The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

XXX

In Which Help Arrives, Wearing a Very Fetching Hat

THE STREETS OF BIDDLECOMBE’S town center were largely deserted as Maria and the scientists drew closer to Wreckit & Sons. Most of Biddlecombe’s citizens had barricaded themselves in their homes and businesses, or were off battling elves and reindeer elsewhere. A small crowd had taken refuge inside the Town Hall, where the forces of darkness were being kept at bay by the singing of BoyStarz, as it turned out that even demonic elves and reindeer had a limited tolerance for infinite variations on “Love Is Like . . .” Some of those trapped inside with BoyStarz had tried to make a break for freedom to take their chances with the forces of darkness, but common sense had prevailed, helped by earplugs and the contents of the mayor’s drinks cabinet.

Professor Hilbert parked the car outside Mr. Tuppenny’s Ice Cream Parlor, where a quartet of abominable snowmen had made the mistake of breaking in and eating some of the stock. Mr. Tuppenny’s ice cream had a reputation for being heavy on the ice and light on the cream. It was said of his Lemon Surprise that the only surprising thing about it was the fact that it eventually melted at all, and lumps of coal had more lemon in them. There were people who swore that they had eaten one of Mr. Tuppenny’s Special Ice Cream Sundaes in May and still had an icy ball moving slowly and painfully through their lower intestine come September. Mr. Tuppenny had stayed in business only because of tourists and mad people. The abominable snowmen had eaten so much Strawberry Swirl that it had made them very unwell, and they were now unable to do anything more threatening than wave their claws in frail “kill me now and make the icy pain go away” gestures.

It was Professor Stefan who spotted the two figures picking their way through the broken glass and ruined Christmas decorations.

“They’re a bit tall for elves, aren’t they?” he said. “Seems to defeat the purpose, having tall elves.”

“They’re not elves,” said Maria. “They’re demons! Unlock the car doors, please. I want to get out.”

Professor Hilbert did as he was told, even though it didn’t seem like a good idea to go after two large demonic elves. The small ones were bad enough.

Maria leaned over Reginald, opened the door, and clambered out.

“Nurd! Wormwood! It’s me!”

Nurd and Wormwood were just as pleased to see Maria as she was to see them. They hugged, and were soon joined by Professors Stefan and Hilbert, and Brian and Reginald, who kept a cautious distance from them.

“When you say ‘demons,’ that usually implies a degree of badness,” said Professor Hilbert to Maria.

Maria tried to explain.

“Look, not all demons are demonic,” she said.

“I did try for a while,” said Nurd. “I just wasn’t very good at it.”

“He was useless,” Wormwood added, unhelpfully.

“I wasn’t useless, I was just . . .”

Nurd tried to find the right word.

“Rotten?” Wormwood suggested. “Incompetent? Gormless?”

Nurd settled for “different.”

“Differently useless,” muttered Wormwood.

The scientists were examining Nurd and Wormwood with some curiosity. Professor Stefan poked Wormwood with a pen, which came back with something unpleasant stuck to its tip. As Professor Stefan watched, his pen began to dissolve.

“That does happen if you’re not careful,” said Nurd. “It’s best to avoid touching him without gloves, or even with them if you fancy wearing them a second time.”

“You’d better explain how you got here,” said Maria. “After all that’s happened, I don’t think it matters much if they know the truth about you now.”

So Nurd did. He covered his banishment in the wilderness, the way he’d been pulled from Hell to Earth, and how he had managed to foil the invasion of Biddlecombe by the forces of Hell using only a borrowed/stolen car. He then explained how Samuel had ended up in Hell, along with two policemen, some dwarfs, and an ice cream salesman,⁵⁰ and the manner in which they had all returned to Earth together.⁵¹

There was a chorus of questions from the scientists when he had finished. They wanted to know about other dimensions, and reverse wormholes, and what the weather was like in Hell. Nurd tried to answer, but each answer seemed to invite ten more questions. Eventually it was left to Maria to call a halt.

“We don’t have time for this now,” she said. “We need to find Samuel. If there are demons, and problems with reality, he has to be involved somehow. And, if I’m right, he’s probably trapped somewhere in there.”

They all took in the great mass of Wreckit & Sons. There was a field of energy surrounding the store, but it was different from the one separating Biddlecombe from the rest of the country. When Maria threw a stone at it, the stone simply bounced off, although it was hot to the touch afterward.

“Do you know what’s happening?” she asked Nurd.

“The stars are going out,” he said. “There’s a darkness approaching. Don’t you feel it? It’s as though the shadows are becoming deeper.”

“Not just that,” said Brian. “They’ve developed a life of their own. I should know. I was chased by one.”

“Who is that, and why is he shaking?” said Nurd.

“His name is Brian,” said Maria. “He made the tea, so according to Professor Hilbert this is all his fault.”

“Hello, Brian,” said Nurd. “Perhaps you should stop making tea. You should probably stop drinking it, too. You might not shake so much.”

He returned his attention to Maria.

“Where were we?”

“The darkness, and the shadows. Is it the Great Malevolence?”

“No, I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like his work. It’s blacker.”

“Whatever is causing it, it lives in the shop,” said Maria. “Wreckit & Sons is at the heart of some kind of supernatural engine designed by the architect Hilary Mould.”

“It’s also a trap,” said Nurd. “It drew in Samuel, and I know that Dan and the dwarfs were given jobs there. It would have taken Wormwood and me as well, but Samuel told us not to go. He didn’t think it would be safe for us.”

“So it wanted Samuel, and Dan and the dwarfs,” said Maria. “It also wanted you and Wormwood, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Sergeant Rowan and Constable Peel are in there, too. Someone springs to mind.”

“Mrs. Abernathy,” said Nurd. “But I saw her being torn apart. I felt it happen. We all did. She’s just atoms scattered throughout the Multiverse now. And even if she was involved, she doesn’t have this kind of power. She can’t darken universes.”

From somewhere at the level of Nurd’s knee, something went glop.

“Evening, all,” said a small gelatinous being, raising his hat in greeting. “My name is Crudford, Esq., and I think I may be able to answer some questions for you.

“And by the way, is it just me, or can everyone else hear what sounds like a big heart beating?”

• • •

Crudford had not headed directly to Earth. After he’d glimpsed the Shadows above Biddlecombe, his first act had been to take a closer look at them. What he saw confirmed his worst fears: there were faces in the gloom, faces that had never been glimpsed before because the place from which the Shadows came was a kingdom of utter darkness. The Shadows were blind—what good were eyes when there was nothing to see?—but like so many other creatures that lived without light, their hearing was very, very sensitive. They had been listening to the sounds of the Multiverse for almost as long as it had been in existence. They believed that they were the true owners of the Multiverse, for before the Multiverse there was nothing, and they were as close to nothing as one could find. They hated the light, and all that dwelt in it. They even hated the Great Malevolence, and all who resided in Hell, for in Hell, too, there was light, even if it was the light of red fires. The only thing that had saved the Multiverse from the Shadows was the fact that their realm was sealed off from every other: they were prisoners inside their own Kingdom, for the Multiverse had ways of protecting itself.⁵²

The Great Malevolence had once thought about trying to recruit the Shadows as its allies, but the messengers it sent to their kingdom had never returned. They had been absorbed into the blackness, their eyes taken from them, and eventually they had become Shadows themselves. The Great Malevolence had learned that the Shadows could not be used, and it was better if they were not allowed to pollute the Multiverse or interfere with Hell’s efforts to dominate it.

But then the balance of the Multiverse had been disturbed by the actions of men. Humans were endlessly curious, and their curiosity led them to take risks. They had built the Large Hadron Collider to try to re-create the beginnings of their universe, and in the process they had opened a gateway between Earth and Hell that had almost caused the end of their world. They had also begun to investigate the nature of reality, and reality was a delicate business. What was unreal stayed that way only as long as reality and unreality kept to their own sides of the fence. If you opened a gate between the two, then all kinds of confusion reigned. That was how dwarfs ended up being chased by eyeballs, and tentacled entities got trapped in closets, and little girls with a fondness for spiders, and webs for skin, climbed down from walls to bother people.

But even all of the messing about with reality might not have come back to bite the humans had they not gone poking their noses into dark matter. It was all very well deciding that, yes, what they saw when they looked through their telescopes was only 4 percent of the stuff of the universe, and the other 96 percent had to be made up of something else. They called that something else “dark matter” and “dark energy.” Dark matter was the universe’s hidden skeleton, giving structure to universes and galaxies, while dark energy was the force changing universes, forcing galaxies farther and farther apart. Humanity decided that the universe was about 70 percent dark energy and 25 to 26 percent dark matter. Heigh-ho, problem solved, who fancies a cup of tea and a biscuit before we clock off early for the afternoon?

But that wasn’t right. They should have paid more attention to one important word: dark. The dark was where things hid. The dark was the place where unpleasant creatures that didn’t want to be seen waited until the time was right.

The dark was the place in which the Shadows were imprisoned.

By engaging in dark-matter detection experiments—including projects such as Multidark, the Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber, and the Cryogenic Dark Matter search—the humans had alerted the Shadows to their existence. Even in their isolated realm, they had been able to hear the humans: voices, music, rockets, wars, the Shadows had listened to them all. When the detection experiments had begun, it was the equivalent of someone tapping on the outside of a prison wall with a pickax—tap-tap-tap—except that the person doing the tapping didn’t know that there were entities imprisoned inside, entities that were very anxious to escape and smother every light in the Multiverse.

Professor Stefan was right: the Large Hadron Collider had worn thin the walls between dimensions, and the pickax jabs of the detection experiments had done the rest. A hole had been opened, and now the Shadows were about to pour through. The Great Malevolence might have wanted to destroy humanity and burn worlds. It might have wanted misery and ruin. But it also wanted the Multiverse to remain in existence. It wanted to transform universes into branch offices of Hell, and to do that required the continued survival of the Multiverse.

The Shadows wanted only nothingness. They were as much a danger to the Great Malevolence as they were to humanity. This was why Crudford, after a quick return visit to Hell, had come down to Earth. He now believed that he knew why Biddlecombe was the place to which the Shadows had come. Mrs. Abernathy’s heart had hidden itself on Earth, and its blackness had found an echo in the Kingdom of Shadows. She had called out to the Shadows, and an alliance had been formed. She would give the Earth, and then the Multiverse, to the Shadows.

And in return, they would give Samuel Johnson to her.

50. Although unfortunately not Mr. Tuppenny the ice cream man.

51. He did all that in a paragraph. It took me two books. I’m in the wrong business.

52. So how big is the Multiverse, exactly? According to quantum theory, particles can pop into and out of existence, and there are scientists who believe that our universe was the result of just such a quantum “pop.” So if one universe can pop into being, why not many universes? This would require extra dimensions, which is where very complicated string theory comes into play. String theory proposes that our universe is made up of very, very small vibrating strings, and when the strings vibrate in different ways they produce different particles. Think of the strings of a guitar producing different notes, and so the universe can be imagined as a great symphony of particles being produced by an unseen orchestra. Pluck one string and you get a proton; pluck another and you get an electron.

One of the difficulties in understanding string theory lies in the fact that it doesn’t work in our four-dimensional world (the three space dimensions of up/down, left/right, and forward/backward, and the fourth dimension of time). String theory requires eleven dimensions, ten of space—which are buried within our existing three dimensions—and one of time. One of the tasks of the Large Hadron Collider was to find proof of these extra dimensions: if, during the Collider’s proton collisions, some of the bits of shattered particles were found to have gone missing from the sealed vacuum, then that would suggest the possibility that they had disappeared into other dimensions.

Anyway, to get back to our original question of how many universes there may be in the Multiverse, some string theorists suggest the number is 10⁵⁰⁰, or one for every possible model of physics that string theory offers. (See, I told you it was complicated. It’s so complicated that this latest version of string theory, the eleven-dimension one, is known as M-theory, and even Edward Whitten, the man who came up with it, isn’t sure what the M stands for.) Mind you, there are some scientists who say that the number of universes in the Multiverse could be far more than 10⁵⁰⁰, and that the only way you can get it down to 10⁵⁰⁰ is by fiddling about with the (coarse) Moduli Space of Kähler and Ricci-Flat (or Calabi-Yau) metrics and then enforcing extra-supersymmetry conditions, which is just cheating, obviously. I mean, everybody knows that.