The Infernals Read Free

anxiously over his shoulder, as though expecting the woman to pop up again and tear both of them into pieces so small that only ants could find them. “You know, I don’t think you’re cut out to be a guard,” he said. “You’re too keen on the whole
guarding
business.”
    “But isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?” asked Edgefast. “Our job is to guard the entrance. I was just trying to be good at it.”
    “Were you now?” said Brompton. He looked doubtful. “You know what I’m good at guarding?”
    “No. What?”
    “My health.”
    He popped Edgefast’s helmet back on Edgefast’s head, and went back to leaning on his spear as he waited for someone to come and take the bits away.
    “Who was … um,
she
, anyway?” asked Edgefast.
    “That,” said Brompton, “was Mrs. Abernathy, and she’s in a
very
bad mood.”

In Which We Learn a Little About How Hard It Is to Be in Love
     
    T IME IS A FUNNY thing. Take time travel: ask a random assortment of people whether they’d prefer to go backward or forward in time, and you’ll probably get a pretty even split between those who like the idea of seeing the Great Pyramid being built, or of playing tag with a dinosaur, and those who’d rather see if all of those jet packs and laser guns we were promised in comic books have finally made it into stores. 4
    Unfortunately, there is bad news for those who would liketo go back in time. Assuming that I, when not writing books or annoying the neighbors by practicing the bassoon at odd hours, build a time machine in my basement, and offer free trips in it to anyone who fancies a jaunt, those who want to visit Queen Elizabeth I to see if she really had wooden teeth (she didn’t: they were just rotten and black, and the lead in her makeup was also slowly poisoning her, so she was probably in a very bad humor most of the time) or to find out if King Ethelred the Unready really was unready (he wasn’t: his nickname is a mistranslation of an Old English word meaning “bad advice”) are going to be sorely disappointed.
    And why is that? Because you can’t go back to a time before there was a time machine. You just can’t. You’re linking two different points in time, and the earliest of those points has to be the moment at which the time machine came into existence. Sorry, those are the rules. I don’t make them, I just enforce them in books. So the reason why there are no visitors from the future is that nobody has yet managed to build a time machine
in our own time
. Either that, or someone has invented one and is keeping very quiet about it so that people don’t keep knocking on his door asking him if they can have a go on his time machine, which would be very annoying. 5
    If Mrs. Abernathy had been able to go back in time, there are a number of things she might have done differently in the course of the attempted invasion of Earth, but principal among them would have been not to underestimate the boy named Samuel Johnson, or his little dog, Boswell. Then again, how could she have imagined that a small boy and his dachshund would prove her undoing? She might have been a demon, but she was also an adult, and most adults have a hard time imagining that small boys, or dachshunds, could possibly be superior to them in any way.
    It might have been of some consolation to Mrs. Abernathy to learn that the person responsible for most of her problems was experiencing some rejection and humiliation of his own, for Samuel Johnson had just tried to ask Lucy Highmore on a date.
    Samuel had been in love with Lucy from the moment he set eyes on her, which was his first day at Montague Rhodes James Secondary School in Biddlecombe. In Samuel’s eyes, little bluebirds flew ceaselessly around Lucy’s head, serenading her with odes to her beauty and depositing petals in her hair, while angelsmade her schoolbag a little lighter by helping her with the burden of it, and whispered the answers to math questions into her ear