very nice to me, then,” said Adam. “Don’t see what the future’s got in it if there’s no robots and spaceships.”
About three days, thought Anathema glumly. That’s what it’s got in it.
“Would you like a lemonade?” she said.
Adam hesitated. Then he decided to take the bull by the horns.
“Look, ’scuse me for askin’, if it’s not a personal question, but are you a witch?” he said.
Anathema narrowed her eyes. So much for Mrs. Henderson poking around.
“Some people might say so,” she said. “Actually, I’m an occultist.”
“Oh. Well. That’s all right, then,” said Adam, cheering up.
She looked him up and down.
“You know what an occultist is, do you?” she said.
“Oh, yes,” said Adam confidently.
“Well, so long as you’re happier now,” said Anathema. “Come on in. I could do with a drink myself. And … Adam Young?”
“Yes?”
“You were thinking ‘Nothin’ wrong with my eyes, they don’t need examining,’ weren’t you?”
“Who, me?” said Adam guiltily.
DOG WAS THE PROBLEM. He wouldn’t go in the cottage. He crouched on the doorstep, growling.
“Come on, you silly dog,” said Adam. “It’s only old Jasmine Cottage.” He gave Anathema an embarrassed look. “Normally he does everything I say, right off.”
“You can leave him in the garden,” said Anathema.
“No,” said Adam. “He’s got to do what he’s tole. I read it in a book. Trainin’ is very important. Any dog can be trained, it said. My father said I can only keep him if he’s prop’ly trained. Now, Dog. Go inside.”
Dog whined and gave him a pleading look. His stubby tail thumped on the floor once or twice.
His Master’s voice.
With extreme reluctance, as if making progress in the teeth of a gale, he slunk over the doorstep.
“There,” said Adam proudly. “Good boy.”
And a little bit more of Hell burned away …
Anathema shut the door.
There had always been a horseshoe over the door of Jasmine Cottage, ever since its first tenant centuries before; the Black Death was all the rage at the time and he’d considered that he could use all the protection he could get.
It was corroded and half covered with the paint of centuries. So neither Adam nor Anathema gave it a thought, or noticed how it was now cooling from a white heat.
Aziraphale’s cocoa was stone cold.
The only sound in the room was the occasional turning of a page.
Every now and again there was a rattling at the door when prospective customers of Intimate Books next door mistook the entrance. He ignored it.
Occasionally he would very nearly swear.
ANATHEMA HADN’T REALLY made herself at home in the cottage. Most of her implements were piled up on the table. It looked interesting. It looked, in fact, as though a voodoo priest had just had the run of a scientific equipment store.
“Brilliant!” said Adam, prodding at it. “What’s the thing with the three legs?”
“It’s a theodolite,” said Anathema from the kitchen. “It’s for tracking ley-lines.”
“What are they, then?” said Adam.
She told him.
“Cor,” he said. “Are they?”
“Yes.”
“All over the place?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never seen ’em. Amazin’, there bein’ all these invisible lines of force around and me not seeing ’em.”
Adam didn’t often listen, but he spent the most enthralling twenty minutes of his life, or at least of his life that day. No one in the Young household so much as touched wood or threw salt over their shoulder. The only nod in the direction of the supernatural was a half-hearted pretense, when Adam had been younger, that Father Christmas came down the chimney.22
He’d been starved of anything more occult than a Harvest Festival. Her words poured into his mind like water into a quire of blotting paper.
Dog lay under the table and growled. He was beginning to have serious doubts about himself.
Anathema didn’t only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn’t compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion. On any scale of mountain moving it shifted at least point five of an alp.23
No one had even used the word environment in Adam’s hearing before. The South American rain forests were a closed book to Adam, and it wasn’t even made of recycled paper.
The only time he interrupted her was to agree with her views on nuclear power: “I’ve been to a nucular power station. It was boring. There was no green smoke and bubbling