“So,” said Samuel. “Trick or treat?”
“Neither,” said Mr. Abernathy.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not Halloween yet, that’s why not.”
“But I was showing initiative.” Samuel’s teacher, Mr. Hume, often spoke about the importance of showing initiative, although anytime Samuel showed initiative, Mr. Hume seemed to disapprove of it, which Samuel found very puzzling.
“No, you weren’t,” said Mr. Abernathy. “You’re just too early. It’s not the same thing.”
“Oh, please. A chocolate bar?”
“No.”
“Not even an apple?”
“No.”
“I can come back tomorrow, if that helps.”
“No! Go away.”
With that, Mr. Abernathy slammed the front door, leaving Samuel and Boswell to stare at the flaking paintwork. Samuel let the sheet drop down once more, restoring himself to ghostliness, and replaced his glasses. He looked down at Boswell. Boswell looked up at him. Samuel shook the bucket sadly.
“It seemed like a good idea,” he said to Boswell. “I thought people might like an early fright.”
Boswell sighed in response, as if to say, “I told you so.”
Samuel gave one final, hopeful glance at Mr. Abernathy’s front door, willing him to change his mind and appear with something for the bucket, even if it was just a single, solitary nut, but the door remained firmly closed. The Abernathys hadn’t lived on the road for very long, and their house was the biggest and oldest in town. Samuel had rather hoped that the Abernathys would decorate it for Halloween, or perhaps turn it into a haunted house, but after his recent encounter with
Mr. Abernathy he didn’t think this was very likely. Mr. Abernathy’s wife, meanwhile, often looked like she had just been fed a very bitter slice of lemon, and was searching for somewhere to spit it out discreetly. No, thought Samuel, the Abernathy house would not be playing a significant part in this year’s Halloween festivities.
As things turned out, he was very, very wrong.
Mr. Abernathy stood, silent and unmoving, at the door. He peered through the peephole until he was certain that the boy and his dog were leaving, then locked the door and turned away. Hanging from the end of the banister behind him was a black, hooded robe, not unlike something a bad monk might wear to scare people into behaving themselves. Mr. Abernathy put the robe back on as he walked down the stairs to his basement. Had Samuel seen Mr. Abernathy in his robe he might have reconsidered his position on Mr. Abernathy’s willingness to enter into the spirit of Halloween.
Mr. Abernathy was not a happy man. He had married the woman who became Mrs. Abernathy because he wanted someone to look after him, someone who would advise him on the right clothes to wear, and the proper food to eat, thus allowing Mr. Abernathy more time to spend thinking. Mr. Abernathy wrote books that told people how to make their lives happier. He was quite successful at this, mainly because he spent every day dreaming about what might have made him happier, including not being married to Mrs. Abernathy. He also made very sure that nobody who read his work ever met his wife. If they did, they would immediately
guess how unhappy Mr. Abernathy really was, and stop buying his books.
Now, his robe heavy on his shoulders, he made his way into the darkened room below. Waiting for him were three other people, all dressed in similar robes. Painted on the floor was a five-pointed star, at the center of which was an iron burner filled with glowing charcoal. Incense grains had been sprinkled across the coals, so that the basement was filled with a thick, perfumed smoke.
“Who was it, dear?” asked one of the hooded figures. She said the word “dear” the way an executioner’s ax might say the word “thud,” if it could speak as it was lopping off someone’s head.
“That weird kid from number 501,” said Mr. Abernathy to his wife, for it was she who had spoken. “And his dog.”
“What did he want?”
“He was trick or treating.”
“But it’s not even Halloween yet.”
“I know. I told him that. I think there’s something wrong with him. And his dog,” Mr. Abernathy added.
“Well, he’s gone now. Silly child.”
“Can we get on with it?” said a male voice from beneath another hood. “I want to go home and watch football.” The man in question was quite fat, and his robe was stretched taut across his belly. His name was Reginald Renfield, and he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing standing around in a smoke-filled basement dressed in a robe that was at least two sizes too small for him. His wife had made him come along, and nobody argued with Doris Renfield. She was even bigger and fatter than
her husband, but not half as nice, and since Mr. Renfield wasn’t very nice at all, that made Mrs. Renfield very unpleasant indeed.
“Reginald, do keep quiet,” said Mrs. Renfield. “All you do is complain. We’re having fun.”
“Oh,” said Reginald. “Are we?”
He didn’t see anything particularly amusing about standing in a cold basement wearing a scratchy robe, trying to summon up demons from the beyond. Mr. Renfield didn’t believe in demons, although he sometimes wondered if his friend Mr. Abernathy might have married one by accident. Mrs. Abernathy frightened him, the way strong women will often frighten weak men. Still, Doris had insisted that they come along and join their new friends, who had recently moved to the town of Biddlecombe, for an evening of “fun.” Mrs. Abernathy and Mrs. Renfield had met in a bookshop, where they were both buying books about ghosts and angels. From then on their friendship had grown, eventually drawing in their husbands as well. Mr. Renfield didn’t like the Abernathys, exactly, but a funny thing about adults is that they will spend time with people they don’t like very much if they think it might benefit them. In this case, Mr. Renfield was hoping that Mr. Abernathy might buy an expensive television from Mr. Renfield’s electrical shop.
“Well, some of us are having fun,” said Mrs. Renfield. “you wouldn’t know fun if it ran up and tickled you under the arm.” She laughed loudly. It sounded to her husband like someone pushing a witch in a barrel over a waterfall. He pictured his wife in a barrel falling into very deep water, and this cheered him up a bit.
“Enough!” said Mrs. Abernathy.
Everyone went quiet. Mrs. Abernathy, stern and beautiful, peered from beneath her hood.
“Join hands,” she said, and they did so, forming a circle around the star. “Now, let us begin.”
And, as one, they started to chant.
Most people are not bad. Oh, they do bad things sometimes, and we all have a little badness in us, but very few people are unspeakably evil, and most of the bad things they do seem perfectly reasonable to them at the time. Perhaps they’re bored, or selfish, or greedy, but, for the most part, they don’t actually want to hurt anyone when they do bad things. They just want to make their own lives a little easier.
The four people in the basement fell into the category of “bored.” They had boring jobs. They drove boring cars. They ate boring food. Their friends were boring. For them, everything was just, well,
dull.
So when Mrs. Abernathy produced an old book she had bought in a used-books store, and suggested, first to her husband, and then to their slightly-less-boring-than-the-rest friends the Renfields, that the book’s contents might make for an interesting evening, everyone had pronounced it a splendid idea.
The book didn’t have a name. Its cover was made of worn black leather, emblazoned with a star not unlike the one painted on the basement floor, and its pages had turned yellow with age. It was written in a language none of them had ever seen, and which they were unable to understand.
And yet, and yet …
Somehow Mrs. Abernathy had looked at the book and known exactly what they were meant to do. It was almost as if the book had been speaking to her in her head, translating its odd scratches and symbols into words she could comprehend. The book had told her to bring her friends and her husband to the basement on this particular night, to paint the star and light the charcoal, and to chant the series of strange sounds that were now coming from each of their mouths. It was all rather odd.
The Abernathys and the Renfields weren’t looking for trouble. Neither were they trying to do anything bad. They weren’t evil, or vicious, or cruel. They were just bored people with too much time on their hands, and such people will, in the end, get up to mischief.
But just as someone who wears a sign saying “Kick Me!” will, in the normal course of events, eventually be kicked, so too there was enough mischief being done in that basement to attract something unusually bad, something with more than mischief on its mind. It had been waiting for a long time. Now that wait was about to come to an end.
D
EEP BENEATH A MOUNTAIN
in the heart of Europe, nothing was happening.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Lots of things were happening, some of them quite spectacular, but because they were happening at an infinitesimally small level, it was quite hard for most people to get too excited about them.
The Large Hadron Collider was, as its name suggested, very big. It was, in fact, 17 miles long, and stretched inside a ring-shaped tunnel burrowed through rock, near Geneva, in Switzerland. The LHC was a particle accelerator, the largest ever constructed: a device for smashing protons together in a vacuum, consisting of 1,600 electromagnets chilled to -271 degrees Celcius (or, to you and me, “Crumbs, that’s
really
cold! Anybody got a sweater I can borrow?”), producing a powerful electromagnetic field. Basically, two beams of hydrogen ions,
atoms that have been stripped of their electrons, would whiz around the ring in opposite directions at about 186,000 miles per second, or close to the speed of light, and then collide. When they met, each beam would have the energy of a big car traveling at 1,000 miles per hour.
You don’t want to be in a car traveling at 1,000 miles per hour that crashes into another car traveling at the same speed. That would not be good.
When the beams collided, enormous amounts of energy would be released from all of the protons they contained, and that was where things got really interesting. The reason scientists had built the LHC was in order to study the aftermath of that collision, which would produce very small particles: smaller than atoms, and atoms are already so small that it would take ten million of them laid end to end to cover the period at the end of this sentence. Ultimately, they hoped to discover the Higgs boson, sometimes called the “God particle,” the most basic component of everything in the material world.
Take our two cars traveling at 1,000 miles per hour before pounding into each other. After the crash, there isn’t likely to be much of the cars left. In fact, there will probably be only very small pieces of car (and possibly very small pieces of anyone who was unfortunate enough to be inside the cars at the time) scattered all over the place. What the scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, hoped was that the colliding beams would leave behind lots of little patches of energy resembling those that existed seconds after the Big Bang, when the dot of which we spoke at the start exploded, and among them might be the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson
would stick out because it would actually be bigger than the two colliding protons that created it, but it wouldn’t hang about for very long, as it would vanish almost instantly, so the scientists would have to be quick to spot it. It would be as though our two colliding cars had come together and formed a truck, which then immediately collapsed.
In other words, the scientists hoped to understand just how the universe came into being, which is a big question that is a lot easier to ask than to answer. You see, scientists—even the very clever ones—understand only about 4 percent of the matter and energy in the universe, which accounts for the stuff we can see around us: mountains, lakes, bears, artichokes, that kind of thing.
3
That leaves them scratching their heads over the remaining 96 percent, which is a lot of scratching. To save time, and prevent unnecessary head injuries, the scientists decided that about 23 percent of what remained should be called “dark matter.” Although they couldn’t see it, they knew that it existed because it bent starlight.
But if dark matter was interesting to them, whatever accounted for the remaining 73 percent of everything in the universe was more interesting still. It was known as “dark energy,” and it was invisible, entirely hidden. Nobody knew where it came from, but they had a pretty good idea of what it was doing. It was driving galaxies farther and farther apart,
causing the universe to expand. This would lead to two things. The first thing was that human beings, if they didn’t start inventing fast ways to move somewhere else, would eventually find themselves entirely alone, as all the neighboring galaxies would have disappeared beyond the edge of the visible universe. After that, the universe would start to cool, and everything in it would freeze to death. Thankfully, that’s likely to happen hundreds of billions of years in the future, so there’s no need to buy a thick coat just yet, but it’s worth remembering the next time you feel the need to complain about the cold.
The LHC would probably be able to help scientists to better understand all of this, as well as provide evidence of other really fascinating stuff like extra dimensions, which as everyone knows are filled with monsters and aliens and big spaceships with laser cannons and …
Well, you get the picture.
At this point, it’s a good idea to mention the Might-Cause-the-Destruction-of-the-Earth-and-the-End-of-Life-As-We-Know-It issue. It’s a minor thing, but you can’t be too careful.
Basically, while the LHC was being built, and lots of men in white coats were chatting about dark matter and high-speed collisions, someone suggested the collider might create a black hole that would swallow the Earth. Or, instead, it could cause particles of matter so strange that they’re called “strangelets” to appear and turn the Earth into a lump of dead gray stuff. It’s safe to say that this chap wasn’t invited to the scientists’ Christmas party.