The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale (19 page)

“Weeee?” it said.

It nudged the elf beside it, and pointed at the tail.

“Weeee!”

The word was passed among the elves. By now, Nurd and Wormwood were at the garden gate. Another step or two and they’d be on the street, and Nurd had Mrs. Johnson’s car keys in his pocket. He had promised her never, ever to drive again without permission, or unless he was being paid to crash the car in question, but Nurd looked at promises as things you said just to make other people feel better. You never knew what might happen in the future, and you didn’t want to go pinning yourself down.

Nurd reached for the keys. The car was in sight. He took one more step toward it and stopped: not because he wanted to, but because his feet wouldn’t carry him forward. He looked over his shoulder to find a dozen elves hanging on grimly to his tail. One of them was even gnawing at it. Nurd wished him luck. His tail was tougher than leather, and tasted like it, too.

Nurd sighed. There was a discarded match on the ground beside him. He picked it up and flicked at it with a curved fingernail, causing it to ignite.

“Wormwood?” he said. “Will you do the honors?”

He held the match out by his side. Wormwood leaned in close, took a deep breath, and blew hard.

The match disappeared in a torrent of flame that continued in the direction of the elves. If they thought the petrol was bad, the effect of Wormwood’s lit breath on them was a thousand times worse. Nurd wasn’t sure what Wormwood’s digestive system was like, but he decided that whatever was happening inside Wormwood must be very horrible, and certainly explained
where a lot of those smells were coming from. The elves didn’t even burn. They just went straight from wood to black ash without any steps in between.

“Thank you, Wormwood,” said Nurd. “Well done. Indeed, they’re probably very well done now, come to think of it.”

Wormwood stopped blowing. Nurd dislodged the remaining pieces of charred elf from his tail, and lifted the tip to examine it. It, too, was on fire. He gave a little puff of breath, and the fire went out.

“What now?” said Wormwood.

“We go to Wreckit & Sons,” said Nurd.

“Why there?”

Nurd picked up an elf foot that had survived the blaze and pointed to the sole of its little painted boot. On it were written the words
PROPERTY OF WRECKIT & SONS
.

40
. You should not play with fire. You are about to discover why.

In Which Battle Commences

D
OZY AND
M
UMBLES COLLIDED
with Angry, Jolly, and Dan, who had just been reunited. They came together next to a pile of old yellow boxes marked, peculiarly enough,
ODD SHOES
, although nothing could have been odder than what they’d already encountered in that basement.

“You won’t believe what happened to us!” said Jolly, then remembered that, not too long before, they’d all been trapped in Hell together. “Hang on, you probably will believe it.”

“You won’t believe what’s
still
happening to us,” Dozy managed to gasp as the first of the running eyeballs rounded the corner and pulled up short. It had been expecting to encounter two dwarfs, but was now facing four, and a human. If it had been gifted with hands, it would have rubbed itself just to be sure that it wasn’t seeing things.

“Is that an eyeball on legs?” said Angry.

“One of many,” said Dozy. “The rest are on their way. Oh, look, here they are.”

More eyeballs appeared, and paused to consider Dan and the dwarfs.

“They’ve got teeth,” said Jolly. “That can’t be right. Why are they chasing you?”

“Because I stood on one of them,” said Dozy. “I stamped on it hard, to be honest, but it was an accident.”

“Messy,” said Jolly.

“I think I still have some of it stuck to my heel,” said Dozy.

“Nasty,” said Angry. “Just so we’re clear, you stood on one, and then the others got angry, so you ran away from them?”

“That’s right.”

“Why didn’t you just stamp on the rest of them?”

“Well, they have teeth.”

“Not much they can do with them though, really, is there?” said Angry. “Bite your feet, maybe, but then you are wearing big boots, which is where the trouble started to begin with, if I’m not mistaken.”

Dozy looked at his boots, and back at the eyeballs.

“Are you suggesting—?”

“I am.”

“They squish,” said Dozy. “It made my tummy feel funny.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“I suppose you’re right. I think I’m almost over it already.”

“There you are, then,” said Angry.

Slowly, deliberately, meaningfully, the dwarfs and Dan advanced on the eyeballs. The eyeballs eyeballed each other. They may not have had ears, but they could see perfectly well, and
what they saw was trouble advancing on them in big boots. As one, the eyeballs turned tail and headed back in the direction from which they’d come. Dan and the dwarfs watched them as they scarpered into the shadows.

“See?” said Angry. “How hard was that?”

“Not very,” said Dozy.

“Bet you feel a bit silly now, don’t you?”

“A bit,” Dozy admitted.

“Where did all those eyeballs come from anyway?” asked Jolly.

“Well,” said Dozy, “there were all these pictures of a bloke with big ears and teeth—a bit vampirish he was—and I said that the eyes seemed to follow you around the room, and the next minute the eyes
were
following us around the room. Very unsettling it was, so—”

“Uh,” said Mumbles. He tapped Dozy on the arm.

“Not now,” said Dozy. “I’m explaining. Anyway—”

Mumbles tapped him on the arm again.

“Really,” said Dozy, turning to give Mumbles a piece of his mind, “you have to learn some . . .”

What Mumbles had to learn was destined to remain undiscovered. Organ music was coming from somewhere nearby, and a shape was emerging from the murk. It was hunched, and wore a long, dark coat. The parts of it that were not covered by the coat were very pale. They included its hands, which had long fingers ending in even longer nails. Its head was entirely bald, and its ears were big and pointed like those of a bat. Its two
front teeth, to reference the famous song,
⁴¹
were not the kind that anyone would want for Christmas. They extended over its lower lip and resembled the fangs of a snake. As for its eyes, when last Dan and the dwarfs had seen them they’d been running along on two little feet and brandishing teeth of their own. They looked more at home in that awful face, and considerably more threatening.

“Oh,” said Dozy.

He had seen many horrible things in his time. He had seen demons. He had seen Hell itself. He had even, due to an unlocked bathroom door, seen Jolly without any pants on. But he believed that he had never seen, and never would see, anything more terrifying than the figure standing before him.

Until he saw the one that appeared next to it, because, unlike its nearly identical twin, it had only one eye. The remains of the other, Dozy guessed, were still stuck in the treads of one of his boots.

“Eh, Dozy,” said Jolly. “I think there’s a gentleman here who’d like a word with you.”

“Should we start running again?” said Dozy.

“I believe,” said Jolly, “that would be a very good idea.”

• • •

Above the dwarfs, in the store itself, Samuel, Lucy, and the policemen were fighting a rearguard action against ranks of dolls that had been reinforced by assorted cuddly toys. The humans had retreated to the first floor, where Samuel had equipped them with guns capable of firing plastic darts and foam bullets. They were having some effect on the demented dolls and threatening teddy bears and yapping demon dogs with large jaws, most of whom struggled to get back on their feet once they’d been knocked over. Some, though, were made of sterner stuff, so Samuel and Lucy, their relationship problems temporarily set aside in the fight for survival, had begun to collect footballs, basketballs, toy cars, and various heavy objects instead. Now, like soldiers in a castle raining down boulders on the besieging forces, they tossed their ammunition with maximum force at their attackers, and watched with satisfaction as dolls lost heads and teddy bears lost limbs.

“I never liked dolls anyway,” said Lucy as a particularly well-aimed rugby ball fragmented a Sally Salty Tears. “They represent the imposition of outdated gender roles on girls too young to know better.”

Samuel looked at Constable Peel, who shrugged. Samuel thought that Constable Peel might have been almost as frightened of Lucy as he was of the attacking dolls.

“Have you noticed anything funny about those dolls?” asked Sergeant Rowan.

Constable Peel goggled at him. He looked like a goose trying to cough up a feather.

“Funny, Sarge? Funny? You mean, apart from the fact that
they’ve come alive and seem intent upon killing us, or isn’t that funny enough for you?”

“Now, now, son,” said Sergeant Rowan, “panicking won’t do us any good. No, what I mean is that they seem to have stopped trying to get up the stairs. It’s as if they’re happy enough just to have forced us up here.”

The sergeant was right. The initial assault had petered out, helped in part by the fact that so many dolls and soft toys were no longer in a position to do much assaulting because of a lack of legs, arms, and heads. Reinforcements continued to arrive, but instead of attempting to scale the stairs they were retreating to positions of cover, from which they were happy just to bare teeth or wave sharp items of cutlery. There had been a worrying moment when the giant twenty-foot teddy on the ground floor had begun moving and seemed about to join in the conflict, but it turned out to be too big and heavy to get to its feet. It had instead remained slumped in a corner growling, like a fat man who had eaten too many pies.

Samuel took a moment to get his bearings. They were in the games department, and it didn’t look like any of the board games, tennis rackets, or cricket bats were about to come to murderous life. The walls, he saw, were decorated with life-size cardboard models of characters from nursery rhymes. He recognized Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet, Humpty Dumpty on his wall, and Little Bo Peep along with assorted sheep. At the very rear of the floor was another flight of stairs. A thin figure watched them from halfway up it.

“Look!” said Samuel. “It’s that Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley.”

“He doesn’t look very happy,” said Constable Peel. “Then again, half of his doll department is in pieces on the ground floor.”

Sergeant Rowan stood up. He unbuttoned the top left-hand pocket of his jacket and from it removed his notebook.

“Oh, he’s in trouble now,” said Constable Peel to Samuel. “Once that notebook comes out it’s not going back in the pocket without someone’s name being written down.”

Sergeant Rowan coughed and licked his pencil. It hung poised over the notebook like the Sword of Damocles.
⁴²

“Right you are, Mr. St. John-Cholmondley,” said Sergeant Rowan. “I’d appreciate it if you’d join me here for a moment and explain just what’s going on.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley. “The answer you seek can only be found by moving higher into the store. The truth lies on the top floor.”

“Well, sir, we don’t have time to be running around chasing
answers and truth. We’re policemen, not philosophers. I think you should come down with us to the station and we’ll have a chat about it all over a nice cup of tea in one of the cells. Why don’t you just open the doors and stop all of this nonsense, there’s a good gentleman. In the meantime, I’m going to write your name in my notebook as a ‘person of interest.’ ”

Sergeant Rowan was just about to do that when he noticed that his pencil was gone.

“Here, who’s made off with my pencil?” he asked as his notebook was yanked from his hand and disappeared into the shadows on the ceiling, leaving only a sticky residue on Sergeant Rowan’s fingers. He pulled at it, and saw that it was spiderweb. He looked again at the ceiling, and noticed that the shadows on it appeared to be moving.

“Ah,” he said. “Right.”

Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley smiled at them from the stairs, then skipped up to the next floor. Samuel barely noticed him go because another figure was moving toward them. It was coming from where the cardboard model of Miss Muffet used to be, except the model was no longer on the wall.

What appeared before them was not Miss Muffet, the beloved figure of nursery-rhyme fame.
⁴³
Either this one loved spiders
an awful lot or she hadn’t run away fast enough when the first one appeared, and it had brought lots of friends along with it for company. She was dressed entirely in black, and wore a veil over her face, a veil that, as she drew closer, was revealed to be made, not from fabric, but from spider silk. The little black spiders that crawled across it, and the dead flies trapped in it, gave the game away on that front. More spiders poured from her sleeves and from beneath her skirts: brown ones, black ones, red ones, yellow ones. There were webs between her fingers, and webs under her arms. Beneath her veil of black spider silk her features were almost entirely concealed by sticky white strands, with only the vaguest of holes torn in them for her eyes and her mouth.

A small black spider descended from the ceiling and dropped onto Sergeant Rowan’s shoulder. He quickly brushed it away, but another fell, and another. He got rid of them, too. One of them scuttled toward Lucy. She stamped on it. When she lifted her foot, it was still there. It looked slightly flatter but was otherwise unharmed. Lucy tried again, but was still unsuccessful in killing it. This was clearly no ordinary spider.

“Ugh!” said Lucy loudly. “How horrid!”

Little Miss Muffet’s head turned in her direction. It was one
thing trying to crush her pets, but obviously quite another entirely to describe them as horrid.

“Not horrid,”
said a soft voice from somewhere behind the silk.
“Beautiful.”

Miss Muffet was having trouble speaking properly. She sounded like she had hairballs caught in her throat. The spider strands around her mouth trembled, and a fat brown spider emerged from between what might have been her lips. It was quickly followed by another, and another, and another.
⁴⁴