Chapter Text
A Soho Bookshop, 2010
June the 21st. Summer Solstice. Litha. It had been a year to the day, and in the back room of his bookshop, Aziraphale uncorked a thrifty half-bottle of 1959 Musigny. He was not in the mood to get drunk, and he’d always hated waste. Nevertheless, the occasion called for the best.
He filled his own glass, and then another, which he placed next to a sepia photograph of a rakish chap in a Jazz Age outfit, perched on the bonnet of a brand-new Bentley. The angel had taken the photograph himself, using a box Brownie he’d bought in an attempt to drag himself into the 20th Century.
He raised his glass, and clinked it against Crowley’s.
“Cheers, old friend.” He should not let himself feel so wretched.
He took a sip of wine, and almost spat. Something was very wrong.
Heaven, 4004 B.C.
Technically, it was not a lie: H’zr aph’aal really was an angel.
A Messenger. A highly-sanctified postman. Post-thing.
Look, anyone could be a Messenger of the Divine. You just had to have the right attitude, and pass the interviews. And H’zr aph’aal had passed them all, with flying colours.
Too many flying colours, that was the problem — most of them either invisible to the human retina or liable to trigger raving madness, and some of them enough to give even a legitimate angel the sort of five-star migraine that Hildegard of Bingen would have envied, since Hildegard of Bingen had been a bit of a strange one.
Some of H’zr aph’aal’s Heavenly colleagues took the form of vast wheels covered with eyes, and went bowling through the firmament like a squad of gyroscopes, occasionally catching the light, a habit which was later to confuse the Hell out of terrestrial astronomers. That was thought perfectly normal behaviour, for an ophanim. And not a single one of Heaven’s staff really looked like an underwear model with silvered pinions; when they needed to manifest, every one of them used LucentGlory™ avatars. It wasn’t fair.
He damned well was an angel. The word was a job description, not a piece of metaphysical taxonomy. Which was just as well, because H’zr aph’aal had never been over-happy to be questioned about his origins, which were ancient and noble, but not very Biblical. The one thing in his favour at the moment was that Heaven’s most accurate approximations of the human body, the ones suitable for day-to-day Terrestrial existence rather than descending in LucentGlory™, were clammy, oddly-articulated contraptions that made pops, clicks, and squelches, even when driven by an experienced operator.
In fact, it was somewhat puzzling why so much effort had been poured into the R&D of these things, considering how much use they were likely to get. Unlike the only two humans who currently yet existed, they had wings, which could be concealed at need, but like humans, they came equipped with toothy maws, slavering tongues, and stomachs filled with high-grade corrosives. They had digestions. They had mucus. They regularly produced miasmas worthy of the aeon-dead proto-earth.
H’zr aph’aal had felt right at home in one. Not that he’d been allowed to try it on more than once.
“Look. I can easily drive one of these things, and none you lot even want to,” he’d said, reasonably. “I don’t think it’s disgusting. Put me on any corporeal duty you like.”
The Dominion who was conducting his millennial review blinked at him, from the left side of itself to the right; the ocular equivalent of a Mexican wave. It was hypnotic.
“But how much of you, precisely, should we put?” Its voice was a duet for wind-chimes and a glass harmonica. “And what should we do with the rest?”
It was not a delicate question, but it was pertinent. Unlike the official Heavenly Host, who really could superimpose themselves on the head of a pin if necessary, like an incandescently holy microdot (even demons could do this, in a pinch, though they had more trouble reversing the process), H’zr aph’aal was an old-school pandimensional native and lacked the ability to turn himself into a singularity. When squeezed into the four — four! — official dimensions of this cramped Universe whose architect might possibly deign to employ him, he also weighed about five gelatinous tons, though they did not all have to be connected all at once. He was currently a radially-symmetrical pseudopod about the size of a telephone box, with the mouth conveniently located right at the top.
There was no getting round it: even in the sworn service of Heaven, H’zr aph’aal remained an Eldritch Abomination. And he spoke Enochian with an accent.
The Dominion chimed to itself. “Very well. No-one doubts your loyalty to the Cause, and its true — you’re psychologically well-adapted to the job. But I can’t promise you much. If we put dispatch you to the Terrestrial side, most of you will have to be hidden away in some pit or cavern…”
“I’m good with pits. And caverns.”
“And I can only offer you guard duty.”
“I’ll take it.”
“And also, we’ll have to change your name. Just a little.”
“What’s wrong with H’zr aph’aal? It’s a simple enough name. Your lot can pronounce it. Mostly.”
“It’s off-brand,” sniffed the Dominion, despite not having a nose. “The humans will be suspicious of it…later. A Heavenly name should be mellifluous, and free from apostrophes. Yours is unholy. Or non-holy. Abholy, perhaps. Either way, it just won’t do.”
“I can be as holey as you like,” said the offended Abomination, and proudly proved it, his newly-expanded orifices providing an assortment of views, among them a night-gaunt roost in the Dreamlands, a wrecked space-ship caressed by cosmic tentacles, and a first-night performance of The King in Yellow, where the audience was just getting to the bit where they hand out the forks.
The Dominion rolled its eyes, which once again took some time.
“Can I ask you one question, Aziraphale? Since that’s the closest to your name I can do for you. All the rest of your sort who were interested joined the Other Team, and frankly I can understand it, though I can’t agree with it. Why don’t you want to work for Hell?”
A wave of doubtful, queasy iridescence passed over all that was visible of the newly-rebranded angel.
“But…I just don’t think it would work. I’m a good person. More or less. Good-ish, anyway. At least, I thought I must be quite a bit more good than bad, once I learned about them both — but how does one tell? Am I good? Officially, I mean.”
The Dominion smiled sadly, a sight guaranteed to make Dukes of Hell beg for quarter.
“Of course you are good, Aziraphale. Heaven help us all.”
----------
His first posting had been Paradise. Or rather, the Eastern Gate of Paradise, which as anyone who’s done any door-work will tell you, is not quite the same thing. It had taken Aziraphale some time to get used to hefting a flaming sword, since no entity in the dimensions he’d originated from had a sufficiently permanent form to worry about being hit by sharp edges, however hot. The forms of combat he was accustomed to were…different. More intimately organic. Hungrier. Nastier, Aziraphale realised with a jolt, and the first time he glimpsed the pair of humans, walking hand in hand to collect breadfruit for their morning picnic, it occurred to him quite spontaneously that he must be careful these fragile beings never saw his true form, most of which resided in a large cistern buried deep beneath the foundations of the Eastern tower.
The man’s name was Clay, which was not terribly imaginative of God. The woman’s name was Life, which was pretty. Aziraphale became quite fond of them.
Nevertheless, guarding Eden was glorified grunt work, and it was dull. Aziraphale could barely believe it when, patrolling the bounds of the place on another relentlessly beautiful evening, he caught sight of an actual interloper, slithering along the perimeter wall. Inside the perimeter wall. He smiled, and drew his sword, and was on the creature in a moment — it was a series of great, dark, glittering coils, the corners of each ridged scale flecked with bronze, terminating in a small neat head with lidless, unblinking eyes. A snake that nevertheless still managed to have an expression on its face, and that expression read, Oh shit.
Aziraphale would do his duty. He would be Righteous. He would Smite.
But like many people since, he made the abrupt discovery that a snake was a work of art. A snake was incredibly beautiful, every enamelled scale different from its fellows, and at the same time almost identical, creating an effect that jewellers would later spend millennia trying to replicate. More particularly, a snake was a precision instrument. Detailed. Intricate. In particular, snakes were awfully good at patterns. Before he’d thrown in his lot with Heaven, Aziraphale, an entity of Chaos, hadn’t even had a word for those, in all the strange languages he knew.
The snake looked up at him, warily, its eyes as yellow as quinces.
“I ssuppose,” it said “that since you haven’t ssmitten me yet, we may as well be introdusssed. The name’s Crawly.”
Staufen im Breisgau, the Black Forest, in what will eventually be Germany, 1542
It had been a long, long time before Aziraphale had crossed paths with a certain Hastur, Duke of Hell. This was understandable, since upon signing up with Hell, the imposingly eldritch H'aaztre had entered its forces at ranking level (though even Hell insisted that he tweak his name). Heaven could never offer Aziraphale such a position. He would always remain an angel, unlikely to ever rise higher than a Principality. While his Heavenly handler took pains to compliment him on his suitwork, they both new that the one and only time Aziraphale had tried on a LucentGlory™ — an androgynous model, with long golden hair — he’d warped the face into a ghastly rictus, and imbued the interior with a stench that even Next to Godliness, Heaven’s most formidable deep-cleaners, had been unable to budge.
They'd had to scrap the thing into a pocket dimension, where it drifted unseen by anyone until one evening in 1797 when Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a heroic dose of laudanum, and woke up to find himself writing something about an An’cyent Ma-rin’ere, and screaming. He never fully regained the ability to spell.
The Black Forest job had been a contract cancellation. A formal nullification of an Infernal Pact, the remorseful owner of which was a fast-living scholar who’d made the traditional bargain: his immortal soul, in return for twenty-four years of good wine, fast women, and cutting-edge science. But lately, he’d sent in a scroll of complaint in Latin, Greek, and German, stating that when it came to scientific advancement, his infernal tutor simply hadn’t been up to the task.
It was a fair point. The tutor’s name had been Hastur, and he had even less use for the Laws of the Cosmos than most demons.
But Heaven didn’t have many Eldritch Abominations on its books, and a job like this could get confrontational. So Aziraphale had been deputised to collect and destroy the Pact, and Crowley had been sent along to witness said destruction, on behalf of Hell.
Hastur wasn’t going to take it lying down. When Aziraphale and Crowley found him, he was storming the first floor of the hapless scholar’s home in the town of Staufen, leaving a trail of glistening destruction as he conducted a top-to-bottom search. For an Eldritch Abomination, Hastur had a remarkably conventional way of doing things; Crowley had already concealed the trembling scholar in the wine-cellar.
“H’zr aph’aal,” said Hastur, who currently resembled a tall, thin man in a slashed doublet, with a jaunty little beard and a pearl in one ear. He was accompanied by another, shorter demon in trunk hose, who was holding a clipboard. The Duke of Hell looked displeased. He laid his hand on the curtains of a four-poster bed, which promptly turned into swathes of detestable putridity.
“H'aaztre?” The name roiled the air as the angel uttered it.
“The very same. Oh boy, ‘Aziraphale’, have I ever heard of you. An Angel of the sodding Lord. I said I wouldn’t believe it ‘til I saw it. And you can back right off, pal. That man is Hell’s property: signed, sealed, and delivered. I don’t know where you’ve hidden him, but you can blessed well hand him over.”
“I believe there’s some difference of opinion on that,” said the angel politely. “He did put in a prayer to Heaven.”
“You’re lying,” sneered Hastur, “or close enough to it. If he’d repented, I’d know about it. Besides, his kind are never contrite.”
“All right, maybe he didn’t formally repent, but he certainly put in a complaint. He says he didn’t get full value. That the contract wasn’t fair.”
“Full value!” put in the shorter demon, who was carelessly wearing trunk hose in a style that the most fashion-forward wouldn’t think up until the 1580’s. “And a fair contract, forsooth! We’re demons!”
“Shut up, Ligur,” said the Entity Formerly Known as H'aaztre, and now styled Hastur, Duke of Hell. “Look, Aziraphale, I delivered exactly what I said I would. Wine, women, power, necromancy, travel, scientific kudos…”
“And therein lies the rub, I’m afraid. Twenty-four years is a long time in terms of academic research, Hastur, and what once sounded cutting edge can be disproved. Even made to look ridiculous. Our client claims that once past ‘the world is round’, virtually nothing you told him turned out to be true. Other academics are laughing at him. We had to come up with a new word for all the things you told him.”
“Pseudoscience,” put in Crowley, helpfully.
“And you can shut up too, snake.” Hastur’s human countenance went puce. “Aziraphale, are you calling me thick?”
“Well, you tell me. How many atoms in a mole?”
Hastur thought very hard. “Are we talking an ordinary mole here, or star-nosed Pta’alphx, Snouter of the Pits of Leng…”
“And what’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”
“I’m a demonic abomination! I don’t have to think about this! And besides, he hasn’t properly repented. He’s mine by right.”
Aziraphale didn’t budge. “I believe, you know, that that’s why Heaven sent me. In case there was some difference of opinion.”
Hastur licked his lips. “Alright,” he said slowly, his face already starting to blur, “I’ll fight you for him. First to cry ‘uncle’ has to hand him over, and no further complaints.”
Aziraphale nodded. Ligur and Crowley gave each other a look, and Hastur saw it. “What about those two, oh Servant of Light?”
“Hastur, I know you to be an Abomination of your word. Don’t hurt my companion, and I won’t hurt yours.”
He held out his hand cordially, and the Duke took it. Aziraphale braced himself for the ordeal to come. Hastur had never been over-subtle, but he was strong. And old.
----------
As soon as his palm touched Hastur’s, the Duke’s fingers darkened and elongated, burrowing under the skin of Aziraphale’s arm like sharp-snouted maggots, racing towards the heart that was no longer there — since during the time Hastur has spent posturing, Heaven’s most abominable angel had been quietly rearranging his internal anatomy. He no longer had a heart. Nevertheless, it hurt.
“Charm the door shut,” he said to Crowley, curtly. “And don’t look.”
Aziraphale drew in his breath sharply, and most of his face came with it, funnelling down his throat like a magician’s handkerchief, revealing a maw as round as a lamprey’s. Surrounding it was what he did best — eyes by the thousand, of all sizes from an orange to a grape, roaming over his body like foam. Though it was true that the pupils of most eyes did not have fangs. These were devouring eyes, ravenous eyes, and whatever they gazed at, they consumed.
Stray patches of the room began to vanish, as if reality had blundered into a swarm of cookie-cutter sharks.
But mostly, the eyes looked at Hastur, eating him inch by inch. The demon flailed, eroded, swore a curse that shot up from the roof like backwards lightning, then reformed into a mass of threadlike maggots, each one no thicker than a straw. There were a lot of them, and each was pointed at one of Aziraphale’s eyes, unerring as the needles of a compass.
Then Hastur spat at Aziraphale, and for the apple of every eye, there was a worm. Aziraphale lost his focus — he blinked, dammit — and then spilled into anatomical madness.
They fought until he floor of the bedroom was eaten away like colander, and vitreous humour pattered to the flagstones of the Great Hall beneath. Both Aziraphale and Hastur began drawing on their hidden physical mass, until the melee of eyes and worms was first the size of a carthorse, and then an elephant, the eyes the size of cannonballs, the maggots as thick as your wrist.
The centre could not hold, and it didn’t. As Crowley and Ligur stood on tiptoe on the skirting-boards, arms flattened against the wall, both demons trying very hard to look as if this sort of thing was completely routine for them, the entire floor dropped out, in a shower of worms, eyes, ichor, pseudopods, acids not found in any terrestrial formulary, Colours out of Space, and palpable, combat-grade madness, with a sound that the inhabitants of Staufen im Breisgau, currently hiding under their tables and beds and praying as fervently as they ever had in their lives, later swore never to describe, beyond that it had been ‘a bit of a racket’.
Crowley peered downwards, between his feet. Then he decided, To Heaven with the feet, and descended to the floor in coils. Ligur had already repaired to the relative safety of the ceiling, and wrapped himself up in a web.
The things that had been Aziraphale and Hastur — no, the things that really were Aziraphale and Hastur — disengaged themselves. Circled each other. Assessed the damage. And there was somewhat less of Hastur.
“Satis. Genug. I concede," said the pillar of maggots, sourly. "Besides, this little bastard’s hardly worth it. And you think I’m stupid, with your fancy rules, but I’ll tell you one thing, H’zr aph’aal: Order can’t last forever, and Chaos can only win, because your precious Second Law, the one you think I can't remember, is the only one that counts. And when the rest of them find out — in Heaven or Hell, who cares? — they’re not going to like it.”
The Abominable Duke took his trans-dimensional leave, and Ligur reluctantly snapped his fingers and departed to give news of their defeat to Hell. Aziraphale slumped in the ruins of what had recently been a desirable Sixteenth-century home. He was triumphant. He was dejected. As Crowley slithered cautiously down to join him, he didn’t even have the courage or honesty to acknowledge to the old serpent that Hastur had been bang to rights. In the gospel according to Crawling Chaos, there were only two sorts of stuff in the Universe: Self, and Notself.
Self was good, but Notself was not bad. Notself was dinner.
----------
“That was quite a sight,” said Crowley, when he was back in roughly human form, which was more than could be said for Aziraphale. He licked his lips, nervously, with a tongue that was still forked. Scales began to ripple beneath his skin again; his irises were still a startled yellow, obviously reptilian. “Blessings, I can’t even keep a grip on my own form. See what you’ve done to me.”
“I thought I told you not to look.”
“Not to look where, exactly? You both got everywhere. And I don’t have eyelids.”
“Forgive me. I forgot.”
“And anyway, I could still see you both, even when I’d covered my eyes with my hands. Pretty, pretty colours. I need a drink, Aziraphale. I need all the drink.”
There was a polite but inquisitive knock at the door that led down to the wine-cellar.
“Don’t come in!” gurgled Aziraphale, in a flat panic. “Crowley, he can’t see me like this. You talk to him.”
Crowley opened the door a chink. The man who’d knocked was wearing a fur-lined academic gown, and clutching a bottle in his hand. His hair and beard were also completely white, which they hadn’t been a few hours ago. He might have not been the world authority on the esoteric that Hastur had promised to make him, but he knew enough to gaze into a pair of yellow, slitted eyes in an approximately human face, know he was looking at yet another demon.
“Ach, Flitzkakke in Excelsis Deo,” he swore, rather mildly in the circumstances. “So, it’s with you lot that I have to go? Am I even still alive?”
“You’re alive. But I’d leave here very soon if I were you. Do you have another way out?”
“The root-cellar has a hatch, for turnips. Not a very dramatic final act. From an artistic perspective, it might’ve been better to let them take me.”
“It would not, and you'd do well to believe it. Look, no-one will suspect you survived this. Don’t stop to get your books, don’t look behind you, just take whatever money you’ve got on you, and keep travelling in a straight line away from here until you get religion. Or drop off the face of the Earth. Or die. Or anything else that takes your fancy, but the less arcane, the better.”
The scholar looked him over: a searching, restless stare. Yes, you’re the bloody type, Crowley thought to himself. The people who who translate the accursed manuscript, who solve the puzzle-box, who lick the specimen for a bet. The ones who chant before a mirror, who unroll mummy-wrappings embroidered ‘DOOM’ in eighteen languages, who buy tickets to plays that no-one has lived to review. The ones who, having heard of a monster that sets you riddles and eats anyone who can’t answer them, set out on a mission to find the blessed thing and get its autograph.
On the other hand: exploration, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, navigation, metallurgy, zymurgy, and all the other fruits of human curiosity. A saving curse; a blessing that all too often got you killed. But someone has to be the first person to ever try blue cheese.
“You poor devils,” said the scholar, sombrely. “You can’t understand what it’s like, to want to know. It was never about the money. Help yourselves to anything that’s left.”
----------
Later, in the wine-cellar, when they’d both managed to drive off the demon of sobriety and Aziraphale looked presentable again, he had apologised and apologised and apologised, long past the point where is was sensible. They’d done what they came to do, after all. The Pact was ash on the wind. The scholar was going to reform his ways, if only for a week or two. Hastur and Ligur had bogged off back to Hell. Job done.
“If you’re really that sorry, you can open another bottle of Tokay,” said the practical demon, propping his feet up on a barrel, and draining the last of his wine. “An’ not — hic! — not by just starin’ at the cork, either, though it is a neat trick. You’re more grotesque than most of my colleagues.”
“Thanks.”
“Not just grotesque; differently grotesque. Never seen anything like it — hic! — an’ I’ve seen a lot, b’lieve me. Those colours you went back there have no name in any language. Not in Enochian. Not in Mu’an. Not in anything. They literally have no names, Aziraphale.”
“You should be cowering before my righteousness, though,” pointed out the angel, who had reassumed his normal shape. “If you cower for other reasons, it confuses the issue.”
“I was not cowering!”
“You were!”
“Wash not…oh, alright then. It’s — hic! — it is bloody impressive. Eldritch, even. It scares me.”
“That’s still not really an endorsement of my holiness. Maybe I should go back to working alone.”
“No. You’re — hic! — you’re all right really, Aziraphale. Hz’r ap’haal. Whatever your name is. You’re a good mate, is what you are.”
It was more than enough. “You’ve got the apostrophes wrong,” complained Aziraphale, to conceal the fact he was bursting with pride. Crowley just grinned, and raised his glass.
One thing was true, though: Hastur had found a pal in Hell, just as Aziraphale had. The Abominable Duke really had formed an unlikely friendship with Ligur, who, like Crowley, was a genuine demon, and unlike Crowley, was a genuine sadist. Four hundred and fifty years later, this friendship was to have serious repercussions.
Clopton Stoke, Hampshire, 1940
“Well, I’ve found a new billet for you,” Aziraphale’s handler had chimed at him, in a Heaven-side briefing room. It had been roused at short notice, and was grumpy as a Dominion could decently be. It was not welcome news to Aziraphale, either. Unusually, he’d grown rather fond of his current Terrestrial lodgings — and there was a war on. Heaven and Hell were both working overtime, which was probably why the miraculous warding on his cave had abruptly failed.
That was no-one’s fault really. It couldn’t be helped. Aziraphale had subsequently raised the alarm himself, but by that time, the damage was done.
The Terrestrial year was 1940. Somewhere in the Dordogne, a teenage boy had just managed to rescue his dog, which had fallen into a deep pit, before it had wandered far enough into the cave beyond to be absent-mindedly devoured by the resident Eldritch Abomination, which (like the more ambulant part of Aziraphale) sometimes forgot that it didn’t really need to eat at all. Then the boy had told his three mates about his exciting find, and all four of them had decided to come back at the weekend, with lanterns and sandwiches.
This was bad news for Aziraphale, who had stowed most of his five tons in the cave since before the French Revolution. He had really liked that cave, enough to visit it without occasionally being forced to by his pan-dimensional link. He would bathe its painted walls in a gentle glow, then cover himself with eyes, though he was careful not to generate any ravenous ones. He only used human eyes, down in his private residence.
Because those paintings were human masterpieces. Aziraphale had never ceased to marvel at the drive to fuse creativity with order, at the desire for a pattern, however transient the pattern might be. It was something well worth protecting.
“…and you won’t like the new place,” went on the Dominion. “It’s a dene-hole.”
“A what?”
“An ancient chalk mine, outside a village in Hampshire. That’s in England, by the way. The archaeologists checked it out in 1892, and again in the Thirties, and found absolutely nothing of interest, so they’re unlikely to bother you now. I’ve already had it warded — and to my own specifications, this time. Ever been to Clopton Stoke?”
----------
As Spitfires patrolled the skies over Britain, the portion of Aziraphale that resembled a fussy, slightly portly man in a cream-coloured suit made a visit to Hampshire, clutching a butterfly-net and a notebook for cover, and returned looking exhausted, his knees covered in grass-stains, the switch completed. The Dominion had been right: the dene-hole was a definite downgrade, and unadorned with anything that might bring Aziraphale back there more often than he possibly had to. But beggars can’t be choosers; at least it was quiet. World War II had been decidedly the reverse, and Aziraphale had found himself sometimes returning to the dene-hole in spirit, just for the chalky, bloodless peace of it.
And most of him had been there ever since. The first of the two deliberate visitors the place had ever had was in the summer of 1954, when a dark-haired fellow, also armed with a butterfly-net for cover, had parked his Bentley by the side of the road to Clopton Stoke, plodded out to Dene Meadow with a skeptical look on his face, disappeared for several hours, and returned with the look of a man who has abundantly satisfied his curiosity.
Clopton Stoke, Hampshire, c. 1990
His other visitor had been more recent.
One day in late autumn, a modest family saloon in proud-owner condition had stopped in the same lay-by Crowley had used, years earlier. A boy got out from one side of the car, and a man from the other — a man who had a moustache, and who always gave the impression of wearing an Argyle vest, even when he wasn’t. They opened the boot to change the boy’s shoes for wellington boots.
“I told you,” the boy was saying, hopping about on one leg, “I’ve always meant to come out here, ever since I heard about the place.”
“I know that, son. I just don’t understand why. God knows there’s nothing here.”
“Reasons,” said the boy mysteriously, in a tone that would brook no argument, and finished getting his wellies on.
“Sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“Positive.”
The boy seemed to know where he was going with the unswerving confidence of youth, and marched across to Dene Meadow to the corner where Aziraphale’s pit was now protected by a chain-link fence, a battered sign advising passers-by to Please Keep Out, and several layers of miraculous warding, to the effect that there was nothing remotely interesting to the human mind to be found here.
From a pocket of his jacket, the boy took out a bulging paper bag with a note taped to it. He took aim, lobbed, and sent the bag sailing in a perfect parabola into the entrance to the dene-hole. Then he returned his still-bemused Dad, who drove him home.
The bag was full of lemon drops, the most benign offering theoretically possible, but even so, Aziraphale had taken a long time to pluck up the courage to read the note. It said:
I know what you really are.
And what you really are, is alright really.
P.S. Thanks.
Which (since Aziraphale had never dared speculate about God’s personal opinion of him) doubled the number of people in the Universe who knew for sure that he was an eldritch abomination, and were perfectly OK with that.
Sentimental as always, Aziraphale had spun out those lemon drops, allowing the greater part of himself one per annum — until that dreadful day a year ago, when the human part of himself had got quietly drunk, and the pullulating, weeping mass is the dene-hole had devoured every remaining lemon drop at once, and still it was no damned good, because Crowley was gone.
----------
Aziraphale had blamed himself; he should have seen it coming.
He and Hastur were both Abominations of the Mythos. And the Mythos ran on a different, less obedient metaphysics than that of Biblical entities: if Aziraphale could recall a few things, even after a miracle as seismic as he suspected had occurred, then so could a certain Duke of Hell
True, Aziraphale’s recall of the events of that strange summer was shifty and blurred, as if an eleven-year-old’s sticky fingers had swiped across his memory, laced with Double-Dip sherbet, and whatever it was that lay at the bottom of packets of Monster Munch. If questioned closely, he’d not have been able to say much beyond that something really big had come very close to happening. But since Aziraphale wasn’t stupid, he had a few suspicions about what such a really big thing, a thing too big to properly remember, might have been.
In hindsight, one particular thing was evident.
In all probability, Hastur had had a pretty legitimate grudge.