The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale (20 page)

Sergeant Rowan backed away. Above them, ranks of spiders moved across the ceiling, forcing the humans and Boswell to retreat farther to avoid having the spiders drop on them. More of the nasty creatures were spreading across the floor. There was a sense of purpose to their approach. The spiders were herding Samuel and the others, moving them closer and closer to the stairs.

In case they needed any more convincing, a massive shape disengaged itself from the darkest corner of the room and
moved steadily toward them. A beam of moonlight caught it, causing the eight black eyes in its head to gleam. It was the size of a small car, except small cars didn’t have eight legs and long poisonous fangs that dripped venom as the enormous spider detected the presence of prey.

“My pretty,”
said Miss Muffet, stroking the dense hairs on the spider’s head.
“Pretty is hungry.”

“You know,” said Sergeant Rowan, “perhaps we should see what’s upstairs after all.”

So they ascended to the next floor, and the spiders, thankfully, did not follow.

41
. “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” was written in 1944, although why anyone would want to wake up in the early hours of Christmas Day to find Santa Claus performing some makeshift implant dentistry on them remains to be seen, and would be likely to result in long-term trauma. What next? “All I Want for Christmas Is My Appendix Removed” or “. . . My Nose Broken and Reset”? What’s wrong with a train set, or a doll? Some people are very complicated.

42
. Damocles was reputed to have been a courtier in the court of Dionysius II, a tyrant ruler of Syracuse in the fourth century B.C. Perhaps unwisely, Damocles suggested that Dionysius was quite the lucky fellow to have such a nice throne, and lots of gold, and all of that power, so Dionysius invited Damocles to take a turn on the throne, just to try it out for size. Unfortunately, as with most tyrants, there was a catch, for Dionysius arranged for a big sword to be hung over the throne, held in place by a single hair from the tail of a horse. Not surprisingly, Damocles didn’t care much for sitting in a throne under a sharp blade that might, at any moment, drop on his head with unpleasant consequences, and after a while he politely asked Dionysius if he might be allowed to sit somewhere else instead. Dionysius, having had his fun, agreed. The moral is that those in power are always in peril, too, especially if they’re tyrants whom nobody likes. The Sword of Damocles is thus very famous, much more so than the lesser-known Onion of Unhappiness and the Custard Tart of Doom.

43
. You know the one:

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet

Eating her curds and whey,

Along came a spider,

Who sat down beside her

And frightened Miss Muffet away.

Or alternatively:

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet

Eating her curds and whey,

Along came a spider,

Who sat down beside her

We lose lots of Miss Muffets that way.

44
. If swallowing a spider sounds unpleasant, it should be noted that most of us consume bits of spiders and insects every day. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration has even published a guide to the level of insect fragments permitted in food. Frozen spinach is allowed fifty aphids or mites per one hundred grams, peanut butter can have thirty insect fragments per one hundred grams, and chocolate is allowed to have sixty. Don’t worry, though: insects are an excellent source of protein. So eat up, they’re good for you.

Incidentally, in 1911 a scientist named C. F. Hodge calculated that if a pair of houseflies started breeding in April and continued until August, their offspring, if they all survived, would cover the Earth forty-seven feet deep by August. So by accidentally eating the odd fly here and there, you’re saving the Earth from being buried in them. Well done, you! Try them with ketchup. They’re tasty. (Warning: May not actually be tasty.)

In Which Constable Peel Is Reduced to Tears of Unhappiness

N
URD DECIDED THAT THE
scenes of Christmas chaos in Biddlecombe were very inventive, even for someone who had previously witnessed an invasion by the forces of Hell itself. It was one thing to encounter people being attacked by, and fighting against, assorted demons, ghouls, and chthonic
⁴⁵
forces, which were, by and large, simply terrifying, and therefore capable of being understood on those terms. It was quite another to witness a running battle in August Derleth Park between the Biddlecombe Ladies’ Football Team and a half-dozen very rough-looking fairies that had climbed
down from the tops of various Christmas trees with murder on their minds. So far, the Biddlecombe Ladies seemed to have the upper hand, mainly because the Biddlecombe Ladies were bigger than some of the Biddlecombe Gentlemen, and had such a reputation for violence on the pitch that opposing teams had been known to injure themselves at first sight of them, just to save the ladies the effort. The fairies were doing some damage with their wands, though, which had been weaponized by the addition of chains and spiked metal balls.

“Those fairies are walking a bit funny,” said Wormwood.

“You’d walk a bit funny, too, if someone stuck a Christmas tree up you,” said Nurd.

A large troop of elves crossed their path, struggling beneath the weight of a tree trunk that they were hoping to use to break down the door of the post office. It was quite clear to Nurd and Wormwood that the tree trunk, while heavy enough to use as a battering ram, was too heavy for even a great many elves to carry for any distance.

“Weeeee!” urged one of the lead elves. “Weeeee!”

Nurd and Wormwood watched as first one set of legs buckled, and then another. By the time the third set went, there was only time for a single, worried “oh-oh” before the competition between the elves and the tree trunk was won by the trunk with a crushing victory, leaving various elf limbs sticking out from beneath it.

“Ow,” said a small voice.

One lead elf, who had managed to escape being trapped through some nifty footwork, looked pleadingly at Nurd and Wormwood for help.

“Weeeee?” it said. “Weeeee?”

Nurd trod on it.

Farther along the way, they saw a giant ferocious reindeer with sharp horns and black eyes standing before a herd of local deer as it tried to incite them to rebellion.

“Rise up!” cried the demon reindeer. “Rise up against the puny humans who know you only as Bambi, the oppressors who think you’re cute but occasionally eat you in stews, or with parsnips and a reduction of juniper berries.”

The local deer did what local deer do, which was to glance nervously from the stranger to one another before returning to eating grass in the hope that it would go away and stop bothering them.

“Oh, have it your way, then,” said the demon reindeer. It looked at the grass. It nibbled a bit. Wow, it thought, the grass was rather good. It ate some more. It continued to graze happily until it was joined by a couple of other demon reindeer who’d had no more luck starting the deer revolution than it had.

“What do you think you’re doing?” asked the leader of the demon reindeer.

The lone demon reindeer did some quick thinking. “Trying to win their trust?” it suggested.

“No, you’re just eating grass. Stop it and come with us. We must sow fear and chaos. The Shadows are about to fall.”

The demon reindeer nibbled one last piece of grass and joined the rest of the demon reindeer herd. It paused only to look back at the local deer and whisper, “Don’t eat it all, right?
Save some for me. Seriously. Please. You’re really lovely deer, and very handsome. Sorry I shouted at you.”

The deer ignored it. After all, it wasn’t fawning season.
⁴⁶

Fires had broken out in houses and gardens. On Wells Street, a large wolf was trying to blow down a house made of bricks while the lady inside threw pots at it from an upstairs window. A troll had hidden under a canal bridge, hoping to spring out and trap unwary travelers, but that was Bill the Tramp’s bridge, and he wasn’t about to share it with anyone. Bill had tied the unconscious troll to a shopping cart and left it outside the police station with a note attached that read “Possibly from abroad.” Meanwhile, Mr. Thompson the greengrocer, who did not like competition, had found a wicked stepmother going around with a basket of apples for sale and had forced her to hide in a dustbin to escape his wrath, and his well-aimed fruit and vegetables.

A water main had burst and was already starting to freeze. It was growing colder. Nurd hadn’t noticed before. He looked at Wormwood. The tip of Wormwood’s nose had turned blue.

“Your nose has turned blue,” Nurd told him.

“Has it? It was feeling a bit funny.”

Wormwood scratched at his nose. It fell off in his hand. He peered at it, then shrugged. These things happened, or they happened to Wormwood. He excavated a disturbingly filthy handkerchief from somewhere on his person, carefully wrapped his nose in it, then stuck it in his pocket for safekeeping.

“Why did you wrap it in a handkerchief?” asked Nurd.

“In case I sneeze,” said Wormwood. “I don’t want to make a mess.”

“Ah,” said Nurd. “Very sensible.”

They walked on, offering Nurd time to think about what Wormwood had just said. Nurd stopped walking, gave Wormwood a hard flick on the ear, and they continued on their way.

Snow fell on them. Nurd looked up, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight. The night was so clear that the sky was filled with stars, like millions of gemstones scattered across a great swatch of dark cloth. Nurd had never seen so many. They took his breath away, but there was something wrong about this sky. It seemed blacker than he remembered, which made the stars shine brighter. The problem was that they weren’t the right stars. The constellations had changed. No, that wasn’t quite true. Nurd thought that he could still pick out Gemini, and Draco, and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great Bear and the Little Bear, but other stars were overlaid upon them. They were dimmer, but growing in intensity. It was as though one solar system were somehow intruding on another.

Nurd found Polaris, the North Star, the center of the night sky, which had guided travelers on land and sea ever since the earliest days of exploration. Once Polaris was visible it was hard to be lost, for it marked the way due north. There was consolation in its presence.

As Nurd watched, the great star blinked once, and disappeared.

• • •

Dan and the dwarfs were still being pursued, although not very quickly. The Nosferati, as Dan had dubbed them, were addicted to sneaking along, their long fingers grasping, their shadows stretching ahead of them, almost touching the heels of Dozy, who was bringing up the rear. But they did so very, very slowly, and had a fondness for stopping occasionally and making scary faces.

And while there was no doubt that they were horrible, and nasty, and smelled of the grave, they might have been more troubling had their every move not been accompanied by music played on an unseen organ. Every footstep, every raised hand, every arch of the eyebrows came with a tune. They were monsters from a silent movie, and in the days of silent movies each cinema would pay an organist to play along with the film. It was part of the deal, and even these Nosferati, liberated from picture frames, had to play by the rules.

“I wish that music would stop,” said Dan. “It sounds like the ice cream van from Hell.”

The music was bothering the Nosferati as well. Some of them snatched at the air, as though trying to pull the notes from the ether and grind them into musical dust. It was no good. The unseen organ kept on playing.

It was Jolly who wondered aloud if the Nosferati had ever even heard the organ music before. By now, Dan and the dwarfs had slowed from a run to a stroll, as it was clear that the Nosferati, though a nuisance, weren’t likely to catch up with them any time soon.

“I mean, they were in a silent film,” said Jolly, “which was, you know, silent. It was only in the real world, our world, that the music played. Imagine if, every time you took a step, there was someone banging away on an organ behind you. It’d drive you crazy. They’d have to lock you away before you killed him.”

The Nosferati had stopped making any progress at all. They were now curled up in balls with their coats over their heads, or were trying to jam their fingers in their ears, which didn’t work because their fingernails were too long. One of them was banging his forehead repeatedly against a wall.

“See?” said Jolly. “There’s only so much of it you can take before—”

The one-eyed Nosferatu, the one who had had his eye (singular) on Dozy, started to shake. He raised a questioning finger as if to say, “Hang on a minute, this doesn’t feel right,” and then his head exploded. As he had been undead for a very long time, there wasn’t much blood or brain to contend with. His head simply disappeared in a puff of gray dust, and his body quickly followed.

This began a chain reaction of exploding heads, and bodies collapsing like old pillars, filling the basement with the dust of the undead. When it finally settled, Dan and the dwarfs were all that remained standing, although they were now covered from head to toe in gray bits of vampire. The few surviving Nosferati who had managed to plug their ears beat a hasty retreat.

Angry coughed up ash.

“I think I swallowed some,” he said. “That can’t be good for me.”

“Look,” said Dozy. “It’s a lift.”

And it was. It was rickety and old and bore an unhappy resemblance to a cage, but it was definitely a lift of sorts. Its floor was made of wood, and its walls were lined with velvet. Instead of a door, it had a metal gate that could be pulled across and secured.

Dozy poked his head inside.

“I don’t see any buttons,” he said. “There’s a control lever, though.”

He stepped into the lift and gave the lever an experimental tug, but nothing happened.