The Creeps

I

In Which a Birthday Party Takes

Place, and We Learn that One

Ought to Be Careful with Candles

(and Dangling Prepositions)

IN A SMALL TERRACED house in the English town of Biddlecombe, a birthday party

was under way.

Biddlecombe was a place in which, for most of its history, it seemed as though

nothing very interesting had ever happened. Unfortunately, as is often the case in a

place in which things have been quite for a little too long, when something interesting

did happen it was very interesting indeed; more interesting, in fact, than anybody

might have wished. The gates of Hell had opened in a basement in Biddlecombe, and

the town had temporarily been invaded by demons.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Biddlecombe had never really been the same since. The

rugby team no longer played on its old pitch, not since a number of its players had

been eaten by burrowing sharks; the voice of the captain of the Biddlecombe Golf

Club could still occasionally be heard crying out from somewhere at the bottom of

the fifteenth hole; and it was rumored that a monster had taken up residence in the

duck pond, although it was said to be very shy, and the ducks appeared to be rather

fond of it.

But the creature in the pond was not the only entity from Hell that had now

taken up permanent residence in Biddlecombe, which brings us back to the birthday

party. It was not, it must be said, a typical birthday party. The birthday boy in question

was named Wormwood. He looked like a large ferret that had suffered a severe attack

of mange, 1 and was wearing a pair of very fetching blue overalls upon which his name

had been embroidered. These overalls replaced a previous pair upon which his name

had also been embroidered, although he had managed to spell his own name wrong

first time round. This time, all of the letters were present and correct, and in the right

order, because Samuel Johnson’s mother had done the stitching herself, and if there

was one thing Mrs. Johnson was a stickler for, 2 it was good spelling. Thus it was that

the overalls now read WORMWOOD and not WROMWOOD as they had previously

done.

Wormwood was, not to put too fine a point on it, a demon. He hadn’t set out

to be a demon. He’d just popped into existence as one, and therefore hadn’t been

given a great deal of choice in the matter. He’d never been very good at being a

demon. He was too nice for it, really. Sometimes folk just end up in the wrong job. 3

A chorus of voices rang out around the kitchen table.

“Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday dear

Woooorrrrrmmmmmmwooooood, Happy Birthday to you! For he’s a jolly good, um,

fellow . . .”

Wormwood smiled the biggest, broadest smile of his life. He looked round the

table at those whom he now thought of as his friends. There was Samuel Johnson and

his dachshund, Boswell. There were Samuel’s schoolmates Maria Mayer and Tom

Hobbes. There was Mrs. Johnson, who had started to come to terms with having

demons sitting at her kitchen table on a regular basis. There were Shan and Gath, two

fellow demons who were employed at the local Spiggit’s Brewery as beer tasters and

developers, and who were responsible for a 50 percent increase in the number of

explosions due to the instability of the still-experimental Spiggit’s Brew Number 666,

also known as “The Tankbuster,” which was rumored to be under consideration by

the military as a field weapon.

And then there was Nurd, formerly “Nurd, the Scourge of Five Deities” and

now sometimes known as the Nurdster, the Nurdmeister, and the Nurdman, although

only to Nurd himself. Nobody else ever called Nurd anything but Nurd. Nurd had

once been banished to the remotest, dullest region of Hell for being annoying, and

Wormwood, as his servant, had been banished with him. Now that they had found

their way to Biddlecombe, Wormwood preferred to think of himself as Nurd’s trusty

assistant rather than his servant. Occasionally, Nurd liked to hit Wormwood over the

head with something hard and memorable, just to remind Wormwood that he could

think of himself as anything he liked just as long as he didn’t say it aloud.

But in the end Nurd, too, was one of Wormwood’s friends.

1 For those of you unfamiliar with mange, it is an ailment that causes a loss of fur. Think of the worst

haircut you’ve ever received, and it’s a bit like that, but all over your body.

2 Technically, that sentence should read “if there was one thing for which Mrs. Johnson was a stickler,”

as nobody likes a dangling preposition, but I said that Mrs. Johnson was a stickler for good spelling,

not good grammar.

3 Such as Augustus the Second (1694-1733), King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, also

known as Augustus the Strong. He managed to bankrupt his kingdom by spending all of its money

on bits of amber and ivory, lost a couple of battles that he really would have been better off winning,

and fathered over three hundred children, which suggests that, in between losing battles and

collecting trinkets, he had a lot of time on his hands, but his party piece consisted of gripping a

horseshoe in his fists and making it straight. He would probably have been very happy just

straightening horseshoes and blowing up hot-water bottles for a living, but due to an accident of

birth he instead found himself ruling a number of kingdoms. Badly. You should bear this in mind if

your dad or mum has a name beginning with the words His/Her Royal Highness, and you are known

as “Prince/Princess Something-or-Other.” Unless, of course, your name is really “Something-or-

Other,” in which case you don’t have anything to worry about (about which to worry—darn it) as your

parents didn’t care enough about you to give you a proper name, and you are therefore unlikely to

amount to anything. Sorry.