The Gates

IX In Which We Learn a Little About the Gates of Hell, None of Which Is Entirely Helpful

AFTER HIS MOTHER LEFT to do her shopping, Samuel spent some time at the kitchen table, his chin cupped in his hands, considering his options. He knew that Mrs. Abernathy, or the entity that now occupied her body, was up to no good, but he was facing a problem encountered by young people the world over: how to convince adults that you were telling the truth about something in which they just did not want to believe.

His mother had told him not to play computer games, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use his computer at all. With Boswell at his heels, Samuel went up to his bedroom, sat at his desk, and began to search the internet. He decided to start with what he knew for certain, so he typed “gates of Hell” into the search engine.

The first reference that came up was to a huge bronze sculpture entitled La Porte de l’Enfer, which in English means The Gate of Hell, by an artist named Auguste Rodin. Apparently, Rodin was asked to create the sculpture in 1880, and promised to deliver it by 1885. Instead Rodin had still been working on it when he died in 1917. Samuel did a small calculation and discovered that Rodin had been thirty-two years late in delivering the sculpture. He wondered if Rodin might have been related to Mr. Armitage, their local painter, who had been supposed to paint their living room and dining room over a single weekend and had in fact taken six months to do it, and even then had left one wall and part of the ceiling unfinished. Samuel’s father and Mr. Armitage had had a big argument about it when they met in the street. “It’s not the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” Mr. Armitage had said. “I’ll get round to it when I can. You’ll want me flat on my back painting angels next.” [16]

Samuel’s father had suggested that if Mr. Armitage had been asked to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he would have taken twenty years instead of four, and still would have left God without a beard. At that point, Mr. Armitage had said a rude word and walked away, and Samuel’s father had ended up finishing the ceiling and wall himself.

Badly.

Anyway, while Rodin’s gates looked very impressive, they didn’t seem to have a blue light around them, and Samuel read that they had been inspired by a writer named Dante, and his book The Divine Comedy. Samuel suspected that neither Dante nor Rodin had ever really seen the gates of Hell, and had just taken a guess. [17]

After that, Samuel found some dodgy heavy-metal groups who either had songs named after the gates of Hell, or simply liked putting images of demons on their album covers in order to make themselves seem more terrifying than they really were, since most of them were just hairy chaps from nice families who had spent too much time alone in their bedrooms as teenagers. Samuel did discover that the Romans and Greeks believed the gates were guarded by a three-headed dog called Cerberus, who made sure that nobody who entered could ever leave, but they also believed a boatman took dead people across the River Styx, and Samuel had seen no sign of a river in the Abernathys’ basement.

He tried “doors of Hell,” but didn’t have any more luck. Finally, he just typed in “Hell,” and came up with lots of stuff. Some religions thought that Hell was hot and fiery, and others thought it was cold and gloomy. Samuel didn’t think any of them could know for certain, since by the time someone found out the truth he would be dead and the information would probably be too late to be useful. What he did find interesting was that most of the world’s religions believed in Hell, even if they didn’t always call it that, and lots of them had names for whatever they felt ruled over it: Satan, Yanluo Wang, Yamaraj. The one thing on which everyone seemed to agree was that Hell wasn’t a very pleasant place, and was not somewhere that you wanted to end up.

After an hour, Samuel stopped searching. He was frustrated. He wanted answers. He wanted to know what to do next.

He wanted to stop Mrs. Abernathy before she opened the gates.

Samuel’s mother was trying to work out if two small cans of baked beans were better value than one big can when a figure appeared beside her. It was Mrs. Abernathy.

“Hello, Mrs. Johnson,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “How lovely to see you.”

Mrs. Johnson didn’t know why exactly it was lovely for Mrs. Abernathy to see her. She and Mrs. Abernathy barely knew each other, and had never exchanged more than a polite hello in the past. [18]

“Well, it’s lovely to see you too,” Mrs. Johnson lied. Something about Mrs. Abernathy was making her uneasy. In fact, now that she thought about it, there were lots of things not quite right about the woman standing next to her. She was wearing a lovely black velvet overcoat, which was far too nice to wear for shopping, unless you were shopping for an even lovelier black overcoat and wanted to impress the salesperson. Her skin, although very pale, paler than Mrs. Johnson remembered from their previous brief meetings, had a bluish tinge to it, and the veins beneath her skin were more obvious than before. Her eyes too were very blue. They seemed to burn with a faint flame, like a gas fire. Mrs. Abernathy was wearing lots of strong perfume, but she still smelled a little funny, and not in a ho-ho way.

As Mrs. Johnson looked at Mrs. Abernathy, and inhaled her perfume, she felt herself becoming sleepy. Those eyes drew her in, and the fire within them grew more intense.

“How is your delightful son?” Mrs. Abernathy asked. “Samuel, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, who couldn’t remember anyone calling Samuel “delightful” before. “Samuel.”

“I was wondering if he ever mentioned me to you?”

Mrs. Johnson heard the words emerge from her mouth before she was even aware that she was thinking them.

“Why, yes,” she said. “He was talking about you only this morning.”

Mrs. Abernathy smiled, but the smile died somewhere around her nostrils.

“And what did he say?”

“He seemed to think…”

“Yes?”

“… that you were trying…”

“Go on.”

“… to open…”

By now, Mrs. Abernathy was leaning in very close to Mrs. Johnson. Mrs. Abernathy’s breath stank, and her teeth were yellow. Her lipstick was bright red, and slightly smeared. In fact, thought Mrs. Johnson, it looked a little like blood. Mrs. Abernathy’s tongue flicked out, and for just a moment, Mrs. Johnson could have sworn that it was forked, like a snake’s tongue.

“… gates…”

“What gates?” said Mrs. Abernathy. “What gates?” Her hand reached for Mrs. Johnson, gripping her shoulder. Her nails dug into Mrs. Johnson’s arm, causing her to wince.

The pain was enough to bring Mrs. Johnson out of her daze. She took a step back, and blinked. When she opened her eyes, Mrs. Abernathy was standing farther away from her, a strange, troubled look on her face.

Try as she might, Mrs. Johnson couldn’t remember what it was they had been talking about. Something about Samuel, she thought, but what?

“Are you all right, Mrs. Johnson?” asked Mrs. Abernathy. “You look a little unwell.”

“No, I’m fine,” said Mrs. Johnson, although she didn’t feel fine. She could still smell Mrs. Abernathy’s perfume and, worse, whatever it was the perfume was being used to disguise. She wanted Mrs. Abernathy to go away. In fact, she felt that it was very important for her to stay as far from Mrs. Abernathy as possible.

“Well, take care,” said Mrs. Abernathy. “It was nice talking to you. We should do it more often.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Johnson, meaning, “No.”

No, no, no, no, no.

When she arrived home Samuel was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing on a sheet of paper, using crayons. He hid it away when she entered, but she glimpsed a blue circle. Samuel looked at her with concern.

“Are you okay, Mum?”

“Yes, dear. Why?”

“You look sick.”

Mrs. Johnson glanced in the mirror by the sink.

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.” She turned to Samuel. “I met-,” she began to say, then stopped. She couldn’t remember who she had met. A woman? Yes, a woman, but the name wouldn’t come to her. Then she wasn’t certain that it had been a woman at all, and seconds later she wasn’t sure she’d met anyone. It was as though her brain were a big house, and someone was turning off the lights in every room, one by one.

“Met who, Mum?” asked Samuel.

“I… don’t know,” said Mrs. Johnson. “I think I’m going to lie down for a while.”

Mrs. Johnson was beginning to wonder if she might not be coming down with something. The day before, she could have sworn that she’d heard a voice coming from the cupboard beneath the stairs, just as she was putting away the vacuum cleaner on the way out to meet her friends.

She left the kitchen and Samuel heard her go upstairs. When he went to check on her minutes later, his mother was already asleep. Her lips were moving, and Samuel thought she might have been having bad dreams. He wondered if he should call one of her friends, maybe Auntie Betty from up the road, then decided that he would just keep a close eye on his mother. He would let her sleep for now.

Samuel went back downstairs, and finished his drawing. He worked very slowly and carefully, trying to capture exactly what he had seen in the Abernathys’ basement. It was the third such drawing he had done. He had thrown the first two away because they weren’t quite accurate, but this one was better. It was nearly right, or as close to it as he was going to get. From a distance it looked more like a photograph than a drawing, for if there was one thing that Samuel was good at, it was art.

When he was done, he hid it carefully in his big atlas. He would show it to someone. He just had to decide who that someone should be.

Mrs. Johnson didn’t get up until later that evening. Samuel stayed downstairs and watched television, reckoning that his mum wouldn’t mind, despite what she had said earlier. After a time, he got bored and did something else that he wasn’t supposed to do.

He went out to the garage at the back of the house to sit in his dad’s car.

The 1961 Aston Martin DB4 Coupe was his dad’s pride and joy, and Samuel had been for only a handful of trips in it before his dad left, and even then his dad had seemed to resent Samuel’s presence slightly, like a child forced to allow another child to play with his favorite toy. Because his dad was living in an apartment in the north, with no garage, he had decided to leave the car in Biddlecombe for now. In a way Samuel was pleased, because he believed that meant his dad might return home at some point. If he took the car away permanently, though, there would be nothing of him left. It would be a sign, thought Samuel, a sign that the marriage was over and it was now just Samuel and his mum.

When Mrs. Johnson rose, they ordered in pizza, but his mum couldn’t finish hers and went back to bed. Every time she tried to recall what had happened at the supermarket her head began to hurt, and intermingled smells came to her, perfume and something rotten and bad that the scent would be able to hide for only so long.

That night, Mrs. Johnson had bad dreams, but they were only dreams.

Samuel Johnson’s nightmares, on the other hand, came alive.