“Quite right, Nigel,” said Gertrude just as the ice-cream van emerged from the mist. “Look! There’s another one. I say, it’s full of little fellows. How sweet!”
The dwarfs crowded to the serving hatch of the van, joined by Constable Peel.
“You don’t see one of those every day,” said Jolly.
“No,” said Angry. “You usually see two of them. Oi, darling, keeping an eye on us, are you? See what I did there, eh: keeping ‘an eye’?”
“Mind you don’t drop it, love,” said Dozy. “You won’t have anything to look for it with.”
Gertrude, wisely, began to reconsider her opinion of the dwarfs. “What dreadful little men,” she said just as her husband’s eyeball appeared beside her, and various hands brandishing sticks, clubs, and, oddly, a stick of rhubarb.
“Come away from them, dear,” said Nigel. “They’re common, vulgar types. You never know what you might catch.”
“Common?” said Angry. “We may be common, but we’ve earned the right to be unpleasant.”
“Sweat of our brows,” said Jolly. “You’ve just inherited rudeness. We’ve had to work at it.”
“You’re peasants!” shouted Nigel. “Vandals! Get off my land!”
“Nyah!” shouted Angry, sticking his tongue out and wiggling his hands behind his ears in that timeless gesture of disrespect beloved in school yards everywhere. “Get a proper job!”
They emerged onto firmer ground, leaving the swamp behind. The dwarfs looked very pleased with themselves, and even Constable Peel and Sergeant Rowan seemed to have enjoyed the exchange.
“I love a good shout,” said Jolly.
“We should visit them on the way back,” said Dozy. “I liked them. Eh, Jolly?”
But Jolly wasn’t listening. Instead, he was sniffing the air.
“Can you smell that?” he said.
“It’s the swamp,” said Angry.
“No, it’s different.”
“That was me,” said Dozy. “It’s all the ice cream. Sorry.”
“No, not that,” said Jolly. “That.”
They all sniffed.
“Nah,” said Angry, “it can’t be.”
“We’re dreaming,” said Dozy.
“It’s-” said Jolly, so overcome with emotion that he could barely speak. “It’s-”
“It’s a brewery,” said Mumbles.
Everybody in the van looked at him, even Dan, who could barely see at the best of times.
“You spoke clearly,” said Jolly.
“I know,” said Mumbles. “But this is important.”
And, to be fair, it was.
XXVI
WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN how exposure to life on Earth had changed Mrs. Abernathy, and not necessarily for the better, depending upon how one might feel about net curtains and potpourri. It had also changed Nurd, who had discovered that if he was any kind of demon at all, then he was a speed demon.
But the brief expedition to the world of men had also changed other denizens of Hell in a variety of ways. A shiver of burrowing sharks 36 had become quite fascinated by the game of rugby, even if they weren’t very good at it because they kept eating the ball; a group of ghouls, having locked themselves in a Biddlecombe sweetshop to escape from some rather aggressive young people, had become very adept at making chocolate, and were now distinctly tubbier than they had been, and therefore a lot less frightening; and a party of imps that had briefly glimpsed a Jane Austen costume drama on some televisions in a store had taken to wearing bonnets and trying to find one another suitable husbands.
In the great clamor and disturbance that had followed the failure of the invasion, nobody noticed that two warthog demons, Shan and Gath, had disappeared, and there were now two fewer pairs of arms to shovel coals into the deep fires of Hell. Still, since it wasn’t as if anyone was being paid a wage, and the fires of Hell showed no sign of going out anytime soon, it was decided that Shan and Gath had merely found more suitable employment elsewhere, and they were quickly forgotten.
Prior to the opening of the portal, Shan and Gath had led uninteresting, fruitless lives. They had never really experienced hunger or thirst, so they didn’t need to eat or drink. Occasionally they would gnaw on a particularly interesting rock, just to test its consistency, and they had been known to nibble on smaller demons, if only to see how quickly their limbs grew back. You had to make your own amusement in Hell.
But their brief visit to Earth had opened their eyes, and their taste buds, to a new world of possibilities, for Shan and Gath’s sole contribution to the invasion had been to spend the night in the Fig & Parrot pub in Biddlecombe sampling free pints of what was then merely the experimental version of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar. And while Spiggit’s was, as we have established, a bit strong, and somewhat harsh on the palate, even for those who had previously dipped rocks in Hell’s lava before sampling them, just to add a little taste, Shan and Gath still agreed that drinking it had been a life-altering experience, as well as briefly altering their sight and the proper working of their digestive systems. They had returned to Hell with only one purpose in mind: to find a way to replicate this wonderful brew and then do nothing else but drink it for eternity. They had therefore retired to a cave and set about their work, having absorbed a certain amount of brewing lore from some of the regulars at the Fig & Parrot, who had drunk so much beer in their time that their bodies were essentially kegs on legs.
Unfortunately, as Shan and Gath soon discovered, replicating the unique taste of Spiggit’s Old Peculiar was considerably more difficult than they had hoped: successive tastings of their early efforts had played havoc with their insides, and it usually took a while for their tongues and sinuses to recover from more than three glasses. They had therefore decided to recruit a taster to test their various brews. The taster’s name was Brock, a small, spherical, blue being with a good nature and two legs, two arms, one mouth, three eyes, and the useful ability to instantly reconstruct himself in the event of any unfortunate accidents.
As it happened, this latter quality had turned out to be particularly useful.
Inside Shan and Gath’s cave were tubes, bottles, vats of water, and stocks of weeds that closely resembled wheat, oats, and barley. In an effort to imitate as closely as possible Spiggit’s distinctive taste, Shan and Gath had also been forced to acquire a number of different acids; three types of mud; assorted dyes and corrosives; grit; oil; rancid fats; and various forms of wee. 37 Each variation was duly fed to Brock by Shan and Gath, who, having encountered a couple of people dressed as mad scientists while drinking in the Fig & Parrot on that fateful Halloween night, had made themselves some white lab coats, and carried stone clipboards on which they carefully made notes of their experiments, as follows:
BREW 1: Subject hiccup, then vanish in puff of smoke.
BREW 2: Subject fall off chair. Appear to die.
BREW 3: One of subject’s eyes fall out.
BREW 4: Two of subject’s eyes fall out.
BREW 5: Subject claim that he can fly. Subject try. Subject wrong.
BREW 6: Subject claim that he can fly again. Subject try. Subject succeed. Gath remove subject from ceiling with broom.
BREW 7: Subject beg for mercy. Threaten to sue. Fall asleep.
BREW 8: Subject turn green. Become violently ill. Appear to die again.
BREW 9: Subject say worst version yet. Subject say it wish it really was dead. Subject plead for mercy.
BREW 10: Subject claim tongue on fire. Gath examine. Subject’s tongue actually on fire.