“I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime,” he said.
There was silence, except for the distant swishing of cars.
[...]
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves.
And that’d be that. No more world. That’s what the end of the world meant. No more world. Just endless Heaven or, depending on who won, endless Hell. Crowley didn’t know which was worse.
Well, Hell was worse, of course, by definition. But Crowley remembered what Heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn’t get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell.
But there was no getting out of it. You couldn’t be a demon and have free will.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.
Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he’d said [...] was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
As they drove past an astonished traffic warden his notebook spontaneously combusted, to Crowley’s amazement.
“I’m pretty certain I didn’t mean to do that,” he said.
Aziraphale blushed.
“That was me,” he said. “I had always thought that your people invented them.”
“Did you? We thought they were yours.”
“Don’t tell me from genetics. What’ve they got to do with it?” said Crowley. “Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you’re going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he’ll grow up to be a demon just because his dad became one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me.”
“I’ll call him Dog,” said his master, positively. “It saves a lot of trouble, a name like that.”
The hell-hound paused. Deep in its diabolical canine brain it knew that something was wrong, but it was nothing if not obedient and its great sudden love of its master overcame all misgivings. Who was to say what size it should be, anyway?
It trotted down the slope to meet its destiny.
Strange, though. It had always wanted to jump up at people but, now, it realized that against all expectation it wanted to wag its tail at the same time.
They’d come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully functioning human brain could conceive, then shout “The Devil Made Me Do It” and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn’t have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.
This wasn’t, insofar as the hell-hound had any expectations, what he had imagined life would be like in the last days before Armageddon, but despite himself, he was beginning to enjoy it.
[...]
Form shapes nature. There are certain ways of behavior appropriate to small scruffy dogs which are in fact welded into the genes. You can’t just become small-dog-shaped and hope to stay the same person; a certain intrinsic small-dogness begins to permeate your very Being.
He’d already chased a rat. It had been the most enjoyable experience of his life.
“I thought the churches...” Newt began.
“Pah!” said Shadwell. [...] “Churches? What good did they ever do? They’m just as bad. Same line o’ business, nearly. You can’t trust them to stamp out the Evil One, ‘cos if they did, they’d be out o’ that line o’ business. If yer goin’ up against a tiger, ye don’t want fellow travelers whose idea of huntin’ is tae throw meat at it. Nay, lad. It’s up to us. Against the darkness.”
“Tye yt well,” she said to the astonished witchfinder. And then, as the villagers sidled toward the pyre, she raised her handsome head in the firelight and said, “Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judgéd, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne death be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with such as theye do notte understande.”
And, apparently, she smiled and looked up at the sky over the village and added, “That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole.”
“You don’t have to be so lit’ral about everything,” he said. “That’s the trouble these days. Grass materialism. ‘S people like you who go round choppin’ down rain forests and makin’ holes in the ozone layer. There’s a great big hole in the ozone layer ‘cos of grass materialism people like you.”
“You see, it’s not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses.”
1111. An the Great Hound sharl coom, and the Two Powers sharl watch in Vane, for it Goeth where is its Master, where they Wot Notte, and he sharl name it, True to Ittes Nature, and Hell sharl flee it.
Dog slunk along with his tail between his legs, whining.
This wasn’t right, he was thinking. Just when I was getting the hang of rats. Just when I’d nearly sorted out that bloody German Shepherd across the road. Now He’s going to end it all and I’ll back with the ole glowin’ eyes and chasin’ lost souls. What’s the sense in that? They don’t fight back, and there’s no taste to ‘em...
Now, as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren’t deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors—doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operations of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren’t paragons of virtue; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it.
And then it was Pigbog’s turn.
“I, uh...I think I’ll be them answer phones. They’re pretty bad,” he said.
“You can’t be ansaphones. What kind of a Biker of the Repocalypse is ansaphones? That’s stupid, that is.”
“S’not!” said Pigbog, nettled. “It’s like War, and Famine, and that. It’s a problem of life, isn’t it? Answer phones. I hate bloody answer phones.”
“I hate ansaphones, too,” said Cruelty to Animals.
But, to look on the bright side, all this only went to prove that evil contains the seeds of its own destruction. Right now, across the country, people who would otherwise have been made just that little bit more tense and angry by being summoned from a nice bath, or having their names mispronounced at them, were instead feeling quite untroubled and at peace with the world. As a result of Hastur’s action a wave of low-grade goodness started to spread exponentially through the population, and millions of people who ultimately would have suffered minor bruises of the soul did not in fact do so. So that was all right.
“Oh, if that’s all that’s worryin’ you, don’t you worry,” said Adam airily, “’cos I could make you all just do whatever I wanted—”
He stopped, his ears listening in horror to the words his mouth was speaking. The Them were backing away.
[...]
“No,” he said hoarsely. “No. Come back! I command you!”
They froze in mid-dash.
Adam stared.
“No, I dint mean it—” he began. “You’re my friends—”
[...]
Adam opened his mouth and screamed. It was a sound that a merely mortal throat should not have been able to utter [...]
Whatever had been standing in the old quarry before, Adam Young was standing there now. A more knowledgeable Adam Young, but Adam Young nevertheless. Possibly more of Adam Young than there had ever been before.
“What you’re all sayin’,” he summed up, [...] “is that it wouldn’t be any good at all if the Greasy Johnsonites beat the Them or the other way round?”
“That’s right,” said Pepper. [...] “Everyone needs a Greasy Johnson.”
“Yeah,” said Adam. “That’s what I thought. It’s no good anyone winning.”
I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, he said. SURELY YOUR VERY EXISTENCE REQUIRES THE ENDING OF THE WORLD. IT IS WRITTEN.
“I dunt see why anyone has to go an’ write things like that,” said Adam calmly. “The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven’t found out all about it yet, so I don’t want anyone messing it about or endin’ it before I’ve had a chance to find out about it. So you can all just go away.”
“I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ‘cos they act like people,” said Adam severely. “Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.”
Everyone found their eyes turning toward Adam. He seemed to be thinking very carefully.
Then he said: “I don’t see why it matters what is written. Not when it’s about people. It can always be crossed out.”
“I’d just like to say,” he said, “if we don’t get out of this, that...I’ll have known, deep down inside, that there was a spark of goodness in you.”
“That’s right,” said Crowley bitterly. “Make my day.”
Aziraphale held out his hand.
“Nice knowing you,” he said.
Crowley took it.
“Here’s to the next time,” he said. “And...Aziraphale?”
“Yes.”
“Just remember I’ll have known that, deep down inside, you were just enough of a bastard to be worth liking.”
He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
