The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale (24 page)

But then the balance of the Multiverse had been disturbed by
the actions of men. Humans were endlessly curious, and their curiosity led them to take risks. They had built the Large Hadron Collider to try to re-create the beginnings of their universe, and in the process they had opened a gateway between Earth and Hell that had almost caused the end of their world. They had also begun to investigate the nature of reality, and reality was a delicate business. What was unreal stayed that way only as long as reality and unreality kept to their own sides of the fence. If you opened a gate between the two, then all kinds of confusion reigned. That was how dwarfs ended up being chased by eyeballs, and tentacled entities got trapped in closets, and little girls with a fondness for spiders, and webs for skin, climbed down from walls to bother people.

But even all of the messing about with reality might not have come back to bite the humans had they not gone poking their noses into dark matter. It was all very well deciding that, yes, what they saw when they looked through their telescopes was only 4 percent of the stuff of the universe, and the other 96 percent had to be made up of something else. They called that something else “dark matter” and “dark energy.” Dark matter was the universe’s hidden skeleton, giving structure to universes and galaxies, while dark energy was the force changing universes, forcing galaxies farther and farther apart. Humanity decided that the universe was about 70 percent dark energy and 25 to 26 percent dark matter. Heigh-ho, problem solved, who fancies a cup of tea and a biscuit before we clock off early for the afternoon?

But that wasn’t right. They should have paid more attention
to one important word:
dark
. The dark was where things hid. The dark was the place where unpleasant creatures that didn’t want to be seen waited until the time was right.

The dark was the place in which the Shadows were imprisoned.

By engaging in dark-matter detection experiments—including projects such as Multidark, the Dark Matter Time Projection Chamber, and the Cryogenic Dark Matter search—the humans had alerted the Shadows to their existence. Even in their isolated realm, they had been able to hear the humans: voices, music, rockets, wars, the Shadows had listened to them all. When the detection experiments had begun, it was the equivalent of someone tapping on the outside of a prison wall with a pickax—
tap-tap-tap
—except that the person doing the tapping didn’t know that there were entities imprisoned inside, entities that were very anxious to escape and smother every light in the Multiverse.

Professor Stefan was right: the Large Hadron Collider had worn thin the walls between dimensions, and the pickax jabs of the detection experiments had done the rest. A hole had been opened, and now the Shadows were about to pour through. The Great Malevolence might have wanted to destroy humanity and burn worlds. It might have wanted misery and ruin. But it also wanted the Multiverse to remain in existence. It wanted to transform universes into branch offices of Hell, and to do that required the continued survival of the Multiverse.

The Shadows wanted only nothingness. They were as much a danger to the Great Malevolence as they were to humanity.
This was why Crudford, after a quick return visit to Hell, had come down to Earth. He now believed that he knew why Biddlecombe was the place to which the Shadows had come. Mrs. Abernathy’s heart had hidden itself on Earth, and its blackness had found an echo in the Kingdom of Shadows. She had called out to the Shadows, and an alliance had been formed. She would give the Earth, and then the Multiverse, to the Shadows.

And in return, they would give Samuel Johnson to her.

50
. Although unfortunately not Mr. Tuppenny the ice cream man.

51
. He did all that in a paragraph. It took me two books. I’m in the wrong business.

52
. So how big is the Multiverse, exactly? According to quantum theory, particles can pop into and out of existence, and there are scientists who believe that our universe was the result of just such a quantum “pop.” So if one universe can pop into being, why not many universes? This would require extra dimensions, which is where very complicated string theory comes into play. String theory proposes that our universe is made up of very, very small vibrating strings, and when the strings vibrate in different ways they produce different particles. Think of the strings of a guitar producing different notes, and so the universe can be imagined as a great symphony of particles being produced by an unseen orchestra. Pluck one string and you get a proton; pluck another and you get an electron.

One of the difficulties in understanding string theory lies in the fact that it doesn’t work in our four-dimensional world (the three space dimensions of up/down, left/right, and forward/backward, and the fourth dimension of time). String theory requires eleven dimensions, ten of space—which are buried within our existing three dimensions—and one of time. One of the tasks of the Large Hadron Collider was to find proof of these extra dimensions: if, during the Collider’s proton collisions, some of the bits of shattered particles were found to have gone missing from the sealed vacuum, then that would suggest the possibility that they had disappeared into other dimensions.

Anyway, to get back to our original question of how many universes there may be in the Multiverse, some string theorists suggest the number is 10
⁵⁰⁰
, or one for every possible model of physics that string theory offers. (See, I told you it was complicated. It’s so complicated that this latest version of string theory, the eleven-dimension one, is known as M-theory, and even Edward Whitten, the man who came up with it, isn’t sure what the
M
stands for.) Mind you, there are some scientists who say that the number of universes in the Multiverse could be far more than 10
⁵⁰⁰
, and that the only way you can get it down to 10
⁵⁰⁰
is by fiddling about with the (coarse) Moduli Space of Kähler and Ricci-Flat (or Calabi-Yau) metrics and then enforcing extra-supersymmetry conditions, which is just cheating, obviously. I mean, everybody knows that.

In Which the Funniness of Clowns Is Doubted

T
HINGS WERE GOING FROM
bad to worse inside Wreckit & Sons, which was surprising given how bad things were to begin with. It seemed that, as Samuel and the others drew closer to the highest floor of the store, the nature of reality was becoming more and more distorted. In fact, as far as Samuel was concerned, reality had pretty much given up on Biddlecombe and gone to live somewhere slightly more down-to-earth.

First off, there were the clowns. Everyone trapped in the store was beginning to realize that Wreckit & Sons had been designed with one purpose in mind: to provide a series of threats that would gradually drive the humans to the top floor. While they had made the best use that they could of whatever weapons they could find—bats, balls, bows and arrows, and foam blasters, for the most part—it wasn’t as if the store had been littered with rocket launchers or heavy artillery. The dangers on each floor were simply meant to force them upward, not kill them,
or so Samuel believed, although Dan and the dwarfs were pretty convinced that, had the Nosferati managed to get their fangs into them, they would soon have been singing in some heavenly choir, assuming Heaven was willing to let them in.

They saw that the next-to-last floor had been given a circus theme. There was a Ferris wheel in one corner, large enough for very small children to ride, and the wooden façade of a big top. There were signs that read
HOOP TOSS
and, slightly worryingly,
GHOST TRAIN
. Over them all hovered the head of a ringmaster in a top hat, his black mustache curling almost to his eyebrows, and his smile wide enough to swallow a person.

The ringmaster was Hilary Mould.

Beneath the ringmaster stood three dummies dressed as clowns. One was bald and entirely covered in whiteface makeup. He wore a suit of broad yellow checks, and a little red hat was positioned on the side of his head. Samuel wondered how it stayed in place: glue, perhaps, or a very thin rubber band. It was only as he drew closer to the clown that he saw the hat had been nailed to his skull.

The second clown wore a huge pink wig that looked like the aftermath of an explosion in a cotton candy machine. Only the areas around his eyes and mouth were painted white: the rest of his face was a sickly yellow. He wore a long green coat with tails, and purple trousers decorated with pink polka dots. A huge plastic flower was pinned to the buttonhole of his jacket.

The third clown was female. She was wearing white one-piece overalls decorated with big red fluffy buttons, and her wig was black. So, too, was the makeup around her mouth and
her eyes, while the rest of her face was very pale. Strangely, her mouth had been painted into a frown instead of a smile. Her fingernails were long and pointed, and varnished a deep, dark red, as though she had recently been tearing apart raw meat.

Samuel had never seen a female clown before,
⁵³
but then he had only been to the circus once in his life. Samuel didn’t care much for the circus, or clowns. He wasn’t scared of clowns; he just didn’t think they were amusing.
⁵⁴

The dwarfs wandered over to join him.

“They’re not going to get many laughs looking like that,” said Dozy.

“Never liked clowns,” said Angry. “They always seem to be trying too hard.”

“What do you call the gooey red stuff between a circus elephant’s toes?” asked Jolly.

“I don’t know,” said Samuel.

“A slow clown,” said Jolly. “Get it? A
slow clown
.”

The female clown turned her head slowly in Jolly’s direction. Her fingers tested the air. The bald clown opened his mouth and licked his lips, and the clown with the fuzzy wig put his hand inside his jacket and squeezed the bulb on his plastic flower. A jet of liquid shot from it, which just missed Angry. It sizzled when it hit the floor, and began burning a hole in the carpet. The others immediately stepped out of range, but instead of joining them Angry began shouting at the clowns.

“Losers!” he said. “I’ve seen funnier dead people.”

The flower-wearing dwarf tried again, firing a stream of acid in Angry’s direction. Again it landed on the carpet and began eating its way through.

“How do you get a clown off your porch?” called Angry. “You pay him for the pizza.”

By now the bewigged clown was growling and spraying a constant stream of acid at Angry as he circled the trio. The others tried to snatch at him with their fingers, but he was too fast.

“What are you doing?” cried Samuel. “You’re going to get hurt!”

The smell of burning carpet and wood was very strong now, and a near-perfect acid-drenched circle was sizzling at the feet of the clowns. The liquid stopped pumping. The clown’s supply
of acid was exhausted. He looked at the flower in disgust before deciding to take care of Angry and the others personally. He took one step forward. The other clowns did the same.

The ceiling collapsed, taking the three clowns with it and leaving only a hole where they had previously stood. Carefully, Samuel and the dwarfs peered over the edge at the floor below. The clowns had shattered on impact, like china dolls. The ceiling had also landed on Miss Muffet’s giant spider: they could see the tips of eight legs sticking out from under the mass of wood and plaster, and its insides were leaking out. Lucy’s boot might not have been strong enough to crush one of the smaller spiders, but three clowns and a heavy ceiling seemed to have done the trick for the big one.

“Like I told you,” said Angry, “I never liked clowns. Never had much time for spiders either.”

Miss Muffet appeared beside the remains of her spider. She glared up at them.

“Bad!”
she said, pointing a web-covered finger at them.
“Very bad!”

“Uh-oh,” said Jolly. “We’ve done it now.”

As they watched, Miss Muffet started to make her way to the stairs. She had obviously decided that someone had to pay for the destruction of her spider, but they were distracted from her approach by the ringmaster. His wooden face had contorted into a mask of rage. Thin streams of black smoke poured from his nostrils. Beside him, the Ferris wheel rattled on its foundations. Bolts popped, and its supports collapsed. The Ferris wheel dropped to the floor and headed toward them.

“Incoming!” shouted Jolly.

Samuel and the dwarfs dived out of the way of the rolling wheel. Samuel was relieved to see Lucy and the policemen do the same. They reacted fast, certainly faster than Miss Muffet, who reached the top of the stairs just in time to be hit by the wheel. It rolled halfway down the stairs before striking a wall at full speed, tearing through the brickwork and taking Miss Muffet with it. All that was left to show she had ever been there at all was a trail of crushed black spiders.

And that was when the Polite Monster appeared.

To start with, Samuel and the others didn’t know that he was polite. When monsters appear, the general approach is to assume that they don’t mean anyone any good and to set about getting rid of them. If that doesn’t work, it’s a good idea to make your apologies and leave while you still can. The Polite Monster had a lot of horns, and a great many teeth in its jaws, and four eyes, two on each side of its head. It was about twelve feet tall, and almost as wide, and was covered entirely in coarse red fur. It popped into existence in a puff of purple and yellow smoke, accompanied by the most horrendous smell combining the worst aspects of rotting fish, dog poo, and very old eggs that had been scrambled and fed to someone with bad digestion and worse wind.

The Polite Monster sniffed the air, made a face, and said, “That wasn’t me.”

It had a very cultured voice. It sounded like a monster that liked light opera, and perhaps acted in plays for the local dramatic society, the kind in which chaps called Gussy popped up
dressed in tennis whites, and people laughed like this: “I say, aha-ha-ha!”