The Infernals (16 page)

But the Watcher did not obey her will alone. For as long as it had been in existence, it had reported back to the Great Malevolence himself, for the Great Malevolence trusted no one and nothing, and despite his power he was suspicious of all those around him.
29
But the Watcher had spent so long with Mrs. Abernathy that its loyalties had become confused: while it still answered to the Great Malevolence, it did not tell him everything. It could not have said why; it merely understood instinctively that not simply knowledge is power, but
secret
knowledge. So it was that it made its own judgments on what the Great Malevolence
needed to be told, and what could safely be hidden from him. In that sense the Watcher was serving two masters, which is never a good idea.

Its situation had been complicated by the Great Malevolence’s descent into misery and madness, which meant that, even if the Watcher had wanted to report to him, it could not, for its voice could not be heard above the wailing that filled the Mountain of Despair, and the Chancellor was careful to control all access. Then again, until now there had been little to report: Mrs. Abernathy had spent most of her time moving back and forth between her lair and that of the Great Malevolence, seeking an audience that would never be granted, and then brooding over it alone in her chamber until it came time to make the pilgrimage again. When she was not walking, or brooding, she was watching Samuel Johnson in the glass, and hurling curses at him that he could not hear. It was left to the Watcher to try to track down the vehicle that had collapsed the portal, but each time it returned without news Mrs. Abernathy’s interest in the vehicle seemed to grow less and less, or so the Watcher had thought. Then, when the Watcher had at last come up with evidence of the vehicle’s presence, it had been surprised to find that Mrs. Abernathy had been plotting quietly all along to open the portal once again, if only to snatch Samuel Johnson from his world and transport him to Hell. She really was a most unusual woman, even leaving aside the fact that she was actually an ancient tentacled demon in disguise, which was one of the reasons why the Watcher’s loyalties were split between her and the Great Malevolence.

The Watcher sniffed at the air, re-creating the scents it had picked up on the plain. It had felt presences nearby, watching it, but it was not sure if they were related to the black substance on the rock. Its sunken nostrils twitched.

An old smell, almost forgotten. And another with it: sharper, more pungent. They were familiar, those smells. The Watcher rummaged through its memories, back, back, until it came at last to a pair of cowering figures, its mistress towering above them in her old, monstrous form, banishing them forever to the Wasteland.

Very little surprised the Watcher. It had seen so much that it was almost incapable of surprise. But its realization of who had been responsible for the collapse of the portal nearly caused it to topple over in shock.

Nurd.

Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities.

Nurd, who barely justified the term
demon
to begin with, so inept was he at being evil.

Nurd had betrayed them all.

Meanwhile, Nurd and Wormwood were standing on a rise and watching a small van tootling merrily across the Desert of Bones while playing “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” Nurd and Wormwood knew that the piece of music was called “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” because at least four voices were singing along to it, adding “woof-woof” noises after each mention of the word
window,
and the words
waggle-waggle
to the bit about “the one with the waggly tail.”

“What’s a doggie?” asked Wormwood. “And why do they want one?”

“A doggie is a small creature that barks, like Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s dachshund,” said Nurd. “It goes ‘woof-woof.’ This one, though, also appears to have a tail that is waggly, which makes it more desirable, I suppose.”

“They do seem to want it very badly,” said Wormwood.

“It doesn’t appear like a good idea to go shouting about it, though,” said Nurd. “The kind of things with waggly tails that live around here tend to have big waggly bodies too, and waggly heads with sharp, waggly teeth.”

“If it’s from the world of men, then maybe Samuel is in there too.”

Nurd shook his head. “No, I’d sense him if he were so close.” Nurd strained to read the writing on the side of the van. “It says something about ice cream on the side. And candy.”

“Candy?” said Wormwood.

“Candy,” said Nurd.

They looked at each other. Their faces brightened, and both said, simultaneously: “Jelly beans!”

Seconds later, they were in hot pursuit of the ice-cream van.

Constable Peel very much wanted to die. More than that, he wanted to die and take four dwarfs with him, and maybe a driver of an ice-cream van for good measure. He’d been listening to “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” for a good four hours now, and was on the verge of insanity.

“Stop singing,” he said to the dwarfs.

“No,” said Angry.

“Stop singing.”

“No.”

“Stop singing.”

“Say ‘please.’”

“Please.”

“No.”

Constable Peel banged on the glass connecting the back of the van to the front compartment, in which Sergeant Rowan and Dan, Dan the Ice-Cream Man were sitting.

“For the last time,” he pleaded, “there must be some way to turn that music off.”

Dan shrugged. “I’ve told you: it comes on automatically with the engine. I haven’t been able to work out how to make it stop without messing up the wiring.”

“You’re messing up
my
wiring,” said Constable Peel. “Can’t I at least sit up front with you?”

“There isn’t really enough room,” said Sergeant Rowan, who didn’t like being cramped.

“Then why don’t we swap places for a while, and you can sit back here?”

“With that lot singing? I don’t think so. It’s bad enough up here.”

Jolly made himself another ice-cream cone. He’d already had twelve, but the sometimes bumpy nature of the terrain meant that he had only managed successfully to eat nine, while the remaining three were smeared all over his face and clothes.

“Lovely ice cream, this,” he said, for the thirteenth time.

“Oi, I hope you’re paying for all of those,” said Dan.

“I’m putting them on my tab.”

“You don’t have a tab.”

“Oh, now you tell me. You should have said that before I started eating them all. Bit late now, isn’t it?”

“He was right about the chocolate too,” said Dozy, who had taken to eating the sprinkles by the fistful. “Very high quality.”

Angry and Mumbles began singing about doggies again, at least Angry did. Mumbles could have been singing about dinosaurs and nobody would have been any the wiser. Constable Peel, his patience now at an end, was stretching out his hands to strangle one or both of them when Dan stopped the van, for there was now something to distract them all from the music.

“That’s interesting,” said Dozy. He and the other three dwarfs, each munching happily on Dan’s livelihood, hopped from the van, closely followed by the two policemen and Dan himself.

Stretched before them were thousands and thousands of little workbenches, each occupied by an imp. Between the desks walked other imps carrying buckets of bone dust. They poured the bone dust into a hole at one end of each desk, the seated imps turned a lever, there was the sound of grinding, and then from the other end of the desks emerged clean, intact bones, which the demons with buckets took from them before walking back the way they had come.

“Well, that explains a lot,” said Jolly. “Sort of.”

There was a larger desk some distance to their right. The dwarfs left the policemen and Dan, and made their way over to it. A demon who bore a remarkable resemblance to the recently
vaporized A. Bodkin sat at the desk, snoozing. His nameplate read “Mr. D. Bodkin, Demon-in-Charge.”

“’Scuse me,” said Jolly, tapping D. Bodkin’s boot.

D. Bodkin woke slowly, and stared at Jolly.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Do you know where all of this dust comes from?”

“What dust?”

“The dust that makes the bones.”

D. Bodkin looked at Jolly as though Jolly had just asked him why the sky was gray and black with bursts of purple and red flame currently flashing through it. That was just the way things were.

“Is there something wrong with you?” asked D. Bodkin. “Look around: there’s
only
dust. Hardly going to run out, are we?”

The dwarfs started giggling. D. Bodkin, suspecting that he was the butt of a joke he didn’t understand, and who didn’t care much for humor at the best of times, glowered at them.

“See over that way,” said Angry, “where all those little demons with buckets are coming from?”

“Yes,” said D. Bodkin.

“You should take a walk over there. There’s a bloke who’d love to meet you. Looks a bit like you. Long-lost relative, you might say.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart. You and him would have a lot to talk about. You’re both in the same business, in a way.”

“Well, I will, then,” said D. Bodkin. “I feel like giving the old legs a stretch. Haven’t left my desk in, ooooh—”

He glanced at the hourglass on his wrist, which, like Mr. A. Bodkin’s similar model, was designed to funnel sand very efficiently from one glass to another without ever depleting the store in the upper glass, or increasing the store in the lower glass. This watch, though, appeared to have stopped, possibly due to a blockage. D. Bodkin looked perturbed. He tapped the glass with a clawed forefinger.

“Funny, my watch doesn’t seem to be working.” He gave his wrist a little shake, and said, “Ah, that’s better.”

Angry leaned forward and noticed that the sand from the lower glass was now running upward into the upper glass, although, as before, neither glass got any emptier, or any fuller.

“You really have been at this desk for too long,” said Angry, glancing back at his fellow dwarfs and twisting one finger slowly by his right temple in the universal indication of someone else’s general absence of marbles. “It’ll be good for you to take a break. We’ll keep an eye on this lot until you get back.”

“You won’t steal anything, will you?” asked D. Bodkin. “I’ll get into terrible trouble if anything goes missing. Budgets, you know. I have to account for every paper clip these days.”

Angry was the picture of wounded innocence. “I’m hurt,” he said, blinking away an imaginary tear. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief upon which to blow his nose, discovered one, looked at it, decided that the only thing more diseases ridden than this handkerchief was an actual disease, and put it back where he’d found it. “I’m so hurt that I don’t know what to say.”

“That’s slander, that is,” said Dozy.

“We’re just trying to brighten up your day,” said Jolly, “and you go and say something nasty like that about us.”

“We’ve been the victims of theft ourselves,” said Angry. “On that subject, you wouldn’t have seen a van anywhere—four wheels, picture of a handsome smiling gentleman somewhat like ourselves on the side—would you?”

“No,” said D. Bodkin.

“What about a police car: four wheels, blue lights?”

“No. I’d like to, though. It sounds very interesting.”

“Hmm,” said Angry. “Fat lot of good that does us.”

He and his other dwarfs folded their arms and looked expectantly at D. Bodkin. Jolly tapped his foot impatiently.

“Well,” said Jolly, “we’re waiting.”

Eventually, D. Bodkin took the hint.

“I’m very sorry for what I said just now,” he said. He looked embarrassed. The horns on his head glowed bright red. He put his hands behind his back and traced little patterns of shame in the sand with his left foot. “I shouldn’t have asked if you were going to steal anything. You can’t be too careful, you know. After all, this is Hell. All sorts of rotten types end up here.”

“Apology accepted,” said Angry. “Off you go, then. Tell the other chap we said hello.”

“Righty-ho,” said D. Bodkin, and began following the line of bone-bearing bucket carriers.

The dwarfs waved him off.

“Nice bloke,” said Jolly.

“Lovely,” said Angry as D. Bodkin disappeared over a dune. “This world needs more demons like him.”

“Suckers, you mean?” said Jolly.

“Absolutely,” said Angry. “Complete and utter suckers.”

Back in the van, Jolly counted their loot.

“That’s fifteen pencils, one pencil sharpener, a stapler, an eraser, a mug that says ‘You Don’t Have to Be Diabolical to Work Here, but It Helps,’” and some stamps,” said Jolly.

“You forgot the desk,” said Dozy.

“And the desk,” confirmed Jolly. He stuck his head out of the side of the van and checked on the desk, which they’d tied to the roof of the van with a length of rope they’d found in Dan’s emergency kit.

“You’re sure he said that you could take them?” said Constable Peel. He was more than a little suspicious, but at least the dwarfs had stopped singing for a while.

“Absolutely. Told us he was quitting. No future in the job. Said we’d be doing him a favor.”

“Well, if you’re sure, although I don’t know why you think you need a desk anyway.”

“Question not the need,” said Angry. “If it isn’t nailed down, we’ll have it. And if it is nailed down, we’ll find a way to un-nail it and have that as well.”

Constable Peel’s brow furrowed. A cloud of dust seemed to be following them. As it drew closer he saw that it was being preceded by a fast-moving rock.

“Look at that,” he said. He pulled back the glass separating the front of the van from the serving section. “Sarge, we’re being chased by a rock.”

“You don’t see a rock rolling uphill very often,” said Angry. “Very unusual, that.”

“It’s gaining on us,” said Dozy.

“Stop the van,” said Sergeant Rowan. Dan did as he was instructed, and they all listened over the music.

“That’s the sound of an engine, Sarge,” said Constable Peel.

“So it is, Constable,” said Sergeant Rowan as the rock pulled up alongside them, its doors opened, and what looked like a ferret with mange jumped out, closely followed by a cloaked demon wearing big boots and an expectant smile on his green face.