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When Madame Tracy brought the tea in he was snoring. She tactfully closed the door, and rather thankfully as well, because she had a seance due in twenty minutes and it was no good turning down money these days.
Although Madame Tracy was by many yardsticks quite stupid, she had an instinct in certain matters, and when it came to dabbling in the occult her reasoning was faultless. Dabbling, she’d realized, was exactly what her customers wanted. They didn’t want to be shoved in it up to their necks. They didn’t want the multi-planular mysteries of Time and Space, they just wanted to be reassured that Mother was getting along fine now she was dead. They wanted just enough Occult to season the simple fare of their lives, and preferably in portions no longer than forty-five minutes, followed by tea and biscuits.
They certainly didn’t want odd candles, scents, chants, or mystic runes. Madame Tracy had even removed most of the Major Arcana from her Tarot card pack, because their appearance tended to upset people.
And she made sure that she had always put sprouts on to boil just before a seance. Nothing is more reassuring, nothing is more true to the comfortable spirit of English occultism, than the smell of Brussels sprouts cooking in the next room.
IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON, and the heavy storm clouds had turned the sky the color of old lead. It would rain soon, heavily, blindingly. The firemen hoped the rain would come soon. The sooner the better.
They had arrived fairly promptly, and the younger firemen were dashing around excitedly, unrolling their hosepipe and flexing their axes; the older firemen knew at a glance that the building was a dead loss, and weren’t even sure that the rain would stop it spreading to neighboring buildings, when a black Bentley skidded around the corner and drove up onto the pavement at a speed somewhere in excess of sixty miles per hour, and stopped with a screech of brakes half an inch away from the wall of the bookshop. An extremely agitated young man in dark glasses got out and ran toward the door of the blazing bookshop.
He was intercepted by a fireman.
“Are you the owner of this establishment?” asked the fireman.
“Don’t be stupid! Do I look like I run a bookshop?”
“I really wouldn’t know about that, sir. Appearances can be very deceptive. For example, I am a fireman. However, upon meeting me socially, people unaware of my occupation often suppose that I am, in fact, a chartered accountant or company director. Imagine me out of uniform, sir, and what kind of man would you see before you? Honestly?”
“A prat,” said Crowley, and he ran into the bookshop.
This sounds easier than it actually was, since in order to manage it Crowley needed to avoid half a dozen firemen, two policemen, and a number of interesting Soho night people,39 out early, and arguing heatedly amongst themselves about which particular section of society had brightened up the afternoon, and why.
Crowley pushed straight through them. They scarcely spared him a glance.
Then he pushed open the door, and stepped into an inferno.
The whole bookshop was ablaze. “Aziraphale!” he called. “Aziraphale, you—you stupid—Aziraphale? Are you here?”
No answer. Just the crackle of burning paper, the splintering of glass as the fire reached the upstairs rooms, the crash of collapsing timbers.
He scanned the shop urgently, desperately, looking for the angel, looking for help.
In the far corner a bookshelf toppled over, cascading flaming books across the floor. The fire was all around him, and Crowley ignored it. His left trouser leg began to smolder; he stopped it with a glance.
“Hello? Aziraphale! For Go—, for Sa—, for somebody’s sake! Aziraphale!”
The shop window was smashed from outside. Crowley turned, startled, and an unexpected jet of water struck him full in the chest, knocking him to the ground.
His shades flew to a far corner of the room, and became a puddle of burning plastic. Yellow eyes with slitted vertical pupils were revealed. Wet and steaming, face ash-blackened, as far from cool as it was possible for him to be, on all fours in the blazing bookshop, Crowley cursed Aziraphale, and the ineffable plan, and Above, and Below.
Then he looked down, and saw it. The book. The book that the girl had left in the car in Tadfield, on Wednesday night. It was slightly scorched around the cover, but miraculously unharmed. He picked it up, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, stood up, unsteadily, and brushed himself off.
The floor above him collapsed. With a roar and gargantuan shrug the building fell in on itself, in a rain of brick and timber and flaming debris.
Outside, the passersby were being herded back by the police, and a fireman was explaining to anyone who would listen, “I couldn’t stop him. He must have been mad. Or drunk. Just ran in. I couldn’t stop him. Mad. Ran straight in. Horrible way to die. Horrible, horrible. Just ran straight in … ”
Then Crowley came out of the flames.
The police and the firemen looked at him, saw the expression on his face, and stayed exactly where they were.
He climbed into the Bentley and reversed back into the road, swung around a fire truck, into Wardour Street, and into the darkened afternoon.
They stared at the car as it sped away. Finally one policeman spoke. “Weather like this, he ought to of put his lights on,” he said, numbly.
“Especially driving like that. Could be dangerous,” agreed another, in flat, dead tones, and they all stood there in the light and the heat of the burning bookshop, wondering what was happening to a world they had thought they understood.
There was a flash of lightning, blue-white, strobing across the cloud-black sky, a crack of thunder so loud it hurt, and a hard rain began to fall.
