It was a dark and stormy night.
Do not let that lull you into a false sense of security. Just because it was the kind of night on which evil things have always been known to walk the earth, the kind of night on which one’s car breaks down in front of the old dark house, while dramatic lightning bolts fork through tarmac-black skies does not mean that this was not a night on which the forces of darkness were not abroad. They were abroad. They were everywhere. They always are. That’s the whole point.
Two of them lurked in the ruined graveyard. Two shadowy figures, one hunched and squat, the other lean and menacing: both of them star-quality lurkers. If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded Born to Lurk, these two would have been on the album cover, no problem. They had been lurking in the rain by a particularly ruined tomb for over an hour now, and they looked like they could carry on all night. Neither of them had spoken a word since arriving, although their body language was a stream of sullen invective. The shorter of them carried a bundle.
There was a splash and a muffled curse as someone trod in a particularly deep puddle. A third figure joined them.
“Sorry I’m late,” it said. “The car broke down, and you wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get someone out on a night like this. Then I got lost. Got here eventually though. Been waiting long?”
The hunched, squat lurker spat in the mud. “We are all here then,” he hissed, in a voice like fingernails clawing through a blackboard. “We can begin. Hastur?”
Hastur, the thin one, nodded. “Great deeds have I done in the service of Our Master. I have poisoned reservoirs and given dogs venomous bones. I have tossed red-hot coins to buskers and strychnine sweets to small children. I have sold cars with carefully defective brakes; given sure tips to small investors, guaranteed to lose them the savings accumulated through their pitiful lives. I have corrupted youths and virgins. I have forced many to madness and beyond. I have written books that drove those who read them to suicide; and I have written songs that made those who heard them wish that they were dead. You could fill Wembley Stadium with those lives I have ruined, those souls I have twisted to Our Master’s cause. And you?”
The squat one cleared his throat, the sound was not unlike slivers of blackboard being driven under someone’s fingernails, and began his litany: “I have burned down orphanages and hospitals. I have altered bus timetables and pushed people in front of subway trains. I have stolen candy from babies and hope from the despairing, swindled poor old women and returned to swindle them again. I have placed ground glass in soup intended for the poor, and ground diamonds in soup for the rich. I have removed warning signs, and made my own Diversion signs, and laughed as cars and lorries tumbled over cliffs. Thousands have I corrupted, thousands more have I destroyed utterly. I might also mention VAT form 10A/VB/003.1. And you, Crawleigh?”
The latecomer shuffled from foot to foot, squelching slightly. They were staring at him.
“Well…I really meant to get around to that sort of stuff. I mean I really meant to. But. I’ve been so busy recently, and I just didn’t, um, you know how it is…” He trailed off.
There was a pause. Then the hunched figure hissed, in a voice that sounded like nails being dragged across an entire language laboratory full of advanced teaching aids, “You’ve been…busy?”
“Uh, yes. I mean, for example, Tuesday. Yes. I really was going to go out and um, well, deprave somebody or something. Only there was this note saying the gas board would finally be sending someone over to fix the boiler, so I stayed in all day specially. Well, that was Tuesday gone. Of course, I phoned and they said he’d be round Wednesday, and so Wednesday I’m in all day, except I popped out for five minutes to get some ciggies, and I get back and there’s a note on the door saying they’d been and I was out and could I get back to them? Five minutes!”
“It‘s not as if,” he added, warming to his theme, “It’s not as if they give you a time they’ll be coming round. Oh no! ‘Be in all day,’ they say, as if you haven’t got better things to do with your time, so there am I…”
“You haven’t done…anything?”
“Erm, I suppose if you want to put it like that…”
“Nothing?”
“Well I was rude to a few people…”
The hunched figure glared hopefully. “You cursed them with dread maledictions and dark and forbidden imprecations, did you?”
“No. Not exactly. Not as such. Mostly I just gave them one of my looks. But, I mean, they could tell I wasn’t pleased. I’m fairly sure about that.”
The lean man, Hastur, spoke. “This is getting us nowhere,” he said. “What news of the parents?” There was something deeply unpleasant in the way he used the word. A raindrop which had begun to trickle down the back of his neck got the message and tried desperately to drip upwards.
Crawleigh seemed marginally less uncomfortable. “All set. A-OK. She goes into labour tonight. We make the swap after everyone’s asleep, and she goes back home with Him next week. The hospital staff are all ours, and when she gets Him back to St. James’s all her nurses, nannies, governesses and so forth will be our people. Everything’s set.”
“Good.“
A clap of thunder smashed the skies, and the rain, innocent of what it was about to fall onto, attempted the impossible and tried to fall even harder. Where it hit the small, squat figure it seemed to be turning into steam.
“There must be no mistakes, Crawleigh.”
“Oh, no. Gosh, of course not. I’ll be making the swap tonight myself what could possibly go wrong?”
There was no answer. Possibly there was a sigh.
The small, squat figure leaned down and picked up the bundle. It was bulky and well wrapped against the rain. “Here. Take good care of it. It is the most important thing there is, Crawleigh. Our Master’s own.”
Crawleigh took the bundle from him. “Right. Well, I’d better be off then. Going to be a busy night. Lovely seeing both of you again. Listen, if you’re ever down my way, give me a bell, love to see you, mustn’t drift out of touch. We could pick up some curries, watch a video back at my place…” He trailed off, realising that he was alone in the graveyard.
Carrying his burden gingerly he squished out of the graveyard and down the hill to the puddly patch of mud where his car, a Citroen 2CV, was waiting.
Halfway down the hill the bundle began to cry: the air-raid siren wail of the newly born. High. Wordless. And old.
——————–
There was something deeply unfair about being an Earthbound demon, Crawleigh reflected, as he started the 2CV and clunked it down the waterlogged country road. From what he could see, most people, ordinary human people, seemed to do far better than he did when it came to adding to the sum total of human misery.
He gripped the wheel miserably. Where He’d gone wrong, of course well, of course, He went wrong all the time, it was His job. Where He’d gone particularly wrong was in making Crawleigh human. It subjected you to all kinds of little pressures, no wonder most of them were several coupons short of a toaster, you ended up feeling sorry for them, the poor bastards.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to ruin the lives and souls of strangers; it was just that after he’d given them nice cups of tea and homemade cakes, and listened to their problems and helped them balance their cheque books, and got their kittens down from trees, there simply wasn’t the time.
The road to heaven, he would reflect gloomily, is paved with bad intentions, and resolve to break his ways. Starting, well, tomorrow. Probably.
He stuck out his chin. Enough of that. No more messing
about. From now on he was going to be bad. Worse than Michael Jackson. The thought turned his mind to something better in the way of in-car entertainment than the sloshing of the windscreen wipers. The radio would do nothing except crackle in Danish, so he fumbled for a cassette and pushed it into the slot.
It was The Best of Queen. It always was. Crawleigh suspected that any tape left in a car for more than a fortnight metamorphosed into a Best of Queen album.
He nearly stopped for a hitchhiker; but at the last moment he remembered the child asleep on the back seat, and sped past the woman hitching by the side of the road, drenching her. Pride and embarrassment struggled within him. Pride won. One of the windscreen wipers was swept away by the rain.
The tape was bleating about someone who kept Moet and Chandon in a pretty cabinet. Crawleigh, in that dreamlike state that afflicts all car drivers in the pouring rain at night, found himself wondering who Moet and Chandon were.
And then he wasn’t. Suddenly Freddy Mercury’s voice was talking to Crawleigh.
WE ARE RELYING ON YOU, it said. DO NOT FAIL US, CRAWLEIGH.
“No, Lord.”
NO…WHAT DID WE DO TO YOU AFTER THE ATLANTIS DEBACLE? REMIND US.
“Half an aeon, O Master of the Nine Hells, partially dismembered, suspended in the flaming cesspits of Abbadon. There were internal stoats in there somewhere as well. And after that l was Earthbound until further notice.”
YESSSSS. WE TELL YOU THIS, CRAWLEIGH: LISTEN WELL: IF ANYTHING, ANYTHING AT ALL GOES WRONG WITH THIS VENTURE YOU WON’T FIND US ANYWHERE NEARLY SO LENIENT. GOT THAT?
Crawleigh shook in his seat. He nodded violently.
GOOD. I see a little silhouetto of a man scaramouche scaramouche will you do the fandango…
A hole in the sunroof chose this moment to make its presence felt. The rain dripped onto Crawleigh’s head. He didn’t care. All he had to do tonight was to swap over two babies. What could be simpler than that?
——————–
The maternity hospital was fairly quiet, if you didn’t count the screams of women in labour.
Mr Brown knew what his role in the actual physical action of having babies ought to be. He should be pacing the corridors, puffing nervously on his pipe, making small talk with the other fathers. Then a matronly nurse with a twinkling eye would pop her head around the door and say Mister Brown? It’s a boy or a girl, or twins, or something and he would hand around the cigars he had bought for the occasion, congratulate Deirdre, and go off and get stinking drunk. He‘d done it twice before, and you soon got the hang of it. It was like shelling peas.
The No Smoking sign was the first hurdle. Deirdre was the second. Mister Brown blamed Woman’s Hour.
He felt strongly that it wasn’t his place to sit next to Deirdre and exhort her to breathe. She knew how to breathe. He was pretty sure about that. He had done his bit nine months earlier when a power cut had sent them to bed earlier than planned, and he didn’t see why he needed to go to classes on ‘Constructive coparenting’ at his time of life. And he didn’t see why he had to tell Deirdre to do something she’d been doing for years. And what was he meant to do with the cigars?
It wasn’t like this in the old days.
In the old days Deirdre had done little more than bustle around the house arranging flowers, with occasional spurts of shopping thrown in to liven up the day before the Women’s Institute meeting. Then one morning he had come down to breakfast to discover Deirdre in a smock that would have not looked out of place on a Nativity play shepherd, if the actor playing the shepherd was five foot eight and was the kind of Shepherd who had a NUCLEAR POWER NO THANKS badge pinned to the right hand side of his bosom. And there was muesli. Not kippers. Not sausages. Bacon was right out. Bacon was practically the Eighth Deadly Sin. From that day forward it had been muesli all the way. And Mrs Brown’s confinement had been mystically transformed into the most joyous and sharing experience that two people can have.
Well, he hadn’t got anything against joyous sharing experiences. Here’s to joyous sharing experiences. Joyous sharing experiences were all right by him. It just that, as far as he was concerned, Deirdre could have this joyous sharing experience by herself. He’d sidled out of the labour room, and was now huddled by a service entrance puffing at his pipe. He was sheltered from the rain, but not from the cold or the wind.
He shivered. It happened to them at a certain age. Your father never warned you about it. Suddenly they started ordering their own newspaper, the sort with pages with names like Lifestyle and Options. They started to join things, and did these robotic exercises in pink socks with the feet cut out. They started to blame you for not having had to work for a living for twenty-five years. It was hormones, or something.
A Citroen 2CV drew up by the dustbins. The young man who got out was wearing a raincoat and carrying a large bundle. He ran across the car park getting wetter with each step. When he reached the service entrance Mr Brown said, “You’ve left your lights on.”
“Damn. It’s supposed to have this thing that bleeps. Here, hold this.” He thrust the bundle into Mr Brown’s arms and dashed back across the car park to wrestle with the car’s door and lighting system. Mr Brown was surprised to find that the bundle seemed to be a small carrycot, with a cover over it.
From the weight there was a baby in the carrycot. Strange, thought Mr Brown, most people take babies away from Maternity Hospitals…
“Thanks,” said the young man in the raincoat, who was by now soaked through. He took back the bundle and winked. “Is it happening yet?” he asked.
Deep in the leather armchair of his soul Mr Brown felt vaguely proud to be so instantly recognisable as a parent.
“Yes,” he admitted, “She’s in labour, if that’s what you mean.
“Already? Any idea how long we’ve got to go?”
We? Obviously a Doctor With ideas about coparenting. “Not long now,” said Mister Brown, “She was, uh, doing it when I had to pop out…” He gestured vaguely with his pipe to indicate pressing calls of nature.
“Shaitan! Now? Why didn’t you say so?” Crawleigh shouldered his burden of waterproofed carrycot and headed for the green swing door. “Oh blast I’ve forgotten. What room’s she in?”
“Room Three,” said Mr Brown “It’s at the top of the stairs.” He fumbled in his pocket for the packet. “Would you like to share a cigar experience?” he called, but Crawleigh was already running through the doors. Mr Brown sighed, and put the cigars away. Then he returned to his pipe.
It had gone out.
——————–
If you have ever watched a slick stage magician perform a three-card trick, or been hustled by a respectable gentleman with a pea and three shells, you will know the ease and dizzying slickness with which three similar objects can be swapped, exchanged and transferred from place to place, so that you lose any knowledge of which was where to start with.
This was nothing like that, although the principle is sort of the same.
Watch carefully. We will stop the action:
Mrs Brown is giving birth in Maternity Room Three. She is having a dark-haired male baby we will call baby A.
The wife of the American Ambassador, Mrs Harriet Dowling, is giving birth in Maternity Room Four. She is having a dark-haired male baby we will call baby B.
Nurse Hodges is a devout Satanist. As a child she went to Sabbat School regular as prunes, and although she won several black stars for things like handwriting and liver she was never particularly bright. She is being handed a dark-haired male baby we will call The Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of this World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness.
There. Got it? Ok, roll ‘em:
“Is that him?” said Nurse Hodges, staring at the baby. “Only I’d expected maybe funny eyes. Or teensyweensy little hoofikins. Or a widdle tail.” She turned him round as she spoke. No horns either. The devil’s child looked ominously normal.
“Yes, it’s him,” sighed Crawleigh.
“Well, I knew it must be, what with you saying he was and all. Coo. Fancy. Me holding the Antichrist. Me bathing the Antichrist. Wiping his little botty and tickling his little toesywoeses…”
She appeared quite carried away, and was now addressing the child. Crawleigh waved a hand in front of her face. “Hello? Nurse Hodges?”
“Sorry, sir. He is a little sweetheart. Do you think he looks like his dad? I bet he does. I bet he looks like his daddywaddykins…”
Crawleigh sighed. “She’s in maternity room three, and she may already have had the baby. Be on standby I want the exchange made as soon as is possible. Got it?”
“OOO’s a widdledumpydumpywumpyden? OOOOOOOOOO’s a widdlerumpypumpydumpyden? Room three is it, sir? Righty-ho.”
Nurse Hodges headed up the stairs with the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of this World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness safely in her arms, and headed towards the maternity rooms. She found a bassinet and laid him down in it.
She stood outside Maternity Room Three. A matronly head popped round the door. “Hodges. What are you doing there? Shouldn’t you be on duty in Room Four?”
“Mister Crawleigh said…”
“Never mind. Have you seen the husband anywhere? Said he had a dicky tummy and walked out half an hour ago.”
“I’ve only just seen Mister Crawleigh, and he told me…”
“I’ll go and look for him. Really. Can you just keep an eye on her? She’s a bit woozy, and the baby’s fine.” Sister paused. “Why are you winking?”
“You know. The babies. The exchange. And one of them’s um, you know.”
“Yes, I know all that, Hodges. And I thought you were meant to be on standby in Ward Four. But the husband’s disappeared. And we can’t have that not tonight of all nights. So just wait here and mind the baby, that’s a love.”
Sister sailed off down the polished corridor. Nurse Hodges, wheeling her bassinet, entered the maternity room.
Mrs Brown was more than woozy. She was fast asleep. The baby (Baby A) was asleep beside her, weighed and name tagged. Nurse Hodges carefully removed its nametag, which she copied out, then attached the duplicate to the baby in her care. Then she swapped the babies. They looked fairly similar, both being small, blotchy and looking sort of, though not really, like Winston Churchill.
Now, thought Nurse Hodges, I could do with a nice cup of tea.
Most of the staff of the Maternity Hospital were born and bred Satanists. They were dyed-in-the-blood-red-velvet Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They weren’t very evil. Human beings mostly aren’t they just tend to get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in iackboots and gassing people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or just dressing up in tie-dyed jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed and a costume and they’ll do anything. Third-generation Satanists tended to worship the Prince of Darkness because that was what they did on a Sunday night, instead of staying home and watching BBC2. And Nurses, of whatever creed, are primarily nurses. Which has to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and drinking huge quantities of tea. She hoped someone would come soon; she’d swapped the babies, now she wanted her tea.
There was a knock on the door. Nurse Hodges opened it.
“Has it happened yet?” asked Mr Brown. “I’m the father. The husband. Whatever.”
Nurse Hodges had rather expected that the American Ambassador would resemble Blake Carrington, or perhaps J.R. Ewing, and Mr Brown, who looked nothing like anyone on American television, except possibly for the mild and unassuming second cousin on the better sort of murder mystery who turns out to have been the murderer all the time, was something of a disappointment. She didn’t think much of the cardigan either.
“Ooo, yes, love. Congratulations. Your lady wife’s asleep, poor pet, must be tired out, but come on in, have a look at him.”
Mr Brown came into the room. He stopped. “Twins?” He reached for his pipe. He stopped reaching for his pipe. He reached for it again. He stopped and repeated, “Twins? Nobody said anything about twins.”
“Oh no, love. No, this one’s yours. This other one’s, er… somebody else’s. Just looking after it for a minute until the ward sister gets back. No,” she reiterated, pointing to the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of this World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness, “… This one’s definitely your son. From the top of his head to the tip of his little hoofywoofys what he hasn’t got,” she added hastily.
“Ah. Yes. He looks like my side of the family. It’s the ears. He’s got Brown ears.”
“Are they really? It might just be a trick of the light. Anyway, they’re bound to fade as he gets older. He’s a very normal child. Very, very normal indeed.”
There was a pause. They stared at the sleeping baby.
“You don’t have much of an accent,” said Nurse Hodges. “It’s funny, I thought you’d have more of one than you’ve got. Been living here long, have you?”
“Well, we moved into the area about ten years ago, now. When Robert was born. That’s my eldest.”
“Ten years. Well I never. You must like it over here, then.”
“I suppose. Before that we were in Luton.”
Nurse Hodges was fascinated. It wasn’t every day she got to chat to the American Ambassador.
“I suppose you must go to a lot of garden parties.”
“I suppose. Dierdre’s recently begun making homemade jams, crabapple curd, damson and parsnip chutney, that sort of thing. So I have to go along to help with the White Elephant.”
Nurse Hodges had never suspected that royal garden parties were hotbeds of homemade jams. But she could see how the pachyderm fitted in.
“I suppose she rides it in from the palace.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Her Majesty. I’m a big fan of the Royal Family, you know.”
“Well, really, yes, so am I,” agreed Mr Brown, who venerated the Royals, the real royals, who shook hands and waved, not the sort who went to nightclubs in backless dresses and pumped their rumps until all hours, before being sick all over the paparazzi.
Nurse Hodges beamed. “That’s nice. I’m so pleased. I thought your people weren’t very keen on her, what with having revolutions and throwing all those tea sets into the river, so you had to drink coffee, like on Dynasty. It’s good to know there’s no hard feelings, and you’ve been helping her with the elephant and all that. Makes you feel proud to be British. Well, not you, I suppose. But me.”
Mr Brown was out of his depth. A new baby, very nearly two new babies, a Nurse who seemed to be having one of those conversations that you never really got the hang of, and a packet of cigars that seemed fated to remain unsmoked; he wished Mrs Brown was awake. It seemed to be one of those nights. Then one of the words in the nurse’s speech struck a tentative opening chord in the light orchestra of his mind.
“Would there be any possibility of me possibly, maybe, being able to get a cup of tea around here?” he asked.
Nurse Hodges was back on familiar ground. “Well,” she said, “Yes and no. I mean, there’s one of those vendible machines on the third floor. But it doesn’t really serve tea. Not what you and I would call tea, anyway. There’s a kettle in the cubby hole, though; half a mo’ and I’ll be back with a cup for each of us. How many lumps?”
Mr Brown had not been permitted sugar at home for almost a year.
“Two please.”
“You’re sure you shouldn’t prefer coffee?” asked Nurse Hodges, conscious that she was entertaining an American.
“Quite sure, thank you.”
Mr Brown was left alone in the empty maternity ward. Alone, that is if you ignored two sleeping babies and a sleeping wife. He felt awkward.
Mr Brown was the kind of person who took to hospitals as naturally as a duck takes to sandpaper. The smell was part of it. And the sheer femaleness; Mrs Brown had once gone through a phase of reading nothing but romances with worried-looking nurses on the covers, being comforted by (or, occasionally, in the searingly realistic social documentaries, ignored by) a dark-haired doctor with a cleft straightedge for a chin. Romance: that was what it was all about. Sex too, he shouldn’t wonder, hospitals were probably all hotbeds of hot beds. It stood to reason.
He sighed.
It was then that Baby A awoke, and began to scream.
Robert was ten; Ethel was seven; Mr Brown had not had to quiet a screaming baby for years. He had lost the hang of it. He wished it didn’t look quite so much like Winston Churchill.
He addressed his first and only words to his son.
“I‘d like to give you a cigar,” he said, “But I don’t think it would be allowed.”
The baby opened its mouth wide, then closed it, bewildered.
Nurse Hodges chose that moment to return, bearing two large, steaming mugs: one in the shape of a novelty bedpan, and the other with MY HUSBAND WENT TO Hastings AND ALL HE GOT ME WAS THIS LOUSY MUG written upon the side.
Mr Brown got the bedpan.
Baby A stared at them both, his father and his abductor. His expression implied that he didn’t think very much of them, but then, that’s usual with newborn babies; there’s nothing quite so supercilious as a newborn baby, except perhaps a llama.
“Whose baby did you say that was?” asked Mr Brown.
The doors swung open. An orderly rushed in, breathless. He looked at Nurse Hodges, realised that Mr Brown was not of their number and confined himself to pointing to Baby A, then winking.
Nurse Hodges nodded and winked back.
The orderly wheeled the baby out.
As methods of human communication go, winking can be fairly versatile. You can say a lot with a wink. For example, the orderly’s winks said:
Where the bloody hell have you been? Baby B has been born, we’re all ready to make the switch, and here’s you in the wrong maternity room with the Baby Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of this World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness, drinking tea with an outsider.
And as far as he was concerned her winking reply meant:
Here’s the Baby Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of this World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness, and I can’t talk now because there’s this outsider here.
Nurse Hodges on the other hand, thought that the orderly’s wink was more on the lines of:
Good Old Nursie Hodges switched over the babies all by herself. Now, indicate to me the superfluous child and I shall remove it and let you get on with your tea with the American Ambassador.
While her reply was:
There you go, deary, that’s Baby B; now take him away and leave Nursie to chat to his excellence.
The subtleties of this conversation were entirely lost on Mr Brown, who was rather embarrassed at the display of obvious clandestine medical affection being carried on in front of him, and so stared at his feet until the orderly left.
Mrs Brown stirred.
“Have you picked a name for him, yet?” asked Nurse Hodges.
“Not really. If it was a girl it would have been Lucinda after my mother. Or Germaine. That was Deirdre’s choice”
“Wormwood’s a nice name,“ said the nurse, remembering her classics. “Or Damien. Damien’s very popular.”
——————–
They took Baby A and swapped it with Baby B as soon as the Ambassador’s wife was asleep. The ambassador himself, John T. Dowling, had been called back to Washington in a hurry a few days before, but he had been on the phone to Mrs Dowling during the birth, helping her with her breathing.
It hadn’t helped that he’d been talking on the other phone to his investment counsellor; at one point he had been forced to put her on hold for twenty minutes.
But he had had the birth recorded on video for posterity anyway.
It was the most joyous coexperience two human beings could share, and he wasn’t going to miss a second of it.
——————–
“Of course, you could always go royal. I always think Royal names are so nice.”
Mr Brown found himself going blank; the only royal names that he could think of were Ethelred and Canute. “You don’t say,” he said politely.
“Ooh yes. Charles. He’s such a gentleman. Andrew. Edward a reely refined name that is. Or Henry. Or even William, I suppose,” she added doubtfully.
Mr Brown thought about it. Then he thought about it some more.
——————–
It would be nice to think that the Satanists had the surplus baby Baby B discreetly adopted, that he grew up to be a normal, happy, laughing child, and, after that, grew further up to be a normal, fairly contented adult.
You can think that, if you wish.
Let your mind dwell on his junior school prize for raffiawork, his unremarkable although pleasant time at university, his job in the Hadley Building Society, his lovely wife. If you wish to imagine some children, perhaps even a hobby (restoring World War 2 Russian motorbikes? breeding tropical fish?), then be my guest. If it makes you feel better.
You don’t really want to know what did happen to Baby B.
I like your version best anyway.
He probably wins prizes for his tropical fish.
——————–
“William,” said Mr Brown ruminatively. “Hm. William…”
He stared down at the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is Called Dragon, Prince of this World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness.
“You know,” he concluded at length, “I think he looks like a William.”
There was a flicker of lightning, an almost simultaneous crash of thunder, and the wind drove the rain in a brief attack on the window. Outside the sky was starting to lighten imperceptibly into a predawn grey.
It was going to be a dark and stormy morning.
(End of Chunk One.)
Ну, кроме сдавленного "Merry Christmas?" после поцелуя 
♡ ~⬍
во второй части было бы про Адама и Тадфилд, ангелов и демонов (их перенесли в сериал), а азикроу были бы сильно на десятом плане. Поэтому Нил не хочет писать вторую часть. он хочет смотреть арты и пересматривать начало третьей серии