The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

XXXIII

In Which Spiggit’s Plays an Important Role

THE VARIOUS DOLLS, TEDDY bears, and small battery-powered animals that had forced Samuel and the others up to the next level of Wreckit & Co. watched in silence as Crudford led Maria and the others into the store. The aftermath of battle was still visible. There were disembodied limbs lying on the floor, and teddy bears with their stuffing hanging out. A makeshift doll hospital had been set up close to the lift, and dolls wearing the uniforms of doctors and nurses were doing their best to reinsert arms and legs, and the occasional head, into the correct sockets. Some of the larger dolls still clutched knives, and a couple of stuffed toys snarled at the new arrivals, but none of the toys made any attempt to attack.

“What happened here?” asked Maria.

Nurd took in the Nerf bullets and sports balls scattered across the floor.

“My guess is that this lot tried to attack Samuel and whoever else was trapped, and they got more than they bargained for,” he said.

Wormwood paused by the remains of a small black stuffed bear. Its head had been almost knocked from its body, and was attached to its neck only by a couple of thin threads. Carefully, tenderly, Wormwood picked it up and held it in his arms, cradling its head in his left hand. A large tear dropped from Wormwood’s right eye.

“Is this what we have become?” he said. “We have set human against teddy, doll against man, and this little bear has paid the price! All he wanted to do was give pleasure to some small child, to be his friend in times of joy, and his comfort in times of trouble. Oh, the humanity!”

He lifted the bear and placed it against his shoulder, its small black body stifling his sobs.

“Ow,” said Wormwood, then louder: “Ow! Ow!”

“What is it?” said Nurd.

“The little swine is biting my ear!” said Wormwood.

He gave the bear a sharp tug, and its body separated entirely from its head. Unfortunately, the head remained attached to Wormwood’s ear, its sharp teeth continuing to gnaw at the lobe.

“Get it off!” said Wormwood. “It really hurts.”

Nurd tried tugging at the bear’s head, but its teeth were firmly embedded, and he succeeded only in painfully stretching Wormwood’s ear.

“That’s not helping,” said Wormwood. “You’re just making it worse.”

“Well, you’re the one who picked it up in the first place.”

“I felt sorry for it.”

“And see where it got you,” said Nurd. “Maybe you can offer to help those dolls sharpen their knives next.”

Maria arrived with a pencil borrowed from Brian. She managed to jam it between the bear’s jaws and prize them open just wide enough for Nurd to remove the head from Wormwood’s vicinity. He held it in front of Wormwood’s face by one of its ears, where it continued to snap at him, just as the elf had earlier tried to get at Nurd. Nurd considered this poetic justice. He didn’t want to be the only one being bitten by possessed objects.

“He seems to have a taste for you,” said Nurd. “Can’t imagine why. I bet you taste awful.”

He tossed the head in the direction of the doll hospital, disturbing the final delicate stages of an operation to restore an arm to a Hug-Me-Hattie doll. Hug-Me-Hattie’s arm slid under a radiator, and the doll doctors and nurses gave Nurd a look that could only be described as cutting.⁵⁸

“Sorry!” said Nurd. “As you were.”

The scientists, meanwhile, were watching the toys. With the exception of the clearly lunatic black bear that had nibbled on Wormwood, the toys still showed no desire to approach.

“Why aren’t they attacking us?” asked Professor Stefan.

“Maybe it’s because we have demons with us,” suggested Professor Hilbert. “It might have confused them.”

“They don’t look confused,” said Professor Stefan. “They just look hostile.”

“Why don’t we see what happens if we try to leave?”

The two scientists, with Brian and Dorothy/Reginald in tow, pretended to depart.

“Bye!” they said. “Lovely meeting you! Good luck with everything!”

The heads of the toys turned to follow their progress, but no attempt was made to stop them, not even when Brian opened the main door and stepped outside. He might have kept going as well had not Professor Hilbert grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back inside.

“That’s quite enough cowardice for today, Brian,” he said.

“It really isn’t,” said Brian. “I have loads left.”

But Professor Hilbert was not to be argued with, and Brian reluctantly trudged back into the store.

“Interesting,” said Professor Stefan. “Mr. Nurd, Mr. Wormwood, perhaps you’d like to try, just out of curiosity.”

Nurd and Wormwood did as he asked, but as they approached the door the toys closed in on them, blocking their way with a wall of plastic and fur broken only by the odd knife.

“Ah,” said Professor Stefan. “That would seem to answer the question, at least partly. Something wants you two to remain here.”

“We should have known,” said Wormwood. “We were invited to the opening, and we never get invited to anything. Now it looks like the only reason we were asked is because something wants to hurt us.”

He and Nurd looked sad.

“Try not to take it personally,” said Maria.

“I’ll try,” said Wormwood, “but it’s difficult.”

Crudford put one hand to the side of his head, even though he didn’t have any obvious ears, and listened.

“Can you still hear the heart?” asked Professor Hilbert.

“It’s definitely near,” said Crudford. “I say we go up. It’s clear that whatever we’re looking for isn’t here.”

Brian didn’t want to go up. He wanted to go out. He could not think of any reason why he should go deeper into this shop of horrors. At that moment, fate intervened—as it often will—to give him a push in the right direction.

“What is that noise?” said Professor Stefan. “It sounds like music.”

A handful of Nosferati survivors, their ears jammed with dead mice to drown out the sound of the organ, had found the stairs out of the basement. They emerged from the stairwell with their fangs exposed, their clawed hands raised, and their bald heads shining under the emergency lights.

“Me first,” said Brian. He made it to the top of the stairs in record time.

Brian might have been a scaredy-cat of the highest order, thought Professor Stefan, but he was very agile when he needed to be. He just hoped that me first wouldn’t be Brian’s last words.

• • •

All of the pieces were on the board—almost. There were two missing, but they were on their way.

The demons called Shan and Gath were probably happier than they had ever been. In Hell, they had been strictly third-level staff: their main task was to shovel coal and tend the Eternal Fiery Pits of Doom, which wasn’t very difficult as the Eternal Fiery Pits of Doom were never likely to go out anytime in the future. That was why they were called the Eternal Fiery Pits of Doom, and not the Temporary Fiery Pits of Doom, which doesn’t have the same ring about it at all. Every so often they were sent on holiday to the Quarry of Gray Meaninglessness, where they broke rocks for two weeks, and were entertained in the evenings by the swinging sounds of Barry Perry on the kazoo.⁵⁹

Then, during the attempted invasion of Earth, they had discovered the strange joys of a foul beer named Spiggit’s Old Peculiar and had never looked back. For a while they had not looked anywhere at all, Spiggit’s tending to cause temporary blindness and an overwhelming desire to be dead. Back in Hell, they attempted to brew it themselves, with mixed results, but they had never stopped trying. When they eventually managed to escape from Hell, their ability to consume large quantities of Spiggit’s without actually dying, combined with their sensitive taste buds, had brought them the job of a lifetime: as chief tasters and beer experimenters at Spiggit’s Brewery, Chemical Weapons, and Cleaning Products Ltd.⁶⁰

Yes, they were demons. Even Old Mr. Spiggit himself, whose eyesight was very poor, and who was generally regarded as a lunatic, could see from the start that Shan and Gath weren’t your usual employees. On the other hand, they didn’t stand out as much at the Spiggit’s Brewery as they might have done elsewhere on Earth. Years of exposure to Spiggit’s had caused biological changes to many of the company’s employees. Mr. Lambert in Accounts had to shave his hands at least twice a week, and had so much facial hair that the only way to be sure that you were talking to his face was to look for the bulge where his nose was; Mr. Norris in Sales had a third thumb; and Mrs. Elmtree in Quality Control had grown small but noticeable horns. They didn’t mind, though, as Spiggit’s paid well, and nobody else would employ them anyway because they looked so distinctive.

Shan and Gath had proven particularly good at looking after the more experimental brews, including the lethal Spiggit’s Old Notorious, a beer so dangerous that a batch of its yeast had once stolen a car and held up the Bank of Biddlecombe. The yeast had never been caught, and was now believed to be living somewhere in Spain. Shan and Gath had put an end to that kind of nonsense. No yeast was going to cause trouble on their watch.

Very few things could lure Shan and Gath out of their comfortable home at Spiggit’s Brewery, but the invitation that had landed on their doorstep a few days earlier had contained the magic words FREE BEER, which was why they were now standing outside Wreckit & Sons wondering where the party was.

Shan approached the occult field. He suspected that it was dangerous, but he wasn’t entirely sure. To test his theory he pushed Gath against it. There was a buzzing sound, and the back of Gath’s coat disappeared, leaving only a smoking hole where the material had once been.

“Hurh-hurh.” Shan laughed as Gath put out the last of the flames.

“Hurh-hurh.” Gath laughed before grabbing Shan’s right hand and sticking Shan’s index finger into the field. The finger promptly vanished, leaving only a smoking stump in its place.

“Hurh-hurh.” Gath laughed again.

“No, hurh-hurt,” said Shan.

He would have wagged his finger disapprovingly at Gath, who always took a joke too far, but he was still waiting for it to grow back. When it had done so, he looked again at the invitation.

“Beer,” he said, and pointed at the shop.

“Beer,” said Gath.

But between them and the beer stood the barrier.

Sometimes in life you have to lose a battle to win a war. Shan dug into one of the pockets of his coat and removed from it a black bottle. The bottle was encased in a titanium frame that kept its cork in place, and the following warning was written on the glass.

THIS BOTTLE CONTAINS ‘SPIGGIT’S OLD RESENTFUL.’ DO NOT OPEN. SERIOUSLY. EVEN CREATING THIS BEER WAS A MISTAKE, BUT ALL ATTEMPTS TO DESTROY IT HAVE PROVED USELESS. IF YOU DO OPEN THIS BOTTLE, YOU AGREE TO GIVE UP ALL RIGHTS TO YOUR HEALTH, AND POSSIBLY YOUR EXISTENCE. BEFORE OPENING, ASK INNOCENT BYSTANDERS TO STAND WELL BACK, OR SUGGEST THAT THEY MOVE TO ANOTHER COUNTRY. DO NOT OPEN NEAR NAKED FLAME. DO NOT SO MUCH AS THINK OF A NAKED FLAME IN YOUR HEAD. DO NOT EVEN SMILE WARMLY. DO NOT INHALE. IF INHALED, SEEK MEDICAL ASSISTANCE WITHIN FIVE SECONDS. IF CONSUMED, SEEK UNDERTAKER.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE: OPEN. RUN AWAY.

Shan and Gath had often looked longingly at the next-to-last remaining bottle of Spiggit’s Old Resentful. It had been developed by Old Mr. Spiggit shortly before people spotted that he was clearly as nutty as a nut-brown squirrel in a nut factory. How bad could Spiggit’s Old Resentful be? Shan and Gath had wondered. The answer was, Probably very bad. Spiggit’s did not issue such warnings lightly. If your regular beer has a biohazard symbol on it, even one with a smiley face, then the special stuff must be lethal.

And so Shan and Gath had long carried the bottles of Spiggit’s Old Resentful around with them, hoping that the day might come when they would have cause to open them. Now, it seemed, that day was upon them.

Shan typed in the seventeen-digit combination on the bottle’s lock, and the titanium cage sprang open. As if sensing that its time was upon it, something rumbled in the glass. Shan looked a bit worried. He looked even more worried as the cork began to remove itself from the bottle under pressure from whatever was inside. Like a man who suddenly finds himself in possession of a live hand grenade, he did the only sensible thing: he handed it to the bloke standing next to him, which in this case was Gath, and began backing away. Gath, meanwhile, might not have been very bright, but he wasn’t entirely stupid. He tossed the bottle straight back to Shan, who caught it and sent it back to Gath, and so a game of Hot Potato continued until Shan saw that there was barely a finger’s width of cork left in the bottle.

He threw the bottle at the occult field. The bottle didn’t pass through but exploded on impact, showering the field with a dark brown liquid that looked like mud and smelled like low tide at a herring factory. Shan’s eyes watered, and his nasal hairs caught fire. Gath fainted.

The occult field didn’t have feelings, exactly. It was just an energy field generated by Hilary Mould’s great engine, aided by the entities with which Hilary Mould had allied himself, but it did have a kind of awareness, for it was alive with dark forces. When the bottle of Spiggit’s Old Resentful hit it and exploded, that awareness kicked into high gear, and the field made a swift decision to put as much distance between it and whatever was in the bottle as quickly as possible. The occult field vanished, retreating to another dimension where even the foulest of creatures had nothing on Spiggit’s Old Resentful.

Shan slapped Gath on the cheeks to bring him back to consciousness. Once the smell had died down to a manageable level, they approached the shattered bottle. All that was left of the Old Resentful was some thick glass, and a large smoking crater in the ground.

Shan and Gath shook their heads sadly, and went to find their free beer.⁶¹

58. Do you need me to explain that joke? No? Good.

59. Barry Perry had tortured crowds throughout the north of England for much of his life, taking innocent songs that had never done anyone any harm and murdering them with his kazoo. When he died and found himself in Hell, he also discovered that his kazoo had come with him, if only because someone had shoved it up his bottom before he was buried. Retrieving it from his bottom proved too difficult, though, so his shows in Hell tended to be a bit muffled, which was no bad thing.

60. In case you think this is an odd name for a company, and are wondering how Spiggit’s could manage to create so many different products, let me set your mind at ease: it was all the same product, with varying amounts of water added. Supplies rarely got mixed up, not since the Goat & Artichoke pub had received a delivery of weapons-grade Spiggit’s by mistake. The pub had since been rebuilt, although some pieces of the landlord had still not been found.

61. To return briefly to the subject of famous last words, which arose earlier in connection with Brian the tea boy, it’s a difficult job, coming up with a memorable farewell to life. If death comes unexpectedly, then last words may be something like “Aaaarrrgggggh!,” or “Ouch!,” or “Of course it isn’t loaded,” or “That bridge will easily support my weight.” It’s hard to be clever under pressure. The last words of the writer H. G. Wells were reputed to have been “Go away, I’m all right,” which was unfortunate as he clearly wasn’t. Arguably the worst last words ever spoken came from Dominique Bouhours, an eighteenth-century French essayist, and a big fan of correct grammar, who announced on his deathbed, “I am about to—or I am going to—die; either expression is correct.” I’ll bet they were glad to see him go.