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On the plus side, however, he at least knew what Aziraphale’s message was. The knowledge could probably buy him his continued existence.
And anyway, he reflected, if he were going to have to face the possible wrath of the Dark Council, at least it wouldn’t be on an empty stomach.
The room filled with thick, sulphurous smoke. When it cleared, Hastur was gone. There was nothing left in the room but ten skeletons, picked quite clean of meat, and some puddles of melted plastic with, here and there, a gleaming fragment of metal that might once have been part of a telephone. Much better to have been a dental assistant.
But, to look on the bright side, all this only went to prove that evil contains the seeds of its own destruction. Right now, across the country, people who would otherwise have been made just that little bit more tense and angry by being summoned from a nice bath, or having their names mispronounced at them, were instead feeling quite untroubled and at peace with the world. As a result of Hastur’s action a wave of low-grade goodness started to spread exponentially through the population, and millions of people who ultimately would have suffered minor bruises of the soul did not in fact do so. So that was all right.
YOU WOULDN’T HAVE KNOWN it as the same car. There was scarcely an inch of it undented. Both front lights were smashed. The hubcaps were long gone. It looked like the veteran of a hundred demolition derbies.
The pavements had been bad. The pedestrian underpass had been worse. The worst bit had been crossing the River Thames. At least he’d had the foresight to roll up all the windows.
Still, he was here, now.
In a few hundred yards he’d be on the M40; a fairly clear run up to Oxfordshire. There was only one snag: once more between Crowley and the open road was the M25. A screaming, glowing ribbon of pain and dark light.48 Odegra. Nothing could cross it and survive.
Nothing mortal, anyway. And he wasn’t sure what it would do to a demon. It couldn’t kill him, but it wouldn’t be ple
asant.
There was a police roadblock in front of the flyover before him. Burnt-out wrecks—some still burning—testified to the fate of previous cars that had to drive across the flyover above the dark road.
The police did not look happy.
Crowley shifted down into second gear, and gunned the accelerator.
He went through the roadblock at sixty. That was the easy bit.
Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone’s quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there’s a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented.
Whatever the statistics were, they had just gone up by one.
The leather seatcovers began to smoke. Staring ahead of him, Crowley fumbled left-handedly on the passenger seat for Agnes Nutter’s Nice and Accurate Prophecies, moved it to the safety of his lap. He wished she’d prophecied this.49
Then the flames engulfed the car.
He had to keep driving.
On the other side of the flyover was a further police roadblock, to prevent the passage of cars trying to come into London. They were laughing about a story that had just come over the radio, that a motorbike cop on the M6 had flagged down a stolen police car, only to discover the driver to be a large octopus.
Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain.
It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met.
It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and the wind at eighty miles per hour.
That would do it every time.
THE QUARRY WAS THE CALM center of a stormy world.
Thunder didn’t just rumble overhead, it tore the air in half.
“I’ve got some more friends coming,” Adam repeated. “They’ll be here soon, and then we can really get started.”
Dog started to howl. It was no longer the siren howl of a lone wolf, but the weird oscillations of a small dog in deep trouble.
Pepper had been sitting staring at her knees.
There seemed to be something on her mind.
