Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant (39 page)

“Before I begin,” he said, “I need you to understand that the words I am about to recite in no way indicate the presence, or indeed the existence, of a Divine Being of any sort. Words are words, and they have power, and arranged in a particular way they can have a particular effect. Is that understood?”

I nodded.

Pleasant looked down at his prisoner. “I command you, unclean spirit, in the name of whichever god you believe in, I command you to depart. Depart, then, transgressor. Depart, seducer, full of lies and cunning, foe of virtue, persecutor of the innocent.”

“Get away from me,” said Moon. “Get away!”

Pleasant ignored him. “Give place, abominable creature, give way, you monster. Depart, then, depart, accursed one, depart with all your deceits.”

Valkyrie grinned. “Say it.”

“I’m not saying it,” said Pleasant.

“Go on,” said Valkyrie. “Say it for me. Please.”

Pleasant sighed, and returned his attention to the exorcism, and then, in a loud voice, he commanded, “
Get thee behind me, Bubba Moon!
” and Valkyrie cheered.

We went home. Felicity had tried to stay up, but she’d fallen asleep on the couch. I helped Sammy to bed, and he hugged me before I turned out the light. For a moment he was a little kid again, a little kid who needed me.

I stayed with him until he was asleep, and then I sat on the couch and waited for Felicity to wake. When she did, we talked. I didn’t tell her about Bubba Moon. We didn’t talk about what I had just been through. Instead, we talked about us, and our great kids, and our life together. We talked for hours, until the sun bled into the night and turned the sky orange.

Bubba Moon’s van pulled up and I went outside. Valkyrie Cain got out, and so did a tall man with dark hair. Skulduggery Pleasant in yet another astonishing disguise.

Valkyrie told us that the exorcism had lasted three hours. When Pete Green’s body finally slumped into unconsciousness, she’d dragged him out of the circle, leaving only the flickering image of the original Bubba Moon trapped within. By that stage, she said, a team of Sensitives had arrived to drain him of his power. Pleasant told us that Moon would never again get the chance to infect anyone. He would stay there, in that warehouse, in that circle, too weak to possess even a passing pigeon, and that’s where he would remain until the end of days.

I thanked them. Not only for saving my life, not only for saving the life of my son, but also for saving the lives of all the other children who would otherwise have been sacrificed to whatever creature had lived in that light. Valkyrie smiled, thanked
me
for rescuing
them
, and ignored Pleasant when he insisted that he’d had the situation under control. He made a joke about not telling anyone what had happened, or he’d have to send in his friends who’d wipe our memories.

I’m pretty sure it was a joke.

They left without saying much else. They didn’t tell me who they were, who they worked for, or what all this meant. Pleasant didn’t explain why he wore so many disguises, although Sammy told me later that he’d caught a glimpse of him when he was handcuffed to the pillar, and he could have sworn Pleasant had a skull for a head. At this point, nothing would have surprised me.

Bubba Moon’s People were scooped up by whoever scoops people like that up, and Chrissy left town with her son. I asked Pleasant not to send anyone after her. She’d suffered enough, I reckoned.

Pete Green was introduced to a team of psychiatrists who were very curious to find out what trauma had led a grown man with all those unusual scars to revert to his eleven-year-old self overnight. They told me they didn’t dare reunite him with any old friends for fear it would traumatise him further – but maybe at some stage in the future…

That suits me fine. Pete’s my best friend, and I’m not going anywhere. This is my home, after all.

omewhere in the distance, a train rattled on its tracks.

Conor sat in his kitchen with the curtains drawn, the lamp on the table casting its searing eye over his handiwork. It was the size of a shoebox, and wooden. Heavy. Inside were things he did not, could not, understand. There were gears and levers and finely balanced cogs and symbols painstakingly etched into it all. He didn’t know what they meant, didn’t know what they were for, but he had seen them in his head for as long as he could remember. Transferring those symbols to metal and wood, after all these years, was… well, it was wonderful. It was a relief. It was like he’d been tense his whole life, every muscle knotted and his teeth gritted and his eyes screwed shut, and now suddenly he was relaxing, and a strange sort of euphoric calm spread through him.

He took a screwdriver from the junkyard of tools on the table and fixed the lid in place. His hands were covered in nicks and cuts. He had run out of plasters days ago. Some of the cuts still stung. There were particular gears and symbols that required blood. He didn’t know why – he just knew that they did. He saw it in his head. He always had. This device, this box, these designs, these gears and levers and symbols – they had always been a part of who he was. This was all he thought about. It was why he didn’t finish school. It was why he couldn’t hold a job. It was why Cathy had left him. This device had ruined any chance he’d ever had at happiness – but here it was, finished. A wooden box with a big red button on its lid.

Conor straightened his back. Vertebrae cracked. How long had he been sitting hunched over like that? How long had he been sitting here? He became suddenly aware of how full his bladder was, and how empty his stomach. He needed to go for a walk. He needed fresh air. Was it even daytime? The curtains were closed and everywhere but the table was in darkness. It was night. But what night? Was it still the weekend?

There was something over by the door, a shape in the gloom. Like a man, standing very still. Conor squinted at it, then turned his head, looked at it out of the corner of his eye. No matter how he viewed the thing, this coat or this shadow or whatever it was, it still looked like a man. A tall man. In a hat.

Conor frowned at it.

“Hello, Conor,” said the man.

A bolt of fear and fright shot from Conor’s belly to his chest, but his body remained still. Would his legs even work if he tried to jump up? He’d been sitting here for so long he doubted it.

Conor’s mouth was dry. How long had it been since he’d taken a drink of water? His voice cracked. The question he asked was not
Who are you?
or
What do you want?
, two questions he felt needed answers, but rather, “How long have you been standing there?”

“Just a few minutes,” said the man. He had a reassuring voice. It was smooth. “You didn’t hear me come in. You were otherwise occupied. What is that you’ve got there?”

“You can’t have it,” said Conor. “If you want to rob me, rob me. I have a little money somewhere. But you can’t have this.”

“I’m not here to rob you,” said the man. “What happens if you press that button, Conor?”

The pressure on his bladder, the dryness of his mouth, the emptiness of his belly, and now a headache, rising slowly from the heat that was stinging his skin and making him sweat. He felt sick. He
was
sick. He needed to lie down.

“I don’t know,” said Conor.

The tall man in the hat moved his head ever so slightly. “You don’t know what it does? But you made it, didn’t you?”

Conor nodded.

“How did you know what to do?”

“I’ve always known,” said Conor. “My whole life I’ve known. I had these images in my head. But I couldn’t see them clear enough until… sorry, what date is it?”

“The twenty-first,” said the tall man. “Four days before Christmas.”

Conor frowned. “That can’t be right. It was the eighth just… just a few days ago.”

“Time got away from you,” said another voice in the gloom, somewhere over by the window. It was a girl’s voice.

“Who are you?” Conor asked at last.

“No one in particular,” said the man. “We have a job to do, that’s all. We help people.”

“I don’t need your help.”

“You may not,” said the girl, “but everyone else does.” She walked forward a bit, until the peripheral glow from the lamp could pick out her features. She was pretty, with dark hair. Wearing black. Seventeen or eighteen, no older. “What does the button do?” she asked.

“I told you,” said Conor. “I don’t know.”

“Then why is your finger on it?”

He looked down. There it was, his finger, resting on the big red button like it had no intention of ever moving. He frowned. He couldn’t remember putting it there and yet… yet it seemed there was no other possible place he could put it. His finger belonged on that button.

“I’m sorry,” Conor said. “I’m not feeling well.”

“Conor Delaney,” said the man, “take your finger off the button.”

And Conor almost did it. Without thinking, his finger rose a fraction before the weight of his obligation forced it back down again.

Obligation? What obligation? What the hell was going on?

“How did you do that?” he asked the man. “How did you make me do that?”

The man made a sound, like a dissatisfied grunt, and it was the girl who spoke. “How did you disobey? Did you take a name?”

“What?” said Conor. “What do you mean?”

“How did you disobey?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, do you understand? I don’t know who you are or what you’re doing here.”

“They’re saying the world will end,” said the girl.

This stopped Conor for a moment. “What?”

“They’re saying the world will end,” the girl repeated. “Did you hear that?”

“Are you… are you talking about that Mayan thing? What about it? The Mayan calendar ends on the twenty-first of December. So what? It’s a calendar. They ran out of room, or they stopped calculating, or a new cycle begins again or something… I’m sorry, what does that have to do with anything? It’s nonsense.”

“Do you know what a Sensitive is, Conor?” the girl asked. “It’s a psychic. You believe in psychics?”

“No,” said Conor. “I don’t believe in astrology, either, or tarot cards, or palm reading.”

The girl nodded. “Palm reading is silly. So is astrology. Most tarot-card readers haven’t a clue what they’re doing. I met one once who assured me I had a happy life ahead of me – so she’s pretty obviously an idiot. But psychics have been predicting the end of the world, Conor, to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar.”

“So?”

“So we think the end of the world starts here,” said the man.

Conor frowned. “In Ireland? You think the end of the world starts here in this country?”

“Actually, I think it starts here in this kitchen.”

Conor blinked. “You can’t be serious.”

“I can be, but rarely am.”

“And what? You think this button kicks it all off?” Conor said, almost laughing. “You think that’s what I’ve been making? This is a box of gears and junk and things that don’t make sense! There’s not a single computer chip or piece of technology in it. It’s not connected to anything. I don’t know what will happen when I push the button, but whatever it is will happen in this box and this box alone. It’s not going to set off a chain reaction, or explode, or detonate nuclear warheads, or… It’s just a silly box.”