Good Omens (46 page)

ALSO BY TERRY PRATCHETT

The Carpet People • The Dark Side of the Sun • Strata •
The Bromeliad Trilogy: Truckers • Diggers • Wings •
Only You Can Save Mankind • Johnny and the Dead •
Johnny and the Bomb • The Unadulterated Cat
(with Gray Jolliffe)
•
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents •
The Wee Free Men • A Hat Full of Sky

THE DISCWORLD SERIES

The Color of Magic • The Light Fantastic •
Equal Rites • Mort • Sourcery •
Wyrd Sisters • Pyramids • Guards! Guards! •
Eric
(with Josh Kirby)
• Moving Pictures •
Reaper Man • Witches Abroad • Small Gods •
Lords and Ladies • Men at Arms • Soul Music •
Feet of Clay • Interesting Times • Maskerade •
Hogfather • Jingo • The Last Continent •
Carpe Jugulum • The Fifth Elephant •
The Truth • Thief of Time • Night Watch •
Monstrous Regiment • Going Postal • Thud! •
The Last Hero
(with Paul Kidby)
• The Art of Discworld
(with Paul Kidby) •
Mort: A Discworld Big Comic
(with Graham Higgins) •
The Streets of Ankh-Morpork
(with Stephen Briggs) •
The Discworld Companion
(with Stephen Briggs) •
The Discworld Mapp
(with Stephen Briggs)

ALSO BY NEIL GAIMAN

NOVELS

Anansi Boys • American Gods • Neverwhere • Stardust

SHORT FICTION

Fragile Things • Smoke and Mirrors

FOR CHILDREN

MirrorMask
(with Dave McKean) •
The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish •
The Wolves in the Walls
(both illustrated by Dave McKean) •
Coraline

GRAPHIC NOVELS
with Dave McKean

Violent Cases • Signal to Noise • Mr. Punch

Sandman

Preludes & Nocturnes • The Doll's House •
Dream Country • Season of Mists • A Game for You •
Fables and Reflections • Brief Lives • World's End •
The Kindly Ones • The Wake

Death

The High Cost of Living • The Time of Your Life

Miscellaneous Graphic Novels

The Books of Magic • Miracleman: The Golden Age • Black Orchid

NONFICTION

MirrorMask: The Illustrated Film Script of the Motion Picture from
The Jim Henson Company
(with Dave McKean) •
The Alchemy of
MirrorMask
(by Dave McKean; commentary by Neil Gaiman) •
Don't Panic • Ghastly Beyond Belief
(with Kim Newman)

¹
 i.e., everybody

²
 It was custom-made for Crowley. Getting just one chip custom-made is incredibly expensive but he could afford it. This watch gave the time in twenty world capitals and in a capital city in Another Place, where it was always one time, and that was Too Late.

³
 Saint Beryl Articulatus of Cracow, reputed to have been martyred in the middle of the fifth century. According to legend, Beryl was a young woman who was betrothed against her will to a pagan, Prince Casimir. On their wedding night she prayed to the Lord to intercede, vaguely expecting a miraculous beard to appear, and she had in fact already laid in a small ivory-handled razor, suitable for ladies, against this very eventuality; instead the Lord granted Beryl the miraculous ability to chatter continually about whatever was on her mind, however inconsequential, without pause for breath or food.

According to one version of the legend, Beryl was strangled by Prince Casimir three weeks after the wedding, with their marriage still unconsummated. She died a virgin and a martyr, chattering to the end.

According to another version of the legend, Casimir bought himself a set of earplugs, and she died in bed, with him, at the age of sixty-two.

The Chattering Order of Saint Beryl is under a vow to emulate Saint Beryl at all times, except on Tuesday afternoons, for half an hour, when the nuns are permitted to shut up, and, if they wish, to play table tennis.

⁴
 With a little old lady as the sleuth, and no car chases unless they're done very slowly.

⁵
 It is possibly worth mentioning at this point that Mr. Young thought that paparazzi was a kind of Italian linoleum.

⁶
 Although he did have to get up in 1832 to go to the lavatory.

⁷
 Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

⁸
 The Buggre Alle This Bible was also noteworthy for having twenty-seven verses in the third chapter of Genesis, instead of the more usual twenty-four.

They followed verse 24, which in the King James version reads:

“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life,” and read:

25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying Where is the flaming sword which was given unto thee?

26 And the Angel said, I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.

27 And the Lord did not ask him again.

It appears that these verses were inserted during the proof stage. In those days it was common practice for printers to hang proof sheets to the wooden beams outside their shops, for the edification of the populace and some free proofreading, and since the whole print run was subsequently burned anyway, no one bothered to take up this matter with the nice Mr. A. Ziraphale, who ran the bookshop two doors along and was always so helpful with the translations, and whose handwriting was instantly recognizable.

⁹
 The other two are
The Trapping of the Mouse
, and
Golde Diggers of 1589
.

¹⁰
 Who had already had a few thoughts in that direction, and spent the last years of his life in Newgate Prison when he eventually put them into practice.

¹¹
 Another master stroke of publishing genius, because Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Parliament had made Christmas illegal in 1654.

¹²
 Nominally a city. It was the size of an English county town, or, translated into American terms, a shopping mall.

¹³
 A night school just off the Tottenham Court Road, run by an elderly actor who had played butlers and gentlemen's gentlemen in films and television and on the stage since the 1920s.

¹⁴
 He avoided mentioning that Attila was nice to his mother, or that Vlad Drakul was punctilious about saying his prayers every day.

¹⁵
 Except for the bits about syphilis.

¹⁶
 A sixteenth-century half-wit, not related to any U.S. president.

¹⁷
 Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true.

¹⁸
 The interview was done in 1983 and went as follows:

Q: You're the Secretary of the United Nations, then?

A:
Si
.

Q: Ever sighted Elvis?

¹⁹
 Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Threlfall, of 9, The Elms, Paignton. They always maintained that one of the nice things about going on holiday was not having to read the newspapers or listen to the news, just getting away from it all really. And due to a tummy bug contracted by Mr. Threlfall, and Mrs. Threlfall rather overdoing it in the sun their first day, this was their first time out of their hotel room for a week and a half.

²⁰
 It didn't matter what the four had called their gang over the years, the frequent name changes usually being prompted by whatever Adam had happened to have read or viewed the previous day (the Adam Young Squad; Adam and Co.; The Hole-in-the-Chalk Gang; The Really Well-Known Four; The Legion of Really Super-Heroes; The Quarry Gang; The Secret Four; The Justice Society of Tadfield; The Galaxatrons; The Four Just Persons; The Rebels). Everyone else always referred to them darkly as Them, and eventually they did too.

²¹
 Greasy Johnson was a sad and oversized child. There's one in every school; not exactly fat, but simply huge and wearing almost the same size clothes as his father. Paper tore under his tremendous fingers, pens shattered in his grip. Children whom he tried to play with in quiet, friendly games ended up getting under his huge feet, and Greasy Johnson had become a bully almost in self-defense. After all, it was better to be called a bully, which at least implied some sort of control and desire, than to be called a big clumsy oaf. He was the despair of the sports master, because if Greasy Johnson had taken the slightest interest in sport, then the school could have been champions. But Greasy Johnson had never found a sport that suited him. He was instead secretly devoted to his collection of tropical fish, which won him prizes. Greasy Johnson was the same age as Adam Young, to within a few hours, and his parents had never told him he was adopted. See? You were
right
about the babies.

²²
 If Adam had been in full possession of his powers in those days, the Youngs' Christmas would have been spoiled by the discovery of a dead fat man upside down in their central-heating duct.

²³
 It may be worth noting here that most human beings can rarely raise more than .3 of an alp (30 centi-alps). Adam believed things on a scale ranging from 2 through to 15,640 Everests.

²⁴
 And hair. And skin tone. And, if you ate enough of it long enough, vital signs.

²⁵
 But not like every other Burger Lord across the world. German Burger Lords, for example, sold lager instead of root beer, while English Burger Lords managed to take any American fast food virtues (the speed with which your food was delivered, for example) and carefully remove them; your food arrived after half an hour, at room temperature, and it was only because of the strip of warm lettuce between them that you could distinguish the burger from the bun. The Burger Lord pathfinder salesmen had been shot twenty-five minutes after setting foot in France.

²⁶
 Wensleydale's alleged comic was a 94-week part-work called
Wonders of Nature and Science
. He had every single one so far, and had asked for a set of binders for his birthday. Brian's weekly reading was anything with a lot of exclamation marks in the title, like “WhiZZ!!” or “Clang!!” So was Pepper's, although even under the most refined of tortures she still wouldn't admit to the fact that she also bought
Just Seventeen
under plain covers. Adam didn't read any comics at all. They never lived up to the kind of things he could do in his head.