Good Omens (8 page)

I
T WAS A HOT
, fume-filled August day in Central London.

Warlock's eleventh birthday was very well attended.

There were twenty small boys and seventeen small girls. There were a lot of men with identical blond crew cuts, dark blue suits, and shoulder holsters. There was a crew of caterers, who had arrived bearing jellies, cakes, and bowls of crisps. Their procession of vans was led by a vintage Bentley.

The Amazing Harvey and Wanda, Children's Parties a Specialty, had both been struck down by an unexpected tummy bug, but by a providential turn of fortune a replacement had turned up, practically out of the blue. A stage magician.

Everyone has his little hobby. Despite Crowley's urgent advice, Aziraphale was intending to turn his to good use.

Aziraphale was particularly proud of his magical skills. He had attended a class in the 1870s run by John Maskelyne, and had spent almost a year practicing sleight of hand, palming coins, and taking rabbits out of hats. He had got, he had felt at the time, quite good at it. The point was that although Aziraphale was capable of doing things that could make the entire Magic Circle hand in their wands, he never applied what might be called his
intrinsic
powers to the practice of sleight-of-hand conjuring. Which was a major drawback. He was beginning to wish that he'd continued practicing.

Still, he mused, it was like riding a velocipede. You never forgot how. His magician's coat had been a little dusty, but it felt good once it was on. Even his old patter began to come back to him.

The children watched him in blank, disdainful incomprehension. Behind the buffet Crowley, in his white waiter's coat, cringed with contact embarrassment.

“Now then, young masters and mistresses, do you see my battered old top hat? What a shocking bad hat, as you young 'uns do say! And see, there's nothing in it. But bless my britches, who's this rum customer? Why, it's our furry friend, Harry the rabbit!”

“It was in your pocket,” pointed out Warlock. The other children nodded agreement. What did he think they were? Kids?

Aziraphale remembered what Maskelyne had told him about dealing with hecklers. “Make a joke of it, you pudding-heads—and I do mean you, Mr. Fell” (the name Aziraphale had adopted at that time). “Make 'em laugh, and they'll forgive you anything!”

“Ho, so you've rumbled my
hat trick,”
he chuckled. The children stared at him impassively.

“You're rubbish,” said Warlock. “I wanted cartoons anyway.”

“He's right, you know,” agreed a small girl with a ponytail. “You are rubbish. And probably a faggot.”

Aziraphale stared desperately at Crowley. As far as he was concerned young Warlock was obviously infernally tainted, and the sooner the Black Dog turned up and they could get away from this place, the better.

“Now, do any of you young 'uns have such a thing as a thrup-penny bit about your persons? No, young master? Then what's this I see behind your ear … ?”

“I got cartoons at
my
birthday,” announced the little girl. “An I gotter transformer anna mylittleponyer anna decepticonattacker anna thundertank anna … ”

Crowley groaned. Children's parties were obviously places where any angel with an ounce of common sense should fear to tread. Piping infant voices were raised in cynical merriment as Aziraphale dropped three linked metal rings.

Crowley looked away, and his gaze fell on a table heaped high with presents. From a tall plastic structure two beady little eyes stared back at him.

Crowley scrutinized them for a glint of red fire. You could never be certain when you were dealing with the bureaucrats of Hell. It was always possible that they had sent a gerbil instead of a dog.

No, it was a perfectly normal gerbil. It appeared to be living in an exciting construction of cylinders, spheres, and treadmills, such as the Spanish Inquisition would have devised if they'd had access to a plastics molding press.

He checked his watch. It had never occurred to Crowley to change its battery, which had rotted away three years previously, but it still kept perfect time. It was two minutes to three.

Aziraphale was getting more and more flustered.

“Do any of the company here assembled possess such a thing about their persons as a pocket handkerchief? No?” In Victorian days it had been unheard of for people not to carry handkerchiefs, and the trick, which involved magically producing a dove who was even now pecking irritably at Aziraphale's wrist, could not proceed without one. The angel tried to attract Crowley's attention, failed, and, in desperation, pointed to one of the security guards, who shifted uneasily.

“You, my fine jack-sauce. Come here. Now, if you inspect your breast pocket, I
think
you might find a fine silk handkerchief.”

“Nossir. 'Mafraidnotsir,” said the guard, staring straight ahead.

Aziraphale winked desperately. “No, go on, dear boy, take a look,
please
.”

The guard reached a hand inside his inside pocket, looked surprised, and pulled out a handkerchief, duck-egg-blue silk, with lace edging. Aziraphale realized almost immediately that the lace had been a mistake, as it caught on the guard's holstered gun, and sent it spinning across the room to land heavily in a bowl of jelly.

The children applauded spasmodically. “Hey, not bad!” said the ponytailed girl.

Warlock had already run across the room, and grabbed the gun.

“Hands up, dogbreaths!” he shouted gleefully.

The security guards were in a quandary.

Some of them fumbled for their own weapons; others started edging their way toward, or away from, the boy. The other children started complaining that they wanted guns as well, and a few of the more forward ones started trying to tug them from the guards who had been thoughtless enough to take their weapons out.

Then someone threw some jelly at Warlock.

The boy squeaked, and pulled the trigger of the gun. It was a Magnum .32, CIA issue, gray, mean, heavy, capable of blowing a man away at thirty paces, and leaving nothing more than a red mist, a ghastly mess, and a certain amount of paperwork.

Aziraphale blinked.

A thin stream of water squirted from the nozzle and soaked Crowley, who had been looking out the window, trying to see if there was a huge black dog in the garden.

Aziraphale looked embarrassed.

Then a cream cake hit him in the face.

It was almost five past three.

With a gesture, Aziraphale turned the rest of the guns into water pistols as well, and walked out.

Crowley found him on the pavement outside, trying to extricate a rather squishy dove from the arm of his frock coat.

“It's late,” said Aziraphale.

“I can see that,” said Crowley. “Comes of sticking it up your sleeve.” He reached out and pulled the limp bird from Aziraphale's coat, and breathed life back into it. The dove cooed appreciatively and flew off, a trifle warily.

“Not the bird,” said the angel. “The dog. It's late.”

Crowley shook his head, thoughtfully. “We'll see.”

He opened the car door, flipped on the radio.
“I-should-be-so-lucky-lucky-lucky-lucky-lucky, I-should-be-so-lucky-in- HELLO CROWLEY.”

“Hello. Um, who is this?”

“DAGON, LORD OF THE FILES, MASTER OF MADNESS, UNDER-DUKE OF THE SEVENTH TORMENT. WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?”

“The hell-hound. I'm just, uh, just checking that it got off okay.”

“RELEASED TEN MINUTES AGO. WHY? HASN'T IT ARRIVED? IS SOMETHING WRONG?”

“Oh no. Nothing's wrong. Everything's fine. Oops, I can see it now. Good dog.
Nice
dog. Everything's terrific. You're doing a great job down there, people. Well, lovely talking to you, Dagon. Catch you soon, huh?”

He flipped off the radio.

They stared at each other. There was a loud bang from inside the house, and a window shattered. “Oh dear,” muttered Aziraphale, not swearing with the practiced ease of one who has spent six thousand years not swearing, and who wasn't going to start now. “I must have missed one.”

“No dog,” said Crowley.

“No dog,” said Aziraphale.

The demon sighed. “Get in the car,” he said. “We've got to talk about this. Oh, and Aziraphale … ?”

“Yes.”

“Clean off that blasted cream cake before you get in.”

It was a hot, silent August day far from Central London. By the side of the Tadfield road the dust weighed down the hogweed. Bees buzzed in the hedges. The air had a leftover and reheated feel.

There was a sound like a thousand metal voices shouting “Hail!” cut off abruptly.

And there was a black dog in the road.

It had to be a dog. It was dog-shaped.

There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners twitter, “He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance,” and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker. …

This dog would make even a dog like that slink nonchalantly behind the sofa and pretend to be extremely preoccupied with its rubber bone.

It was already growling, and the growl was a low, rumbling snarl of spring-coiled menace, the sort of growl that starts in the back of one throat and ends up in someone else's.

Saliva dripped from its jaws and sizzled on the tar.

It took a few steps forward, and sniffed the sullen air.

Its ears flicked up.

There were voices, a long way off. A voice. A boyish voice, but one it had been created to obey, could not
help
but obey. When that voice said “Follow,” it would follow; when it said “Kill,” it would kill. His master's voice.

It leapt the hedge and padded across the field beyond. A grazing bull eyed it for a moment, weighed its chances, then strolled hurriedly toward the opposite hedge.

The voices were coming from a copse of straggly trees. The black hound slunk closer, jaws streaming.

One of the other voices said: “He never will. You're always saying he will, and he never does. Catch your dad giving you a pet. An int'restin' pet, anyway. It'll prob'ly be stick insects. That's your dad's idea of int'restin'.”

The hound gave the canine equivalent of a shrug, but immediately lost interest because now the Master, the Center of its Universe, spoke.

“It'll be a dog,” it said.

“Huh. You don't
know
it's going to be a dog. No one's
said
it's going to be a dog. How d'you know it's goin' to be a dog if no one's
said
? Your dad'd be complaining about the food it eats the whole time.”

“Privet.” This third voice was rather more prim than the first two. The owner of a voice like that would be the sort of person who, before making a plastic model kit, would not only separate and count all the parts before commencing, as per the instructions, but also paint the bits that needed painting first and leave them to dry properly prior to construction. All that separated this voice from chartered accountancy was a matter of time.

“They don't eat privet, Wensley. You never saw a dog eatin' privet.”

“Stick insects do, I mean. They're jolly interesting,
actually
. They eat each other when they're mating.”

There was a thoughtful pause. The hound slunk closer, and realized that the voices were coming from a hole in the ground.

The trees in fact concealed an ancient chalk quarry, now half overgrown with thorn trees and vines. Ancient, but clearly not disused. Tracks crisscrossed it; smooth areas of slope indicated regular use by skateboards and Wall-of-Death, or at least Wall-of-Seriously-Grazed-Knee, cyclists. Old bits of dangerously frayed rope hung from some of the more accessible greenery. Here and there sheets of corrugated iron and old wooden boards were wedged in branches. A burnt-out, rusting Triumph Herald Estate was visible, half-submerged in a drift of nettles.

In one corner a tangle of wheels and corroded wire marked the site of the famous Lost Graveyard where the supermarket trolleys came to die.

If you were a child, it was paradise. The local adults called it The Pit.

The hound peered through a clump of nettles, and spotted four figures sitting in the center of the quarry on that indispensible prop to good secret dens everywhere, the common milk crate.

“They don't!”

“They do.”

“Bet you they don't,” said the first speaker. It had a certain timbre to it that identified it as young and female, and it was tinted with horrified fascination.

“They do, actually. I had six before we went on holiday and I forgot to change the privet and when I came back I had one big fat one.”

“Nah. That's not stick insects, that's praying mantises. I saw on the television where this big female one ate this other one and it dint hardly take any notice.”

There was another crowded pause.

“What're they prayin' about?” said his Master's voice.

“Dunno. Prayin' they don't have to get married, I s'pect.”

The hound managed to get one huge eye against an empty knothole in the quarry's broken-down fence, and squinted downward.

“Anyway, it's like with bikes,” said the first speaker authoritatively.
“I
thought I was going to get this bike with seven gears and one of them razorblade saddles and purple paint and everything, and they gave me this light blue one. With a basket. A
girl's
bike. ”

“Well. You're a girl,” said one of the others.

“That's
sexism
, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.”

“I'm
going to get a dog,” said his Master's voice, firmly. His Master had his back to him; the hound couldn't quite make out his features.