The Infernals Read online

  “What’s our motivation?” asked Angry. “Why are we here?”

  “What do you mean?” said the director. “You’re defending the castle.”

  “This castle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it ours?”

  “Of course it’s yours.”

  “I beg to differ. The steps are too big. I nearly did myself an injury climbing up those steps. Almost ruptured something, I did. If we’d built this castle, we’d have made the steps smaller. Can’t be ours. Makes no sense.”

  The director pinched the bridge of his nose hard and closed his eyes.

  “Right then, you captured it from somebody else.”

  “Who?” asked Jolly.

  “Capsmodwa?” said Mumbles.

  “That’s right,” said Angry. “Did we capture it from smaller dwarfs? We’re dwarfs—er, elves. I can’t even see over the battlements. How are four of us supposed to have captured this castle? What did we do, raid it in installments?”

  “Perhaps it was just abandoned, and you took it over.”

  “You can’t do that. You can’t wander into places without a by-your-leave just because someone’s popped out for a pint of milk or a bit of a battle, and then call it home. It’s not right. They’d have you up in court, you know. That’s illegal entry, that is. That’s six months in jail. And I should know.”

  The director opened his eyes, grasped Angry by his chain mail, then lifted him from the ground so that he and Angry were on eye level.

  “Listen to me,” said the director. “This is going to be a very long, very wet day, and if I have to, I will drop you from these battlements as an example to your friends of what happens when people start questioning the logic of a video in which a boy band with perfect teeth and blond highlights attempts to capture a castle from a bunch of little people wearing plastic armor. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Abundantly,” said Angry. “Just trying to help.”

  The director put him down.

  “Good. Now, I’m going to go down there, and we’re going to start filming. Clear?”

  “As crystal,” said Angry, Dozy, and Jolly.

  “Al,” said Mumbles.

  The dwarfs watched the director descend to the castle gate, then tramp angrily across the mud to the assemblage of tents and vans that constituted the video set.

  “He’s obviously very artistic,” said Angry. “They’re like that, artistic people. They go off at the slightest thing. Them, and wrestlers.”

  “Why did they give us plastic armor and real swords?” asked Dozy.

  “Dunno,” said Angry. “Doesn’t say much for his battle strategy.”

  “Nice castle, though.”

  “Oh yes. Lovely workmanship. Knew what they were doing, these old builders.” Angry tapped his sword approvingly on a battlement, and watched as a chunk of it sheared off and almost killed a lighting technician below.

  “Sorry,” said Angry.

  He saw the director glaring at him, and raised his sword.

  “A bit fell off,” he shouted in explanation. “We can fix it later,” then added to this colleagues: “Very shoddy, that. Bet a French bloke built this castle. Wouldn’t have that in an English castle. Built to last, English castles. It’s why we had an empire.”

  But the others weren’t listening. Instead, they were gazing slack-jawed at the sight of BoyStarz, who had just emerged from the caravan that was their dressing room. Even by the standards of the average boy band, BoyStarz looked a bit soft: their hair was perfect, their skin unblemished, their teeth white. They seemed to be struggling under the weight of their armor, and one of them was complaining that his sword was too heavy.

  The director accompanied them to within a few feet of the castle walls, and introduced them to the dwarfs.

  “Okay, these are the BoyStarz,” he said, and at the mention of their band name some deep-seated instinct kicked in, aided by many months of training involving beatings, bribes, and threats of starvation, and each of the four young men did a little dance.

  “Hi,” said the first, “I’m Starlight.”

  “And I’m Twinkle.”

  “I’m Gemini.”

  “And I’m Phil.”

  The dwarfs looked at the fourth member, who wasn’t as pretty as the rest, and seemed a bit lost.

  “Why is there always one bloke in these boy bands who looks like he came to fix the boiler and somehow got bullied into joining the group?” asked Jolly.

  “Dunno,” said Dozy. “Can’t dance much either, can he?”

  Which was true. Phil danced like a man trying to shake a rat from his leg.

  “We’re supposed to hand our lovely castle over to this lot?” said Angry. “It’d be like surrendering it to powder puffs.”

  “No,” said Jolly softly. “No, there’s such a thing as pride, as dignity. We can’t have this. We just can’t.”

  “What are they saying?” Twinkle asked the director nervously. “They look frighteningy.”

  “I want to go home,” said Starlight. “I don’t like the little men.”

  “The ground feels funny, and it smells like poo,” said Gemini.

  “And I’m Phil,” said Phil.

  The director was already backing away. He didn’t care for the look in the elves’ eyes. He didn’t care for it at all.

  Hey, he thought, they’re not elves. They’re dwarfs. They’re not Mr. Merryweather’s Elves, they’re Mr. Merryweather’s—

  Dwarfs!

  He was already running, four terrified boy band members at his heels, as the first rocks began to rain down on them, for Mr. Merryweather’s Elves were intent upon defending Lollymore Castle even if they had to take it apart brick by brick to do so.

  In Which Samuel Is Reunited with Boswell, and We Learn Why One Should Not Trust a Mirror

  AS SUCH TALES WILL do, the story of how Samuel Johnson had managed to ask a letter box on a date had made its way around the entire school by the time the bell rang to send everyone home.

  “Hey, Johnson!” Lionel Hashim shouted at him as he made his way to the school gates. “I hear there’s a very good-looking traffic light over on Shelley Road. You could ask it to go to the cinema with you. Don’t try to kiss it, though. It might go red!”

  Funny, thought Samuel. Really funny. His bag, and his heart, felt very heavy.

  Outside the gates, Samuel’s pet dachshund, Boswell, was waiting. Boswell had the worried air of one who suspects that bad news is imminent, and its arrival has only been delayed by the fact that it’s looking for some more bad news to keep it company. A series of frown lines creased Boswell’s brow, and at regular intervals he would give a sigh. He was a familiar sight around the town of Biddlecombe, but particularly at the school, for Boswell was Samuel Johnson’s faithful companion, and was always present to greet his master when the bell struck four.

  Boswell had always been a somewhat sensitive, contemplative dog.15 Even as a puppy, he would regard his ball warily, as though waiting for it to sprout legs and run off with another dog. He displayed a fondness for the sadder types of classical music, and had been known to howl along to Mozart’s Requiem in a plaintive manner.

  But recent events had given Boswell good cause to think that the world was an even stranger and more worrying place than he had previously thought. After all, he had witnessed monsters emerging from holes in space, and had even been injured by one as he attempted to save his master from its clutches. One of his legs had been broken, and ever since he had walked with a slight limp. Being a dog, although a very clever one, Boswell wasn’t entirely clear about the nature of what had occurred during the invasion. All he knew was that it had been very bad, and he didn’t want it to happen again. Most of all, he didn’t want anything to happen to Samuel, whom he loved very much, and so each morning, regardless of the weather, Boswell would trot along beside his beloved master as Samuel walked to school, and would be waiting for him when he emerged from school at the end of the day. A flap in the f
ront door of the house meant that he could come and go as he pleased. Boswell’s duty was to protect Samuel, and he intended to fulfill it to the best of a small dog’s ability.

  That day Boswell detected a change in Samuel’s usually sunny disposition. While some dogs might have made an effort to cheer up their master under such circumstances, perhaps by chasing their tail or showing them something that smelled funny, Boswell was the kind of dog that shared his master’s mood. If Samuel was happy, then Boswell was content. If Samuel was sad, Boswell stayed quiet and kept him company. In this, Boswell was wiser than most people.

  And so the boy and his dog, each bearing some of the weight of the world upon his shoulders, made their way home, and had anyone taken the time to give them more than a passing glance, they might have noticed that both the boy and the dog kept their heads down as they went. They did not look in shop windows, and they avoided puddles. They did not seem to want to see themselves. It was as if they were frightened of their own reflections, or scared of being noticed.

  People still occasionally shot funny looks at Samuel and indeed at Boswell, but not as often as they used to, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the funny looks they shot were of a general kind—“He’s an odd kid, and his dog makes me feel sad”—rather than the specific kind, such as, “There’s Samuel Johnson and his dog, who were involved with all of that demonic business that I’d rather not remember, thanks very much. Actually, now that I see them again, I feel a bit angry at them because I don’t want to be reminded of what happened, but by their presence here they remind me of it anyway, so I think I’ll just blame them for everything instead of the demons because it’s easier to be angry at a small boy and a smaller dog, and less likely to result in me being eaten, or whisked off to Hell, or some similarly horrible consequence.”

  Or words to that effect.

  Samuel had almost ceased to notice the reactions of other people to his presence, but that was not why he and Boswell kept their heads down. It was true to say that they did not want to be noticed, but it was not their neighbors in Biddlecombe who worried them. The individual who concerned them was much farther away.

  Farther away, yet strangely close.

  Most of us do not think very hard about the nature of mirrors. We see the reflection of a room, or of ourselves, in a glass and we think, “Oh, look, it’s the couch,” or “Oh, look, it’s me. I thought I was thinner/fatter/better-looking/uglier/a girl.”16 But it’s not your couch, and it’s not you. It’s a version of you, which is why the artist René Magritte could paint a picture of a pipe and write beneath it, in French, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, or “This is not a pipe.” Because it’s not a pipe: it’s an image of a pipe. As Magritte himself pointed out: “Could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation. So if I had written on my picture, ‘This is a pipe,’ I’d have been lying!”

  The painting in question, from 1929, is called The Treachery of Images. (Treachery, meaning to trick or deceive, is another great word, especially if you roll that first r on your tongue and really stretch it out: “Trrrrrrreachery!” you can shout, in a demented way, while waving a sword and alarming the neighbors.) In other words, you can’t trust images, because they’re not what they pretend to be.

  Samuel had become very familiar with this concept, and not in a good way. He had begun to suspect that mirrors were very strange indeed, and that, far from simply providing a reflection of this world, they might in fact be a world of their own.17 He felt this because very occasionally he would glance at a mirror, or the window of a shop, or some other reflective surface, and he would see a figure that should not have been there. It was the figure of a no-longer-quite-beautiful woman in a floral dress. It was Mrs. Abernathy.

  For Mrs. Abernathy, Samuel had decided, walked in the world of mirrors. She couldn’t get back into this world, but somehow she could see into it by moving behind the glass. Samuel had caught glimpses of her in the mirror of his bathroom cabinet, in the glass of his front door, even once, most peculiarly, on a spoon, where she was distorted and upside down. She seemed to prefer to come at night, when the windows were dark and the reflections more distinct in the glass, as though the clarity of her own image in turn made the world at which she gazed easier to discern.

  And each time her eyes were filled with a blue light, and they burned with her hatred for Samuel.

  Samuel’s mother greeted him from the kitchen as he opened the front door and dumped his bag in the hall.

  “Hello, Samuel. Did you have a good day?”

  “If, by good, you mean embarrassing and soul-destroying, then, yes, I had a good day,” said Samuel.

  “Oh dear,” said his mum. “Sit down at the table and I’ll make you a nice cup of tea.”

  What was it about mothers, wondered Samuel, that led them to believe all of the problems of the world could be solved with a nice cup of tea? Samuel could have walked in with his head under his arm, blood spurting from his neck and his back quilled with arrows, and his mother would have suggested a nice cup of tea as a means of salving his wounds. She would probably even have tried to rub some tea on his severed head in an effort to stick it back on his shoulders.

  But the funny thing was that, more often than not, a cup of tea and a consoling word from your mum were enough to make things at least a little better, so Samuel sat down and waited until a steaming mug of tea was placed in front of him. It really did smell good. He could almost feel it warming his throat already. Today had been bad, but perhaps tomorrow would be better. Tea: our friend in times of trouble.

  “Oh bother,” said Samuel’s mother. “We’re out of milk.”

  Samuel’s forehead thumped hard against the kitchen table.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “There’s a good lad,” said his mum. “I’ll have a fresh cup waiting for you when you get back. Will you get some bread while you’re at it? I don’t know: even with your dad gone, we’re still getting through as much food as ever.”

  Samuel winced. He didn’t know which hurt more: to hear his mother grow sad when she talked about his dad’s absence, or to hear her remark upon it so casually. His mother seemed to notice his discomfort, for she moved to him and enveloped him in her arms.

  “Oh, you,” she said, kissing his hair. “I don’t mind you eating. You’re a growing lad. And your dad and I, well, we’re talking, which is something. I’m not as angry with him as I was, although I’d still hit him over the head with a frying pan given half the chance. But we’re okay, you and I, aren’t we?”

  Samuel nodded, his eyes closed, taking in the comforting smell of flour and perfume from his mother’s dress.

  “Yes, we’re okay,” he said, although he wasn’t sure if it was true.

  His mother pushed him gently away, and held him at arm’s length. She looked at him seriously.

  “There’s been no more, um, strangeness, has there?” she asked.

  “You mean demons?”

  Now it was his mother’s turn to look uncomfortable.

  “Yes, if that’s what you want to call them.”

  “That’s what they were.”

  “Now, I don’t want to get into an argument about it,” said his mum. “I’m only asking.”

  “No, Mum,” said Samuel. “There’s been no more strangeness.” Not unless you include glimpses of a woman with her face stitched together, staring out at him from mirrors and glass doors. “There’s been no more strangeness at all.”

  In Which We Pay a Visit to Mrs. Abernathy’s House. Which Is Nice. Not.

  BEFORE WE GO ANY further, a quick word about evil.

  Evil has been in existence for a very long time, long enough to be part of the birth of everything billions and billions of years ago following the Big Bang that brought this universe into being. Unfortunately, for a while after the Big Bang there wasn’t much for Evil to do because there wasn’t a great deal of life about, and what life there was consisted of little single-celled organisms which had quite
enough to be getting along with just trying to become multicelled organisms, thank you very much, without having to worry about being unkind to one another for no good reason as well. Even when these multicelled organisms grew incredibly complex, and became sharks, and spiders, and carnivorous dinosaurs, they still didn’t provide much amusement for Evil. These beasts operated on instinct alone, and their instinct was simply to eat, and thus to survive.

  But then man came along, and Evil perked up a bit, because here was a creature that could choose, which made it very interesting indeed. Being good or bad is not a passive state: you have to decide to be one or the other. Evil did everything it could to encourage people to do bad instead of good, and because it was clever it disguised itself well, so that people who did bad things found ways to convince themselves that they weren’t really bad at all. They needed more money to be happy, and hence they stole, or they cheated on their taxes; and then they told lies to hide what they’d done, because they were kind of sorry for it, but not sorry enough to admit what they’d done, or to stop doing it. In the end, most of it came down to selfishness, but Evil didn’t mind. You could call it what you wanted, as far as Evil was concerned, just as long as you kept on being bad.

  And Evil wasn’t just busy in this universe, but in a lot of others too, for ours was but one in a great froth of universes known as the Multiverse, each one its own expanding bubble of planets and stars. You might think that this would require Evil to spread itself a little thinly, because there can only be so much Evil to go around, but you’d be surprised what Evil can do when it puts its mind to it. On the other hand, no matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process it corrupts itself. That’s just the way Evil is. All things considered, it’s better to be on the side of Good, even if Evil occasionally has nicer uniforms.