The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

XXVI

In Which Constable Peel Is Reduced to Tears of Unhappiness

NURD DECIDED THAT THE scenes of Christmas chaos in Biddlecombe were very inventive, even for someone who had previously witnessed an invasion by the forces of Hell itself. It was one thing to encounter people being attacked by, and fighting against, assorted demons, ghouls, and chthonic⁴⁵ forces, which were, by and large, simply terrifying, and therefore capable of being understood on those terms. It was quite another to witness a running battle in August Derleth Park between the Biddlecombe Ladies’ Football Team and a half-dozen very rough-looking fairies that had climbed down from the tops of various Christmas trees with murder on their minds. So far, the Biddlecombe Ladies seemed to have the upper hand, mainly because the Biddlecombe Ladies were bigger than some of the Biddlecombe Gentlemen, and had such a reputation for violence on the pitch that opposing teams had been known to injure themselves at first sight of them, just to save the ladies the effort. The fairies were doing some damage with their wands, though, which had been weaponized by the addition of chains and spiked metal balls.

“Those fairies are walking a bit funny,” said Wormwood.

“You’d walk a bit funny, too, if someone stuck a Christmas tree up you,” said Nurd.

A large troop of elves crossed their path, struggling beneath the weight of a tree trunk that they were hoping to use to break down the door of the post office. It was quite clear to Nurd and Wormwood that the tree trunk, while heavy enough to use as a battering ram, was too heavy for even a great many elves to carry for any distance.

“Weeeee!” urged one of the lead elves. “Weeeee!”

Nurd and Wormwood watched as first one set of legs buckled, and then another. By the time the third set went, there was only time for a single, worried “oh-oh” before the competition between the elves and the tree trunk was won by the trunk with a crushing victory, leaving various elf limbs sticking out from beneath it.

“Ow,” said a small voice.

One lead elf, who had managed to escape being trapped through some nifty footwork, looked pleadingly at Nurd and Wormwood for help.

“Weeeee?” it said. “Weeeee?”

Nurd trod on it.

Farther along the way, they saw a giant ferocious reindeer with sharp horns and black eyes standing before a herd of local deer as it tried to incite them to rebellion.

“Rise up!” cried the demon reindeer. “Rise up against the puny humans who know you only as Bambi, the oppressors who think you’re cute but occasionally eat you in stews, or with parsnips and a reduction of juniper berries.”

The local deer did what local deer do, which was to glance nervously from the stranger to one another before returning to eating grass in the hope that it would go away and stop bothering them.

“Oh, have it your way, then,” said the demon reindeer. It looked at the grass. It nibbled a bit. Wow, it thought, the grass was rather good. It ate some more. It continued to graze happily until it was joined by a couple of other demon reindeer who’d had no more luck starting the deer revolution than it had.

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked the leader of the demon reindeer.

The lone demon reindeer did some quick thinking. “Trying to win their trust?” it suggested.

“No, you’re just eating grass. Stop it and come with us. We must sow fear and chaos. The Shadows are about to fall.”

The demon reindeer nibbled one last piece of grass and joined the rest of the demon reindeer herd. It paused only to look back at the local deer and whisper, “Don’t eat it all, right? Save some for me. Seriously. Please. You’re really lovely deer, and very handsome. Sorry I shouted at you.”

The deer ignored it. After all, it wasn’t fawning season.⁴⁶

Fires had broken out in houses and gardens. On Wells Street, a large wolf was trying to blow down a house made of bricks while the lady inside threw pots at it from an upstairs window. A troll had hidden under a canal bridge, hoping to spring out and trap unwary travelers, but that was Bill the Tramp’s bridge, and he wasn’t about to share it with anyone. Bill had tied the unconscious troll to a shopping cart and left it outside the police station with a note attached that read “Possibly from abroad.” Meanwhile, Mr. Thompson the greengrocer, who did not like competition, had found a wicked stepmother going around with a basket of apples for sale and had forced her to hide in a dustbin to escape his wrath, and his well-aimed fruit and vegetables.

A water main had burst and was already starting to freeze. It was growing colder. Nurd hadn’t noticed before. He looked at Wormwood. The tip of Wormwood’s nose had turned blue.

“Your nose has turned blue,” Nurd told him.

“Has it? It was feeling a bit funny.”

Wormwood scratched at his nose. It fell off in his hand. He peered at it, then shrugged. These things happened, or they happened to Wormwood. He excavated a disturbingly filthy handkerchief from somewhere on his person, carefully wrapped his nose in it, then stuck it in his pocket for safekeeping.

“Why did you wrap it in a handkerchief?” asked Nurd.

“In case I sneeze,” said Wormwood. “I don’t want to make a mess.”

“Ah,” said Nurd. “Very sensible.”

They walked on, offering Nurd time to think about what Wormwood had just said. Nurd stopped walking, gave Wormwood a hard flick on the ear, and they continued on their way.

Snow fell on them. Nurd looked up, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight. The night was so clear that the sky was filled with stars, like millions of gemstones scattered across a great swatch of dark cloth. Nurd had never seen so many. They took his breath away, but there was something wrong about this sky. It seemed blacker than he remembered, which made the stars shine brighter. The problem was that they weren’t the right stars. The constellations had changed. No, that wasn’t quite true. Nurd thought that he could still pick out Gemini, and Draco, and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great Bear and the Little Bear, but other stars were overlaid upon them. They were dimmer, but growing in intensity. It was as though one solar system were somehow intruding on another.

Nurd found Polaris, the North Star, the center of the night sky, which had guided travelers on land and sea ever since the earliest days of exploration. Once Polaris was visible it was hard to be lost, for it marked the way due north. There was consolation in its presence.

As Nurd watched, the great star blinked once, and disappeared.

• • •

Dan and the dwarfs were still being pursued, although not very quickly. The Nosferati, as Dan had dubbed them, were addicted to sneaking along, their long fingers grasping, their shadows stretching ahead of them, almost touching the heels of Dozy, who was bringing up the rear. But they did so very, very slowly, and had a fondness for stopping occasionally and making scary faces.

And while there was no doubt that they were horrible, and nasty, and smelled of the grave, they might have been more troubling had their every move not been accompanied by music played on an unseen organ. Every footstep, every raised hand, every arch of the eyebrows came with a tune. They were monsters from a silent movie, and in the days of silent movies each cinema would pay an organist to play along with the film. It was part of the deal, and even these Nosferati, liberated from picture frames, had to play by the rules.

“I wish that music would stop,” said Dan. “It sounds like the ice cream van from Hell.”

The music was bothering the Nosferati as well. Some of them snatched at the air, as though trying to pull the notes from the ether and grind them into musical dust. It was no good. The unseen organ kept on playing.

It was Jolly who wondered aloud if the Nosferati had ever even heard the organ music before. By now, Dan and the dwarfs had slowed from a run to a stroll, as it was clear that the Nosferati, though a nuisance, weren’t likely to catch up with them any time soon.

“I mean, they were in a silent film,” said Jolly, “which was, you know, silent. It was only in the real world, our world, that the music played. Imagine if, every time you took a step, there was someone banging away on an organ behind you. It’d drive you crazy. They’d have to lock you away before you killed him.”

The Nosferati had stopped making any progress at all. They were now curled up in balls with their coats over their heads, or were trying to jam their fingers in their ears, which didn’t work because their fingernails were too long. One of them was banging his forehead repeatedly against a wall.

“See?” said Jolly. “There’s only so much of it you can take before—”

The one-eyed Nosferatu, the one who had had his eye (singular) on Dozy, started to shake. He raised a questioning finger as if to say, “Hang on a minute, this doesn’t feel right,” and then his head exploded. As he had been undead for a very long time, there wasn’t much blood or brain to contend with. His head simply disappeared in a puff of gray dust, and his body quickly followed.

This began a chain reaction of exploding heads, and bodies collapsing like old pillars, filling the basement with the dust of the undead. When it finally settled, Dan and the dwarfs were all that remained standing, although they were now covered from head to toe in gray bits of vampire. The few surviving Nosferati who had managed to plug their ears beat a hasty retreat.

Angry coughed up ash.

“I think I swallowed some,” he said. “That can’t be good for me.”

“Look,” said Dozy. “It’s a lift.”

And it was. It was rickety and old and bore an unhappy resemblance to a cage, but it was definitely a lift of sorts. Its floor was made of wood, and its walls were lined with velvet. Instead of a door, it had a metal gate that could be pulled across and secured.

Dozy poked his head inside.

“I don’t see any buttons,” he said. “There’s a control lever, though.”

He stepped into the lift and gave the lever an experimental tug, but nothing happened.

“You have to close the gate first, I think,” said Dan.

“Hang on,” said Jolly. “Don’t do anything until we’re all inside.”

Dan, Jolly, Angry, and Mumbles joined Dozy in the lift.

“All aboard?” said Dozy. “Right. Up we go!”

He pulled the lever. There came the groaning of ancient machinery. The lift vibrated, and slowly began to rise.

• • •

Samuel, Lucy, and the policemen had just reached the next floor when they heard a rumbling in the basement.

“What’s that?” said Sergeant Rowan.

“Sorry,” said Constable Peel. “That’s me. I haven’t been feeling very well.”

“No, not that,” said Sergeant Rowan, although he took a couple of cautious steps back from Constable Peel. “That!”

They all heard it now. It was the sound of a lift ascending.

“Over there,” said Samuel.

To their right was a dark, gated shaft, and above it a panel displaying floor numbers had just lit up.

“Something’s coming up from the basement!” said Lucy.

“It has to be something nasty,” said Constable Peel. “There are only nasty things in this shop, present company excepted.”

The number 1 lit up.

“It’ll be here in a couple of seconds,” said Constable Peel.

“Be brave, lad,” said Sergeant Rowan.

He gripped his cricket bat tightly. He’d had the foresight to grab a weapon as they ran from the spiders. Samuel and Lucy hefted their pool cues threateningly, for they had been wise enough to do the same.

Constable Peel took his place beside them.

“What are you holding?” said Sergeant Rowan.

“Ping-Pong bat,” said Constable Peel. “It was all I could find.”

“Constable, we need to have a long talk when this is all over.”

“Yes, Sarge.”

The lift came into view. The light on the second floor was poor, and the lift itself remained dark, but as it stopped, Samuel and the others could pick out five gray shapes.

“Ghouls!” whispered Lucy.

“Wraiths!” said Constable Peel.

The lift’s gate opened. The five figures emerged and stepped into a small pool of moonlight cast through the murky glass of one of the windows. It was Constable Peel who reacted first.

“It’s Dan and the dwarfs,” he said. “Look at them! They’re all gray and spooky and sickly. They’re dead, but somehow they’re still upright. Only the shells of them remain! Oh! Oh!”

He fell to his knees, buried his face in his hands, and began to weep.

Jolly raised a hand and opened his mouth.

“Look,” said Sergeant Rowan. “One of them is trying to speak.”

Constable Peel peered over the tips of his fingers. It was true. He waited to hear the hollow, undead rattle of what had once been Mr. Jolly Smallpants.

Jolly didn’t speak. He sneezed. The sneeze was so massive that it caused most of the ash to lift from him, and Jolly used the opportunity to step to one side and avoid the dust as it came down again.

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s just bits of dead vampire.”

Constable Peel stared at him for a time, then burst into tears again, crying even harder than before.

“Oh no!” he wailed. “They’re alive. They’re still alive . . .”

45. Chthonic (pronounced “thonic” to rhyme with “sonic”) is a great word of Greek origin, and means of, or relating to, the Underworld. Feel free to drop it into conversations at home, where it has many amusing uses. For example: “Mum, this broccoli is positively chthonic.” Or: “I’m not sure about that tie, Dad. It looks kind of chthonic.” And, of course, the ever-popular “I’d give that bathroom a minute or two. It smells a bit chthonic.”

46. A very clever joke that plays upon the fact that the word fawn, meaning to gain favor through flattery, and fawn, meaning a young deer, are spelled the same. See? Oh, please yourself. It’s like casting pearls before swine . . .