Good Omens

“I know. But there’s, er, some evidence that that’s how it works,” said Anathema.

They looked at the map spread out between them. Beside them the radio murmured. Newt was very aware that a woman was sitting next to him. Be professional, he told himself. You’re a soldier, aren’t you? Well, practically. Then act like a soldier. He thought hard for a fraction of a second. Well, act like a respectable soldier on his best behavior, then. He forced his attention back to the matter at hand.

“Why Lower Tadfield?” said Newt. “I just got interested because of the weather. Optimal microclimate, they call it. That means it’s a small place with its own personal nice weather.”

He glanced at her notebooks. There was definitely something odd about the place, even if you ignored Tibetans and UFOs, which seemed to be infesting the whole world these days. The Tadfield area didn’t only have the kind of weather you could set your calendar by, it was also remarkably resistant to change. No one seemed to build new houses there. The population didn’t seem to move much. There seemed to be more woods and hedges than you’d normally expect these days. The only battery farm to open in the area had failed after a year or two, and been replaced by an old-fashioned pig farmer who let his pigs run loose in his apple orchards and sold the pork at premium prices. The two local schools seemed to soldier on in blissful immunity from the changing fashions of education. A motorway which should have turned most of Lower Tadfield into little more than the Junction 18 Happy Porker Rest Area changed course five miles away, detoured in a great semicircle, and continued on its way oblivious to the little island of rural changelessness it had avoided. No one quite seemed to know why; one of the surveyors involved had a nervous breakdown, a second had become a monk, and a third had gone off to Bali to paint nude women.

It was as if a large part of the twentieth century had marked a few square miles Out of Bounds.

Anathema pulled another a card out of her index and flicked it across the table.

2315. Sum say It cometh in London Town, or New Yorke, butte they be Wronge, for the plase is Taddes Fild, Stronge inne hys powr, he cometh like a knight inne the fief, he divideth the Worlde into 4 partes, he bringeth the storme. [. . . 4 years early [New Amsterdam till 1664] … . . . Taddville, Norfolk … . . . Tardesfield, Devon … . . . Tadfield, Oxon …

“I had to go and look through a lot of county records,” said Anathema.

“Why’s this one 2315? It’s earlier than the others.”

“Agnes was a bit slapdash about timing. I don’t think she always knew what went where. I told you, we’ve spent ages devising a sort of system for chaining them together.”

Newt looked at a few cards. For example:

1111. An the Great Hound sharl coom, and the Two Powers sharl watch in Vane, for it Goeth where is its Master, Where they Wot Notte, and he sharl name it, True to Ittes Nature, and Hell sharl flee it. [? Is this something to do with Bismark? [A F Device, June 8, 1888] . . . ? . . . Schleswig-Holstein?]

“She’s being unusually obtuse for Agnes,” said Anathema.

3017. I see Four Riding, bringing the Ende, and the Angells of Hell ride with them, And Three sharl Rise. And Four and Four Together be Four, an the Dark Angel sharl Own Defeat, Yette the Manne sharl claim his Own. [The Apocalyptic Horsemen The Man = Pan, The Devil (The Witch Trials of Lancashire, Brewster, 1782). ?? I feel good Agnes had drunk well this night, [Quincy Device, Octbr. 15, 1789] I concur. We are all human, alas. [Miss O J Device, Janry. 5, 1854]]

“Why Nice and Accurate?” said Newt.

“Nice as in exact, or precise,” said Anathema, in the weary tones of one who’d explained this before. “That’s what it used to mean.”

“But look,” said Newt—

—he’d nearly convinced himself about the non-existence of the UFO, which was clearly a figment of his imagination, and the Tibetan could have been a, well, he was working on it, but whatever it was it wasn’t a Tibetan, but what he was more and more convinced of was that he was in a room with a very attractive woman, who appeared actually to like him, or at least not to dislike him, which was a definite first for Newt. And admittedly there seemed to be a lot of strange stuff going on, but if he really tried, poling the boat of common sense upstream against the raging current of the evidence, he could pretend it was all, well, weather balloons, or Venus, or mass hallucination.

In short, whatever Newt was now thinking with, it wasn’t his brain.

“But look,” he said, “the world isn’t really going to end now, is it? I mean, just look around. It’s not like there’s any international tension … well, any more than there normally is. Why don’t we leave this stuff for a while and just go and, oh, I don’t know, maybe we could just go for a walk or something, I mean—”

“Don’t you understand? There’s something here! Something that affects the area!” she said. “It’s twisted all the ley-lines. It’s protecting the area against anything that might change it! It’s … it’s … ” There it was again: the thought in her mind that she could not, was not allowed to grasp, like a dream upon waking.

The windows rattled. Outside, a sprig of jasmine, driven by the wind, started to bang insistently on the glass.

“But I can’t get a fix on it,” said Anathema, twisting her fingers together. “I’ve tried everything.”

“Fix?” said Newt.

“I’ve tried the pendulum. I’ve tried the theodolite. I’m psychic, you see. But it seems to move around.”

Newt was still in control of his own mind enough to do the proper translation. When most people said “I’m psychic, you see,” they meant “I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination / wear black nail varnish / talk to my budgie”; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she’d much prefer not to have.

“Armageddon moves around?” said Newt.

“Various prophecies say the Antichrist has to arise first,” said Anathema. “Agnes says he. I can’t spot him—”

“Or her,” said Newt.

“What?”