"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 questionwhere 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 Travelling 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 aside 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 of 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.”
“Ahem. That's right. Well, I'm a keen rose grower, but my prizewinning 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? 1 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, 1 believe.”
“Well, you've got no problems, my friend. 1 hear you've also been having rains of blood in these parts.. and 1 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 Bard ...”
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.
* * * * *
hey came down the outside lane of the motorway like destroying angels, which was fair enough.