The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

XIII

In Which We Learn That Hilary Mould May Have Been Even Odder Than First Suspected

SAMUEL KNOCKED ON THE door of the bedroom shared by Nurd and Wormwood and waited until Nurd’s voice gave him permission to come in. Samuel was very conscious of giving Nurd and Wormwood as much privacy and space as he could. The little bedroom was their home within the home, although they hadn’t done much to change it apart from putting up a few posters on the walls. Nurd had opted for pictures of ancient monuments in far-off countries: the Pyramids of Egypt, the temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the Inca site of Machu Picchu in Peru. Wormwood, by contrast, preferred pictures of terrible boy bands. He even had a signed poster of BoyStarz, given to him by Dan and the dwarfs. According to Dan, there were plenty more posters where that came from. Hundreds.

Thousands.

Nurd was lying on the top bunk, flicking through the travel supplement from one of the weekend newspapers. Wormwood was listening to music on his headphones. It was loud enough for Samuel to be able to hear some of the words: something about how love was like a garden, or a rosebush, or a snail. Whatever it was, it sounded dreadful, but Samuel said nothing. It made Wormwood happy, which was all that mattered. As if to confirm this, Wormwood gave Samuel a smile and a big thumbs-up. Samuel waved back and climbed the ladder on the bunks so that he could speak face-to-face with Nurd.

“Is everything all right?” asked Samuel.

“Everything’s fine,” said Nurd, although his expression suggested the opposite was true.

“It’s just that you don’t seem to be yourself lately,” said Samuel. “I’m worried about you.”

Faced with Samuel’s obvious concern, Nurd put the travel supplement away.

“That’s just it,” he said. “I’m not sure what being myself means anymore. When I was in Hell, I was Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities. I wasn’t very important. I wasn’t important at all, really, but I had a name, and I knew my place, even if it wasn’t a very nice one. But here on Earth I live under a false name, and I have to hide my face. I crash cars for a living. Don’t get me wrong, I like crashing cars, or I used to, but there’s only so many times that you can crash a car and survive a fireball before it starts to get a bit samey.”²⁷

“What can I do to help?” said Samuel.

“Nothing,” said Nurd. “It’s not your fault. It’s just me, that’s all. I’ll figure something out.”

Samuel wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t know how to make life better for Nurd. If he’d had money, he’d have given it to Nurd so that he could travel and see a bit more of the world, but Samuel and his mum were barely making ends meet as it was, even with the wages that Nurd and Wormwood earned from testing cars.

“Look,” said Samuel, “maybe you should come along to the opening of the toy shop after all. It’ll do you good.”

Nurd shook his head.

“No, what you said downstairs was right. We shouldn’t attract any more attention to ourselves, and we wouldn’t want to frighten anyone.”

He picked up his travel supplement again. On the cover, a young couple smiled in front of the Taj Mahal in India.

“I’m sorry,” said Samuel as he climbed down from the bunk. “I thought you’d be happy here.”

“I am happy,” said Nurd. “I just wish I was . . . happier.”²⁸

• • •

Maria, accompanied by Tom, came round to Samuel’s house later that evening. Samuel showed the invitation to them, and they were both impressed.

“Maybe if we keep hanging around with you, some of your celebrity will rub off on us and we’ll get invited to openings, too,” said Tom.

“Well, can you keep rubbing, then,” said Samuel, “because I don’t want to be a celebrity at all.”

“Still, it’s nice to be asked,” said Tom. “I mean, if the only reward for being famous was being chased by demons and dragged off to Hell every so often, then it really wouldn’t be worth being famous at all, would it? Are you going to bring someone along with you? I’d go, but my mum and dad are keeping me out of school that day so we can visit my gran in Liverpool.”

“I expect Lucy will want to go,” said Samuel.

Maria winced, but said nothing. The nature of her friendship with Samuel had changed a lot since Samuel had started seeing Lucy Highmore. Lucy didn’t like Maria, and Maria certainly didn’t like Lucy, so when Samuel was with Lucy he couldn’t be with Maria, and even when he was with Maria without Lucy, there was now a certain chill between them. Samuel wondered if it was always that way when a group of friends had to deal with the fact that one of them now had a girlfriend or boyfriend. He wished there was somebody he could ask about it, but the person he would usually have asked was Maria. There was no point in asking Tom: Tom was as close to being married to the rest of the rugby First Fifteen as it was possible to be without them all exchanging rings and sprinkling confetti on one another.

“Since we’re all here,” said Maria, “we may as well get some work done on our project.”

Tom groaned.

“I hate this project. I have to look at old buildings and try to find something to say about them other than that they’re a bit gloomy and should probably have been demolished a long time ago. Yesterday I nearly got knocked out by a piece of brick that dropped off one of them. I’m lucky to be alive. Whose idea was it to write about Hilary Mould anyway?”

“It was mine,” said Maria icily. “And you really will be lucky to stay alive if you don’t stop complaining. We either studied the Mould buildings or spent our Saturdays wandering around shopping centers counting shoe shops. At least Mould is interesting.”

“Only if you’re a depressed pigeon with no friends,” said Tom. “And then there’s that business with his statue.”

They all agreed that the statue was odd. Nobody ever saw it moving around. It would be in one place for an hour, or a day, or a week, and then it would be somewhere else. Some weeks earlier, Maria had suggested that their science class should do a study of the statue, but Mr. Lugosi, the science teacher, didn’t believe it was a good idea.

“Who knows what might happen if we start paying attention to it?” he said, a statement which led Maria to suspect that Mr. Lugosi wasn’t really cut out to teach science.

“Perhaps it’s a quantum statue,” Tom had suggested, “so that it’s in every possible place in Biddlecombe until someone observes it.”

“Very clever, Hobbes,” said Mr. Lugosi, “except that the statue appears to have only six known preferred locations.”

“Sir?” called Mooch, who always sat at the back of the class and walked with a slight stoop, as though auditioning for the role of bell ringer in an old cathedral.

“Yes, Mooch?”

“Seven, sir.”

“Seven what?”

“Seven places the statue seems to prefer.”

“Why do you say that, Mooch?”

“Sir, it’s outside the window.”

And it was.

“Don’t look at it,” said Mr. Lugosi. “Ignore it and it will go away.”

Everybody ignored Mr. Lugosi instead and looked at the statue, but after a while it began to give them the creeps, so they looked away again. Seconds later, the statue had gone.

“If anyone asks, that never happened,” said Mr. Lugosi.

But Maria in particular continued to be intrigued, and when Mr. Franklin, the geography teacher, had told them to form groups of three and come up with a project on buildings and public spaces in Biddlecombe, she had twisted the arms of Samuel and Tom until they’d agreed to look at the work of Hilary Mould. The subject was now quite topical due to the reopening of Wreckit & Sons.

“This bloke Grimly will have to do something pretty spectacular with Wreckit’s if he doesn’t want to send little kids home crying and wondering what the point of life is,” said Tom.

“It is a strange building to turn into a toy store,” said Samuel. “I know it’s right in the center of town, but it still looks like it should be used for something else.”

“Storing dead bodies,” Tom suggested.

“Storing undead bodies,” Samuel offered.

“A rest home for retired vampires.”

“Kennels for werewolves.”

“Will you two shut up!” said Maria. “Look, I’ve printed off a map of Biddlecombe. I thought we could use it as the centerpiece for the project, and mark the Mould buildings on it. Then we could add a picture of each building, and a little potted history of it. Now that Samuel is going to the grand opening, maybe he can find a way to interview Mr. Grimly. Samuel might have more luck than the local paper has had. How does that sound?”

It was certainly better than anything Samuel or Tom had come up with. There were six Mould buildings in total in Biddlecombe, and they had taken two each to study. Samuel and Tom hadn’t done much more than walk by their buildings, which in Samuel’s case included Wreckit’s, and then move along as quickly as possible, but Maria had already completed her histories and taken her photos. Now, as they sat around the table, she placed dots on the map indicating the locations of the six Mould buildings.

Maria sat back. She appeared troubled.

“What is it?” asked Samuel. “Did you make a mistake?”

“She doesn’t make mistakes,” said Tom, which was kind of true. What Maria did, she did well.

“Don’t you see it?” said Maria.

Samuel and Tom didn’t see anything at all, apart from the names of streets and buildings, and six black dots. Maria picked up her pen again, grabbed a ruler, and began drawing lines on the map, connecting the dots.

“Now do you see it?” she asked.

They did. It might have been a coincidence, but if it was, then it was a very large one. The dots, when joined by lines, made a very distinct pattern. It looked like this, with Wreckit & Sons at the center:

“I could be wrong,” said Maria, “but that looks very like a pentagram.”²⁹

Samuel, Maria, and Tom talked for a long time about the pentagram. Maria was the most worried about it, and Tom the least. Samuel was stranded somewhere in the middle. It was unusual, he had to admit, but so what if weird Hilary Mould had set out to position his awful buildings in the shape of a pentagram? It just confirmed what everyone had always thought: he was as odd as two left shoes.

“Maybe you shouldn’t go to the grand reopening,” said Maria, “not until we know more. In fact, we should try to have the reopening postponed.”

“Are you mad?” said Tom. “The reopening is tomorrow, and it’s the biggest thing to have happened to Biddlecombe in years. Everybody is looking forward to it. Do you really think they’re going to call it off just because you’ve made the shape of a star on a map?”

“Tom’s right,” said Samuel. “It doesn’t mean anything, beyond the fact that Hilary Mould had an unusual sense of humor.”

“But what if it’s more than that?” said Maria. “What if it’s dangerous?”

“How can it be?” said Samuel. “Those buildings have been around for more than a century and they’ve done nothing worse than make the town look a bit uglier. Why should they start being dangerous now?”

And that was how things ended, because Maria had no answer to Samuel’s question. She had only her instincts to go on, and they told her that something was very wrong here. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to the people of Biddlecombe, and especially not to Samuel and Boswell. She didn’t even want any harm to befall Lucy Highmore.

Or not much harm, anyway.

27. No matter how great your job is, there will be days when you might wish that you were doing something else. Everybody feels the need to have a bit of a moan once in a while. Your job could be knocking baseballs through the windows of buildings and every so often you’d still feel the urge to complain that your arm was tired.

28. Which is, in a way, the story of life.

29. It was only in the nineteenth century that the pentagram—a five-pointed star—came to be regarded as a symbol for evil, and its use in old manuscripts of the supernatural is rare. Just to be clear, if it has one point at the top, then it’s a symbol of good, and if there are two points at the top, like the one Maria found, it’s a symbol for evil. Then again, like most things in life, it rather depends upon how one looks at it, doesn’t it?