The Gates (Samuel Johnson vs. the Devil #1)(9)

With that a long pink tongue slithered from the portal, and Mr. Abernathy was yanked from his feet and disappeared into thin air. Moments later a fat blob, green and large eyed, assumed his shape and took its place beside what looked, to the casual observer, like Mrs. Abernathy and the Renfields.

By then, Samuel had seen enough, and he and Boswell were running as fast as they could for the safety of home. Had he waited, Samuel might have seen the creature that was now Mrs. Abernathy staring in the direction of the small window, and at the faint shape of a boy that hung in the still night air where Samuel had been hiding.





V

In Which We Meet Nurd, Who Is Not Quite As Terrifying As He Would Like to Be, but a Great Deal Unluckier

NURD, THE SCOURGE OF Five Deities, sat on his gilded throne, his servant Wormwood at his feet and his kingdom spread before him, and yawned.

“Bored, Your Scourgeness?” inquired Wormwood.

“Actually,” said Nurd, “I am extremely excited. I cannot remember the last time I felt so enthused about anything.”

“Really?” asked Wormwood hopefully, and received a painful tap on the head from Nurd’s Scepter of Terrible and Awesome Might for his trouble.

“No, you idiot,” said Nurd. “Of course I’m bored. What else is there to be?”

It was an entirely understandable question, for Nurd was not in a happy place. In fact, the place in which Nurd happened to be was so far from Happy that even if one walked for a very long time—centuries, millennia—one still would not even be able to see Slightly Less Unhappy from wherever one ended up.

Nurd’s kingdom, the Wasteland, consisted of mile upon mile of flat, gray stone entirely unbroken by anything very pretty at all, apart from the odd rock that was marginally less gray, and some pools of viscous, bubbling black liquid. At the horizon, the rock met a slate gray sky across which lightning occasionally flashed without ever bringing the sound of thunder, or the feel of rain.

It wasn’t even a kingdom as such. Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities, had simply been banished to it for being, as his name had it, a Scourge, although the nature of Nurd’s offenses was open to some doubt.10

The title “Scourge of Five Deities,” which Nurd had come up with all by himself, was technically true: Nurd had been something of a bother to five different demonic entities, but they were relatively minor ones: Schwell, the Demon of Uncomfortable Shoes; Ick, the Demon of Unpleasant Things Discovered in Plug Holes During Cleaning; Graham, the Demon of Stale Biscuits and Crackers; Mavis, the Demon of Inappropriate Names for Men; and last, and quite possibly least, Erics’, the Demon of Bad Punctuation.

Nurd had been less of a scourge to these worthies and more of a minor irritation, like a fly buzzing against a window in summer or, well, like a stale biscuit that one had been quite looking forward to having with a nice cup of tea, but, thanks to the demon Graham, turns out to taste soggy and a bit dusty. Eventually, because he wouldn’t go away, and kept trying to muscle in on their operations, the five deities appealed to an aide to the Great Malevolence himself, which was how Nurd came to be occupying a not-very-interesting piece of nowhere-in-particular with not-very-much-to-do, but had decided to make the best of it by calling it his kingdom. To keep him company, his faithful servant Wormwood had been expelled along with him, an expulsion that Wormwood considered more than a bit unfair because he hadn’t done anything wrong at all, except to be careless in his choice of employer. The Great Malevolence was not entirely without mercy (or, indeed, a sense of humor), for he had seen fit to give Nurd a slightly used throne upon which to sit, and a cushion for Wormwood, as well as a box in which Nurd could keep various bits and pieces that had proved of no use whatsoever during his banishment. Thus it was that Nurd and Wormwood had been sitting in the middle of nowhere, if not for eternity, then since a few minutes past. They had never had very much to talk about. Now they had even less.

Wormwood rubbed his head, where a new bump had been added to the already impressive collection that adorned his misshapen skull, and, not for the first time, thought that Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities, really was a bit of a sod.

Nurd, heedless of Wormwood’s resentment, yawned once more, and promptly disappeared.

? ? ?

There wasn’t a name for the bundle of blue energy that had managed to escape from the Large Hadron Collider. It was part of that 96 percent of matter and energy unknown to science, and it wasn’t an intended result of the collider experiment at all. Rather, the great explosions in the collider had, very briefly, opened a portal, and on the other side of the portal the Great Malevolence had been waiting for precisely that moment. The little bundle of energy was the equivalent of a piece of wood that has been wedged beneath a door to keep it open. Now the challenge was to start putting pressure on the door in order to open it wider, because the Great Malevolence was immense. What Mrs. Abernathy had glimpsed, before she met her unfortunate end, were the gates of Hell, which had been put in place to keep the Great Malevolence within the boundaries of that awful place. The little piece of blue energy had created a small hole in those gates, large enough for some of the Great Malevolence’s agents to pass through. They were scouts, and guardians of the portal. They also represented the first step in the Great Malevolence’s plan to leave his own place of banishment, which wasn’t much better than that of Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities, but did at least have a view, and a few more chairs.