The Gates (2009) (21 page)

“So what are we going to do, Sarge?”

“We’re going to put a stop to it, Constable,” said Sergeant Rowan, with the kind of assurance that had kept the British empire running for a lot longer than it probably should have.

The sergeant walked over to the car and leaned in close to the window, where Nurd waited expectantly.

“Now look here, sir,” he began, “what’s all this stuff about the world coming to an end?”

“Well,” said Nurd, “I thought I was the only one who’d come through.”

“Through from where, sir?”

“From Hell.”

“
The
Hell.”

“That’s the one.”

“What’s it like, then?” asked Constable Peel, who had reluctantly joined them.

“Not very nice,” said Nurd. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“There’s a surprise,” said Sergeant Rowan. “What did you think he’d say, Constable? That it was pleasant on a sunny day? It’s not the beach at Eastbourne, you know.”

“I was just asking,” said Constable Peel.

“Anyway, back to the issue at hand,” said Sergeant Rowan. “So, you’ve come from Hell, and you thought you were alone, but you’re not.”

“No, I’m not.”

“And these, er, ‘ladies’ who may have attacked our police station, friends of yours, are they?”

“No, they came some other way.”

“How, exactly?”

“I don’t know how,” said Nurd. “Someone must have opened a portal, and now they’re spilling through.”

“This portal, sir? What would it look like?”

Nurd considered the question. “I think it would be sort of
bluish,”
he said, finally. “It probably started off quite small, but now it’s getting bigger and bigger. And when it gets big enough, then…”

then …”

“Then what?”

“Then
he’ll
come through. Our master. The Source of All Evil. The Great Malevolence, along with his army. And that’ll be that, really. Hell on Earth.”

“Do you think you could find this portal, sir?”

Nurd nodded. He thought that he could already sense it. He felt the presence of the blue energy; it made the hairs on the back of his neck tingle. He knew that the closer he got to its source, the more he’d be aware of it. He was like a walking Evil Energy Detector. Now his hope was that, if he could get near enough, he might be able to sneak back to the Wasteland unobserved. Better yet, if Hell was empty because all the demons had moved here, he might find a way to leave the Wasteland altogether. He could go and live somewhere else, perhaps in a cozy cave with a nice view of some burning lakes.

“That‘s decided then,” said Sergeant Rowan. “This gentleman will show us where the portal is, and we can set about stopping all this nonsense. Get on the radio, Constable. Make sure everything is fine back at the station, and then tell WPC Hay to alert the army. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

Constable Peel prepared to do as he was told. Before he could make the call, WPC Hay came on the radio herself.

“Base to Tango One, over.”

“This is Tango One,” said Constable Peel. “Is everything all right, Liz? Over.”

“Those flying women have gone, and we’ve got the doors locked, but now we’re getting calls left, right, and center. People’s houses are being attacked; there are monsters crawling and flying all over the place. And there’s some trouble over at the church. Over.”

“What kind of trouble? Over.”

“According to the verger, the dead have started to rise. Over.”

Constable Peel, who already looked unhappy, now looked very,
very
unhappy. He’d joined the police to stop bank robberies, and solve the odd murder, neither of which he had yet managed to do as Biddlecombe was rather quiet, and so far the combined total of bank robberies and murders in the town was precisely nil.
²⁵
Constable Peel had most certainly not joined the police to fight demons, not unless he was going to be paid overtime, and danger money, and given a great big gun.

He was about to ask another question, and possibly begin shouting at Sergeant Rowan to call out the air force, the U.S. Marines, the Swiss Guard, and perhaps the pope, vampire hunters, and anyone else who might be able to sort out dead people popping up from the ground, when a bolt of blue lightning shot across the radio. Seconds later the radio exploded in a shower of sparks and went dead. He looked up and saw that the telephone lines along the road were also glowing blue and sparking at their connections. He reached for his cell phone, but it too was dead.

Constable Peel banged his forehead against the steering wheel. A very bad situation had just got much worse.

• • • 

Mrs. Abernathy stood in the garden of 666 Crowley Road, her arms outstretched, blue energy flying from the tips of her fingers and out of her eyes. She was smiling as she brought down all communications within a ten-mile radius of Biddlecombe. She felt the power surge through her as she set about creating a barrier around the town, invisible to the naked eye but completely impenetrable. It would remain in place until the Great Malevolence himself emerged, and then he would unleash himself upon this miserable planet. Behind her the walls and roof of the house expanded, as though the whole structure had taken a deep breath, and then most of it fell to pieces, to be replaced by a great tunnel of blue light twenty feet across from which more and more creatures began to pour: imps and small dragons, hooded serpents and hunched gnomelike figures armed with axes and blades. And those were just the ones that could be described in recognizable terms: there were other things that bore no resemblance to anything ever seen or imagined on earth, monstrous things that had lived so long in total darkness they struggled to accommodate themselves to their new environment, creatures that had never had a form because there hadn’t been any point: it would have been too dark to see them. Now they were trying to construct shapes for themselves, resembling balls of fleshy dough from which arms and claws and tails and legs occasionally emerged before retreating again, accompanied by the odd eyeball to enable them to see what they were becoming.

Mrs. Abernathy turned to face them as they streamed past. She stared into the portal and saw the gates were now almost half gone, a huge hole gaping at the heart of them.

Soon. Soon he would be here, and then she would receive her reward. But first, there was one small matter to attend to. She turned to Mr. Abernathy, now a toad, and the spider demon by his side, the one that had, until recently, been crammed into Mr. Renfield’s skin, and instructed them to find Samuel Johnson.

To find the interfering boy who was frightened of spiders and suck his insides dry.

Tom was keeping watch on the street, and Maria and Samuel the back of the house, when Dr. Planck appeared at the front gate.

“Mrs. Johnson,” called Tom, “there’s a man coming up the garden path.”

“Are you sure he’s a man?” asked Mrs. Johnson.

“Pretty sure,” said Tom.

Dr. Planck hadn’t seen the huge flies, but the flies had seen him. With a loud buzzing they descended upon the scientist, but so intent were they that they didn’t notice the front door opening, and Maria and Tom emerging, each with a can of bug spray. Before the flies could get within chomping distance of Dr. Planck they had fallen to the ground, writhing and spitting, then had ceased moving entirely before they, like the other demons who had run afoul of their intended victims, vanished.

Samuel joined Mrs. Johnson as she approached the front door, clutching a broom handle. Tom waited at the living room door, his cricket bat at the ready.

“Hurry up,” Mrs. Johnson told Dr. Planck. “We don’t know what else is out here.”

As if to confirm her worst suspicions, a batlike shadow flew over the house. Seconds later, a creature the size of an eagle, but with spines instead of feathers and a head that consisted of dozens of wriggling worms with a single eye at the end of each, got tangled up in the telephone lines and fell crashing to the ground. Boswell, who had been watching it suspiciously, barked with delight.

Dr. Planck looked upon its demise with relief until the door slammed shut, cutting off his view and almost cutting off his nose as well. “Thank goodness,” he said. “That thing has been chasing me ever since I locked the skull in a shed.”

“Right,” said Mrs. Johnson, waving the broom handle in a threatening manner. “What’s going on? None of your scientific nonsense, now. Keep it simple.”

Dr. Planck kept it very simple indeed. “I don’t know.”

“Well, fat lot of good you are, then,” said Mrs. Johnson.

“Actually, I was hoping Samuel might be able to help me in that regard,” said Dr. Planck.

Samuel stepped forward. “I’m Samuel.”

At that moment the lights went out as Mrs. Abernathy deprived the town of its power. Samuel and Dr. Planck sat at the kitchen table while Mrs. Johnson lit candles and Samuel told him of almost everything that had happened, from the time that Samuel had gone trick or treating at the Abernathys’ house
to the battle with the flying skulls. Dr. Planck said nothing until Samuel was finished, although he did raise his eyebrow when Samuel described Mrs. Abernathy’s tentacles, then sat back and tapped an index finger against his lip.

“It’s incredible,” he said at last. “Somehow, the power of the collider has been harnessed to create a rip in the fabric of time and space. I mean, on one level it’s wonderful. We’ve proved the existence of other dimensions, even if it was by accident, and we’ve discovered a way to travel between them. On the other hand, if this Mrs. Abernathy creature is right, and it is a gateway between this world and, for want of a better word, ‘Hell,’ then we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“A lot of trouble” seemed like an understatement to Samuel, but then he wasn’t a scientist. Mrs. Johnson didn’t look very impressed with this description either.

“So all of this is your fault?” she said.

“Not exactly,” said Dr. Planck. “We were trying to discover something of the truth about the nature of the universe.”

“Well, now something has discovered you instead, and the truth is that it doesn’t like any of us. I hope you’re happy.”

“What can we do?” asked Samuel.

“If the phones were working, or I had access to a computer, I could contact CERN,” said Dr. Planck. “Unfortunately, the last I heard they were having troubles of their own.”

“What do you mean?” asked Samuel.

“I got a call on my way to the Abernathys’ house. It seemed that the collider had started up again, and they couldn’t shut it down.”

“Could Mrs. Abernathy have done that?”

“Mrs. Abernathy, or whatever this thing is whose will she is obeying,” Dr. Planck said. “Assuming the two events are linked, then if they can shut the collider down, it should close the portal as well.”

“So all we can do is wait?” asked Mrs. Johnson.

“I’m afraid so.”

“What if they don’t manage to shut it down in time?” asked Maria.

“We’ll just have to hope that they do.”

By now Maria had joined them, and it was she who spoke next.

“It can’t be very stable, though, can it?”

“What?” asked Dr. Planck.

“The portal,” said Maria.

“It’s not,” said Samuel. “The monster under the bed told me as much. He said that Mrs. Abernathy was expending a lot of power keeping it open.”

“Monster under the bed?” said Dr. Planck.

“It’s a long story,” said Samuel.

“I mean, there are only so many possibilities,” Maria continued. “It could be an Einstein-Rosen bridge, but that doesn’t sound likely given its size and duration, or a wormhole of some kind, or even a combination of both. Either way, its stability is dependent on the energy resulting from the explosions in the collider. And there was that wind we felt when we spied on the Abernathy house …”

“Wind,” said Dr. Planck thoughtfully. “Yes, I felt it too. It smelt of … elsewhere.”

“So perhaps it was coming from the other side of the portal,” said Maria. “But its force wasn’t very strong. You’re the expert,
Dr. Planck, but isn’t it true that, in theory, a portal like that would allow only a one-way trip?”

“Well, according to some theories, yes, and assuming the portal was sufficiently stable. It’s to do with the force of gravity,” Dr. Planck added, to a confused-looking Mrs. Johnson, and an even more confused-looking Tom.

“But that kind of force would hurl the travelers out the far side, wouldn’t it?” said Maria. “There should be a howling gale tearing this town apart, but there isn’t.”

“You may be right,” said Professor Planck. “I mean, this is all speculative.”

“So there isn’t that force of gravity,” said Maria.

“It appears not. There’s some, but not sufficient to suggest a perfect balance between gravity and centrifugal force.”

“Then suppose that we collapse it.”

“But how?” asked Dr. Planck. Even as he asked the question, he seemed to come up with an answer, for his face cleared for the first time since he had arrived at the house. Nevertheless, it was Maria who was left to make the suggestion.

“By sending something in the opposite direction,” she said.

“Like two cars meeting on a bridge and destroying themselves,
and
the bridge,” said Samuel.

“Two cars meeting on a narrow,
unstable
bridge,” said Maria.

“You know,” said Dr. Planck, “that just might work. The questions are, where do we find our car, and who will drive it?”

O
VER AT THE
F
IG
and Parrot, Shan and Gath were having a rare old time. Someone had started playing the piano, and Shan and Gath were doing their best to grunt along to “My Old Man’s a Dustman.” Earlier, someone had sung “Danny Boy,” which, although they had never heard it before, Shan and Gath sensed was a very sad song. It had caused a tear to well up in Gath’s eyes, leading Shan to give him a consoling hug.

“One more for the road?” asked someone, waving a handful of beer vouchers in their faces.

Why, Shan and Gath thought, spying the vouchers, we don’t mind if we do …