Death, the Devil, and the Goldfish (8 page)

Five minutes after Neville left, the research team decided that testing new units and computers would take way too long so they decided to skip the testing altogether and move straight on to the main phase.

Diagnostics drawings for the elves began the very next day.

Nigel noted that the colour of Mrs. Jones' house, a sordid light green, made it stand out from the rest of the sickly, hospital-cream-coloured houses attached to it.

The street had recently fallen into chaos, as Mrs. Beatty from two doors down had woken up that morning after being dead for a full hour and a half. People had been lining up at her front door since the event to ask her questions about the afterlife and to see if she needed a cup of tea.

Tea had long been a highly favored drink of the British. They fought wars over it, attributed miracles to it, and once, a religious crusade, just a small one, had been launched over the lack of tea in a small Welsh village. With the world in chaos over no one dying, the logical thing for any British person to do was to sit down and have a nice cup of tea, offer tea to others who were not drinking tea, chat warmly about tea, and maybe have a scone, too.

Nigel inferred from the incessant laughter that Mrs. Beatty was having a whale of a time and, according to the handwritten sign hung on her garden wall, had even started charging five pounds a person for entrance into her house. Nigel fought the compulsion to join the lineup, continued up Mrs. Jones' steps, and gave her door a somber yet authoritative knock.

The somber yet authoritative knock received a response in the form of the ominous sound a shotgun makes when being cocked. Nigel's suspicions about the sound proved true two seconds later, when there came a loud
bang
and the sordid light green door exploded out into many sordid light green bits of wood, leaving a gaping hole.

"Take that, you furry bastard!" came the screech from inside.

Somewhere in between the knock at the door and the explosion of said door, Nigel had stepped aside and stood pressed firmly up against the wall. Suddenly, the head of a four-foot-tall old lady stuck her head through the two-foot-wide hole in the door. She looked around wildly before looking at Nigel, who smiled back politely.

"Did you see him," she said, "did you see him?"

Nigel was surprised that such volume could come from such a small head encased in a knitted woolen bonnet. Nigel flashed his badge.

"Detective Reinhardt. You are Mrs. Jones, I presume?"

"Ms. Jones. Mizzzz! Did you see him? He's going to come back for me, you know? He told me he would," said Ms. Jones with a hint of alarm. Her eyes scanned the street like a weasel looking for dinner.

In his mind, Nigel rolled his eyes; physically he continued to fix his gaze on the deranged old woman.

"I don't suppose you'd like to hand me the shotgun?"

Ms. Jones thought about this for a while before answering a resolute
No,
then asked if he'd like to come in for a cup of tea, proclaimed that he seemed to be a nice young man, and then apologized for almost blowing his head off. She unlocked the door and let Nigel in.

The people standing lined up outside Mrs. Beatty's house had been busy staring disapprovingly at the hullabaloo. Comments like, "No respect for the dead," and, "Always trying to be the centre of attention," got thrown around.

On closer inspection, Nigel found that Ms. Jones was actually shorter than four feet. She was more like three and a half feet. The word
elf
wandered through his head but didn't feel right in relation to Ms. Jones, and so it left. Her small head encased in the woolen bonnet sat gingerly upon her shoulders, almost as if independent of the rest of her rather stumpy body. Her body moved and her head would reluctantly follow, as if resigned to the fact that it had no other choice.

Ms. Jones showed Nigel to the living room, a place that already had the smell of old lady poured into the very particles of every object in the room, right down to the hand-knitted doilies.

"So, Ms. Jones—"

"Mrs.!" she snapped. "Mrs. Jones! I was married for fifty-two years to our Arthur, God rest his soul."

"I'm sorry?" said Nigel completely perplexed.

"It’s Mrs. Jones thank you very much," she replied. "It was the drink that did him in."

"Arthur?"

"Hit by a Guinness truck coming home from the pub one night. He didn't drink Guinness, mind you, reminded him of drinking motor oil, he always said."

Mrs. Jones stared at Nigel as if waiting for a reply.

With the sudden change in recent world events, Nigel decided that this wasn't a big issue and he might as well just ignore it. Plus, the old woman was still nursing her shotgun. She looked very much to Nigel like an unhinged English version of Granny Clampett. A slightly confused and uncomfortable silence ensued.

"Oh, tea!" She shrieked and ran off to the kitchen. She left the shotgun leaning against her easy chair. Nigel thought it best if he moved the shotgun for the time being, so he hid it under the couch cushion he was currently sitting on. With any luck, she'd never notice it was gone.

Nigel closed his eyes and proceeded to do some breathing exercises he'd learnt from an ex-roommate of his.
Beware the elf
, flashed across the inside of his eyelids as Mrs. Jones scuttled back into the room.

"Here you go, I'm sure you'll like it," she said, passing a tiny, china teacup to Nigel.

"I'm sure I will." Nigel placed the teacup on the coffee table, took out a pencil and pad, and proceeded with caution.

Mrs. Jones settled back into her easy chair and sipped her own tea. The lack of a shotgun at her side momentarily escaped her notice.

"The report that you filed with Scotland Yard was a bit on the sketchy side. Just for the record, I don't suppose you'd like to elaborate a bit?"

Mrs. Jones shuffled herself around in her chair.

"Well, it was all very strange," she began, "I’ve had that cat for six years and he's never said bugger all before. Then two nights ago, he wouldn't shut up."

Nigel shot Mrs. Jones a calm glance, which she returned instantly with a stubborn glare.

"Go on."

"Well, I was coming back from the Hare and Hound; we have a nice little darts competition going with the sewing circle girls from Notting Hill."

"That's the pub on Rhodes St.?" ventured Nigel.

Mrs. Jones snorted at the interruption.

"Yes. I came home earlyish because I had to feed Fuzzbucket."

Nigel wrote down the name
Fuzzbucket
, then began to wonder whether he'd heard her right.

"I'm sorry. The cat in question, the one you say is possessed by the devil, his name is Fuzzbucket?"

"Yes, Fuzzbucket. When I got home, the cheeky little bastard was sitting at the kitchen table eating a chicken I'd been defrosting for Sunday lunch. Said he'd got hungry and decided to cook himself some food. And then he told me to go out and buy him some cigarettes."

"This must all have come as quite a shock to you. What happened then?"

"I told him that it was most unnatural for him to be talking and smoking all of a sudden like that. And that he should stop doing it, and then I asked him who he thought he was."

Mrs. Jones suddenly began to look around the small living room. She was missing something and couldn't remember what.

Nigel caught the searching look and quickly urged her on.

"So what was his reply?"

"It was most peculiar. He looked me straight in the eye and proclaimed that he was the Prince of Darkness, the Devil himself, and that he'd come to wreak havoc on the Earth. And then he babbled something about small robots, and flocks of nervous Australian ducks, and then told me that he would be borrowing my cat for a while and that he'd come back for me one day so I'd better watch out."

"Humph," said Nigel uncomfortably. At his last testing, Nigel's IQ measured at over 200. And then, at another point it measured at 76, just because he felt like being stupid that day. He had always been smart, and he knew how to spot a liar. What disturbed him was that everything Mrs. Jones said, as far as he could tell, appeared to be completely true.

He decided to adjust his seating position. Whether it was Nigel's movements, or whether it was just meant to be, the shotgun under the couch chose that moment to fire off. The pellets ripped half the couch apart and destroyed some lovely little ceramic pots that had been sitting on the fireplace. They were souvenirs from a little seaside town in the south of Wales called Tenby.

"Bollocks," exclaimed Nigel as Mrs. Jones' heart gave out.

She clutched at her chest and died right there on the spot.

"Bloody hell! A castle!" exclaimed Jeremiah for the one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-eighty-second time as he swam around his bowl. But then it hit him, a tingling feeling somewhere behind his eyes. A feeling that he may or may not have had before, because he couldn't remember. It felt familiar, but uncomfortable. A phrase popped into his head. He tried to hold the thought; he swam to the bottom of his tank and pushed his coloured rocks around, trying to make a memory of what he saw.

Then he couldn't remember what he had been doing. He wondered why the rocks at the bottom of his tank formed funny letters.

"Most peculiar thing for rocks to do."

Jeremiah looked around the bowl, forgetting the rocks. "Well, well, well, look at that," he said, "there's a castle in here!"

There were some feelings that just couldn’t be explained. No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t make head nor tail of them. Nigel had one of those inexplicable feelings while he sat sipping his tea, a smoking shotgun on his left and a dead, yet, funnily enough, happy-looking old lady on his right.

He'd already checked her pulse. Nothing. He'd tried shaking her. No result. He'd even tried tickling her, thinking that maybe nobody had ever tried that with a dead person before. Not a titter. It was a most unfortunate situation.

For the first time since he'd set his mother's best wig on fire by accident when he was six, he had absolutely no idea what to do. Thoughts and ideas rushed at him at an astounding rate. He tried to duck and avoid them, but it was no good. He thought that maybe he should make a run for it, so he stood up.
No, that wouldn't even be close to rational
. He sat down again.

He tried to think outside of his own head; surely people heard the blast. But then again, this crazy old lady shot a hole through her front door in broad daylight, and all she’d drawn were a few glares of disapproval and some angry comments. They were all too preoccupied.

There was a stunned moment of complete silence as the realization smacked him in the face. The sensation felt like a cross between getting hit in the head by a startled gerbil that was just shot out of a cannon and that wonderful feeling which happened when people woke up and thought they were late for work but then realized it was actually their day off. That was the kind of feeling he got slapped with.

The dead not dying had everyone preoccupied. So really, Nigel only had to wait until Mrs. Jones got bored with the afterlife and then came back. Nigel relaxed a little and flipped on the TV, resolving to stay there until the old bat woke up.