Good Omens (30 page)

Despite the fact that the lyrics didn't rhyme, or, as a rule, make any sense, and that Marvin, who was not particularly musical, had stolen all the tunes from old country songs, Jesus Is My Buddy had sold over four million copies.

Marvin had started off as a country singer, singing old Conway Twitty and Johnny Cash songs.

He had done regular live concerts from San Quentin jail until the civil rights people got him under the Cruel and Unusual Punishment clause.

It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money.

He had found the perfect TV mix, on Marvin's Hour of Power (“The show that put the fun back into Fundamentalist!”). Four three-minute songs from the LP, twenty minutes of Hellfire, and five minutes of healing people. (The remaining twenty-three minutes were spent alternately cajoling, pleading, threatening, begging, and occasionally simply asking for money.) In the early days he had actually brought people into the studio to heal, but had found that too complicated, so these days he simply proclaimed visions vouchsafed to him of viewers all across America getting magically cured as they watched. This was much simpler—he no longer needed to hire actors, and there was no way anyone could check on his success rate.
⁴³

The world is a lot more complicated than most people believe. Many people believed, for example, that Marvin was not a true Believer because he made so much money out of it. They were wrong. He believed with all his heart. He believed utterly, and spent a lot of the money that flooded in on what he really thought was the Lord's work.

The phone line to the savior's always free of interference

He's in at any hour, day or night

And when you call J-E-S-U-S you always call toll free

He's the telephone repairman on the switchboard of my life.

The first song concluded, and Marvin walked in front of the cameras and raised his arms modestly for silence. In the control booth, the engineer turned down the Applause track.

“Brothers and sisters, thank you, thank you, wasn't that beautiful? And remember, you can hear that song and others just as edifyin' on Jesus Is My Buddy, just phone 1-800-CASH and pledge your donation now.”

He became more serious.

“Brothers and sisters, I've got a message for you all, an urgent message from our Lord, for you all, man and woman and little babes, friends, let me tell you about the Apocalypse. It's all there in your Bible, in the Revelation our Lord gave Saint John on Patmos, and in the Book of Daniel. The Lord always gives it to you straight, friends—your future. So what's goin' to happen?

“War. Plague. Famine. Death. Rivers urv blurd. Great earthquakes. Nukyeler missiles. Horrible times are comin', brothers and sisters. And there's only one way to avoid 'em.

“Before the Destruction comes—before the four horsemen of the apocalypse ride out—before the nukerler missles rain down on the unbelievers—there will come The Rapture.

“What's the Rapture? I hear you cry.

“When the Rapture comes, brothers and sisters, all the True Believers will be swept up in the air—it don't mind what you're doin', you could be in the bath, you could be at work, you could be drivin' your car, or just sittin' at home readin' your Bible. Suddenly you'll be up there in the air, in perfect and incorruptible bodies. And you'll be up in the air, lookin' down at the world as the years of destruction arrive. Only the faithful will be saved, only those of you who have been born again will avoid the pain and the death and the horror and the burnin'. Then will come the great war between Heaven and Hell, and Heaven will destroy the forces of Hell, and God shall wipe away the tears of the sufferin', and there shall be no more death, or sorrow, or cryin', or pain, and he shall rayon in glory for ever and ever—”

He stopped, suddenly.

“Well, nice try,” he said, in a completely different voice, “only it won't be like that at all. Not really.

“I mean, you're right about the fire and war, all that. But that Rapture stuff—well, if you could see them all in Heaven—serried ranks of them as far as the mind can follow and beyond, league after league of us, flaming swords, all that, well, what I'm trying to say is who has time to go round picking people out and popping them up in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning earth below them? If that's your idea of a morally acceptable time, I might add.

“And as for that stuff about Heaven inevitably winning … Well, to be honest, if it were that cut and dried, there wouldn't be a Celestial War in the first place, would there? It's propaganda. Pure and simple. We've got no more than a fifty percent chance of coming out on top. You might just as well send money to a Satanist hotline to cover your bets, although to be frank when the fire falls and the seas of blood rise you lot are all going to be civilian casualties either way. Between our war and your war, they're going to kill everyone and let God sort it out—right?

“Anyway, sorry to stand here wittering, I've just a quick question—where am I?”

Marvin O. Bagman was gradually going purple.

“It's the devil! Lord protect me! The devil is speakin' through me!” he erupted, and interrupted himself, “Oh no, quite the opposite in fact. I'm an angel. Ah. This has to be America, doesn't it? So sorry, can't stay … ”

There was a pause. Marvin tried to open his mouth, but nothing happened. Whatever was in his head looked around. He looked at the studio crew, those who weren't phoning the police, or sobbing in corners. He looked at the gray-faced cameramen.

“Gosh,” he said, “am I on television?”

CROWLEY WAS DOING a hundred and twenty miles an hour down Oxford Street.

He reached into the glove compartment for his spare pair of sunglasses, and found only cassettes. Irritably he grabbed one at random and pushed it into the slot.

He wanted Bach, but he would settle for The Traveling Wilburys.

All we need is
,
Radio Gaga
, sang Freddie Mercury.

All I need is out, thought Crowley.

He swung around the Marble Arch Roundabout the wrong way, doing ninety. Lightning made the London skies flicker like a malfunctioning fluorescent tube.

A livid sky on London, Crowley thought
, And I knew the end was near. Who had written that? Chesterton, wasn't it? The only poet in the twentieth century to even come close to the Truth.

The Bentley headed out of London while Crowley sat back in the driver's seat and thumbed through the singed copy of The Nice and
Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter.

Near the end of the book he found a folded sheet of paper covered in Aziraphale's neat copperplate handwriting. He unfolded it (while the Bentley's gearstick shifted itself down to third and the car accelerated around a fruit lorry, which had unexpectedly backed out of a side street), and then he read it again.

Then he read it one more time, with a slow sinking feeling at the base of his stomach.

The car changed direction suddenly. It was now heading for the village of Tadfield, in Oxfordshire. He could be there in an hour if he hurried.

Anyway, there wasn't really anywhere else to go.

The cassette finished, activating the car radio.

“. . . Gardeners' Question Time coming to you from Tadfield Gardening Club. We were last here in 1953, a very nice summer, and as the team will remember it's a rich Oxfordshire loam in the East of the parish, rising to chalk in the West, the kind of place oi say, don't matter what you plant here, it'll come up beautiful. Isn't that right, Fred?”

“Yep,” said Professor Fred Windbright, Royal Botanical Gardens, “couldn't of put it better meself.”

“Right—First question for the team, and this comes from Mr. R.P. Tyler, chairman of the local Residents Association, I do believe.”

“'hem. That's right. Well, I'm a keen rose grower, but my prize-winning Molly McGuire lost a couple of blossoms yesterday in a rain of what were apparently fish. What does the team recommend for this, other than place netting over the garden? I mean, I've written to the council … ”

“Not a common problem, I'd say. Harry?”

“Mr. Tyler, let me ask you a question—were these fresh fish, or preserved?”

“Fresh, I believe.”

“Well, you've got no problems, my friend. I hear you've also been having rains of blood in these parts—and I wish we had these up in the Dales, where my garden is. Save me a fortune in fertilizers. Now, what you do is, you dig them in to your … ” CROWLEY?

Crowley said nothing.

CROWLEY. THE WAR HAS BEGUN, CROWLEY. WE NOTE WITH INTEREST THAT YOU AVOIDED THE FORCES WE EMPOWERED TO COLLECT YOU.

“Mm,” Crowley agreed.

CROWLEY … WE WILL WIN THIS WAR. BUT EVEN IF WE LOSE, AT LEAST AS FAR AS YOU ARE CONCERNED, IT WILL MAKE NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL. FOR AS LONG AS THERE IS ONE DEMON LEFT IN HELL, CROWLEY, YOU WILL WISH YOU HAD BEEN CREATED MORTAL.

Crowley was silent.

MORTALS CAN HOPE FOR DEATH, OR FOR REDEMPTION. YOU CAN HOPE FOR NOTHING.

ALL YOU CAN HOPE FOR IS THE MERCY OF HELL.

“Yeah?”

JUST OUR LITTLE JOKE.

“Ngk,” said Crowley.

“. . . now as keen gardeners know, it goes without sayin' that he's a cunnin' little devil, your Tibetan. Tunnelin' straight through your begonias like it was nobody's business. A cup of tea'll shift him, with rancid yak butter for preference—you should be able to get some at any good gard … ”

Wheee. Whizz. Pop. Static drowned out the rest of the program.

Crowley turned off the radio and bit his lower lip. Beneath the ash and soot that flaked his face, he looked very tired, and very pale, and very scared.

And, suddenly, very angry. It was the way they talked to you. As if you were a houseplant who had started shedding leaves on the carpet.

And then he turned a corner, which was meant to take him onto the slip road to the M25, from which he'd swing off onto the M40 up to Oxfordshire.

But something had happened to the M25. Something that hurt your eyes, if you looked directly at it.

From what had been the M25 London Orbital Motorway came a low chanting, a noise formed of many strands: car horns, and engines, and sirens, and the bleep of cellular telephones, and the screaming
of small children trapped by back-seat seat belts for ever. “Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds,” came the chanting, over and over again, in the secret tongue of the Black priesthood of ancient Mu.

The dreaded sigil Odegra, thought Crowley, as he swung the car around, heading for the North Circular. I did that—that's my fault. It could have been just another motorway. A good job, I'll grant you, but was it really worthwhile? It's all out of control. Heaven and Hell aren't running things any more, it's like the whole planet is a Third World country that's finally got the Bomb …

Then he began to smile. He snapped his fingers. A pair of dark glasses materialized out of his eyes. The ash vanished from his suit and his skin.

What the hell. If you had to go, why not go with style?

Whistling softly, he drove.

THEY CAME DOWN the outside lane of the motorway like destroying angels, which was fair enough.

They weren't going that fast, all things considered. The four of them were holding a steady 105 mph, as if they were confident that the show could not start before they got there. It couldn't. They had all the time in the world, such as it was.

Just behind them came four other riders: Big Ted, Greaser, Pigbog, and Skuzz.

They were elated. They were real Hell's Angels now, and they rode the silence.

Around them, they knew, was the roar of the thunderstorm, the thunder of traffic, the whipping of the wind and the rain. But in the wake of the Horsemen there was silence, pure and dead. Almost pure, anyway. Certainly dead.

It was broken by Pigbog, shouting to Big Ted.

“What you going to be, then?” he asked, hoarsely.

“What?”

“I said, what you—”

“I heard what you said. It's not what you said. Everyone heard what you said. What did you mean, tha's what I wanter know?”

Pigbog wished he'd paid more attention to the Book of Revelation. If he'd known he was going to be in it, he'd have read it more carefully. “What I mean is, they're the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, right?”

“Bikers,” said Greaser.

“Right. Four Bikers of the Apocalypse. War, Famine, Death, and—and the other one. P'lution.”

“Yeah? So?”

“So they said it was all right if we came with them, right?”

“So?”

“So we're the other Four Horse—, um, Bikers of the Apocalypse. So which ones are we?”

There was a pause. The lights of passing cars shot past them in the opposite lane, lightning after-imaged the clouds, and the silence was close to absolute.

“Can I be War as well?” asked Big Ted.

“Course you can't be War. How can you be War? She's War. You've got to be something else.”

Big Ted screwed up his face with the effort of thought. “G.B.H.,” he said, eventually. “I'm Grievous Bodily Harm. That's me. There. Wott're you going to be?”

“Can I be Rubbish?” asked Skuzz. “Or Embarrassing Personal Problems?”

“Can't be Rubbish,” said Grievous Bodily Harm. “He's got that one sewn up, Pollution. You can be the other, though.”

They rode on in the silence and the dark, the rear red lights of the Four a few hundred yards in front of them.