Attack of the Cupids
Read Attack of the Cupids Online
Authors: John Dickinson
Contents
19: The End of the World (Again)
âGo, Go, Go!' And they were everywhere â pouring in through the windows in a wave of chubby bodies wearing nothing but balaclavas. Arms lifted. Bows bent . . .
There's only one thing that angels and devils can agree on: cupids are Trouble. And when a golden arrow makes Sally's sister Billie fall for the hottest boy in school, that's exactly what Sally gets â Trouble. Suddenly things aren't just black or white, they're outrageously, shockingly pink!
For once Sally's devil, Muddlespot, and her angel, Windleberry, are on the same side. But can they take down the Angel of Love and her cupid army?
The world is about to end.
The world is always about to end. For thousands of years, everyone has known it was going to happen.
Some have said it would be destroyed by fire. Some have said it would be flood. Some have said it would be fire
and
flood (and, of course, quite a lot of steam too). The Ancient Persians thought a great lizard would wake and ravage all the lands. The Vikings believed there would be a winter of three years followed by a great battle between gods and giants in which the Earth would get wiped out just because it was in the way. And the Aztecs said that there would be a huge earthquake and the sun would fall from the sky and That Would Be It â for the fifth time, because they also believed the world had ended four times already.
In modern times gods and giant lizards have gone out of fashion. People prefer to think of scientific reasons why everything should go pop. Nuclear war was a good one. You couldn't get more scientific than a nuclear war. Although, strangely, all those old ideas about battle and fire and everlasting winter were still going to be part of it somehow.
Then someone noticed how much everyone depended on computers these days and suggested that all the computers would suddenly stop working on the stroke of midnight. And that, of course, would be the end of absolutely everything.
Then
somebody else noticed how much carbon humans were pumping into the atmosphere, and after quite a lot of complicated science people started to worry about floods and everlasting winter all over again.
Year in, year out, through the whole of history, people have been expecting the end of the world. Especially in years with lots of zeros.
And they have all been right. All of them.
(Except the Aztecs, who were on something they shouldn't.)
The world really is about to end.
It always has been.
High above the clouds, in one of the thousand wings of the palaces of Heaven, there is a room.
Visitors â should there be any â reach it by passing down a long corridor. The passage walls are built of Sorrow and the floor is paved with Deep Cold. The light is â well â
thicker
, more colourful than it should be, and the further you go the thicker and more colourful it gets, until it seems almost solid, pressing upon the skin. An ominous groaning fills the air.
At the end there is a door made of human tears. Beside it is written in letters of fire:
Oops.
(Is this the right place?)
(All right, maybe it is the right place. But should we be here?)
Swallow hard. Open the door, gently. The sounds of groaning increase. They're coming from all around â from a million million throats, which have not yet
groaned these groans, but when they do they will groan them so terribly that you can already hear them, now, in this chamber of stillness surrounded by walls of wind.
The winds spiral up and up. They form the shape of a vast beehive, closing at last in a purple dome far overhead. All the space within them is filled with bookcases â bookcases as tall as cathedrals, running left, running right, away into infinity. And every shelf is packed with folders that have titles like
Ragnarök
and
Great Plague
,
Armageddon
and
Apocalypse 2012
and
Pole Shift
and
Galactic Alignment
, on and on, one after another, pages and pages and pages. Each page has been spun from someone's dying breath, and every one describes, calmly and carefully, how the world will end. They are all different. Although they do repeat each other quite a lot.
In this stillness, in this unending library of destruction, something moves. A figure like the shadow of a small eclipse, huge and silent, stalks between the shelves. The groaning of as-yet-unslain souls weaves itself in a comet-trail behind him. Robed in fire, shod in flood, he comes. Darkness is on his brow, sickness on his breath, his wings are thunderclouds and his eyes white ice. He is the Archangel Destruction,
the Herald of Calamity â the One, who, at the Final Word, shall have the sorrowful task of showing the human race its chequered flag. He has many names. Some call him Azreal. Some call him Thanatos, some call him Grimnir, some Ankou. Quite a lot of people call him âSir' or âMy Lord', especially when they meet him.
But when his back is turned?
Well, then it's a different story. The seraphs who bow before him pull faces and jerk their thumbs if they think he's not looking. The angels who greet his coming with halleluiahs burst into fits of giggles as soon as he's passed. He knows it. The reason he looks so stony-faced is not because he is supposed to end billions of human lives. It's because he's trying not to notice that the choir has got the hiccups again.
He knows what they call him too. It's âDaddy Doomsday'.
In some ways Heaven is like everywhere else. You can be as majestic as you like, as creative, as powerful, as brilliant; but if everything you do ends in failure, too bad. You just don't get the respect.
Doomsday's eye roams the shelves. He reads the names on the folders. He remembers every one.
The Babel Project
â ah yes, very neat. There had
been something poetic in using mankind's greatest achievement (speech) to sow the seeds of mankind's destruction. When they had told him it must go no further, he had almost cried.
The Great Plague 171
st
edition.
Easy and effective. You could always rely on a Great Plague. Except that you never had to.
Enormous Aardvark Eats the Sun.
Aha. Ahem. That one, he had to admit, had been a little on the flaky side. His staff had put it together at a time when three of their very best Ends of the World had just been cancelled one after another. Everyone had been upset. Of course it was really a protest. He shouldn't have let it go, but he had. It had earned him an icy memo from the Governors.
In its
elements
, it should have been acceptable. Something eating the Sun was an idea they had used many times. The aardvark was a holy beast to . . . some human tribe or other, he couldn't quite remember which one. And the flood was perfectly standard as well.
Although it shouldn't really have been a flood of aardvark puke. He ought to have known that would cause trouble.
âSir.'
Doomsday turned. A smart young angel, clothed in white light, was looking up at him.
An effort of memory. âAh. Mishamh.'
He managed not to make the name sound like a question. Mishamh was one of his assistants, on loan from the Physics Department. He did know that. But like anyone else who had been around since The Beginning, he had a lot to remember. He
could
remember it all. It was just that sorting through it took a while.
âIt's ready, sir.'
The angel held up a folder. Its title was:
Doomsday took it. He turned the pages slowly. He always showed respect for the work of a colleague â however junior â and for the souls upon whose final breaths the work had been written.
It was good. It planned for all of the things that were supposed to happen on the Last Day. And it was perfectly clear â which was unusual for anything written by the Physics staff, who normally used words
that no one else understood and sentences that had been dragged through a black hole backwards.
âNot bad,' he said. âReally not bad at all.'
The angel looked at him hopefully. He was expecting questions. Doomsday tried to think of one.
âTime to impact?'
âSix months, sir. It's on page one.'
So it was. Exactly on the deadline that the Governors had passed down to him.