Good Omens (20 page)

“Two calls in one day, Mr. Shadwell,” she said. “Your little army must be marching away like anything!”

“Ach, awa' wi' ye, ye murrain plashed berrizene,” muttered Shadwell, and slammed the door. Tadfield, he thought. Och, weel. So long as they paid up on time …

Neither Aziraphale or Crowley ran the
Witch
finder Army, but they both approved of it, or at least knew that it would be approved of by their superiors. So it appeared on the list of Aziraphale's agencies because it was, well, a Witchfinder Army, and you had to support anyone calling themselves witchfinders in the same way that the U.S.A. had to support anyone calling themselves anti-communist. And it appeared on Crowley's list for the slightly more sophisticated reason that people like Shadwell did the cause of Hell no harm at all. Quite the reverse, it was felt.

Strictly speaking, Shadwell didn't run the WA either. According to Shadwell's pay ledgers it was run by Witchfinder General Smith. Under him were Witchfinder Colonels Green and Jones, and Witchfinder Majors Jackson, Robinson, and Smith (no relation). Then there were Witchfinder Majors Saucepan, Tin, Milk, and Cupboard, because Shadwell's limited imagination had been beginning to struggle at this point. And Witchfinder Captains Smith, Smith, Smith, and Smythe and Ditto. And five hundred Witchfinder Privates and Corporals and Sergeants. Many of them were called Smith, but this didn't matter because neither Crowley nor Aziraphale had ever bothered to read that far. They simply handed over the pay.

After all, both lots put together only came to around £60 a year.

Shadwell didn't consider this in any way criminal. The army was a sacred trust, and a man had to do something. The old ninepences weren't coming in like they used to.

I
T WAS VERY EARLY
on Saturday morning, on the last day of the world, and the sky was redder than blood.

The International Express delivery man rounded the corner at a careful thirty-five miles an hour, shifted down to second, and pulled up on the grass verge.

He got out of the van, and immediately threw himself into a ditch to avoid an oncoming lorry that had barreled around the bend at something well in excess of eighty miles an hour.

He got up, picked up his glasses, put them back on, retrieved his parcel and clipboard, brushed the grass and mud from his uniform, and, as an afterthought, shook his fist at the rapidly diminishing lorry.

“Shouldn't be allowed, bloody lorries, no respect for other road users, what I always say, what I always say, is remember that without a car, son, you're just a pedestrian too … ”

He climbed down the grassy verge, clambered over a low fence, and found himself beside the river Uck.

The International Express delivery man walked along the banks of the river, holding the parcel.

Farther down the riverbank sat a young man dressed all in white. He was the only person in sight. His hair was white, his skin chalk pale, and he sat and stared up and down the river, as if he were admiring the view. He looked like how Victorian Romantic poets looked just before the consumption and drug abuse really started to cut it.

The International Express man couldn't understand it. I mean, in the old days, and it wasn't that long ago really, there had been an angler every dozen yards along the bank; children had played there; courting couples had come to listen to the splish and gurgle of the river, and to hold hands, and to get all lovey-dovey in the Sussex sunset. He'd done that with Maud, his missus, before they were married. They'd come here to spoon and, on one memorable occasion, fork.

Times changed, reflected the delivery man.

Now white and brown sculptures of foam and sludge drifted serenely down the river, often covering it for yards at a stretch. And where the surface of the water was visible it was covered with a molecules-thin petrochemical sheen.

There was a loud whirring as a couple of geese, thankful to be back in England again after the long, exhausting flight across the Northern Atlantic, landed on the rainbow-slicked water, and sank without trace.

Funny old world, thought the delivery man. Here's the Uck, used to be the prettiest river in this part of the world, and now it's just a glorified industrial sewer. The swans sink to the bottom, and the fishes float on the top.

Well, that's progress for you. You can't stop progress.

He had reached the man in white.

“'Scuse me, sir. Party name of Chalky?”

The man in white nodded, said nothing. He continued to gaze out at the river, following an impressive sludge and foam sculpture with his eyes.

“So beautiful,” he whispered. “It's all so damn beautiful.”

The delivery man found himself temporarily devoid of words. Then his automatic systems cut in. “Funny old world isn't it and no mistake I mean you go all over the world delivering and then here you are practically in your own home so to speak, I mean I was born and bred 'round here, sir, and I've been to the Mediterranean, and to Des O' Moines, and that's in America, sir, and now here I am, and here's your parcel, sir.”

Party name of Chalky took the parcel, and took the clipboard, and signed for the parcel. The pen developed a leak as he did so, and his signature obliterated itself as it was written. It was a long word, and it began with a P, and then there was a splodge, and then it ended in something that might have been—
ence
and might have been—
ution
.

“Much obliged, sir,” said the delivery man.

He walked back along the river, back toward the busy road where he had left his van, trying not to look at the river as he went.

Behind him the man in white opened the parcel. In it was a crown—a circlet of white metal, set with diamonds. He gazed at it for some seconds, with satisfaction, then put it on. It glinted in the light of the rising sun. Then the tarnish, which had begun to suffuse its silver surface when his fingers touched it, spread to cover it completely; and the crown went black.

White stood up. There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises. It looked like someone had set fire to the sky.

And a careless match would have set fire to the river, but, alas, there was no time for that now. In his mind he knew where the Four Of Them would be meeting, and when, and he was going to have to hurry to be there by this afternoon.

Perhaps we
will
set fire to the sky, he thought. And he left that place, almost imperceptibly.

It was nearly time.

The delivery man had left his van on the grass verge by the dual carriageway. He walked around to the driver's side (carefully, because other cars and lorries were still rocketing around the bend), reached in through the open window, and took the schedule from the dashboard.

Only one more delivery to make, then.

He read the instructions on the delivery voucher carefully.

He read them again, paying particular attention to the address, and the message. The address was one word: Everywhere.

Then, with his leaking pen, he wrote a brief note to Maud, his wife. It read simply,
I love you
.

Then he put the schedule back on the dashboard, looked left, looked right, looked left again and began to walk purposefully across the road. He was halfway across when a German juggernaut came around the corner, its driver crazed on caffeine, little white pills, and EEC transport regulations.

He watched its receding bulk.

Cor, he thought, that one nearly had me.

Then he looked down at the gutter.

Oh, he thought.

YES, agreed a voice from behind his left shoulder, or at least from behind the memory of his left shoulder.

The delivery man turned, and looked, and saw. At first he couldn't find the words, couldn't find anything, and then the habits of a working lifetime took over and he said, “Message for you, sir.”

FOR ME?

“Yes, sir.” He wished he still had a throat. He could have swallowed, if he still had a throat. “No package, I'm afraid, Mister … uh, sir. It's a message.”

DELIVER IT, THEN.

“It's this, sir. Ahem.
Come and See
.”

FINALLY. There was a grin on its face, but then, given the face, there couldn't have been anything else.

THANK YOU, it continued. I MUST COMMEND YOUR DEVOTION TO DUTY.

“Sir?” The late delivery man was falling through a gray mist, and all he could see were two spots of blue, that might have been eyes, and might have been distant stars.

DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.

The delivery man had a brief moment to wonder whether his new companion was making a joke, and to decide that he wasn't; and then there was nothing.

Red sky in the morning. It was going to rain.

Yes.

WITCHFINDER SERGEANT Shadwell stood back with his head on one side. “Right, then,” he said. “Ye're all ready. Hae ye got it all?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pendulum o' discovery?”

“Pendulum of discovery, yes.”

“Thumbscrew?”

Newt swallowed, and patted a pocket.

“Thumbscrew,” he said.

“Firelighters?”

“I really think, Sergeant, that—”

“Firelighters?”

“Firelighters,”
²⁸
said Newt sadly. “And matches.”

“Bell, book, and candle?”

Newt patted another pocket. It contained a paper bag inside which was a small bell, of the sort that maddens budgerigars, a pink candle of the birthday cake persuasion, and a tiny book called
Prayers for Little Hands
. Shadwell had impressed upon him that, although witches were the primary target, a good Witchfinder should never pass up the chance to do a quick exorcism, and should have his field kit with him at all times.

“Bell, book, and candle,” said Newt.

“Pin?”

“Pin.”

“Good lad. Never forget yer pin. It's the bayonet in yer artillery o' light.”

Shadwell stood back. Newt noticed with amazement that the old man's eyes had misted over.

“I wish I was goin' with ye,” he said. “O' course, this won't be anything, but it'd be good to get out and about again. It's a tryin' life, ye ken, all this lyin' in the wet bracken spying on their devilish dancin'. It gets into yer bones somethin' cruel.”

He straightened up, and saluted.

“Off ye go, then, Private Pulsifer. May the armies o' glorification march wi' ye.”

After Newt had driven off Shadwell thought of something, something that he'd never had the chance to do before. What he needed now was a pin. Not a military issue pin, witches, for the use of. Just an ordinary pin, such as you might stick in a map.

The map was on the wall. It was old. It didn't show Milton Keynes. It didn't show Harlow. It barely showed Manchester and Birmingham. It had been the army's HQ map for three hundred years. There were a few pins in it still, mainly in Yorkshire and Lancashire and a few in Essex, but they were almost rusted through. Elsewhere, mere brown stubs indicated the distant mission of a long-ago witchfinder.

Shadwell finally found a pin among the debris in an ashtray. He breathed on it, polished it to a shine, squinted at the map until he located Tadfield, and triumphantly rammed the pin home.

It gleamed.

Shadwell took a step backward, and saluted again. There were tears in his eyes.

Then he did a smart about turn and saluted the display cabinet. It was old and battered and the glass was broken but in a way it
was
the WA. It contained the Regimental silver (the Interbattalion Golf Trophy, not competed for, alas, in seventy years); it contained the patent muzzle-loading Thundergun of Witchfinder-Colonel Ye-Shall-Not-Eat-Any-Living-Thing-With-The-Blood-Neither-Shall-Ye-Use-Enchantment-Nor-Observe-Times Dalrymple; it contained a display of what were apparently walnuts but were in reality a collection of shrunken headhunter heads donated by Witchfinder CSM Horace “Get them afore they Get You” Narker, who'd traveled widely in foreign parts; it contained memories.

Shadwell blew his nose, noisily, on his sleeve.

Then he opened a tin of condensed milk for breakfast.

IF THE ARMIES OF GLORIFICATION had tried to march with Newt, bits of them would have dropped off. This is because, apart from Newt and Shadwell, they had been dead for quite a long time.

It was a mistake to think of Shadwell (Newt never found out if he had a first name) as a lone nut.

It was just that all the others were dead, in most cases for several hundred years. Once the Army had been as big as it currently appeared in Shadwell's creatively edited bookkeeping. Newt had been surprised to find that the Witchfinder Army had antecedents as long and almost as bloody as its more mundane counterpart.

The rates of pay for witchfinders had last been set by Oliver Cromwell and never reviewed. Officers got a crown, and the General got a sovereign. It was just an honorarium, of course, because you got ninepence per witch found and first pick of their property.

You really got to rely on those ninepences. And so times had been a bit hard before Shadwell had gone on the payrolls of Heaven and Hell.

Newt's pay was one old shilling per year.
²⁹

In return for this, he was charged to keep “glimmer, firelock, firebox, tinderbox or igniferous matches” about his person at all times, although Shadwell indicated that a Ronson gas lighter would do very well. Shadwell had accepted the invention of the patent cigarette lighter in the same way that conventional soldiers welcomed the repeating rifle.

The way Newt looked at it, it was like being in one of those organizations like the Sealed Knot or those people who kept on refighting the American Civil War. It got you out at weekends, and meant that you were keeping alive fine old traditions that had made Western civilization what it was today.

AN HOUR AFTER LEAVING the headquarters, Newt pulled into a layby and rummaged in the box on the passenger seat.

Then he opened the car window, using a pair of pliers for the purpose since the handle had long since fallen off.

The packet of firelighters was sent winging over the hedge. A moment later the thumbscrew followed it.

He debated about the rest of the stuff, and then put it back in the box. The pin was Witchfinder military issue, with a good ebony knob on the end like a ladies' hat pin.

He knew what it was for. He'd done quite a lot of reading. Shadwell had piled him up with pamphlets at their first meeting, but the Army had also accumulated various books and documents which, Newt suspected, would be worth a fortune if they ever hit the market.

The pin was to jab into suspects. If there was a spot on their body where they didn't feel anything, they were a witch. Simple. Some of the fraudulent Witchfinders had used special retracting pins, but this one was honest, solid steel. He wouldn't be able to look old Shadwell in the face if he threw away the pin. Besides, it was probably bad luck.

He started the engine and resumed his journey.

Newt's car was a Wasabi. He called it Dick Turpin, in the hope that one day someone would ask him why.

It would be a very accurate historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing. But the Wasabi had been designed on that one confused day, and combined the traditional bad points of most Western cars with a host of innovative disasters the avoidance of which had made firms like Honda and Toyota what they were today.

Newt had never actually seen another one on the road, despite his best efforts. For years, and without much conviction, he'd enthused to his friends about its economy and efficiency in the desperate hope that one of them might buy one, because misery loves company.