The Infernals Read Online Free PDF

eating, drinking, or fiddling withthe remote control for the television. Very occasionally, a useful invention may result from tinkering, but for the most part tinkering involves trying to improve pieces of machinery that work perfectly well already, with the result that they stop doing what they were supposed to do and instead do nothing at all, hence requiring more tinkering to fix them, and even then they never work quite as well as they did before, so they have to be tinkered with some more, and so on and so on, until eventually the man in question dies, often after being severely beaten by his wife with a malfunctioning kettle, or a piece of a fridge.
    Inside the cave was a car. At one point, the car had been a pristine Aston Martin, perfectly maintained by Samuel Johnson’s father, who had kept it in the garage behind their house and only drove it on sunny days. Unfortunately the car had been one of the casualties of the demonic assault on Biddlecombe. Without it, though, there might not have been a Biddlecombe at all, or not one that wasn’t overrun by Hellish entities. Samuel’s dad hadn’t seen things that way, though, once he found out that his car was missing.
    “You mean it was stolen by a demon?” he had asked, staring at the empty space in his garage that had until recently been occupied by his pride and joy. Samuel had watched his dad as he searched behind stacks of old paint and bits of lawn mower, as though expecting the car to jump out from behind a tin of white emulsion and shout “Surprise!”
    “That’s right.”
    It was Samuel’s mum who had answered. She seemed quite pleased that her husband was upset at the loss of his car, mainlybecause Samuel’s dad had left them to go and live with another woman while expecting his abandoned wife and son to look after his car for him, which Mrs. Johnson regarded as being more than a little selfish.
    It wasn’t quite true that the car had been stolen. In fact, Samuel had given the keys to the demon Nurd so that he could drive it straight down the mouth of the portal between Hell and Biddlecombe, thus collapsing it and preventing the Great Malevolence from escaping into our world. Samuel had nevertheless been grateful to his mother for clouding the truth, even if he felt that it was unfair to Nurd to describe him as a thief.
    That same Nurd was now standing with his arms folded, staring at what had once been Mr. Johnson’s Aston Martin but was now Nurd’s. The car had passed through the portal relatively unscathed, which came as a nice surprise to Nurd, who had half expected that he and the car would be ripped into lots of little pieces and then crushed into something the size of a gnat’s eyeball. He had also been relieved to find that the pools of viscous, bubbling black liquid dotted throughout Hell were wells of hydrocarbons and other organic compounds: or, to put it another way, every one of those pools was a miniature petrol station waiting to be put to use.
    Unfortunately the petroleum mix was somewhat crude, and the landscape of Hell had not been designed with vintage cars in mind. Doubly unfortunately, Nurd knew next to nothing about how internal combustion engines worked, so he was ill-equipped to deal with any problems that might arise. Nurd fancied himself a good driver, but since driving in Hell requiredhim to do little more than point the car in a given direction, put his foot down, and avoid rocks and pools of crude oil, Nurd was not as expert behind the wheel as he liked to think.
    But sometimes fortune can smile unexpectedly on the most unlikely of faces, and Nurd’s, being green and shaped like a crescent moon, was unlikelier than most. For being particularly annoying, Nurd had been banished to one of Hell’s many wildernesses by the Great Malevolence. To keep Nurd company, the Great Malevolence had sent with him Nurd’s assistant, Wormwood, who looked like a big ferret that had recently been given a haircut by a blind barber with a