully across the road. He was halfway across when a German juggernaut came around the corner, its driver crazed on caffeine, little white pills, and EEC transport regulations.

He watched its receding bulk.

Cor, he thought, that one nearly had me.

Then he looked down at the gutter.

Oh, he thought.

YES, agreed a voice from behind his left shoulder, or at least from behind the memory of his left shoulder.

The delivery man turned, and looked, and saw. At first he couldn't find the words, couldn't find anything, and then the habits of a working lifetime took over and he said, "Message for you, sir."

FOR ME?

"Yes, sir." He wished he still had a throat. He could have swal­lowed, if he still had a throat. "No package, I'm afraid, Mister … uh, sir. It's a message."

DELIVER IT, THEN.

"It's this, sir. Ahem. Come and See."

FINALLY. There was a grin on its face, but then, given the face, there couldn't have been anything else.

THANK YOU, it continued. I MUST COMMEND YOUR DE­VOTION TO DUTY.

"Sir?" The late delivery man was falling through a gray mist, and all he could see were two spots of blue, that might have been eyes, and might been distant stars.

DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.

The delivery man had a brief moment to wonder whether his new companion was making a joke, and to decide that he wasn't; and then there was nothing.

– – -

Red sky in the morning. It was going to rain.

Yes.

– – -

Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell stood back with his head on one side. "Right, then," he said. "Ye're all ready. Hae ye' got it all?"

"Yes, sir."

"Pendulum o' discovery?"

"Pendulum of discovery, yes." "Thumbscrew?"

Newt swallowed, and patted a pocket. "Thumbscrew," he said.

"Firelighters?"

"I really think, Sergeant, that‑"

"Firelighters?"

"Firelighters," said Newt sadly. "And matches." ^[28]

"Bell, book, and candle?"

Newt patted another pocket. It contained a paper bag inside which was a small bell, of the sort that maddens budgerigars, a pink candle of the birthday cake persuasion, and a tiny book called Prayers for Little Hands.Shadwell had impressed upon him that, although witches were the pri­mary target, a good Witchfinder should never pass up the chance to do a quick exorcism, and should have his field kit with him at all times.

"Bell, book, and candle," said Newt.

"Pin?"

"Pin."

"Good lad. Never forget yer pin. It's the bayonet in yer artillery o' light."

Shadwell stood back. Newt noticed with amazement that the old man's eyes had misted over.

"I wish I was goin' with ye," he said. "O' course, this won't be anything, but it'd be good to get out and about again. It's a tryin' life, ye ken, all this lyin' in the wet bracken spying on their devilish dancin'. It gets into yer bones somethin' cruel."

He straightened up, and saluted.

"Off ye go, then, Private Pulsifer. May the armies o' glorification march wi' ye."

After Newt had driven off Shadwell thought of something, some­thing that he'd never had the chance to do before. What he needed now was a pin. Not a military issue pin, witches, for the use of. Just an ordinary pin, such as you might stick in a map.

The map was on the wall. It was old. It didn't show Milton Keynes. It didn't show Harlow. It barely showed Manchester and Birmingham. It had been the army's HQ map for three hundred years. There were a few pins in it still, mainly in Yorkshire and Lancashire and a few in Essex, but they were almost rusted through. Elsewhere, mere brown stubs indicated the distant mission of along‑ago witchfinder.

Shadwell finally found a pin among the debris in an ashtray. He breathed on it, polished it to a shine, squinted at the map until he located Tadfield, and triumphantly rammed the pin home.

It gleamed.

Shadwell took a step backward, and saluted again. There were tears in his eyes.

Then he did a smart about turn and saluted the display cabinet. It was old and battered and the glass was broken but in a way it was the WA. It contained the Regimental silver (the Interbattalion Golf Trophy, not competed for, alas, in seventy years); it contained the patent muzzle‑load­ing Thundergun of Witchfinder‑Colonel Ye‑Shall‑Not‑Eat‑Any‑Living­Thing‑With‑The‑Blood‑ Neither‑Shall‑Ye‑Use‑Enchantment‑ Nor‑Ob­serve‑Times Dalrymple; it contained a display of what were apparently walnuts but were in reality a collection of shrunken headhunter heads donated by Witchfinder CSM Horace "Get them afore they Get You" Narker, who'd travelled widely in foreign parts; it contained memories.

Shadwell blew his nose, noisily, on his sleeve.

Then he opened a tin of condensed milk for breakfast.

– – -

If the armies of glorification had tried to march with Newt, bits of them would have dropped off. This is because, apart from Newt and Shad­well, they had been dead for quite a long time.

It was a mistake to think of Shadwell (Newt never found out if he had a first name) as a lone nut.

It was just that all the others were dead, in most cases for several hundred years. Once the Army had been as big as it currently appeared in Shadwell's creatively edited bookkeeping. Newt had been surprised to find that the Witchfinder Army had antecedents as long and almost as bloody as its more mundane counterpart.

The rates of pay for witchfinders had last been set by Oliver Crom­well and never reviewed. Officers got a crown, and the General got a sovereign. It was just an honorarium, of course, because you got ninepence per witch found and first pick of their property.

You really got to rely on those ninepences. And so times had been a bit hard before Shadwell had gone on the payrolls of Heaven and Hell.

Newt's pay was one old shilling per year ^[29].

In return for this, he was charged to keep "glimmer, firelock, fire­box, tinderbox or igniferous matches" about his person at all times, al­though Shadwell indicated that a Ronson gas lighter would do very well. Shadwell had accepted the invention of the patent cigarette lighter in the same way that conventional soldiers welcomed the repeating rifle.

The way Newt looked at it, it was like being in one of those organi­zations like the Sealed Knot or those people who kept on refighting the American Civil War. It got you out at weekends, and meant that you were keeping alive fine old traditions that had made Western civilization what it was today.

– – -

An hour after leaving the headquarters, Newt pulled into a layby and rummaged in the box on the passenger seat.

Then he opened the car window, using a pair of pliers for the purpose since the handle had long since fallen off.

The packet of firelighters was sent winging over the hedge. A mo­ment later the thumbscrew followed it.

He debated about the rest of the stuff, and then put it back in the box. The pin was Witchfinder military issue, with a good ebony knob on the end like a ladies' hat pin.

He knew what it was for. He'd done quite a lot of reading. Shadwell had piled him up with pamphlets at their first meeting, but the Army had also accumulated various books and documents which, Newt suspected, would be worth a fortune if they ever hit the market.

The pin was to jab into suspects. If there was a spot on their body where they didn't feel anything, they were a witch. Simple. Some of the fraudulent Witchfinders had used special retracting pins, but this one was honest, solid steel. He wouldn't be able to look old Shadwell in the face if he threw away the pin. Besides, it was probably bad luck.

He started the engine and resumed his journey.

Newt's car was a Wasabi. He called it Dick Turpin, in the hope that one day someone would ask him why.

It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the pre­cise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engi­neers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been de­signed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today.

Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he'd enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company.

In vain did he point out its 823cc engine, its three‑speed gearbox, its incredible safety devices like the balloons which inflated on dangerous occasions such as when you were doing 45 mph on a straight dry road but were about to crash because a huge safety balloon had just obscured the view. He'd also wax slightly lyrical about the Korean‑made radio, which picked up Radio Pyongyang incredibly well, and the simulated electronic voice which warned you about not wearing a seatbelt even when you were; it had been programmed by someone who not only didn't understand English, but didn't understand Japanese either. It was state of the art, he said.

The art in this case was probably pottery.

His friends nodded and agreed and privately decided that if ever it came to buying a Wasabi or walking, they'd invest in a pair of shoes; it came to the same thing anyway, since one reason for the Wasabi's incredi­ble m.p.g. was that fact that it spent a lot of time waiting in garages while crankshafts and things were in the post from the world's only surviving Wasabi agent in Nigirizushi, Japan.

In that vague, zen‑like trance in which most people drive, Newt found himself wondering exactly how you used the pin. Did you say, "I've got a pin, and I'm not afraid to use it"? Have Pin, Will Travel . . . The Pinslinger . . . The Man with the Golden Pin . . . The Pins of Navarone . . .

It might have interested Newt to know that, of the thirty‑nine thou­sand women tested with the pin during the centuries of witch‑hunting, twenty‑nine thousand said "ouch," nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety‑nine didn't feel anything because of the use of the aforesaid retract­able pins, and one witch declared that it had miraculously cleared up the arthritis in her leg.

Her name was Agnes Nutter.

She was the Witchfinder Army's great failure.

– – -

One of the early entries in The Nice and Accurate Propheciescon­cerned Agnes Nutter's own death.

The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe. In Germany the bonfires were built and burned with regular Teutonic thoroughness. Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long‑drawn‑out battle with their arch‑enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings. But the English never seemed to have the heart for it.

One reason for this may have to do with the manner of Agnes Nutter's death, which more or less marked the end of the serious witch­hunting craze in England. A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people, arrived at her house one April evening to find her sitting with her coat on, waiting for them.

"Ye're tardie," she said to them. "I shoulde have beene aflame ten minutes since."

Then she got up and hobbled slowly through the suddenly silent crowd, out of the cottage, and to the bonfire that had been hastily thrown together on the village green. Legend says that she climbed awkwardly onto the pyre and thrust her arms around the stake behind her.

"Tye yt well," she said to the astonished witchfinder. And then, as the villagers sidled toward the pyre, she raised her handsome head in the firelight and said, "Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judged, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne deathe be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do none understande."

And, apparently, she smiled and looked up at the sky over the village and added, "That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole."

And after that strange blasphemy she said no more. She let them gag her, and stood imperiously as the torches were put to the dry wood.

The crowd grew nearer, one or two of its members a little uncertain as to whether they'd done the right thing, now they came to think about it.

Thirty seconds later an explosion took out the village green, scythed the valley clean of every living thing, and was seen as far away as Halifax.

There was much subsequent debate as to whether this had been sent by God or by Satan, but a note later found in Agnes Nutter's cottage indicated that any divine or devilish intervention had been materially helped by the contents of Agnes's petticoats, wherein she had with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roof­ing nails.

What Agnes also left behind, on the kitchen table beside a note cancelling the milk, was a box and a book. There were specific instructions as to what should be done with the box, and equally specific instructions about what should be done with the book; it was to be sent to Agnes's son, John Device.

The people who found it‑who were from the next village, and had been woken up by the explosion‑considered ignoring the instructions and just burning the cottage, and then looked around at the twinkling fires and nail‑studded wreckage and decided not to. Besides, Agnes's note included painfully precise predictions about what would happen to people who did not carry out her orders.

The man who put the torch to Agnes Nutter was a Witchfinder Major. They found his hat in a tree two miles away.

His name, stitched inside on a fairly large piece of tape, was Thou­-Shalt‑Not‑Commit‑Adultery Pulsifer, one of England's most assiduous witchfinders, and it might have afforded him some satisfaction to know that his last surviving descendant was now, even if unawares, heading toward Agnes Nutter's last surviving descendant. He might have felt that some ancient revenge was at last going to be discharged.

If he'd known what was actually going to happen when that de­scendant met her he would have turned in his grave, except that he had never got one.

* * * * *

F irstly, however, Newt had to do something about the flying saucer.

It landed in the road ahead of him just as he was trying to find the Lower Tadfield turning and had the map spread over the steering wheel. He had to brake hard.

It looked like every cartoon of a flying saucer Newt had ever seen.

As he stared over the top of his map, a door in the saucer slid aside with a satisfying whoosh, revealing a gleaming walkway which extended automatically down to the road. Brilliant blue light shone out, outlining three alien shapes. They walked down the ramp. At least, two of them walked. The one that looked like a pepper pot just skidded down it, and fell over at the bottom.

The other two ignored its frantic beeping and walked over to the car quite slowly, in the worldwide approved manner of policemen already compiling the charge sheet in their heads. The tallest one, a yellow toad dressed in kitchen foil, rapped on Newt's window. He wound it down. The thing was wearing the kind of mirror‑finished sunglasses that Newt always thought of as Cool Hand Luke shades.

"Morning, sir or madam or neuter," the thing said. "This your planet, is it?"

The other alien, which was stubby and green, had wandered off into the woods by the side of the road. Out of the corner of his eye Newt saw it kick a tree, and then run a leaf through some complicated gadget on its belt. It didn't look very pleased.

"Well, yes. I suppose so," he said.

The toad stared thoughtfully at the skyline.

"Had it long, have we, sir?" it said.

"Er. Not personally. I mean, as a species, about half a million years. I think."

The alien exchanged glances with its colleague. "Been letting the old acid rain build up, haven't we, sir?" it said. "Been letting ourselves go a bit with the old hydrocarbons, perhaps?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Could you tell me your planet's albedo, sir?" said the toad, still staring levelly at the horizon as though it was doing something interesting.

"Er. No."

"Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category, sir."

"Oh, dear," said Newt. He was wondering who he could tell about this, and realizing that there was absolutely no one who would believe him.

The toad bent closer. It seemed to be worried about something, insofar as Newt was any judge of the expressions of an alien race he'd never encountered before.

"We'll overlook it on this occasion, sir."

Newt gabbled. "Oh. Er. I'll see to it‑well, when I say I, I mean, I think Antarctica or something belongs to every country, or something, and‑"

"The fact is, sir, that we have been asked to give you a message."

"Oh?"

"Message runs 'We give you a message of universal peace and cos­mic harmony an' suchlike.' Message ends," said the toad.

"Oh." Newt turned this over in his mind. "Oh. That's very kind."

"Have you got any idea why we have been asked to bring you this message, sir?" said the toad.

Newt brightened. "Well, er, I suppose," he flailed, "what with Mankind's, er, harnessing of the atom and‑"

"Neither have we, sir." The toad stood up. "One of them phenom­ena, I expect. Well, we'd better be going." It shook its head vaguely, turned around and waddled back to the saucer without another word.

Newt stuck his head out of the window.

"Thank you!"

The small alien walked past the car.

"C02 level up 0.5 percent," it rasped, giving him a meaningful look. "You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse‑driven consumerism, don't you?"

The two of them righted the third alien, dragged it back up the ramp, and shut the door.

Newt waited for a while, in case there were any spectacular light displays, but it just stood there. Eventually he drove up on the verge and around it. When he looked in his rear‑view mirror it had gone.

I must be overdoing something, he thought guiltily. But what?

And I can't even tell Shadwell, because he'd probably bawl me out for not counting their nipples.

– – -

"Anyway," said Adam, "you've got it all wrong about witches."

The Them were sitting on a field gate, watching Dog rolling in cowpats. The little mongrel seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.

"I've been reading about them," he said, in a slightly louder voice. "Actually, they've been right all along and it's wrong to persecute 'em with British Inquisitions and stuff."

"My mother said they were just intelligent women protesting in the only way open to them against the stifling injustices of a male‑dominated social hierarchy," said Pepper.

Pepper's mother lectured at Norton Polytechnic.

"Yes, but your mother's always saying things like that," said Adam, after a while.

Pepper nodded amiably. "And she said, at worst they were just free‑thinking worshippers of the progenerative principle."

"Who's the progenratty principle?" said Wensleydale.

"Dunno. Something to do with maypoles, I think," said Pepper vaguely.

"Well, 1 thought they worshipped the Devil," said Brian, but with­out automatic condemnation. The Them had an open mind on the whole subject of devil worship. The Them had an open mind about everything."Anyway, the Devil'd be better than a stupid maypole."

"That's where you're wrong," said Adam. "It's not the Devil. It's another god, or something. With horns."

"The Devil," said Brian.

"No," said Adam patiently. "People just got 'em mixed up. He's just got horns similar. He's called Pan. He's half a goat."

* During the day. In the evenings she gave Power tarot readings to nervous executives, because old habits die hard.

"Which half?" said Wensleydale.

Adam thought about it.

"The bottom half," he said at length. "Fancy you not knowin' that. I should of thought everyone knew that. "

"Goats haven't got a bottom half," said Wensleydale. "They've got a front half and a back half. Just like cows."

They watched Dog some more, drumming their heels on the gate. It was too hot to think.

Then Pepper said, "If he's got goat legs, he shouldn't have horns. They belong to the front half."

"I didn't make him up, did I?" said Adam, aggrieved. "I was just telling you. It's news to me I made him up. No need to go on at me."

"Anyway," said Pepper. "This stupid Pot can't go around com­plaining if people think he's the Devil. Not with having horns on. People are boundto say, oh, here comes the Devil."

Dog started to dig up a rabbit hole.

Adam, who seemed to have a weight on his mind, took a deep breath.

"You don't have to be so lit'ralabout everything," he said. "That's the trouble these days. Grass materialism. 's people like you who go round choppin' down rain forests and makin' holes in the ozone layer. There's a great big hole in the ozone layer 'cos of grass materialism people like you."

"I can't do anythin' about it," said Brian automatically. "I'm still paying off on a stupid cucumber frame."

"It's in the magazine," said Adam. "It takes millions of acres of rain forest to make one beefburger. And all this ozone is leakin' away because of . . ." he hesitated, "people sprayin' the environment."

"And there's whales," said Wensleydale. "We've got to save 'em."

Adam looked blank. His plunder of New Aquarian'sback issues hadn't included anything about whales. Its editors had assumed that the readers were all for saving whales in the same way they assumed that those readers breathed and walked upright.

"There was this program about them," explained Wensleydale.

"What've we got to save 'em for?" said Adam. He had confused visions of saving up whales until you had enough for a badge.

Wensleydale paused and racked his memory. "Because they can sing. And they've got big brains. There's hardly any of them left. And we don't need to kill them anyway 'cos they only make pet food and stuff."

"If they're so clever," said Brian, slowly, "what are they doin' in the sea?"

"Oh, I dunno," said Adam, looking thoughtful. "Swimmin' around all day, just openin' their mouths and eating stuff . . . sounds pretty clever to me‑"

A squeal of brakes and a long‑drawn‑out crunch interrupted him. They scrambled off the gate and ran up the lane to the crossroads, where a small car lay on its roof at the end of a long skidmark.

A little further down the road was a hole. It looked as though the car had tried to avoid it. As they looked at it, a small Oriental‑looking head darted out of sight.

The Them dragged the door open and pulled out the unconscious Newt. Visions of medals for heroic rescue thronged Adam's head. Practi­cal considerations of first aid thronged around that of Wensleydale.

"We shouldn't move him," he said. "Because of broken bones. We ought to get someone."

Adam cast around. There was a rooftop just visible in the trees down the road. It was Jasmine Cottage.

And in Jasmine Cottage Anathema Device was sitting in front of a table on which some bandages, aspirins, and assorted first‑aid items had been laid out for the past hour.

– – -

Anathema had been looking at the clock. He'll be coming around any moment now, she'd thought.

And then, when he got there, he wasn't what she'd been expecting. More precisely, he wasn't what she'd been hoping for.

She had been hoping, rather self‑consciously, for someone tall, dark, and handsome.

Newt was tall, but with a rolled‑out, thin look. And while his hair was undoubtedly dark, it wasn't any sort of fashion accessory; it was just a lot of thin, black strands all growing together out of the top of his head. This was not Newt's fault; in his younger days he would go every couple of months to the barber's shop on the corner, clutching a photograph he'd carefully torn from a magazine which showed someone with an impres­sively cool haircut grinning at the camera, and he would show the picture to the barber, and ask to be made to look like that, please. And the barber, who knew his job, would take one look and then give Newt the basic, all­purpose, short‑back‑and‑sides. After a year of this, Newt realized that he obviously didn't have the face that went with haircuts. The best Newton Pulsifer could hope for after a haircut was shorter hair.

It was the same with suits. The clothing hadn't been invented that would make him look suave and sophisticated and comfortable. These days he had learned to be satisfied with anything that would keep the rain off and give him somewhere to keep his change.

And he wasn't handsome. Not even when he took off his glasses. ^[30]And, she discovered when she took off his shoes to lay him on her bed, he wore odd socks: one blue one, with a hole in the heel, and one gray one, with holes around the toes.

I suppose I'm meant to feel a wave of warm, tender female some­thing‑or‑other about this, she thought. I just wish he'd wash them.

So . . . tall, dark, but not handsome. She shrugged. Okay. Two out of three isn't bad.

The figure on the bed began to stir. And Anathema, who in the very nature of things always looked to the future, suppressed her disap­pointment and said:

"How are we feeling now?"

Newt opened his eyes.

He was lying in a bedroom, and it wasn't his. He knew this in­stantly because of the ceiling. His bedroom ceiling still had the model aircraft hanging from bits of cotton. He'd never got around to taking them down.

This ceiling just had cracked plaster. Newt had never been in a woman's bedroom before, but he sensed that this was one largely by a combination of soft smells. There was a hint of talcum and lily‑of‑the-­valley, and no rank suggestion of old T‑shirts that had forgotten what the inside of a tumble‑dryer looked like.

He tried to lift his head up, groaned, and let it sink back onto the pillow. Pink, he couldn't help noticing.

"You banged your head on the steering wheel," said the voice that had roused him. "Nothing broken, though. What happened?"

Newt opened his eyes again.

"Car all right?" he said.

"Apparently. A little voice inside it keeps repeating 'Prease to fras­ten sleat‑bert.' "

"See?" said Newt, to an invisible audience. "They knew how to build them in those days. That plastic finish hardly takes a dent."

He blinked at Anathema.

"I swerved to avoid a Tibetan in the road," he said. "At least, I think I did. I think I've probably gone mad."

The figure walked around into his line of sight. It had dark hair, and red lips, and green eyes, and it was almost certainly female. Newt tried not to stare. It said, "If you have, no one's going to notice." Then she smiled. "Do you know, I've never met a witchfinder before?"

"Er‑" Newt began. She held up his open wallet.

"I had to look inside," she said.

Newt felt extremely embarrassed, a not unusual state of affairs. Shadwell had given him an official witchfinder's warrant card, which among other things charged all beadles, magistrates, bishops, and bailiffs to give him free passage and as much dry kindling as he required. It was incredibly impressive, a masterpiece of calligraphy, and probably quite old. He'd forgotten about it.

"It's really just a hobby," he said wretchedly. "I'm really a . . . a . . . ," he wasn't going to say wages clerk, not here, not now, not to a girl like this, "a computer engineer," he lied. Wantto be, wantto be; in my heartI'm a computer engineer, it's only the brain that's letting me down. "Excuse me, could I know‑"

"Anathema Device," said Anathema. "I'm an occultist, but that's just a hobby. I'm really a witch. Well done. You're half an hour late," she added, handing him a small sheet of cardboard, "so you'd better read this. It'll save a lot of time."

– – -

Newt did in fact own a small home computer, despite his boyhood experiences. In fact, he'd owned several. You always knewwhich ones he owned. They were desktop equivalents of the Wasabi. They were the ones which, for example, dropped to half‑price just after he'd bought them. Or were launched in a blaze of publicity and disappeared into obscurity within a year. Or only worked at all if you stuck them in a fridge. Or, if by some fluke they were basically good machines, Newt always got the few that were sold with the early, bug‑infested version of the operating system. But he persevered, because he believed.

Adam also had a small computer. He used it for playing games, but never for very long. He'd load a game, watch it intently for a few minutes, and then proceed to play it until the High Score counter ran out of zeroes.

When the other Them wondered about this strange skill, Adam professed mild amazement that everyone didn't play games like this.

"All you have to do is learn how to play it, and then it's just easy," he said.

– – -

Quite a lot of the front parlor in Jasmine Cottage was taken up, Newt noticed with a sinking feeling, with piles of newspapers. Clippings were stuck around the walls. Some of them had bits circled in red ink. He was mildly gratified to spot several he had cut out for Shadwell.

Anathema owned very little in the way of furniture. The only thing she'd bothered to bring with her had been her clock, one of the family heirlooms. It wasn't a full‑cased grandfather clock, but a wall clock with a free‑swinging pendulum that E. A. Poe would cheerfully have strapped someone under.

Newt kept finding his eye drawn to it.

"It was built by an ancestor of mine," said Anathema, putting the coffee cups down on the table. "Sir Joshua Device. You may have heard of him? He invented the little rocking thing that made it possible to build accurate clocks cheaply? They named it after him."

"The Joshua?" said Newt guardedly.

"The device."

In the last half hour Newt had heard some pretty unbelievable stuff and was close to believing it, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

"The device is named after a real person?" he said.

"Oh, yes. Fine old Lancashire name. From the French, I believe.

be telling me next you've never heard of Sir Humphrey Gadget‑"

"Oh, now come on‑"

"‑who devised a gadgetthat made it possible to pump out flooded mineshafts. Or Pietr Gizmo? Or Cyrus T. Doodad, America's foremost black inventor? Thomas Edison said that the only other contemporary practical scientists he admired were Cyrus T. Doodad and Ella Reader Widget. And‑"

She looked at Newt's blank expression.

"I did my Ph.D. on them," she said. "The people who invented things so simple and universally useful that everyone forgot that they'd ever actually needed to be invented. Sugar?"

"Er‑"

"You normally have two," said Anathema sweetly.

Newt stared back at the card she'd handed him.

She'd seemed to think it would explain everything.

It didn't.

It had a ruled line down the middle. On the left‑hand side was a short piece of what seemed to be poetry, in black ink. On the right‑hand side, in red ink this time, were comments and annotations. The effect was as follows:

3819: When Orient's Japanese car? Upturned.

chariot inverted be, four Car smash ... not serious

wheles in the skye, a man injury??

with bruises be upon … take in …

Youre Bedde, achinge his … willowfine = Aspirin

hedd for willow fine, a (cf.3757 Pin =

manne who testeth with a witchfinder (cf. 102) Good

pyn yette his hart be witchfinder?? Refers to

clene, yette seed of myne Pulsifer (cf. 002) Search

own undoing, take the for matches, etc. In the

means of flame from 1990s!

himme for to mayk ryght … hmm …

certain, together ye sharle … less than a day

be, untyl the Ende that is (cf. 712, 3803, 4004)

to come.

Newt's hand went automatically to his pocket. His cigarette lighter had gone.

"What's this mean?" he said hoarsely.

"Have you ever heard of Agnes Nutter?" said Anathema.

"No," said Newt, taking a desperate defense in sarcasm. "You're going to tell me she invented mad people, I suppose."

"Another fine old Lancashire name," said Anathema coldly. "If you don't believe, read up on the witch trials of the early seventeenth century. She was an ancestress of mine. As a matter of fact, one of your ancestors burned her alive. Or tried to."

Newt listened in fascinated horror to the story of Agnes Nutter's death.

"Thou‑Shalt‑Not‑Commit‑Adultery Pulsifer?" he said, when she'd finished.

"That sort of name was quite common in those days," said Anath­ema. "Apparently there were ten children and they were a very religious family. There was Covetousness Pulsifer, False‑Witness Pulsifer‑"

"I think I understand," said Newt. "Gosh. I thoughtShadwell said he'd heard the name before. It must be in the Army records. I suppose if I'd gone around being called Adultery Pulsifer I'd want to hurt as many people as possible."

"I think he just didn't like women very much."

"Thanks for taking it so well," said Newt. "I mean, he must have been an ancestor. There aren't many Pulsifers. Maybe . . . that's why I sort of met up with the Witchfinder Army? Could be Fate," he said hope­fully.

She shook her head. "No," she said. "No such thing."

"Anyway, witchfinding isn't like it was in those days. I don't even think old Shadwell's ever done more than kick over Doris Stokes's dust­bins."

"Between you and me, Agnes was a bit of a difficult character," said Anathema, vaguely. "She had no middle gears."

Newt waved the bit of paper.

"But what's it got to do with this?" he said.

"She wrote it. Well, the original. It's No. 3819 of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter,first published 1655."

Newt stared at the prophecy again. His mouth opened and shut.

"She knew I'd crash my car?" he said.

"Yes. No. Probably not. It's hard to say. You see, Agnes was the worst prophet that's ever existed. Because she was always right. That's why the book never sold."

* * * * *

M ost psychic abilities are caused by a simple lack of temporal focus, and the mind of Agnes Nutter was so far adrift in Time that she was considered pretty mad even by the standards of seventeenth­century Lancashire, where mad prophetesses were a growth industry.

But she was a treat to listen to, everyone agreed.

She used to go on about curing illnesses by using a sort of mold, and the importance of washing your hands so that the tiny little animals who caused diseases would be washed away, when every sensible person knew that a good stink was the only defense against the demons of ill health. She advocated running at a sort of gentle bouncing trot as an aid to living longer, which was extremely suspicious and first put the Witchfinders onto her, and stressed the importance of fiber in diet, al­though here she was clearly ahead of her time since most people were less bothered about the fiber in their diet than the gravel. And she wouldn't cure warts.

"Itt is alle in youre Minde," she'd say, "fogett about Itte, ane it wine goe Away."

It was obvious that Agnes had a line to the Future, but it was an unusually narrow and specific line. In other words, almost totally useless.

– – -

"How do you mean?" said Newt.

"She managed to come up with the kind of predictions that you can only understand after the thing has happened," said Anathema. "Like 'Do Notte Buye Betamacks.' That was a prediction for 1972."

"You mean she predictedvideotape recorders?"

"No! She just picked up one little fragment of information," said Anathema. "That's the point. Most of the time she comes up with such an oblique reference that you can't work it out until it's gone past, and then it all slots into place. And she didn't know what was going to be important or not, so it's all a bit hit and miss. Her prediction for November 22, 1963, was about a house falling down in King's Lynn."

"Oh?" Newt looked politely blank.

"President Kennedy was assassinated," said Anathema helpfully. "But Dallas didn't exist then, you see. Whereas King's Lynn was quite important."

"Oh."

"She was generally very good if her descendants were involved."

"Oh?"

"And she wouldn't know anything about the internal combustion engine. To her they were just funny chariots. Even my mother thought it referred to an Emperor's carriage overturning. You see, it's not enough to know what the future i.. You have to know what it means.Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses.

"Sometimes you can be lucky," Anathema went on. "My great­-grandfather worked out about the stock market crash of 1929, for exam­ple, two days before it actually happened. Made a fortune. You could say we're professional descendants."

She looked sharply at Newt. "You see, what no one ever realized until about two hundred years ago that The Nice and Accurate Prophecieswas Agnes's idea of a family heirloom. Many of the prophecies relate to her descendants and their well‑being. She was sort of trying to look after us after she'd gone. That's the reason for the King's Lynn prophecy, we think. My father was visiting there at the time, so from Agnes's point of view, while he was unlikely to be struck by stray rounds from Dallas, there was a good chance he might be hit by a brick."

"What a nice person," said Newt. "You could almost overlook her blowing up an entire village."

Anathema ignored this. "Anyway, that's about it," she said. "Ever since then we've made it our job to interpret them. After all, it averages out at about one prophecy a month‑more now, in fact, as we get closer to the end of the world."

"And when is that going to be?" said Newt.

Anathema looked meaningfully at the clock.

He gave a horrible little laugh that he hoped sounded suave and worldly. After the events so far today, he wasn't feeling very sane. And he could smell Anathema's perfume, which made him uncomfortable.

"Think yourself lucky I don't need a stopwatch," said Anathema. "We've got, oh, about five or six hours."

Newt turned this over in his mind. Thus far in his life he'd never had the urge to drink alcohol, but something told him there had to be a first time.

"Do witches keep drink in the house?" he ventured.

"Oh, yes." She smiled the sort of smile Agnes Nutter probably smiled when unpacking the contents of her lingerie drawer. "Green bubbly stuff with strange Things squirming on the congealing surface. You should know that."

"Fine. Got any ice?"

It turned out to be gin. There was ice. Anathema, who had picked up witchcraft as she went along, disapproved of liquor in general but approved of it in her specific case.

"Did I tell you about the Tibetan coming out of a hole in the road?" Newt said, relaxing a bit.

"Oh, I know about them," she said, shuffling the papers on the table. "The two of them came out of the front lawn yesterday. The poor things were quite bewildered, so I gave them a cup of tea and then they borrowed a spade and went down again. I don't think they quite know what they're supposed to be doing."

Newt felt slightly aggrieved. "How did you know they were Ti­betan?" he said.

"If it comes to that, how did you know? Did he go 'Ommm' when you hit him?"

"Well, he‑he looked Tibetan," said Newt. "Saffron robes, bald head . . . you know . . . Tibetan . "

"One of mine spoke quite good English. It seems that one minute he was repairing radios in Lhasa, next minute he was in a tunnel. He doesn't know how he's going to get home."

"If you'd sent him up the road, he could probably have got a lift on a flying saucer," said Newt gloomily.

"Three aliens? One of them a little tin robot?"

"They landed on your lawn too, did they?"

"It's about the only place they didn't land, according to the radio. They keep coming down all over the world delivering a short trite message of cosmic peace, and when people say 'Yes, well?' they give them a blank look and take off again. Signs and portents, just like Agnes said."

"You're going to tell me she predicted all this too, I suppose?"

Agnes leafed through a battered card index in front of her.

"I kept meaning to put it all on computer," she said. "Word searches and so forth. You know? It'd make it a lot simpler. The prophe­cies are arranged in any old order but there are clues, handwriting and so."

"She did it all in a card index?" said Newt.

"No. A book. But I've, er, mislaid it. We've always had copies, of course."

"Lost it, eh?" said Newt, trying to inject some humor into the proceedings. "Bet she didn't foresee that!"

Anathema glowered at him. If looks could kill, Newt would have been on a slab.

Then she went on: "We've built up quite a concordance over the years, though, and my grandfather came up with a useful cross‑referencing system . . . ah. Here we are."

She pushed a sheet of paper in front of Newt.

3988. Whene menne of ... Crocus=saffron (cf.2003)

crocus come frome the

Earth and green manne... Aliens ...??

frome thee Sky, yette ken ... paratroops?

not why, and Pluto's ... nuclear power stations

barres quitte the light-(see cuttings Nos. 798­806)

­ning castels, and sunken

landes riseth, and Levia-... Atlantis, cuttings 812-­819

­than runneth free, and

Brazil is vert, then Three ... leviathan=whale (cf.1981)?

cometh together and ... South America is green? ?

Four arise, upon iron 3=4? Railways?

horses ride; I tell you the ('iron road', cf.2675)

ende draweth nigh.

"I didn't get all of this one in advance," Anathema admitted. "I filled it in after listening to the news."

"You must be incredibly good at crosswords in your family," said Newt.

"I think Agnes is getting a bit out of her depth here, anyway. The bits about leviathan and South America and threes and fours could mean anything." She sighed. "The problem is newspapers. You never know if Agnes is referring to some tiny little incident that you might miss. Do you know how long it takes to go through everydaily paper thoroughlyevery morning?"

"Three hours and ten minutes," said Newt automatically.

– – -

"I expect we'll get a medal or something," said Adam optimisti­cally. "Rescuing a man from a blazing wreck."

"It wasn't blazing," said Pepper. "It wasn't even very wrecked when we put it back rightside up."

"It could of been," Adam pointed out. "I don't see why we shouldn't have a medal just because some old car doesn't know when to catch fire."

They stood looking down at the hole. Anathema had called the police, who had put it down to subsidence and put some cones around it; it was dark, and went down a long way.

"Could be good fun, going to Tibet," said Brian. "We could learn marital arts and stuff. I saw this old film where there's this valley in Tibet and everyone there lives for hundreds of years. It's called Shangri‑La."

"My aunt's bungalow's called Shangri‑La," said Wensleydale.

Adam snorted.

"Not very clever, naming a valley after some ole bungalow," he said. "Might as well call it Dunroamin', or, or The Laurels."

"'S lot better than Shambles, anyway," said Wensleydale mildly.

"Shambala," corrected Adam.

"I expect it's the same place. Prob'ly got both names," said Pepper, with unusual diplomacy. "Like our house. We changed the name from The Lodge to Norton View when we moved in, but we still get letters addressed to Theo C. Cupier, The Lodge. Perhaps they've named it Shambala now but people still call it The Laurels."

Adam flicked a pebble into the hole. He was becoming bored with Tibetans.

"What shall we do now?" said Pepper. "They're dipping sheep over at Norton Bottom Farm. We could go and help."

Adam threw a larger stone into the hole, and waited for the thump. It didn't come.

"Dunno," he said distantly. "I reckon we should do something about whales and forests and suchlike."

"Like what?" said Brian, who enjoyed the diversions available at a good sheep‑dipping. He began to empty his pockets of crisp packets and drop them, one by one, into the hole.

"We could go into Tadfield this afternoon and not have a hamburger," said Pepper. "If all four of us don't have one, that's millions of acres of rainforest they won't have to cut down."

"They'll be cutting 'em down anyway," said Wensleydale.

"It's grass materialism again," said Adam. "Same with the whales. It's amazin', the stuff that's goin' on." He stared at Dog.

He was feeling very odd.

The little mongrel, noticing the attention, balanced expectantly on its hind legs.

"S people like you that's eating all the whales," said Adam severely. "I bet you've used up a nearly a whole whale already."

Dog, one last tiny satanic spark of his soul hating himself for it, put his head on one side and whined.

"S gonna be a fine ole world to grow up in," Adam said. "No whales, no air, and everyone paddlin' around because of the seas risin'."

"Then the Atlantisans'd be the only ones well off," said Pepper cheerfully.

"Huh," said Adam, not really listening.

Something was happening inside his head. It was aching. Thoughts were arriving there without him having to think them. Something was saying, You can do something, Adam Young. You can make it all better. You can do anything you want.And what was saying this to him was . . . him. Part of him, deep down. Part of him that had been attached to him all these years and not really noticed, like a shadow. It was saying: yes, it's a rotten world. It could have been great. But now it's rotten, and it's time to do something about it. That's what you're here for. To make it all better.

"Because they'd be able to go everywhere," Pepper went on, giving him a worried look. "The Atlantisans, I mean. Because‑"

"I'm fed up with the ole Atlantisans and Tibetans," snapped Adam.

They stared at him. They'd never seen him like this before.

"It's all very well for them," said Adam. "Everyone's goin' around usin' up all the whales and coal and oil and ozone and rainforests and that, and there'll be none left for us. We should be goin' to Mars and stuff, instead of sittin' around in the dark and wet with the air spillin' away."

This wasn't the old Adam the Them knew. The Them avoided one another's faces. With Adam in this mood, the world seemed a chillier place.

"Seems to me," said Brian, pragmatically, "seems to me,the best thing you could do about it is stop readin' about it."

"It's like you said the other day," said Adam. "You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's all full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped‑down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion."

The Them exchanged glances.

There wasa shadow over the whole world. Storm clouds were building up in the north, the sunlight glowing yellow off them as though the sky had been painted by an enthusiastic amateur.

"Seems to me it ought to be rolled up and started all over again," said Adam.

That hadn't sounded like Adam's voice.

A bitter wind blew through the summer woods.

Adam looked at Dog, who tried to stand on his head. There was a distant mutter of thunder. He reached down and patted the dog absentmindedly.

"Serve everyone right if all the nucular bombs went off and it all started again, only prop'ly organized," said Adam. "Sometimes I think that's what I'd like to happen. An' then we could sort everythin' out."

The thunder growled again. Pepper shivered. This wasn't the normal Them mobius bickering, which passed many a slow hour. There was a look in Adam's eye that his friend couldn't quite fathom‑not devilment, because that was more or less there all the time, but a sort of blank grayness that was far worse.

"Well, I dunno about we," Pepper tried. "Dunno about the we,because, if there's all these bombs goin' off, we all get blown up. Speaking as a mother of unborn generations, I'm against it."

They looked at her curiously. She shrugged.

"And then giant ants take over the world," said Wensleydale nervously. "I saw this film. Or you go around with sawn‑off shotguns and everyone's got these cars with, you know, knives and guns stuck on‑"

"I wouldn't allow any giant ants or anything like that," said Adam, brightening up horribly. "And you'd all be all right. I'd see to that. It'd be wicked,eh, to have all the world to ourselves. Wouldn't it? We could share it out. We could have amazing games. We could have War with real armies an' stuff."

"But there wouldn't be any people," said Pepper.

"Oh, I could make us some people," said Adam airily. "Good enough for armies, at any rate. We could all have a quarter of the world each. Like, you'!‑‑ he pointed to Pepper, who recoiled as though Adam's finger were a white­hot poker‑"could have Russia because it's red and you've got red hair, right? And Wensley can have America, and Brian can have, can have Africa and Europe, an', an'—"

Even in their state of mounting terror the Them gave this the con­sideration it deserved.

"H‑huh," stuttered Pepper, as the rising wind whipped at her T‑shirt, "I don't s‑see why Wensley's got America an' all I've g‑got is just Russia. Russia's boring."

"You can have China and Japan and India," said Adam.

"That means I've got jus' Africa and a lot of jus' borin' little coun­tries," said Brian, negotiating even on the curl of the catastrophe curve. "I wouldn't mind Australia," he added.

Pepper nudged him and shook her head urgently.

"Dog's goin' to have Australia," said Adam, his eyes glowing with the fires of creation, "on account of him needin' a lot of space to run about. An' there's all those rabbits and kangaroos for him to chase, an'—"

The clouds spread forwards and sideways like ink poured into a bowl of clear water, moving across the sky faster than the wind.

"But there won't beany rab‑" Wensleydale shrieked.

Adam wasn't listening, at least to any voices outside his own head. "It's all too much of a mess," he said. "We should start again. Just save the ones we want and start again. That's the best way. It'd be doing the Earth a favor, when you come to think about it. It makes me angry,seeing the way those old loonies are messing it up . . ."

– – -

"It's memory, you see," said Anathema. "It works backwards as well as forwards. Racial memory, I mean."

Newt gave her a polite but blank look.

"What I'm trying to say," she said patiently, "is that Agnes didn't seethe future. That's just a metaphor. She rememberedit. Not very well, of course, and by the time it'd been filtered through her own understand­ ing it's often a bit confused. We think she's best at remembering things that were going to happen to her descendants."

"But if you're going to places and doing things because of what she wrote, and what she wrote is her recollection of the places you went to and the things you did," said Newt, "then‑"

"I know. But there's, er, some evidence that that's how it works," said Anathema.

They looked at the map spread out between them. Beside them the radio murmured. Newt was very aware that a woman was sitting next to him. Be professional, he told himself. You're a soldier, aren't you? Well, practically. Then act like a soldier. He thought hard for a fraction of a second. Well, act like a respectable soldier on his best behavior, then. He forced his attention back to the matter at hand.

"Why Lower Tadfield?" said Newt. "I just got interested because of the weather. Optimal microclimate, they call it. That means it's a small place with its own personal nice weather."

He glanced at her notebooks. There was definitely something odd about the place, even if you ignored Tibetans and UFOs, which seemed to be infesting the whole world these days. The Tadfield area didn't only have the kind of weather you could set your calendar by, it was also remarkably resistant to change. No one seemed to build new houses there. The popula­tion didn't seem to move much. There seemed to be more woods and hedges than you'd normally expect these days. The only battery farm to open in the area had failed after a year or two, and been replaced by an old‑fashioned pig farmer who let his pigs run loose in his apple orchards and sold the pork at premium prices. The two local schools seemed to soldier on in blissful immunity from the changing fashions of education. A motorway which should have turned most of Lower Tadfield into little more than the Junction 18 Happy Porker Rest Area changed course five miles away, detoured in a great semicircle, and continued on its way oblivi­ous to the little island of rural changelessness it had avoided. No one quite seemed to know why; one of the surveyors involved had a nervous break­down, a second had become a monk, and a third had gone off to Bali to paint nude women.

It was as if a large part of the twentieth century had marked a few square miles Out of Bounds.

Anathema pulled another card out of her index and flicked it across the table.

2315. Sum say It cometh ...

4 years early [New in London Town, or New Amsterdam till 1664] ...

Yorke, butte they be ...

Taddville, Norfolk ...

Wronge, for the plase is ...

Tardesfield, Devon ...

Taddes Fild, Stronge inne ...

Tadfield, Oxon ... hys powr, he cometh like ..!..

See Revelation, C6, v10 a knight inne the fief, he divideth the Worlde into 4 partes, he bringeth the storme.

"I had to go and look through a lot of county records," said Anathema

"Why's this one 2315? It's earlier than the others."

"Agnes was a bit slapdash about timing. I don't think she always knew what went where. I told you, we've spent ages devising a sort of system for chaining them together."

Newt looked at a few cards. For example:

1111. An the Great ? Is this something to do with Hound sharl coom, Bismark? [A F De­vice, June 8, 1888]

and the Two Powers sharl watch in Vane, for it Goeth where is its Mas­-… ? ter, Where they Wot

Notte, and he sharl name Schleswig‑Holstein? it, True to Ittes Nature, and Hell sharl flee it.

"She's being unusually obtuse for Agnes," said Anathema.

3017. I see Four Riding, The Apocalyptic Horse­men.

bringing the Ende, and the Man = Pan, The Devil

the Angells of Hell ride The Witch Trials of Lancashire,

with them, And Three Brewster, 1782).??

sharl Rise. And Four and

Four Together be Four, I feel good Agnes had drunk well this

an the Dark Angel sharl night, (Quincy Device, Octbr. 15, 1789]

Own Defeat, Yette the

Manne sharl claim his I concur. We are all hu­man, alas.

Own.[Miss O J De­vice, Janry. 5, 1854]

"Why Niceand Accurate?" said Newt.

"Nice as in exact, or precise," said Anathema, in the weary tones of one who'd explained this before. "That's what it used to mean."

"But look, " said Newt‑

‑he'd nearly convinced himself about the non‑existence of the UFO, which was clearly a figment of his imagination, and the Tibetan could have been a, well, he was working on it, but whatever it was it wasn't a Tibetan, but what he wasmore and more convinced of was that he was in a room with a very attractive woman, who appeared actually to like him, or at least not to dislike him, which was a definite first for Newt. And admittedly there seemed to be a lot of strange stuff going on, but if he really tried, poling the boat of common sense upstream against the raging current of the evidence, he could pretend it was all, well, weather balloons, or Venus, or mass hallucination.

In short, whatever Newt was now thinking with, it wasn't his brain.

"But look," he said, "the world isn't reallygoing to end now, is it? I mean, just look around. It's not like there's any international tension . . . well, any more than there normally is. Why don't we leave this stuff for a while and just go and, oh, I don't know, maybe we could just go for a walk or something, I mean‑"

"Don't you understand? There's something here! Something that affects the area!" she said. "It's twisted all the ley‑lines. It's protecting the area against anything that might change it! It's . . . it's . . ." There it was again: the thought in her mind that she could not, was not allowed to grasp, like a dream upon waking.

The windows rattled. Outside, a sprig of jasmine, driven by the wind, started to bang insistently on the glass.

"But I can't get a fix on it," said Anathema, twisting her fingers together. "I've tried everything."

"Fix?" said Newt.

"I've tried the pendulum. I've tried the theodolite. I'm psychic, you see. But it seems to move around."

Newt was still in control of his own mind enough to do the proper translation. When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an over‑active but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/ talk to my budgie"; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.

"Armageddon moves around?" said Newt.

"Various prophecies say the Antichrist has to arise first," said Anathema. "Agnes says he. Ican't spot him‑"

"Or her," said Newt.

"What?"

"Could be a her," said Newt. "This is the twentieth century, after all. Equal opportunities."

"I don't think you're taking this entirely seriously," she said se­verely. "Anyway, there isn't any evilhere. That's what I don't understand. There's just love."

"Sorry?" said Newt.

She gave him a helpless look. "It's hard to describe it," she said. "Something or someone loves this place. Loves every inch of it so powerfully that it shields and protects it. A deep‑down, huge, fierce love. How can anything bad start here? How can the end of the world start in a place like this? This is the kind of town you'd want to raise your kids in. It's a kids' paradise." She smiled weakly. "You should seethe local kids. They're unreal! Right out of the Boys' Own Paper! All scabby knees and 'brilliant!' and bulls‑eyes‑"

She nearly had it. She could feel the shape of the thought, she was gaining on it.

"What's this place?" said Newt.

"What?" Anathema screamed, as her train of thought was derailed.

Newt's finger tapped at the map.

" 'Disused aerodrome', it says. Just here, look, west of Tadfield itself‑"

Anathema snorted. "Disused? Don't you believe it. Used to be a wartime fighter base. It's been Upper Tadfield Air Base for about ten years or so. And before you say it, the answer's no. I hate everything about the bloody place, but the colonel's saner than you are by a long way. His wife does yoga, for God's sake."

Now. What was it she'd said before? The kids round here . . .

She felt her mental feet slipping away from under her, and she fell back into the more personal thought waiting there to catch her. Newt was okay, really. And the thing about spending the rest of your life with him was, he wouldn't be around long enough to get on your nerves.

The radio was talking about South American rainforests.

New ones.

It began to hail.

– – -

Bullets of ice shredded the leaves around the Them as Adam led them down into the quarry.

Dog slunk along with his tail between his legs, whining.

This wasn't right, he was thinking. Just when I was getting the hang of rats. Just when I'd nearly sorted out that bloody German Shep­herd across the road. Now He's going to end it all and I'll be back with the ole glowin' eyes and chasin' lost souls. What's the sense in that? They don't fight back, and there's no taste to 'em . . .

Wensleydale, Brian, and Pepper were not thinking quite so coher­ently. All that they were aware of was that they could no more not follow Adam than fly; to try to resist the force marching them forward would simply result in multiply‑broken legs, and they'd still have to march.

Adam wasn't thinking at all. Something had opened in his mind and was aflame.

He sat them down on the crate.

"We'll all be all right down here," he said.

"Er," said Wensleydale, "don't you think our mothers and fa­thers‑"

"Don't you worry about them," said Adam loftily. "I can make some new ones. There won't be any of this being in bed by half past nine, either. You don't ever have to go to bed ever, if you don't want to. Or tidy your room or anything. You just leave it all to me and it will be great." He gave them a manic smile. "I've got some new friends comin'," he confided. "You'll like 'em."

"But‑" Wensleydale began.

"You jus' think of all the amazin' stuff afterwards," said Adam enthusiastically. "You can fill up America with all new cowboys an' Indi­ans an' policemen an' gangsters an' cartoons an' spacemen and stuff. Won't that be fantastic?"

Wensleydale looked miserably at the other two. They were sharing a thought that none of them would be able to articulate very satisfactorily even in normal times. Broadly, it was that there had once been real cow­boys and gangsters, and that was great. And there would always be pre­tend cowboys and gangsters, and that was also great. But real pretend cowboys and gangsters, that were alive and not alive could be put back in their box when you were tired of them‑this did not seem great at all. The whole point about gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home.

"But before all that," said Adam darkly, "We're really goin' to show 'em . . ."

– – -

There was a tree in the plaza. It wasn't very big and the leaves were yellow and the light it got through the excitingly dramatic smoked glass was the wrong sort of light. And it was on more drugs than an Olympic athlete, and loudspeakers nested in the branches. But it was a tree, and if you half‑closed your eyes and looked at it over the artificial waterfall, you could almost believe that you were looking at a sick tree through a fog of tears.

Jaime Hernez liked to have his lunch under it. The maintenance supervisor would shout at him if he found out, but Jaime had grown up on a farm and it had been quite a good farm and he had liked trees and he didn't want to have to come into the city, but what could you do? It wasn't a bad job and the money was the kind of money his father hadn't dreamed of. His grandfather hadn't dreamed of any money at all. He hadn't even known what money was until he was fifteen. But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history.

But what could you do? Where there were trees now there were big farms, where there were small farms now there were plazas, and where there were plazas there were still plazas, and that's how it went.

He hid his trolley behind the newspaper stand, sat down furtively, and opened his lunchbox.

It was then that he became aware of the rustling, and a movement of shadows across the floor. He looked around.

The tree was moving. He watched it with interest. Jaime had never seen a tree growing before.

The soil, which was nothing more than a scree of some sort of artificial drippings, was actually crawling as the roots moved around un­der the surface. Jaime saw a thin white shoot creep down the side of the raised garden area and prod blindly at the concrete of the floor.

Without knowing why, without ever knowing why, he nudged it gently with his foot until it was close to the crack between the slabs. It found it, and bored down.

The branches were twisting into different shapes.

Jaime heard the screech of traffic outside the building, but didn't pay it any attention. Someone was yelling something, but someone was always yelling in Jaime's vicinity, often at him.

The questing root must have found the buried soil. It changed color and thickened, like a fire hose when the water is turned on. The artificial waterfall stopped running; Jaime visualised fractured pipes blocked with sucking fibers.

Now he could see what was happening outside. The street surface was heaving like a sea. Saplings were pushing up between the cracks.

Of course, he reasoned; they had sunlight. His tree didn't. All it had was the muted gray light that came through the dome four stories up. Dead light.

But what could you do?

You could do this:

The elevators had stopped running because the power was off, but it was only four flights of stairs. Jaime carefully shut his lunchbox and pad­ded back to his cart, where he selected his longest broom.

People were pouring out of the building, yelling. Jaime moved ami­ably against the flow like a salmon going upstream.

A white framework of girders, which the architect had presumably thought made a dynamic statement about something or other, held up the smoked glass dome. In fact it was some sort of plastic, and it took Jaime, perched on a convenient strip of girder, all his strength and the full lever­age of the broom's length to crack it. A couple more swings brought it down in lethal shards.

The light poured in, lighting up the dust in the plaza so that the air looked as though it was full of fireflies.

Far below, the tree burst the walls of its brushed concrete prison and rose like an express train. Jaime had never realized that trees made a sound when they grew, and no one else had realized it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves twenty‑four hours from peak to peak.

Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vroooom.

Jaime watched it come toward him like a green mushroom cloud. Steam was billowing out from around its roots.

The girders never stood a chance. The remnant of the dome went up like a ping‑pong ball on a water spray.

It was the same over all the city, except that you couldn't see the city any more. All you could see was the canopy of green. It stretched from horizon to horizon.

Jaime sat on his branch, clung to a liana, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Presently, it began to rain.

– – -

The Kappamaki,a whaling research ship, was currently research­ing the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?

Except that, today, there weren't any whales. The crew stared at the screens, which by the application of ingenious technology could spot anything larger than a sardine and calculate its net value on the interna­tional oil market, and found them blank. The occasional fish that did show up was barreling through the water as if in a great hurry to get elsewhere.

The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research material. He wondered what they did to you. Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honorable thing.

This was unreal. There ought to be something.

The navigator punched up a chart and stared at it.

"Honorable sir?" he said.

"What is it?" said the captain testily.

"We seem to have a miserable instrument failure. Seabed in this area should be two hundred meters."

"What of it?"

"I'm reading 15,000 meters, honorable sir. And still falling."

"That is foolish. There is no such depth."

The captain glared at several million yen worth of cutting‑edge technology, and thumped it.

The navigator gave a nervous smile.

"Ah, sir," he said, "it is shallower already."

Beneath the thunders of the upper deep, as Aziraphale and Tenny­son both knew, Far, far beneath in the abyssal sea/The kraken sleepeth.

And now it was waking up.

Millions of tons of deep ocean ooze cascade off its flanks as it rises. "See," said the navigator. "'Three thousand meters already."

The kraken doesn't have eyes. There has never been anything for it to look at. But as it billows up through the icy waters it picks up the microwave noise of the sea, the sorrowing beeps and whistles of the whalesong.

"Er," said the navigator, "one thousand meters?"

The kraken is not amused.

"Five hundred meters?"

The factory ship rocks on the sudden swell.

"A hundred meters?"

There is a tiny metal thing above it. The kraken stirs.

And ten billion sushi dinners cry out for vengeance.

– – -

The cottage windows burst inward. This wasn't a storm, it was war. Fragments of jasmine whirled across the room, mingled with the rain of file cards.

Newt and Anathema clung to one another in the space between the overturned table and the wall.

"Go on," muttered Newt. "Tell me Agnes predicted this."

"She did say he bringeth the storm," said Anathema.

"This is a bloody hurricane. Did she say what's supposed to happen next?"

"2315 is cross‑referenced to 3477," said Anathema.

"You can remember details like that at a time like this?"

"Since you mention it, yes," she said. She held out a card.

3477. Lette the wheel of ? Some mysticism here, one fears.

Fate turne, let harts en-[A F Device, Octbr 17, 1889]

­join, there are othere

fyres than mine; when the

wynd blowethe the blos­-

soms, reach oute one to

anothere, for the calm

cometh when Redde and Peas/blossoms? [OFD, 1929, Sept 4]

Whyte and Blacke and

Pale approche to Peas is Revelations Ch 6 again, I presume.