The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale (12 page)

“I could be wrong,” said Maria, “but that looks very like a pentagram.”
²⁹

Samuel, Maria, and Tom talked for a long time about the pentagram. Maria was the most worried about it, and Tom the least. Samuel was stranded somewhere in the middle. It was unusual, he had to admit, but so what if weird Hilary Mould had
set out to position his awful buildings in the shape of a pentagram? It just confirmed what everyone had always thought: he was as odd as two left shoes.

“Maybe you shouldn’t go to the grand reopening,” said Maria, “not until we know more. In fact, we should try to have the reopening postponed.”

“Are you mad?” said Tom. “The reopening is tomorrow, and it’s the biggest thing to have happened to Biddlecombe in years. Everybody is looking forward to it. Do you really think they’re going to call it off just because you’ve made the shape of a star on a map?”

“Tom’s right,” said Samuel. “It doesn’t mean anything, beyond the fact that Hilary Mould had an unusual sense of humor.”

“But what if it’s more than that?” said Maria. “What if it’s dangerous?”

“How can it be?” said Samuel. “Those buildings have been around for more than a century and they’ve done nothing worse than make the town look a bit uglier. Why should they start being dangerous now?”

And that was how things ended, because Maria had no answer to Samuel’s question. She had only her instincts to go on, and they told her that something was very wrong here. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to the people of Biddlecombe, and especially not to Samuel and Boswell. She didn’t even want any harm to befall Lucy Highmore.

Or not much harm, anyway.

27
. No matter how great your job is, there will be days when you might wish that you were doing something else. Everybody feels the need to have a bit of a moan once in a while. Your job could be knocking baseballs through the windows of buildings and every so often you’d still feel the urge to complain that your arm was tired.

28
. Which is, in a way, the story of life.

29
. It was only in the nineteenth century that the pentagram—a five-pointed star—came to be regarded as a symbol for evil, and its use in old manuscripts of the supernatural is rare. Just to be clear, if it has one point at the top, then it’s a symbol of good, and if there are two points at the top, like the one Maria found, it’s a symbol for evil. Then again, like most things in life, it rather depends upon how one looks at it, doesn’t it?

In Which the Worst Date in the History of Dating Begins

L
UCY
H
IGHMORE LOOKED LOVELY
when she arrived at Samuel’s house on the evening of the grand reopening. Her dress was lovely, her face was lovely, and her hair was lovely. Her dad had dropped her off at Samuel’s house in a car that was so big it qualified as a boat, and he had glowed in the light of his daughter’s sheer loveliness. If there had been a town called Lovely and its residents were looking for a statue of Loveliness to represent it, they would have modeled it on Lucy Highmore. Samuel felt slightly awkward standing beside her, as though he were somehow dragging her down just by being around.

Lucy Highmore had agreed to go with Samuel to Wreckit & Sons because it was such a big event, even though she knew that, pretty soon, she and Samuel would not be going anywhere together; and Samuel had asked Lucy to go to the special event even though he knew that, pretty soon, he and Lucy would not be going anywhere together; and Boswell had gone with
Samuel and Lucy to the special event because Samuel had put a leash on him and said, “Come on, Boswell,” which was all that Boswell needed to hear.

“You two—um, three—have a lovely time,” said Mrs. Johnson as they left the house. “I just hope that it’s a special evening for you.”

Even if the reopening of Wreckit & Sons had been the grandest event that Biddlecombe had ever seen, the evening would not have been destined to go well for these two young people and one small dachshund. As things happened, it was destined to be an opening unlike any other.

Dimensions were fragmenting.

Cracks were appearing in the Multiverse.

The Shadows were gathering.

Eternal Darkness was coming.

Not a good evening for a date, then. Not a good evening at all.

In Which Brian the Tea Boy Really Wishes That He Had Found Himself a Safer Job, like Hand-Feeding Great White Sharks, or Juggling Scorpions

B
RIAN THE TEA BOY
was still not used to the ghosts. Oh, he understood that they weren’t really ghosts as such. Professor Stefan had sat him down shortly after the policemen had paid their visit, and explained to Brian in some detail his theory about why a former sweet factory seemed to be quite the hive of activity for people who had been dead for a long time.

“Think of the Multiverse as a series of bubbles, and each bubble is a universe,” said Professor Stefan. “But they’re not like the bubbles in a glass of fizzy pop. Instead, they’re pressed very tightly together, so tightly that the ‘skin’ of one universe almost,
but not quite, shares the skin of another. And what is in these universes, you might ask?”

“Ghosts,” said Brian.

“No, Brian,” said Professor Stefan in the tone of a man who has just discovered a large hole in his bucket of patience, and is now considering hitting someone over the head with the bucket, “not ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist. Let’s say it together on the count of three. One, two, three. Ghosts don’t exist.”

“G-ghosts don’t exist,” echoed Brian dully, casting an anxious glance over his shoulder in case one decided to pop up and prove him wrong. Brian felt that he had been reduced to a big jellied spine waiting for a shiver to run down it.

“Very good,” said Professor Stefan. “If you could say it without stammering, that would be even better.”

“S-sorry,” s-said Brian.

“D-don’t— Blast it, you have me at it now. Don’t worry, just listen.”

“Right,” said Brian.

“What I think we are seeing in this sweet factory are quantum universes parallel to our own, but we’re being given glimpses of different points in their time lines, which is why the people who keep popping up are wearing the clothing of Victorian servants, or Tudor courtiers, or, in that slightly disturbing incident involving the elderly gentleman climbing into his bathtub, nothing at all. Similarly, it’s entirely possible that somewhere on
their
time lines, people are glimpsing scientists in false beards who
are pretending to run a sweetshop, although so far we’ve seen no evidence of that.

“Look, people think of time as a single straight line, like this,” said Professor Stefan. He drew a straight line for Brian, just to be helpful.

“But suppose,” he continued, “time isn’t like that at all. Suppose time really looks like this.”

“Handy that you happened to have a picture of twigs with you, wasn’t it?” said Brian.

“Yes,” said Professor Stefan. “I have to explain this often. So, imagine that, every time you made a decision, like whether to come here to work with us—”

“So a bad decision?”

“Yes. No. Maybe. Anyway, suppose that every time you made a decision, the universe branched off, and another universe came into being. So there’s this universe, the universe in which you work here, and there’s another universe, in which—”

“In which I work somewhere there are no ghosts,” said Brian. “Sorry, no not-ghosts.”

“Precisely. Now, if you think about all the decisions and actions that you take in a single day, suddenly time begins to seem a lot more complicated, doesn’t it, with lots and lots of lines running alongside each other. And perhaps they’re not straight lines either. Perhaps they tangle and cross over at points, just like those twigs. And sometimes, if the circumstances are right, we get a glimpse of one of those other universes, those alternative realities.”

“And you believe that’s what’s happening here?”

“It’s a possibility,” Professor Stefan said. He decided not to mention that some of these universes might not contain just other, equally slow, versions of Brian, but potentially destructive beings. He was making some progress with Brian, and didn’t want to spoil it all by introducing nameless horrors from the beyond.

“But how has this happened?” said Brian.

Professor Stefan shifted awkwardly on his seat.

“What may have occurred—and I stress ‘may,’ because we don’t want people blaming us for things that we might not have done, and especially not for things that we might
actually
have done—is that, in the course of the Collider experiments,
the skins separating some of the universes within the Multiverse might have been worn a little thin, thus enabling us to peer through them into other realms.”

“Weren’t we talking about twigs a moment ago?”

“We were, but forget the twigs. We’re back on skins.”

“So why can’t the people in these other universes see us when we see them?”

Brian really was asking the most awkward questions, thought Professor Stefan. He began mentally weighing his empty patience bucket and practicing his swing.

“Think of them as those windows in police stations that look like plain old mirrors on one side but, if you’re sitting on the other side, allow you to watch suspects being questioned.” Professor Stefan had just thought of this explanation, and was quite pleased with it, even if it meant moving from twigs to skins to police stations. “That would explain why we can see them, but they can’t see us.”

“Oh,” said Brian.

It made a kind of sense, in a not very sensible way.

“So we’re not going to talk about ghosts anymore, okay?” said Professor Stefan.

“Okay.”

“Because they’re not ghosts, not in the way that you think, and they can’t see you or hurt you.”

“Er, yes, right.”

“And we’re not going to mention them to policemen, or anyone else, isn’t that right?”

“Absolutely.”

“There’s a good chap. Now, back to work you go. Milk, two sugars, and a Jammie Dodger, please.”

Brian did as he was told. He made a large pot of tea, put some mugs and a plate of Jammie Dodgers beside it on the tray, added a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar, and looked at his handiwork. It was all very neat and tidy. He picked up the tray, and instantly his hands began shaking so much that the Jammie Dodgers were awash with tea and milk before he even managed to get halfway to the door.

“Oh dear,” said Brian.

He turned round to return to the kitchen counter, and stopped dead.

There was a not-ghost in the room with him.

In Which a Scientist Tries to Be Cleverer than Maria, and Fails

T
HE BELL ABOVE THE
sweetshop door jangled. It was Professor Hilbert’s turn to sell sweets for a couple of hours, but then it
always
seemed to be Professor Hilbert’s turn. Professor Stefan didn’t like dealing with children and, on the two occasions Dorothy had been left in charge, she had eaten so many caramel chews that her jaw had swollen on one side, making her look as though she was concealing a golf ball in her mouth. As for Brian, his hands continued to tremble so much that he inevitably poured more sweets on the floor than he managed to put into bags. If Brian and Dorothy had been left in charge, Mr. Pennyfarthinge’s would have gone out of business in a week.

Professor Hilbert was engaged in mapping reported sightings of strange phenomena in and around Biddlecombe, which was no simple task, as
everything
about Biddlecombe seemed strange, even the stuff that people had begun to regard as comparatively normal. For example, it was widely accepted that something
unusual was living at the bottom of Miggin’s Pond, but attempts to discover precisely what it was had been hampered by the ducks, which were very protective of their new resident and tended to attack anyone who attempted anything more threatening than throwing bread at them. The long-dead, and very unpleasant, Bishop Bernard the Bad, who had popped back to life for a while with the sole intention of sticking hot pokers up people’s bottoms, had been reduced to bits of broken bone and mummified flesh, but on quiet evenings his remains could still be heard rattling angrily in the crypt beneath the church. It had been suggested that someone should go down and examine them, but since the person who had made the suggestion was Professor Stefan, and the someone he had in mind was anyone but himself, that suggestion had been put on hold.

Nevertheless, Professor Hilbert had still managed to pinpoint at least five areas of Biddlecombe in which unusual numbers of residents had recently complained of seeing spectral figures. Professor Hilbert shared Professor Stefan’s view that these were glimpses of parallel universes, although he also believed that there were other dimensions as yet unknown existing alongside these universes. From his interviews with the boy named Samuel Johnson, Professor Hilbert had come to some understanding of how beings from these other dimensions had entered our own, and had even managed to abduct humans from our world to theirs. Professor Hilbert suspected that Samuel Johnson wasn’t telling the scientists everything he knew, but Professor Hilbert didn’t mind. Like many adults, he believed that he was cleverer than any child and, quite possibly, most other adults. In
this, of course, he was wrong. Being clever is not just about how much you know, but about knowing that you really don’t know very much at all.