The Gates (Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil #1)(24)

“Does shooting off into another dimension count?” asked Nurd.

“No.”

“Fine, then.” Nurd sat on the chair, and looked around the room. “Nice place.”

“Thank you.”

“You decorate it yourself?”

“My dad did most of it.”

“Oh.”

They were silent for a time.

“If you don’t mind me saying so, you don’t look very happy,” said Samuel.

“I think I’m in shock,” said Nurd. “You try being wrenched from one dimension to another, then being hit by a truck, sent back home again for long enough to start hurting, and then have the whole thing begin all over. It’s not conducive to a healthy outlook on life, let me tell you.”

Nurd put his very large chin in his hands and frowned.

“Anyway,” he said, “it’s not like you look overjoyed either.”

“I’m not,” said Samuel. “My dad’s left us, my mum cries in the evenings, and I think the woman down the road is trying to kill me. Are you sure she didn’t send you?”

“Quite sure,” said Nurd, and for the first time in many years, he felt sorry for someone other than himself. “That’s not very nice of her.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Well, like I said, I live in a wasteland. There’s nothing to see, nothing to do, and Wormwood and I have run out of things to talk about. In fact, this interdimensional travel has brightened up my days no end, or it would have if I didn’t keep being injured by hard metal objects. This is such an interesting place.”

He moved to the window and gazed out. “Look,” he said, and there were eons of longing and sadness in his voice. “You have fluffy white clouds, and sunshine. What I wouldn’t give to be able to see sunshine every day.”

Samuel picked up a bag of jelly beans from his nightstand.

“Would you like a sweet?”

“A what?”

“A sweetie. They’re jelly beans.”

Tentatively, Nurd reached into the bag and came out with a red bean.

“Oh, those ones are lovely,” said Samuel, popping an orange one into his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. Nurd followed his example, and seemed pleasantly surprised by the result.

“Ooooh, that’s good,” he said. “That’s very good. Fluffy clouds. Jelly beans. Big metal things that move fast. What a world you live in!”

Samuel sat down on his bed. Leaving the window, Nurd returned to his chair.

“You’re not going to hurt me, are you?” asked Samuel.

Nurd looked shocked. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re a demon.”

“Just because I’m a demon doesn’t mean that I’m bad,” said Nurd. A piece of jelly bean had stuck to his teeth, and he worked at it with a long fingernail. “I didn’t ask to be a demon. It just happened that way. I opened my eyes one day, and there I was. Nurd. Ugly bloke. No friends. Even other demons don’t care much for my company.”

“Why? You seem all right to me.”

“I suppose that’s it, really. I’ve never been very demonic. I don’t want to torture, or wreak havoc. I don’t want to be frightening, or terrible. I just want to potter along, minding my own business. But they told me I had to do something destructive or I’d be in trouble, so I tried to find a role that wouldn’t attract too much attention, or cause a lot of bother to people, but all those jobs were taken. You know, there’s a demon who looks after the little bit of toothpaste that you can’t squeeze out of the end of the tube, even though you know it’s there and there’s no other toothpaste in the house. There’s even a demon of shyness, or there’s supposed to be. Nobody’s ever seen him, so it’s hard to know for sure. I quite fancied a job like that.

“Eventually, some of the other demons just got irritated with me trying to muscle in on their action, and I was banished. It all seemed pretty hopeless, and then suddenly I started popping up here. I just feel like I could make something of myself in this world. There are so many opportunities.”

“This world is hard too,” said Samuel, and there was something in the boy’s voice that made Nurd want to reach out to him. The demon picked up the bag of jelly beans, and offered one to Samuel. He picked a green one.

“You can have another too,” he said to Nurd.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

Nurd tried a black one. It tasted a bit funny, but it was still better than anything else he had ever eaten, except for that first jelly bean.

“Go on,” said Nurd. “You were saying?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Samuel.

“No, it does. I want to know. Really.”

So Samuel told him. He spoke of his mother and his father, and of how his dad had left and maybe it was Samuel’s fault, and maybe it wasn’t. He spoke of how the world doesn’t listen to children, even when it should. He spoke of Boswell, and of how he would be lost without the little dog for company.

And Nurd, who had never had a mother and father, and who had never loved or been loved, marveled at the ways in which a feeling so wonderful could also leave one open to so much pain. In a strange way, he envied Samuel even that. He wanted to care about someone so much that it could hurt.