The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

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In Which We Pay a Brief Visit to Hell

THE MOUNTAIN OF DESPAIR was the tallest peak in Hell. It dominated the landscape of that terrible place in the way that only something really, really terrible can do, given the general terribleness of the place in which it happened to be. Even though no sun shone in Hell, and the skies above were forever darkened by warring thunderclouds, still the Mountain of Despair somehow managed to cast a shadow over everything, if only in the minds of those who were doomed, or damned, to exist there. It was so big that, no matter how far away you might stand, it never appeared any smaller. A lifetime might be spent trying to walk around it without success. A short lifetime might be spent trying to climb it, for some very disagreeable creatures lived among its cracks and crevasses, and they were always hungry.

Mind you, there were some inhabitants of Hell who had no objection whatsoever to the looming presence of the Mountain of Despair. It provided employment to those who were content to ensure that the business of running an empire based entirely on evil, misery, and general demonic activity proceeded as smoothly as possible. A job, in their view, was a job, and, as with most jobs, you just had to find that perfect balance between doing as little as possible so you didn’t get tired, and just enough so that you didn’t get fired.

Two such beings were currently guarding the great carved entrance to the mountain. Their names were Brompton and Edgefast. Edgefast was, strictly speaking, simply a disembodied head,²³ and Brompton was about as much use at guarding as a toy dog on wheels, but they had somehow managed to continue to be employed as guards despite their general uselessness. This was because Brompton and Edgefast were members of the Union of Demonic Employees and Tormentors (Guards Branch), which fiercely protected the rights of its members to lean on their spears and nap any time their eyes got a bit heavy; to take tea breaks at unsuitable times, including during battles, invasions, and serious fires; and not to actually guard anything if they thought that it might place their personal safety at risk. All of this made Brompton and Edgefast as hard to fire as a pair of chocolate cannons. The Mountain of Despair could have been stolen from under their noses and broken down to make garden gnomes and, thanks to the union, Brompton and Edgefast would still have been guarding the place where it once stood, in between taking essential naps and tea breaks.

“Quiet today,” said Edgefast.

“Too quiet for my liking,” said Brompton.

“Really?”

Edgefast couldn’t help but sound surprised. Brompton was the laziest demon Edgefast had ever met. Brompton could fall over and make hitting the ground look like an effort.

“Nah, only joking,” said Brompton. “Not quiet enough, if you ask me, what with you piping up every few minutes about how quiet it is.”

“Sorry,” said Edgefast.

He’d said that it was quiet only once. It wasn’t like he kept repeating the word quiet over and over until nobody could remember what silence had been like.

Edgefast’s nose was itchy. He’d have scratched it, but he didn’t have any arms. It was one of the problems with not having a body. Still, Brompton was very good about making sure that he had a straw through which to suck his tea, and he usually remembered to pick Edgefast up and take him home when they had finished guarding for the day.

“Would you mind scratching my nose for me?” Edgefast said.

“Oh, it’s all about you, isn’t it?” said Brompton. “Me, me, me, that’s all I ever hear. Who made you king, that’s what I’d like to know. Must have been when I wasn’t looking. All right, Your Majesty, I’ll scratch your nose for you. There! Happy now?”

Edgefast wasn’t, really. He couldn’t be, not with the business end of Brompton’s spear jammed up one nostril.

“ ’Es bine,” he said. “Mub bedder, dan gew.”

Brompton withdrew the spear and went back to leaning on it and staring glumly over the blasted landscape of Hell.

“Sorry,” he said. “Trouble at home.”

“Mrs. Brompton?” said Edgefast.

Brompton and Mrs. Brompton had a difficult marriage. There were fatal diseases that had better relationships with their victims than Brompton had with Mrs. Brompton.

“Yeah.”

“She move out again?”

“No, she moved back in.”

“Oh.”

There was silence for a time.

“I thought you were going to leave her,” said Edgefast.

“I did.”

“What happened?”

“She came with me.”

“Oh,” said Edgefast for a second time. There wasn’t much else to say. Brompton always seemed to be unhappy with Mrs. Brompton. The trouble was, he was even unhappier without Mrs. Brompton.

“She’d be lost without you, you know,” said Edgefast.

“Nah, I tried that,” said Brompton. “She found her way back.”

“Oh,” said Edgefast, for the third time, followed by “Oh?” and then “Oh-oh!”

Crudford manifested himself directly in front of the two guards with a sound like a plate of jelly being dropped on a stone floor. He raised his hat with his left hand and said, “Evening, gentlemen.” Under his right arm he carried a jar, and in the jar a mass of blue atoms seethed and roiled, slowly forming something that became, as he drew closer to Edgefast, a single hostile eye surrounded by pale, bruised skin. The eye seemed to glare at Edgefast, who would have taken a step back if it hadn’t been for his shortcomings in the leg department. Edgefast had clear memories of that eye. It had looked at him in a similar way just moments before some very sharp bits of the body to which it was then attached had ripped him apart.

Crudford put his hat back on his head, and patted the jar the way one might pat the comfortable carrying case of a beloved pet.

“Here we are, ma’am,” he said. “It’s nice to be back, isn’t it?”

• • •

The Great Malevolence, the monstrous fount of all evil, sat in its lair of fire and stone at the heart of the Mountain of Despair, the flames reflected in its eyes so that it seemed almost to be burning from within. It had cast aside its armor for now, and set aside its shield of skulls and its burning spear. The great crown of bone that grew from its head glowed red from the heat of the infernos that surrounded it. Its monstrous body, scarred and misshapen, lay slumped on its throne.

The throne was a massive construct of bones that twisted and tangled like pale branches and yellowed vines. There was no comfort to the throne, but that was as the Great Malevolence preferred: it never wanted to grow used to its banishment in Hell, and never wished to find a moment’s peace there. It had come into existence milliseconds after the birth of the Multiverse, a force for destruction born out of the creation of worlds. It could, it supposed, have become an agent for good, but it was a jealous being, an angry being, and it had fought against all that was fine and noble in the Multiverse until at last a force greater than itself had grown tired of its evil. The Great Malevolence was cast down to Hell for eternity, and it had conspired to free itself ever since. It had almost succeeded, too, but its plans had been ruined by the boy named Samuel Johnson and his dog, Boswell.

The Great Malevolence had also lost its lieutenant, the demon Ba’al. It was Ba’al who had led the invasion of Earth, occupying the body of a woman named Mrs. Abernathy and then, for reasons unclear, deciding that being a woman was altogether nicer than being a demon. When the invasion failed, the Great Malevolence chose to blame Mrs. Abernathy, and she was banished from its presence. When she had tried to get back in its good graces by opening another portal to Earth, Samuel Johnson had intervened again, and that was when all of the atoms in Mrs. Abernathy’s body had been separated from their neighbors and scattered throughout the Multiverse.

The Great Malevolence was a being filled with self-pity. It now regretted banishing Mrs. Abernathy, not because of any hurt that it might have caused her, but because she had been useful and loyal, and the Great Malevolence’s strength was reduced without her.²⁴ This was why it had ordered the creature named Crudford to find all of the pieces of her and bring them back to Hell so that she might be reassembled. Crudford wasn’t much to look at, but like many creatures that appear humble and insignificant, Crudford had turned out to be far more important and gifted that he had first appeared.

Now Crudford oozed into the Great Malevolence’s presence and added the eyeball in the jar to the other body parts that were currently lined up on a stone platform in the throne room. Crudford had been summoned to the Great Malevolence’s presence to detail his progress in tracking down the billions of atoms of Mrs. Abernathy’s being. Crudford was feeling nervous about this. He thought he’d done well in finding as many bits as he had so far. It was no easy business oozing between universes looking for tiny blue atoms. You needed a steady hand, and a good eye, and a lot of luck. On the other hand, the Great Malevolence wasn’t very keen on listening to excuses, and it had a habit of tossing those who displeased it into bottomless pits, or leaving them to freeze in the great Lake of Cocytus.

“Afternoon, Your Virulence,” said Crudford, lifting his hat in greeting. “Nice day out there. Not too chilly.”

The Great Malevolence’s voice boomed through the chamber. It made dust and pebbles and the occasional napping demon fall from the walls. Its voice really had a rumble to it.

“Show me what you have found,” it said.

It towered above Crudford, and the little gelatinous being felt himself grow cold in the Great Malevolence’s shadow.

“Well,” said Crudford, “we’ve made some progress, Your Unpleasantness.”

He began to move down the line of jars, pointing a gloopy finger at each one in turn.

“This here’s an eye, as you can see—and, I suppose, as it can see, too, ho ho. This one’s half a pancreas. That looks like a bit of an ear. That one—”

Crudford paused and squinted. He tapped the jar, as if hoping that the atoms might rearrange themselves and give him a clue. They didn’t.

“To be honest, I’m not sure what that is, so we’ll just leave it for now and ooze along,” he said. “That’s a finger. This is three-quarters of a lung. In there we have part of a lip, and most of a lower jaw. This one here—actually, you don’t even want to know what that is. Seriously, you don’t. Over here we have . . .”

This went on for some time. When Crudford was finished, the Great Malevolence didn’t exactly seem pleased, but the fact that Crudford was still in one piece meant that the Great Malevolence wasn’t displeased either.

“How much longer before you find the rest of her?” it asked. “I want my lieutenant restored to me.”

“Hard to say,” said Crudford.

“It will be harder to say if I freeze you, or feed you to the imps,” said the Great Malevolence.

“Good point,” said Crudford. “I’ll work doubly fast.”

Crudford was about to say something more, but decided against it. The Great Malevolence made a few more threats, and warned of the harm that would come to Crudford if he didn’t find the rest of Mrs. Abernathy soon. Crudford wasn’t offended. The Great Malevolence was just letting off steam. Anyway, Crudford was the only one who could find Mrs. Abernathy’s atoms. The Great Malevolence couldn’t do him any harm: if it did, then it would never get its lieutenant back.

But the search was harder than Crudford had anticipated, and each time he found some of Mrs. Abernathy’s atoms he detected hatred in them. It was almost as if Mrs. Abernathy didn’t want to be found. That was what he had almost told the Great Malevolence before good sense made him stay silent. The Great Malevolence didn’t need to hear that, just as it didn’t want to hear about the beating, somewhere in the Multiverse, of what Crudford was certain was Mrs. Abernathy’s heart.

Because Mrs. Abernathy wasn’t supposed to have a heart.

23. In the first chapter of The Infernals, Edgefast was torn limb from limb for daring to question the right of Mrs. Abernathy to enter the Mountain of Despair. Once again, if you’d read that book then you’d know all of this already. Look, why don’t we just arrange for me to give you a telephone call and I can read the book to you, or perhaps I can act it out in your back garden for you and your friends? Or maybe, just maybe, you could go and read The Infernals, and maybe The Gates as well, and then when I mention a name like Edgefast you’ll be able to say, “Aha, that’s the bloke who got torn apart by Mrs. Abernathy in the last book!” and be very pleased with yourself, instead of forcing me to pause in the important task of telling the new story just so you don’t feel left out. You’ve just kept everyone else waiting, you know. I hope you’re happy. And I bet you didn’t even buy this book: you probably received it as a gift, or stole it. Frankly, I don’t know why I bother.

24. This is the curse of kings. While you or I might get annoyed with our friends on occasion, we tend not to order their execution simply because they’ve trodden on our toes or, if we do, people ignore us, which is usually for the best. The trouble with being a king is that, when you lose your temper with someone and order his head to be lopped off, a chap appears with an ax and promptly does the deed, or someone drops a noose around his neck and—well, you get the picture. Then later, when the king announces that he misses old What’s-His-Name and wonders where on Earth he’s got to because he was always good for a laugh, a courtier has to go through the awkward business of explaining that old What’s-His-Name is unlikely to be cracking jokes anytime in the near, or distant, future owing to his definite deadness. Henry VIII, for example, who was king of England from 1509 to 1547, ended his days surrounded by a great many young people for the simple reason that he’d had most of his old courtiers exiled or executed. Between the years 1532 and 1540 alone, Henry ordered 330 political executions, probably more than any other ruler in British history. If you worked for Henry VIII, then you really didn’t need to worry about putting money into your pension fund as you probably wouldn’t live long enough to spend it.