Good Omens

The outgoing message tape began to turn on his ansaphone. Then there was a beep, and, as the incoming message tape turned, a voice from the speaker screamed, after the beep, “Right! What? … You bloody snake!”

The little red message light began to flash.

On and off and on and off, like a tiny, red, angry eye.

Crowley really wished he had some more holy water and the time to hold the cassette in it until it dissolved. But getting hold of Ligur’s terminal bath had been dangerous enough, he’d had it for years just in case, and even its presence in the room made him uneasy. Or … or maybe … yes, what would happen if he put the cassette in the car? He could play Hastur over and over again, until he turned into Freddie Mercury. No. He might be a bastard, but you could only go so far.

There was a rumble of distant thunder.

He had no time to spare.

/> He had nowhere to go.

He went anyway. He ran down to his Bentley and drove toward the West End as if all the demons of hell were after him. Which was more or less the case.

MADAME TRACY HEARD Mr. Shadwell’s slow tread come up the stairs. It was slower than usual, and paused every few steps. Normally he came up the stairs as if he hated every one of them.

She opened her door. He was leaning against the landing wall.

“Why, Mr. Shadwell,” she said, “whatever have you done to your hand?”

“Get away frae me, wumman,” Shadwell groaned. “I dinna know my ane powers!”

“Why are you holding it out like that?”

Shadwell tried to back into the wall.

“Stand back, I tell ye! I canna be responsible!”

“What on earth has happened to you, Mr. Shadwell?” said Madame Tracy, trying to take his hand.

“Nothing on earth! Nothing on earth!”

She managed to grab his arm. He, Shadwell, scourge of evil, was powerless to resist being drawn into her flat.

He’d never been in it before, at least in his waking moments. His dreams had furnished it in silks, rich hangings, and what he thought of as scented ungulants. Admittedly, it did have a bead curtain in the entrance to the kitchenette and a lamp made rather inexpertly from a Chianti bottle, because Madame Tracy’s apprehension of what was chic, like Aziraphale’s, had grounded around 1953. And there was a table in the middle of the room with a velvet cloth on it and, on the cloth, the crystal ball which increasingly was Madame Tracy’s means of earning a living.

“I think you could do with a good lie-down, Mr. Shadwell,” she said, in a voice that brooked no argument, and led him on into the bedroom. He was too bewildered to protest.

“But young Newt is out there,” Shadwell muttered, “in thrall to heathen passions and occult wiles.”

“Then I’m sure he’ll know what to do about them,” said Madame Tracy briskly, whose mental picture of what Newt was going through was probably much closer to reality than was Shadwell’s. “And I’m sure he wouldn’t like to think of you getting yourself worked up into a state here. Just you lie down, and I’ll make us both a nice cup of tea.”

She disappeared in a clacking of bead curtains.

Suddenly Shadwell was alone on what he was just capable of recalling, through the wreckage of his shattered nerves, was a bed of sin, and right at this moment was incapable of deciding whether that was in fact better or worse than not being alone on a bed of sin. He turned his head to take in his surroundings.

Madame Tracy’s concepts of what was erotic stemmed from the days when young men grew up thinking that women had beach balls affixed firmly in front of their anatomy, Brigitte Bardot could be called a sex kitten without anyone bursting out laughing, and there really were magazines with names like Girls, Giggles and Garters. Somewhere in this cauldron of permissiveness she had picked up the idea that soft toys in the bedroom created an intimate, coquettish air.

Shadwell stared for some time at a large, threadbare teddy bear, which had one eye missing and a torn ear. It probably had a name like Mr. Buggins.

He turned his head the other way. His gaze was blocked by a pajama case shaped like an animal that may have been a dog but, there again, might have been a skunk. It had a cheery grin.

“Urg,” he said.

But recollection kept storming back. He really had done it. No one else in the Army had ever exorcised a demon, as far as he knew. Not Hopkins, not Siftings, not Diceman. Probably not even Witchfinder Company Sergeant Major Narker,38 who held the all-time record for most witches found. Sooner or later every Army runs across its ultimate weapon and now it existed, Shadwell reflected, on the end of his arm.

Well, screw No First Use. He’d have a bit of a rest, seeing as he was here, and then the Powers of Darkness had met their match at last …