Free The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams

stopped him.

"Doedth eddydthig dthrike you adth dthraydge aboud dthidth houdth?" he said.

"What did you say?" said Gilks in irritation.

"Subbthig dthraydge," said Dirk.

"Something what?"

"Dthraydge!" insisted Dirk.

"Strange?"

"Dthadth right, dthraydge."

Gilks shrugged. "Like what?" he said.

"Id dtheemdth to be cobbleedly dthouledth."

"Completely what?"

"Dthouledth!" he tried again. "Thoul-leth! I dthigg dthadth dverry idderedthigg!"

With that he doffed his hat politely, and swept on out of the house and up the street, where an eagle swooped out of the sky at him and came within a whisker of causing him to fall under a 73 bus on its way south. For the next twenty minutes, hideous yells and screams emanated from t he top floor of the house in Lupton Road, and caused much tension among the neighbours. The ambulance took away the upper and lower remains of Mr Anstey and also a policeman with a bleeding face. For a short while after this, there was quietness.

Then another police car drew up outside the house. A lot o "Bob's here" type of remarks floated from the house, as an extremely large and burly policeman heaved himself out of the car and bustled up the steps. A few minutes and a great deal of screaming and yelling later he re-emerged also clutching his face, and drove off in deep dudgeon, squealing his tyres in a violent and unnecessary manner.

Twenty minutes later a van arrived from which emerged another policeman carrying a tiny pocket television set. He entered the house, and re-emerged a short while later leading a docile thirteen-year-old boy, who was content with his new toy.

Once all policemen had departed, save for the single squad car which remained parked outside to keep watch on the house, a large, hairy, green-eyed figure emerged from its hiding place behind one of the molecules in the large basement room.

It propped its scythe against one of the hi-fi speakers, dipped a long, gnarled finger in the almost congealed pool of blood that had collected on the deck of the turntable, smeared the finger across the bottom of a sheet of thick, yellowing paper, and then disappeared off into a dark and hidden otherworld whistling a strange and vicious tune and returning only briefly to collect its scythe.

Chapter 7

A little earlier in the morning, at a comfortable distance from all these events, set at a comfortable distance from a wellproponioned window through which cool mid-morning light was streaming, lay an elderly one-eyed man in a white bed. A newspaper sat like a half-collapsed tent on the floor, where it had been hurled two minutes before, at shortly aher ten o'clock by the clock on the bedside table.

The room was not large, but was furnished in excessively bland good taste, as if it were a room in an expensive private hospital or clinic, which is exactly what it was - the Woodshead Hospital, set in its own small but well-kempt grounds on the outskirts of a small but well-kempt village in the Cotswolds.

The man was awake but not glad to be.

His skin was very delicately old, like finely stretched, translucent parchment, delicately freckled. His exquisitely frail hands lay slightly curled on the pure white linen sheets and quivered very faintly.

His name was variously given as Mr Odwin, or Wodin, or Odin. He was - is - a god, and furthermore he was that least good of all gods to be alongside, a cross god. His one eye glinted.

He was cross because of what he had been reading in the newspapers, which was that another god had been cutting loose and making a nuisance of himself. It didn't say that in the papers, of course. It didn't say, "God cuts loose, makes nuisance of himself in airport," it merely described the resulting devastation and was at a loss to draw any meaningful conclusions from it.

The story had been deeply unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways, on account of its perplexing inconclusiveness, its goingnowhereness and the irritating (from the newspapers' point of view) lack of any good