This has nothing to do with influences, demonic or angelic. It’s more to do with geography, and history, and architecture.
Mostly this works to people’s advantage, although they’d never believe it.
London was not designed for cars. Come to that, it wasn’t designed for people. It just sort of happened. This created problems, and the solutions that were implemented became the next problems, five or ten or a hundred years down the line.
The latest solution had been the M25: a motorway that formed a rough circle around the city. Up until now the problems had been fairly basic—things like it being obsolete before they had finished building it, Einsteinian tailbacks that eventually became tailforwards, that kind of thing.
The current problem was that it didn’t exist; not in normal human spatial terms, anyway. The tailback of cars unaware of this, or trying to find alternate routes out of London, stretched into the city center, from every direction. For the first time ever, London was completely gridlocked. The city was one huge traffic jam.
Cars, in theory, give you a terrifically fast method of traveling from place to place. Traffic jams, on the other hand, give you a terrific opportunity to stay still. In the rain, and the gloom, while around you the cacophonous symphony of horns grew ever louder and more exasperated.
Crowley was getting sick of it.
He’d taken the opportunity to reread Aziraphale’s notes, and to thumb through Agnes Nutter’s prophecies, and to do some serious thinking.
His conclusions could be summarized as follows:
Armageddon was under way.
There was nothing Crowley could do about this.
It was going to happen in Tadfield. Or to begin there, at any rate. After that it was going to happen everywhere.
Crowley was in Hell’s bad books.47
Aziraphale was—as far as could be estimated—out of the equation.
All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel—or if there was, it was an oncoming train.
He might just as well find a nice little restaurant and get completely and utterly pissed out of his mind while he waited for the world to end.
And yet …
And that was where it all fell apart.
Because, underneath it all, Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times—he thought briefly of the fourteenth century—then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.
Okay, so Hell was down on him. So the world was ending. So the Cold War was over and the Great War was starting for real. So the odds against him were higher than a vanload of hippies on a blotterful of Owlsley’s Old Original. There was still a chance.
It was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
The right place was Tadfield. He was certain of that; partly from the book, partly from some other sense: in Crowley’s mental map of the world, Tadfield was throbbing like a migraine.
The right time was getting there before the end of the world. He checked his watch. He had two hours to get to Tadfield, although probably even the normal passage of Time was pretty shaky by now.
Crowley tossed the book into the passenger seat. Desperate times, desperate measures: he had maintained the Bentley without a scratch for sixty years.
What the hell.
He reversed suddenly, causing severe damage to the front of the red Renault 5 behind him, and drove up onto the pavement.
He turned on his lights, and sounded his horn.
That should give any pedestrians sufficient warning that he was coming. And if they couldn’t get out of the way … well, it’d all be the same in a couple of hours. Maybe. Probably.
“Heigh ho,” said Anthony Crowley, and just drove anyway.
THERE WERE SIX WOMEN and four men, and each of them had a telephone and a thick wodge of computer printout, covered with names and telephone numbers. By each of the numbers was a penned notation saying whether the person dialed was in or out, whether the number was currently connected, and, most importantly, whether or not anybody who answered the phone was avid for cavity-wall insulation to enter their lives.
Most of them weren’t.
The ten people sat there, hour after hour, cajoling, pleading, promising through plastic smiles. Between calls they made notations, sipped coffee, and marveled at the rain flooding down the windows. They were staying at their posts like the band on the Titanic. If you couldn’t sell double glazing in weather like