As Christmas approaches, the town of Biddlecombe is excited about the opening of the greatest toyshop they could imagine, housed in an old building that used to be the headquarters of Wreckit & Sons. Samuel Johnson, however, is not in a happy place — he is dating the wrong girl, demons are occupying his spare room, and the town in which he lives appears to be cursed. A sinister statue keeps moving around the town, Shadows are slowly blocking out the stars, and somewhere in Biddlecombe, a rotten black heart is beating a rhythm of revenge. The last hope for humanity lies with one young boy and the girl who’s secretly in love with him. Oh, and a dog, two demons, four dwarfs and a very polite monster.
Synopsis
The Creeps
The Creeps
Samuel Johnston and his friends fight a third (and final?) battle against the forces of evil.
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.