Free The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale by John Connolly Page A

strictly speaking, simply a disembodied head, 23 and Brompton was about as much use at guarding as a toy dog on wheels, but they had somehow managed to continue to be employed as guards despite their general uselessness. This was because Brompton and Edgefast were members of the Union of Demonic Employees and Tormentors (Guards Branch), which fiercely protected the rights of its members to lean on their spears and nap any time their eyes got a bit heavy; to take tea breaks at unsuitable times, including during battles, invasions, and serious fires; and not to actually guard anything ifthey thought that it might place their personal safety at risk. All of this made Brompton and Edgefast as hard to fire as a pair of chocolate cannons. The Mountain of Despair could have been stolen from under their noses and broken down to make garden gnomes and, thanks to the union, Brompton and Edgefast would still have been guarding the place where it once stood, in between taking essential naps and tea breaks.
    “Quiet today,” said Edgefast.
    “Too quiet for my liking,” said Brompton.
    “Really?”
    Edgefast couldn’t help but sound surprised. Brompton was the laziest demon Edgefast had ever met. Brompton could fall over and make hitting the ground look like an effort.
    “Nah, only joking,” said Brompton. “Not quiet enough, if you ask me, what with you piping up every few minutes about how quiet it is.”
    “Sorry,” said Edgefast.
    He’d said that it was quiet only once . It wasn’t like he kept repeating the word quiet over and over until nobody could remember what silence had been like.
    Edgefast’s nose was itchy. He’d have scratched it, but he didn’t have any arms. It was one of the problems with not having a body. Still, Brompton was very good about making sure that he had a straw through which to suck his tea, and he usually remembered to pick Edgefast up and take him home when they had finished guarding for the day.
    “Would you mind scratching my nose for me?” Edgefast said.
    “Oh, it’s all about you, isn’t it?” said Brompton. “Me, me, me,that’s all I ever hear. Who made you king, that’s what I’d like to know. Must have been when I wasn’t looking. All right, Your Majesty, I’ll scratch your nose for you. There! Happy now?”
    Edgefast wasn’t, really. He couldn’t be, not with the business end of Brompton’s spear jammed up one nostril.
    “ ’Es bine,” he said. “Mub bedder, dan gew.”
    Brompton withdrew the spear and went back to leaning on it and staring glumly over the blasted landscape of Hell.
    “Sorry,” he said. “Trouble at home.”
    “Mrs. Brompton?” said Edgefast.
    Brompton and Mrs. Brompton had a difficult marriage. There were fatal diseases that had better relationships with their victims than Brompton had with Mrs. Brompton.
    “Yeah.”
    “She move out again?”
    “No, she moved back in.”
    “Oh.”
    There was silence for a time.
    “I thought you were going to leave her,” said Edgefast.
    “I did.”
    “What happened?”
    “She came with me.”
    “Oh,” said Edgefast for a second time. There wasn’t much else to say. Brompton always seemed to be unhappy with Mrs. Brompton. The trouble was, he was even unhappier without Mrs. Brompton.
    “She’d be lost without you, you know,” said Edgefast.
    “Nah, I tried that,” said Brompton. “She found her way back.”
    “Oh,” said Edgefast, for the third time, followed by “Oh?” and then “Oh-oh!”
    Crudford manifested himself directly in front of the two guards with a sound like a plate of jelly being dropped on a stone floor. He raised his hat with his left hand and said, “Evening, gentlemen.” Under his right arm he carried a jar, and in the jar a mass of blue atoms seethed and roiled, slowly forming something that became, as he drew closer to Edgefast, a single hostile eye surrounded by pale, bruised skin. The eye seemed to glare at Edgefast, who would have taken a step back if it hadn’t