“How about a game of chess?” suggested Spike.
“Oh, no!” said Raum, wagging a reproachful finger. “We don’t fall for that one anymore. Now, who’s it going to be?”
“You can take me,” said Spike.
“No!” I cried, but Raum merely laughed. He laughed long and loud. He laughed again. Then some more. He laughed so long, in fact, that Spike and I looked at each other. But still Raum laughed. The plates and cups smashed on the dresser, and glasses that were upside down on the drainer broke into smithereens. More laughter. Louder, longer, harder, until suddenly and quite without warning he exploded into a million tiny fragments that filled the small kitchen like a red mist. Released from the ceiling, I fell to the floor via the kitchen table, which was luckily a bit frail and had nothing on it. I was slightly dazed but got up to see…the real Major Pickles, standing where Raum had been, still holding the steel bayonet that had dispatched the demon back to hell.
“Hah!” said the elderly little gent with an aggressive twinkle in his eye. “They don’t like the taste of cold steel up ’em!”
He had several days of stubble and was dressed in torn pajamas and covered in soil.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“He thought he could keep me prisoner in the garden shed,” replied the pensioner resolutely, “but it was only fifteen yards nornoreast under the patio to the geranium bed.”
“You dug your way out?”
“Yes, and would have been quicker, too, if I’d had a soup spoon instead of this.”
He showed me a very worn and bent teaspoon.
“Or a spade?” I ventured.
“Hah!” he snorted contemptuously. “Spades are for losers.” He looked up and noticed Spike. “I say, you there, sir—get off my ceiling this minute.”
“Nothing I’d like better.”
So we got Spike down and explained as best we could to the sprightly nonagenarian just who Raum was, something that he seemed to have very little trouble understanding.
“Good Lord, man!” he said at last. “You mean I killed a demon? There’s a notch for the cricket bat, and no mistake.”
“Sadly, no,” replied Spike. “You just relegated him to the second sphere—he’ll not reappear on earth for a decade or two and will get a serious lashing from the Dark One into the bargain.”
“Better than he deserves,” replied Major Pickles, checking the cookie jar. “The rotten blighter has pigged all my Jaffa cakes.”
“Spike,” I said, pointing at a desk diary I’d found on the counter, “we’re not the only people who have had an appointment this morning.”
He and Major Pickles bent over to have a look, and there it was. This morning was the first of three days of soul entrapment that Raum had planned for the house-call professionals of Swindon, and we had been the third potential damnees. The first, an electrician, Raum had crossed out and made a note: “sickeningly pleasant.” The next, however, was for a new washing machine, and Raum had made three checks next to the name of the company: Wessex Kitchens. I rummaged through the papers on the counter-top and found a job sheet—the workman had been someone called Hans Towwel.
“Blast!” said Spike. “I hate it when Satan obtains a soul. Don’t get me wrong, some people deserve to be tortured for all eternity, but damnation without the possibility of salvation—it’s like a three-strike life sentence without the possibility of parole.”
I nodded in agreement. Obscene though the crime was, eternal damnation was several punishments too far.
“All this defeatist claptrap is making me sick to the craw,” growled Major Pickles. “No one is going to hell on my account—what happens if we get the money back?”
Spike snapped his fingers.
“Pickles, you’re a genius! Mr. Towwel doesn’t join the legion of the damned until he actually makes use of his ill-gotten gains. Thursday, call Wessex Kitchens and find out where he is—we need to get to him before he spends any of the cash.”
Ten minutes later we were heading at high speed toward the Greasy Monk, a popular medieval-themed eatery not far from the rebuilt cathedral of St. Zvlkx. I had tried to call Towwel’s cell phone, but it was switched off, and when I explained that there was a substantial sum of money missing from Major Pickles’s house, the boss of Wessex Kitchens said he was horrified—and promised to meet us there.
The restaurant was filled to capacity, as the cathedral of St. Zvlkx had just been nominated as the first GSD drop-around-if-you-want-but-hey-no-one’s-forcing-you place of worship/contemplation/meditation, and the many followers/adherents/vaguely interested parties of the single unified faith were having lunch and discussing ways in which they could best use the new multi-faith for overwhelming good.
As soon as we pushed open the doors Spike yelled, “Hans Towwel?” in his most commanding voice, and in the silence that followed, a man in a navy blue coverall signaled to us from behind a wooden plate of bread and dripping.
“Problems?” he said as we walked up.
“Could be,” said Spike. “Did you pay for that meal with the money you pinched from Major Pickles?”