Good Omens
Had she been studious enough to be accepted as an internationally glamorous jet.. setter, or a dental assistant (her second choice of profession), or indeed, anything other than a telephone salesperson in that particular office, she would have had a longer, and probably more fulfilled, life.
Perhaps not a very much longer life, all things considered, it being the Day of Armageddon, but several hours anyway.
For that matter, all she really needed to do for a longer life was not ring the number she had just dialed, listed on her sheet as the Mayfair home of, in the best traditions of tenth.. hand mail.. order lists, Mr. A. J. Cowlley.
But she had dialed. And she had waited while it rang four times. And she had said, “Oh, pout, another ansaphone,” and started to put down the handset.
But then something climbed out of the earpiece. Something very big, and very angry.
It looked a little like a maggot. A huge, angry maggot made out of thousands and thousands of tiny little maggots, all writhing and screaming, millions of little maggot mouths opening and shutting in fury, and every one of them was screaming “Crowley.”
It stopped screaming. Swayed blindly, seemed to be taking stock of where it was.
Then it went to pieces.
The thing split into thousands of thousands of writhing gray maggots. They flowed over the carpet, up over the desks, over Lisa Morrow and her nine colleagues; they flowed into their mouths, up their nostrils, into their lungs; they burrowed into flesh and eyes and brains and lights, reproducing wildly as they went, filling the room with a towering mess of writhing flesh and gunk. The whole began to flow together, to coagulate into one huge entity that filled the room from floor to ceiling, pulsing gently.
A mouth opened in the mass of flesh, strands of something wet and sticky adhering to each of the not.. exactly lips, and Hastur said:
“I needed that.”
Spending half an hour trapped on an ansaphone with only Aziraphale’s message for company had not improved his temper.
Neither did the prospect of having to report back to Hell, and having to explain why he hadn’t returned half an hour earlier, and, more importantly, why he was not accompanied by Crowley.
Hell did not go a bundle on failures.
On the plus side, however, he at least knew what Aziraphale’s message was. The knowledge could probably buy him his continued existence.
And anyway, he reflected, if he were going to have to face the possible wrath of the Dark Council, at least it wouldn’t be on an empty stomach.
The room filled with thick, sulphurous smoke. When it cleared, Hastur was gone. There was nothing left in the room but ten skeletons, picked quite clean of meat, and some puddles of melted plastic with, here and there, a gleaming fragment of metal that might once have been part of a telephone. Much better to have been a dental assistant.
But, to look on the bright side, all this only went to prove that evil contains the seeds of its own destruction. Right now, across the country, people who would otherwise have been made just that little bit more tense and angry by being summoned from a nice bath, or having their names mispronounced at them, were instead feeling quite untroubled and at peace with the world. As a result of Hastur’s action a wave of low.. grade goodness started to spread exponentially through the population, and millions of people who ultimately would have suffered minor bruises of the soul did not in fact do so. So that was all right.
* * *
You wouldn’t have known it as the same car. There was scarcely an inch of it undented. Both front lights were smashed. The hubcaps were long gone. It looked like the veteran of a hundred demolition derbies.
The pavements had been bad. The pedestrian underpass had been worse. The worst bit had been crossing the River Thames. At least he’d had the foresight to roll up all the windows.
Still, he was here, now.
In a few hundred yards he’d be on the M40; a fairly clear run up to Oxfordshire. There was only one snag: once more between Crowley and the open road was the M25. A screaming, glowing ribbon of pain and dark light. [Not actually an oxymoron. It’s the color past ultra.. violet. The technical term for it is infrablack. It can be seen quite easily under experimental conditions. To perform the experiment simply select a healthy brick wall with a good run.. up, and, lowering your head, charge. The color that flashes in bursts behind your eyes, behind the pain, just before you die, is infra.. black.]
Odegra. Nothing could cross it and survive.
Nothing mortal, anyway. And he wasn’t sure what it would do to a demon. It couldn’t kill him, but it wouldn’t be pleasant.
There was a police roadblock in front of the flyover before him. Burnt.. out wrecks.. .. some still burning.. testified to the fate of previous cars that had to drive across the flyover above the dark road.
The police did not look happy.
Crowley shifted down into second gear, and gunned the accelerator.
He went through the roadblock at sixty. That was the easy bit.
Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone’s quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there’s a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented.
Whatever the statistics were, they had just gone up by one.
The leather seatcovers began to smoke. Staring ahead of him, Crowley fumbled left.. handedly on the passenger seat for Agnes Nutter’s Nice and Accurate Prophecies~ moved it to the safety of his lap. He wished she’d prophecied this.
[She had. It read:
A street of light will screem, the black chariot of the Serpente will flayme, and a Queene wille sing quickfilveres songes no moar.
Most of the family had gone along with Gelatly Device, who wrote a brief monograph in the 1830s explaining it as a metaphor for the banishment of Weishaupt’s Illuminati from Bavaria in 1785.]
Then the flames engulfed the car.
He had to keep driving.
On the other side of the flyover was a further police roadblock, to prevent the passage of cars trying to come into London. They were laughing about a story that had just come over the radio, that a motorbike cop on the M6 had flagged down a stolen police car, only to discover the driver to be a large octopus.
Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down.. to.. earth police force in Britain.
It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met.
It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour.