Good Omens (5 page)

“But after we win life will be better!” croaked the angel.

“But it won't be as interesting. Look, you
know
I'm right. You'd be as happy with a harp as I'd be with a pitchfork.”

“You know we don't play harps.”

“And we don't use pitchforks. I was being rhetorical.”

They stared at one another.

Aziraphale spread his elegantly manicured hands.

“My people are more than happy for it to happen, you know. It's what it's all about, you see. The great final test. Flaming swords, the Four Horsemen, seas of blood, the whole tedious business.” He shrugged.

“And then Game Over, Insert Coin?” said Crowley.

“Sometimes I find your methods of expression a little difficult to follow.”

“I like the seas as they are. It doesn't have to happen. You don't have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.”

Aziraphale shrugged again.

“That's ineffable wisdom for you, I'm afraid.” The angel shuddered, and pulled his coat around him. Gray clouds were piling up over the city.

“Let's go somewhere warm,” he said.

“You're asking me?” said Crowley glumly.

They walked in somber silence for a while.

“It's not that I disagree with you,” said the angel, as they plodded across the grass. “It's just that I'm not allowed to disobey. You know that.”

“Me too,” said Crowley.

Aziraphale gave him a sidelong glance. “Oh, come now,” he said, “you're a demon, after all.”

“Yeah. But my people are only in favor of disobedience in general terms. It's
specific
disobedience they come down on heavily.”

“Such as disobedience to themselves?”

“You've got it. You'd be amazed. Or perhaps you wouldn't be. How long do you think we've got?” Crowley waved a hand at the Bentley, which unlocked its doors.

“The prophecies differ,” said Aziraphale, sliding into the passenger seat. “Certainly until the end of the century, although we may expect certain phenomena before then. Most of the prophets of the past millennium were more concerned with scansion than accuracy.”

Crowley pointed to the ignition key. It turned.

“What?” he said.

“You know,” said the angel helpfully, “‘And thee Worlde Unto An Ende Shall Come, in tumpty-tumpty-tumpty One.' Or Two, or Three, or whatever. There aren't many good rhymes for Six, so it's probably a good year to be in.”

“And what sort of phenomena?”

“Two-headed calves, signs in the sky, geese flying backwards, showers of fish. That sort of thing. The presence of the Antichrist affects the natural operation of causality.”

“Hmm.”

Crowley put the Bentley in gear. Then he remembered something. He snapped his fingers.

The wheel clamps disappeared.

“Let's have lunch,” he said. “I owe you one from, when was it … ”

“Paris, 1793,” said Aziraphale.

“Oh, yes. The Reign of Terror. Was that one of
your
s, or one of ours?”

“Wasn't it yours?”

“Can't recall. It was quite a good restaurant, though.”

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.”

Crowley stared at the smoke in the rearview mirror.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's do the Ritz.”

Crowley had
not
bothered to book. In his world, table reservations were things that happened to other people.

AZIRAPHALE COLLECTED BOOKS. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand bookseller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours—he was incredibly good at it.

He had been collecting for a long time, and, like all collectors, he specialized.

He had more than sixty books of predictions concerning developments in the last handful of centuries of the second millennium. He had a penchant for Wilde first editions. And he had a complete set of the Infamous Bibles, individually named from errors in typesetting.

These Bibles included the Unrighteous Bible, so called from a printer's error which caused it to proclaim, in I Corinthians, “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?”; and the Wicked Bible, printed by Barker and Lucas in 1632, in which the word not was omitted from the seventh commandment, making it “Thou shalt commit Adultery.” There were the Discharge Bible, the Treacle Bible, the Standing Fishes Bible, the Charing Cross Bible and the rest. Aziraphale had them all. Even the very rarest, a Bible published in 1651 by the London publishing firm of Bilton and Scaggs.

It had been the first of their three great publishing disasters.

The book was commonly known as the Buggre Alle This Bible. The lengthy compositor's error, if such it may be called, occurs in the book of Ezekiel, chapter 48, verse five.

2.
And bye the border of Dan, fromme the east side to the west side, a portion for Afher
.

3.
And bye the border of Afher, fromme the east side even untoe the west side, a portion for Naphtali
.

4.
And bye the border of Naphtali, from the east side untoe the west side, a portion for Manaffeh
.

5.
Buggre Alle this for a Larke. I amme sick to mye Hart of typefettinge. Master Biltonn if no Gentelmann, and Master Scagges noe more than a tighte fisted Southwarke Knobbefticke. I telle you, onne a daye laike thif Ennywone with half an oz. of Sense should
e bee oute in the Sunneshain, ane nott Stucke here alle the liuelong daie inn thif mowldey olde By-Our-Lady Workefhoppe. @ *“Æ@;!*

6.
And bye the border of Ephraim, from the east fide even untoe the west fide, a portion for Reuben
.
⁸

Bilton and Scaggs' second great publishing disaster occurred in 1653. By a stroke of rare good fortune they had obtained one of the famed “Lost Quartos”—the three Shakespeare plays never reissued in folio edition, and now totally lost to scholars and playgoers. Only their names have come down to us. This one was Shakespeare's earliest play,
The Comedie of Robin Hoode, or, The Forest of Sherwoode
.
⁹

Master Bilton had paid almost six guineas for the quarto, and believed he could make nearly twice that much back on the hardcover folio alone.

Then he lost it.

Bilton and Scaggs' third great publishing disaster was never entirely comprehensible to either of them. Everywhere you looked, books of prophecy were selling like crazy. The English edition of Nostradamus'
Centuries
had just gone into its third printing, and five Nostradamuses, all claiming to be the only genuine one, were on triumphant signing tours. And Mother Shipton's
Collection of Prophecies
was sprinting out of the shops.

Each of the great London publishers—there were eight of them—had at least one Book of Prophecy on its list. Every single one of the books was wildly inaccurate, but their air of vague and generalized omnipotence made them immensely popular. They sold in the thousands, and in the tens of thousands.

“It is a licence to printe monney!” said Master Bilton to Master Scaggs.
¹⁰
“The public are crying out for such rubbishe! We must straightway printe a booke of prophecie by some hagge!”

The manuscript arrived at their door the next morning; the author's sense of timing, as always, was exact.

Although neither Master Bilton nor Master Scaggs realized it, the manuscript they had been sent was the sole prophetic work in all of human history to consist entirely of completely correct predictions concerning the following three hundred and forty-odd years, being a precise and accurate description of the events that would culminate in Armageddon. It was on the money in every single detail.

It was published by Bilton and Scaggs in September 1655, in good time for the Christmas trade,
¹¹
and it was the first book printed in England to be remaindered.

It didn't sell.

Not even the copy in the tiny Lancashire shop with “Locale Author” on a piece of cardboard next to it.

The author of the book, one Agnes Nutter, was not surprised by this, but then, it would have taken an awful lot to surprise Agnes Nutter.

Anyway, she had not written it for the sales, or the royalties, or even for the fame. She had written it for the single gratis copy of the book that an author was entitled to.

No one knows what happened to the legions of unsold copies of her book. Certainly none remain in any museums or private collections. Even Aziraphale does not possess a copy, but would go weak at the knees at the thought of actually getting his exquisitely manicured hands on one.

In fact, only one copy of Agnes Nutter's prophecies remained in the entire world.

It was on a bookshelf about forty miles away from where Crowley and Aziraphale were enjoying a rather good lunch and, metaphorically, it had just begun to tick.

AND NOW IT WAS THREE O'CLOCK. The Antichrist had been on Earth for fifteen hours, and one angel and one demon had been drinking solidly for three of them.

They sat opposite one another in the back room of Aziraphale's dingy old bookshop in Soho.

Most bookshops in Soho have back rooms, and most of the back rooms are filled with rare, or at least very expensive, books. But Aziraphale's books didn't have illustrations. They had old brown covers and crackling pages. Occasionally, if he had no alternative, he'd sell one.

And, occasionally, serious men in dark suits would come calling and suggest, very politely, that perhaps he'd like to sell the shop itself so that it could be turned into the kind of retail outlet more suited to the area. Sometimes they'd offer cash, in large rolls of grubby fifty-pound notes. Or, sometimes, while they were talking, other men in dark glasses would wander around the shop shaking their heads and
saying
how inflammable paper was, and what a firetrap he had here.

And Aziraphale would nod and smile and say that he'd think about
it
. And then they'd go away. And they'd never come back.

Just because you're an angel doesn't mean you have to be a fool.

The table in front of the two of them was covered with bottles.

“The point is,” said Crowley, “the point is. The point is.” He tried to focus on Aziraphale.

“The point
is
,” he said, and tried to think of a
point
.

“The point I'm trying to make,” he said, brightening, “is the dolphins. That's my point.”

“Kind of fish,” said Aziraphale.

“Nononono,” said Crowley, shaking a finger. “'S mammal. Your actual mammal. Difference is—” Crowley waded through the swamp of his mind and tried to remember the difference. “Difference is, they—”

“Mate out of water?” volunteered Aziraphale.

Crowley's brow furrowed. “Don't think so. Pretty sure that's not it. Something about their young. Whatever.” He pulled himself together. “The point is. The point is. Their brains.”

He reached for a bottle.

“What about their brains?” said the angel.

“Big brains. That's my point. Size of. Size of. Size of damn big brains. And then there's the whales. Brain city, take it from me. Whole damn sea full of brains.”

“Kraken,” said Aziraphale, staring moodily into his glass.

Crowley gave him the long cool look of someone who has just had a girder dropped in front of his train of thought.

“Uh?”

“Great big bugger,” said Aziraphale. “Sleepeth beneath the thunders of the upper deep. Under loads of huge and unnumbered polypol—polipo—bloody great seaweeds, you know. Supposed to rise to the surface right at the end, when the sea boils.”

“Yeah?”

“Fact.”

“There you are, then,” said Crowley, sitting back. “Whole sea bubbling, poor old dolphins so much seafood gumbo, no one giving a damn. Same with gorillas. Whoops, they say, sky gone all red, stars crashing to ground, what they putting in the bananas these days? And then—”

“They make nests, you know, gorillas,” said the angel, pouring another drink and managing to hit the glass on the third go.

“Nah.”

“God's truth. Saw a film. Nests.”

“That's birds,” said Crowley.

“Nests,” insisted Aziraphale.

Crowley decided not to argue the point.

“There you are then,” he said. “All creatures great and smoke. I mean small. Great and small. Lot of them with brains. And then, bazamm.”

“But
you're
part of it,” said Aziraphale. “You tempt people. You're good at it.”

Crowley thumped his glass on the table. “That's different. They don't have to say yes. That's the ineffable bit, right? Your side made it up. You've got to keep testing people. But not to destruction.”

“All right. All right. I don't like it any more than you, but I told you. I can't disod—disoy—not do what I'm told. 'M a'nangel.”

“There's no theaters in Heaven,” said Crowley. “And very few films.”

“Don't you try to tempt
me
,” said Aziraphale wretchedly. “I know you, you old serpent.”

“Just you think about it,” said Crowley relentlessly. “You know what eternity is? You know what eternity is? I mean, d'you know what eternity is? There's this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and once every thousand years there's this little bird—”