Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, Page 6

  “That’s great.”

  “So we’re going corporate. It’s time to blow the big one, am I right? California, I think. I want factories, restaurants, the whole schmear. We’ll keep the publishing arm, but it’s time to diversify. Yeah?”

  Frannie nodded. “Sounds good, Sable. We’ll need—”

  She was interrupted by a skeleton. A skeleton in a Dior dress, with tanned skin stretched almost to snapping point over the delicate bones of the skull. The skeleton had long blond hair and perfectly made-up lips: she looked like the person mothers around the world would point to, muttering, “That’s what’ll happen to you if you don’t eat your greens”; she looked like a famine-relief poster with style.

  She was New York’s top fashion model, and she was holding a book. She said, “Uh, excuse me, Mr. Sable, I hope you don’t mind me intruding, but, your book, it changed my life, I was wondering, would you mind signing it for me?” She stared imploringly at him with eyes deep-sunk in gloriously eyeshadowed sockets.

  Sable nodded graciously, and took the book from her.

  It was not surprising that she had recognized him, for his dark gray eyes stared out from his photo on the foil-embossed cover. Foodless Dieting: Slim Yourself Beautiful, the book was called; The Diet Book of the Century!

  “How do you spell your name?” he asked.

  “Sherryl. Two Rs, one Y, one L.”

  “You remind me of an old, old friend,” he told her, as he wrote swiftly and carefully on the title page. “There you go. Glad you liked it. Always good to meet a fan.”

  What he’d written was this:

  Sherryl,

  A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley

  for a penny, and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

  Rev. 6:6.

  Dr. Raven Sable.

  “It’s from the Bible,” he told her.

  She closed the book reverently and backed away from the table, thanking Sable, he didn’t know how much this meant to her, he had changed her life, truly he had. …

  He had never actually earned the medical degree he claimed, since there hadn’t been any universities in those days, but Sable could see she was starving to death. He gave her a couple of months at the outside. Foodless. Handle your weight problem, terminally.

  Frannie was stabbing at her laptop computer hungrily, planning the next phase in Sable’s transformation of the eating habits of the Western World. Sable had bought her the machine as a personal present. It was very, very expensive, very powerful, and ultra-slim. He liked slim things.

  “There’s a European outfit we can buy into for the initial toehold—Holdings (Holdings) Incorporated. That’ll give us the Liechtenstein tax base. Now, if we channel funds out through the Caymans, into Luxembourg, and from there to Switzerland, we could pay for the factories in … ”

  But Sable was no longer listening. He was remembering the exclusive little restaurant. It had occurred to him that he had never seen so many rich people so hungry.

  Sable grinned, the honest, open grin that goes with job satisfaction, perfect and pure. He was just killing time until the main event, but he was killing it in such exquisite ways. Time, and sometimes people.

  SOMETIMES HE WAS called White, or Blanc, or Albus, or Chalky, or Weiss, or Snowy, or any one of a hundred other names. His skin was pale, his hair a faded blond, his eyes light gray. He was somewhere in his twenties at a casual glance, and a casual glance was all anyone ever gave him.

  He was almost entirely unmemorable.

  Unlike his two colleagues, he could never settle down in any one job for very long.

  He had had all manner of interesting jobs in lots of interesting places.

  (He had worked at the Chernobyl Power Station, and at Windscale, and at Three Mile Island, always in minor jobs that weren’t very important.)

  He had been a minor but valued member of a number of scientific research establishments.

  (He had helped to design the petrol engine, and plastics, and the ring-pull can.)

  He could turn his hand to anything.

  Nobody really noticed him. He was unobtrusive; his presence was cumulative. If you thought about it carefully, you could figure out he had to have been doing something, had to have been somewhere. Maybe he even spoke to you. But he was easy to forget, was Mr. White.

  At this time he was working as deckhand on an oil tanker, heading toward Tokyo.

  The captain was drunk in his cabin. The first mate was in the head. The second mate was in the galley. That was pretty much it for the crew: the ship was almost completely automated. There wasn’t much a person could do.

  However, if a person just happened to press the EMERGENCY CARGO RELEASE switch on the bridge, the automatic systems would take care of releasing huge quantities of black sludge into the sea, millions of tons of crude oil, with devastating effect on the birds, fish, vegetation, animals, and humans of the region. Of course, there were dozens of fail-safe interlocks and foolproof safety backups but, what the hell, there always were.

  Afterwards, there was a huge amount of argument as to exactly whose fault it was. In the end it was left unresolved: the blame was apportioned equally. Neither the captain, the first mate, nor the second mate ever worked again.

  For some reason nobody gave much of a thought to Seaman White, who was already halfway to Indonesia on a tramp steamer piled high with rusting metal barrels of a particularly toxic weedkiller.

  AND THERE WAS ANOTHER. He was in the square in Kumbolaland. And he was in the restaurants. And he was in the fish, and in the air, and in the barrels of weedkiller. He was on the roads, and in houses, and in palaces, and in hovels.

  There was nowhere that he was a stranger, and there was no getting away from him. He was doing what he did best, and what he was doing was what he was.

  He was not waiting. He was working.

  HARRIET DOWLING returned home with her baby, which, on the advice of Sister Faith Prolix, who was more persuasive than Sister Mary, and with the telephonic agreement of her husband, she had named Warlock.

  The Cultural Attaché returned home a week later, and pronounced the baby the spit of his side of the family. He also had his secretary advertise in The Lady for a nanny.

  Crowley had seen Mary Poppins on television one Christmas (indeed, behind the scenes, Crowley had had a hand in most television; although it was on the invention of the game show that he truly prided himself). He toyed with the idea of a hurricane as an effective and incredibly stylish way of disposing of the queue of nannies that would certainly form, or possibly stack up in a holding pattern, outside the Cultural Attaché’s Regent’s Park residence.

  He contented himself with a wildcat tube strike, and when the day came, only one nanny turned up.

  She wore a knit tweed suit and discreet pearl earrings. Something about her might have said nanny, but it said it in an undertone of the sort employed by British butlers in a certain type of American film. It also coughed discreetly and muttered that she could well be the sort of nanny who advertises unspecified but strangely explicit services in certain magazines.

  Her flat shoes crunched up the gravel drive, and a gray dog padded silently by her side, white flecks of saliva dripping from its jaw. Its eyes glinted scarlet, and it glanced from side to side hungrily.

  She reached the heavy wooden door, smiled to herself, a brief satisfied flicker, and rang the bell. It donged gloomily.

  The door was opened by a butler, as they say, of the old school.13

  “I am Nanny Ashtoreth,” she told him. “And this,” she continued, while the gray dog at her side eyed the butler carefully, working out, perhaps, where it would bury the bones, “is Rover.”

  She left the dog in the garden, and passed her interview with flying colors, and Mrs. Dowling led the nanny to see her new charge.

  She smiled unpleasantly. “What a delightful child,” she said. “He’ll be wanting a little tricycle soon.”

  By one of those coincidenc
es, another new member of staff arrived the same afternoon. He was the gardener, and as it turned out he was amazingly good at his job. No one quite worked out why this should be the case, since he never seemed to pick up a shovel and made no effort to rid the garden of the sudden flocks of birds that filled it and settled all over him at every opportunity. He just sat in the shade while around him the residence gardens bloomed and bloomed.

  Warlock used to come down to see him, when he was old enough to toddle and Nanny was doing whatever it was she did on her afternoons off.

  “This here’s Brother Slug,” the gardener would tell him, “and this tiny little critter is Sister Potato Weevil. Remember, Warlock, as you walk your way through the highways and byways of life’s rich and fulsome path, to have love and reverence for all living things.”

  “Nanny says that wivving fings is fit onwy to be gwound under my heels, Mr. Fwancis,” said little Warlock, stroking Brother Slug, and then wiping his hand conscientiously on his Kermit the Frog overall.

  “You don’t listen to that woman,” Francis would say. “You listen to me.”

  At night, Nanny Ashtoreth sang nursery rhymes to Warlock.

  Oh, the grand old Duke of York

  He had Ten Thousand Men

  He Marched them Up To The Top of The Hill

  And Crushed all the nations of the world and brought them

  under the rule of Satan our master.

  and

  This little piggy went to Hades

  This little piggy stayed home

  This little piggy ate raw and steaming human flesh

  This little piggy violated virgins

  And this little piggy clambered over a heap of dead bodies to

  get to the top.

  “Bwuvver Fwancis the gardener says that I mus’ selfwesswy pwactice virtue an’ wuv to all wivving fings,” said Warlock.

  “You don’t listen to that man, darling,” the nanny would whisper, as she tucked him into his little bed. “You listen to me.”

  And so it went.

  The Arrangement worked perfectly. A no-score win. Nanny Ashtoreth bought the child a little tricycle, but could never persuade him to ride it inside the house. And he was scared of Rover.

  In the background Crowley and Aziraphale met on the tops of buses, and in art galleries, and at concerts, compared notes, and smiled.

  When Warlock was six, his nanny left, taking Rover with her; the gardener handed in his resignation on the same day. Neither of them left with quite the same spring in their step with which they’d arrived.

  Warlock now found himself being educated by two tutors.

  Mr. Harrison taught him about Attila the Hun, Vlad Drakul, and the Darkness Intrinsicate in the Human Spirit.14 He tried to teach Warlock how to make rabble-rousing political speeches to sway the hearts and minds of multitudes.

  Mr. Cortese taught him about Florence Nightingale,15 Abraham Lincoln, and the appreciation of art. He tried to teach him about free will, self-denial, and Doing unto Others as You Would Wish Them to Do to You.

  They both read to the child extensively from the Book of Revelation.

  Despite their best efforts Warlock showed a regrettable tendency to be good at maths. Neither of his tutors was entirely satisfied with his progress.

  When Warlock was ten he liked baseball; he liked plastic toys that transformed into other plastic toys indistinguishable from the first set of plastic toys except to the trained eye; he liked his stamp collection; he liked banana-flavor bubble gum; he liked comics and cartoons and his B.M.X. bike.

  Crowley was troubled.

  They were in the cafeteria of the British Museum, another refuge for all weary foot soldiers of the Cold War. At the table to their left two ramrod-straight Americans in suits were surreptitiously handing over a briefcase full of deniable dollars to a small dark woman in sunglasses; at the table on their right the deputy head of MI7 and the local KGB section officer argued over who got to keep the receipt for the tea and buns.

  Crowley finally said what he had not even dared to think for the last decade.

  “If you ask me,” Crowley said to his counterpart, “he’s too bloody normal.”

  Aziraphale popped another deviled egg into his mouth, and washed it down with coffee. He dabbed his lips with a paper napkin.

  “It’s my good influence,” he beamed. “Or rather, credit where credit’s due, that of my little team.”

  Crowley shook his head. “I’m taking that into account. Look—by now he should be trying to warp the world around him to his own desires, shaping it in his own image, that kind of stuff. Well, not actually trying. He’ll do it without even knowing it. Have you seen any evidence of that happening?”

  “Well, no, but … ”

  “By now he should be a powerhouse of raw force. Is he?”

  “Well, not as far as I’ve noticed, but … ”

  “He’s too normal.” Crowley drummed his fingers on the table. “I don’t like it. There’s something wrong. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

  Aziraphale helped himself to Crowley’s slice of angel cake. “Well, he’s a growing boy. And, of course, there’s been the heavenly influence in his life.”

  Crowley sighed. “I just hope he’ll know how to cope with the hell-hound, that’s all.”

  Aziraphale raised one eyebrow. “Hell-hound?”

  “On his eleventh birthday. I received a message from Hell last night.” The message had come during “The Golden Girls,” one of Crowley’s favorite television programs. Rose had taken ten minutes to deliver what could have been quite a brief communication, and by the time non-infernal service was restored Crowley had quite lost the thread of the plot. “They’re sending him a hell-hound, to pad by his side and guard him from all harm. Biggest one they’ve got.”

  “Won’t people remark on the sudden appearance of a huge black dog? His parents, for a start.”

  Crowley stood up suddenly, treading on the foot of a Bulgarian cultural attaché, who was talking animatedly to the Keeper of Her Majesty’s Antiques. “Nobody’s going to notice anything out of the ordinary. It’s reality, angel. And young Warlock can do what he wants to that, whether he knows it or not.”

  “When does it turn up, then? This dog? Does it have a name?”

  “I told you. On his eleventh birthday. At three o’clock in the afternoon. It’ll sort of home in on him. He’s supposed to name it himself. It’s very important that he names it himself. It gives it its purpose. It’ll be Killer, or Terror, or Stalks-by-Night, I expect.”

  “Are you going to be there?” asked the angel, nonchalantly.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the worlds,” said Crowley. “I do hope there’s nothing too wrong with the child. We’ll see how he reacts to the dog, anyway. That should tell us something. I hope he’ll send it back, or be frightened of it. If he does name it, we’ve lost. He’ll have all his powers and Armageddon is just around the corner.”

  “I think,” said Aziraphale, sipping his wine (which had just ceased to be a slightly vinegary Beaujolais, and had become a quite acceptable, but rather surprised, Chateau Lafitte 1875), “I think I’ll see you there.”

  Wednesday

  IT 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 ma
gical 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 … ?”