The Infernals aka Hell's Bells

XI

SAMUEL FELT BOSWELL LICKING his face. He tried to brush the dog away, but Boswell seemed insistent that he wake up. Samuel didn’t want to. His limbs ached, and his head hurt. He wondered if he might not be coming down with something.

Then he remembered: disappearing vans; a blue light; Mrs. Abernathy’s face in a puddle…

Mrs. Abernathy.

He opened his eyes.

He was lying on his side by the bank of a dark, muddy river that flowed viscously in the direction of a copse of crooked trees. Beneath his cheek was hard ground topped with sparse, blackened grass. He raised himself to his knees, and Boswell yipped with relief. Samuel gathered his dog into his arms and stroked him, all the while looking around and trying to get some sense of where he was. He had a memory of falling, and being aware that he was falling, but when he tried to stop himself he just fell faster. There had been a moment of compression and severe pain, and then nothing.

Above him were black clouds broken by veins of burning red. It was like looking into the heart of a volcano, and he experienced a sensation of dizziness as, briefly, up became down, and down became up, and he had a vision of himself kneeling at the bottom of a great sphere suspended in a furnace. He had to fight the urge to fall back and hold on to the ground. Instead he hugged Boswell tighter and said, “It’s okay, it’s all okay,” but he was trying to convince himself as much as the animal.

Mrs. Abernathy had done this, he knew, which meant that they could only be in one place: Hell. Somehow she had wrenched them from their world into hers, and that could only be for one purpose: she wanted revenge. Already, she would be looking for them.

Although he was now just thirteen, and no longer considered himself a child, Samuel wanted to cry. He wanted his mother; he wanted his friends. Back in Biddlecombe, when he had faced Mrs. Abernathy’s wrath, he had done so surrounded by familiar buildings, and with the support of those whom he loved, and who loved him in return. Here he was alone, except for Boswell, and it says much about the kind of boy Samuel was that, even in the midst of his own fear and sorrrow, he wished he had remembered to let go of Boswell’s leash before he was transported. His loyal dog had no business being here, and yet Samuel was also not a little grateful that Boswell had in fact come with him, for there was at least one other being who was on his side in this terrible place.

No, that wasn’t entirely true. Boswell was not the only one who cared about him. There was another. The question was: how could Samuel find him?

Wormwood tapped Nurd on the shoulder.

“Master, why have we stopped?”

The car, still disguised as a rock, had been making good progress across the Vale of Fruitless Journeys, as Nurd put as much distance as possible between themselves and the cave in which they had been hiding. The Vale was formed of massive slabs of brown stone on which the car left no tracks. To the west (or maybe it was to the south, such concepts as direction having little or no meaning in a place where reality struggled to maintain a grip on itself) they ended at the Forest of Broken Forms, where those who had been vain about their looks, and dismissive of those whom they didn’t consider as pretty as themselves, were condemned to spend their lives as ugly trees. But that way was too close to the Mountain of Despair for Nurd’s liking, and so they had proceeded in another direction, or what they hoped was another direction given that Hell had a habit of confounding such expectations, so that you might head off away from Point A with the best of intentions only to find yourself rapidly back at Point A without ever having veered from a straight line. Ultimately, they wanted to reach the Honeycomb Hills, where they could hide themselves before the Watcher or, worse, its mistress, came hunting for them.

But now Nurd had brought the car to a halt and was staring into the distance in the troubled manner of someone who thinks he may have left the gas on even though he can’t remember ever owning a gas oven.

“Master?” said Wormwood, by now growing concerned.

Nurd’s brow furrowed, and a single tear rolled down one of his cheeks as he whispered softly:

“Samuel?”

Mrs. Abernathy was not the only denizen of Hell who had been changed by experiencing the world of men at first hand. Nurd, too, had been altered. To begin with, he was a little kinder to Wormwood than he had been before, and not only because Wormwood knew how to keep the car running. During the long period of his banishment, Nurd had spent a lot of time moping, complaining, and generally bemoaning his lot in life. When he wasn’t doing that, he was usually hitting Wormwood on the head for being annoying. But since his return to Hell he had started to view Wormwood as, for want of a better word, a friend. Admittedly he might have preferred a friend who wasn’t as prone to waving a finger under Nurd’s nose and inviting him to look at what had just been excavated from some orifice of his body, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Similarly, Nurd had abandoned any ideas of ruling another world or becoming a serious demon; not that he’d ever been very keen on that to begin with, but he had now dispensed with his self-invented title “Scourge of Five Deities” and had decided not to go looking for any other demon’s job 24 as he was much happier not bothering anyone at all.

But, crucially, Nurd had also brought back with him a deep psychic and emotional connection to Samuel Johnson, the first person who had ever been kind to Nurd, and the first friend that Nurd had ever made. Had they lived in the same world, they would have been inseparable. Instead they were divided by time, and space, and the difficulties of crossing between worlds and dimensions. Despite all of those obstacles, each had held the memory of the other in his heart, and there were times as they slept when it seemed to them that they spoke to each other in their dreams. Not a day went by when one did not think of the other, and such feelings have a way of transcending the barriers that life may put in the way of people. An invisible energy linked these two beings, the boy and the demon, just as it connects all those who feel deeply for another, and the nature of that link had suddenly been altered for Nurd. He felt it more intensely than ever before, and he knew at once that Samuel was near. He was in this world, in this foul place where all things were said to reach the end of hope. But that was no longer true, for Nurd now had hope of better times, of a better way of existing, and it was Samuel who had given it to him.

Yet if Samuel was here, then it could not be of his own will. Nothing came to Hell willingly. Even the entities trapped there wished to be elsewhere, or to cease to exist at all, for that would be infinitely preferable to an eternity spent in the abyss.

Mrs. Abernathy had been hunting, unknowingly, for Nurd, the mysterious driver of the car that had brought an end to her master’s hope of escape, but Nurd knew that Samuel was the greater prize she sought. Somehow she had found a way to bring him here. For all Nurd knew, Samuel might already be her prisoner, and he had a terrifying vision of his friend, chained and bound, being brought before the Great Malevolence himself, there to be punished for his part in all that had occurred. But even if Samuel were not yet in Mrs. Abernathy’s clutches, there were plenty of other foul beings in Hell who would relish the chance to taste a human child. Someone would have to save Samuel, and that someone was Nurd.

Except Nurd didn’t have much experience of saving anyone, apart from Nurd himself, and he was having enough difficulty keeping himself from becoming Mrs. Abernathy’s prisoner without trying to prevent the capture of someone else. He also didn’t consider himself particularly bright, or brave, or cunning. But like most people who think that way, Nurd was a lot smarter, and braver, and cleverer than he realized. He simply hadn’t been given much opportunity to prove it to himself, or to others.

“Master?” asked Wormwood, for the third time, and on this occasion he received an answer.

“Samuel is here,” said Nurd. “We have to find him.”

Wormwood didn’t look surprised. If his master said that Samuel, whom Wormwood had never met but about whom he’d heard a great deal, was somewhere in Hell, then Wormwood was happy to believe him. On the other hand Wormwood did look a bit startled when Nurd turned the car a hundred and eighty degrees so that it was facing in the direction from which they had just come.

“Er, Master,” he said. “You told me that way lay misery, torture, poor food, and certain dismemberment at the hands of Mrs. Abernathy.”

“I did indeed, Wormwood, but only Mrs. Abernathy could have brought Samuel here, so wherever she is, that’s where he will be too.” He put his foot down and gunned the engine. The car lifted slightly, like a horse yearning for the start of a big race. Then Nurd released the brake, and they were off.

Wormwood looked at his master in awe. The old Nurd had been cowardly, self-serving, and determined to avoid personal injury at all costs. This new Nurd was courageous, selfless, and apparently keen to have his limbs separated from his body as soon as possible.

On reflection, thought Wormwood as they sped toward their destiny, I think I preferred the old one.