Attack of the Cupids Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  1: The End of the World

  2: Sally at a Window

  3: Double Evil

  4: The Appeals Board

  5: Hard Hat Area

  6: The Pink Heart

  7: The Hit

  8: War!

  9: Field of Battle

  10: The Angel of Love

  11: Ghost

  12: Take Me to Heaven

  13: Corridors

  14: Guilty

  15: The Arrow of Lead

  16: The Mask of Eros

  17: The Hounds of Heaven

  18: Charlie’s Last Stand

  19: The End of the World (Again)

  About the Author

  Also by John Dickinson

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘Go, Go, Go!’ And they were everywhere – pouring in through the windows in a wave of chubby bodies wearing nothing but balaclavas. Arms lifted. Bows bent . . .

  There’s only one thing that angels and devils can agree on: cupids are Trouble. And when a golden arrow makes Sally’s sister Billie fall for the hottest boy in school, that’s exactly what Sally gets – Trouble. Suddenly things aren’t just black or white, they’re outrageously, shockingly pink!

  For once Sally’s devil, Muddlespot, and her angel, Windleberry, are on the same side. But can they take down the Angel of Love and her cupid army?

  The world is about to end.

  The world is always about to end. For thousands of years, everyone has known it was going to happen.

  Some have said it would be destroyed by fire. Some have said it would be flood. Some have said it would be fire and flood (and, of course, quite a lot of steam too). The Ancient Persians thought a great lizard would wake and ravage all the lands. The Vikings believed there would be a winter of three years followed by a great battle between gods and giants in which the Earth would get wiped out just because it was in the way. And the Aztecs said that there would be a huge earthquake and the sun would fall from the sky and That Would Be It – for the fifth time, because they also believed the world had ended four times already.

  In modern times gods and giant lizards have gone out of fashion. People prefer to think of scientific reasons why everything should go pop. Nuclear war was a good one. You couldn’t get more scientific than a nuclear war. Although, strangely, all those old ideas about battle and fire and everlasting winter were still going to be part of it somehow.

  Then someone noticed how much everyone depended on computers these days and suggested that all the computers would suddenly stop working on the stroke of midnight. And that, of course, would be the end of absolutely everything.

  Then somebody else noticed how much carbon humans were pumping into the atmosphere, and after quite a lot of complicated science people started to worry about floods and everlasting winter all over again.

  Year in, year out, through the whole of history, people have been expecting the end of the world. Especially in years with lots of zeros.

  And they have all been right. All of them.

  (Except the Aztecs, who were on something they shouldn’t.)

  The world really is about to end.

  It always has been.

  High above the clouds, in one of the thousand wings of the palaces of Heaven, there is a room.

  Visitors – should there be any – reach it by passing down a long corridor. The passage walls are built of Sorrow and the floor is paved with Deep Cold. The light is – well – thicker, more colourful than it should be, and the further you go the thicker and more colourful it gets, until it seems almost solid, pressing upon the skin. An ominous groaning fills the air.

  At the end there is a door made of human tears. Beside it is written in letters of fire:

  Oops.

  (Is this the right place?)

  (All right, maybe it is the right place. But should we be here?)

  Swallow hard. Open the door, gently. The sounds of groaning increase. They’re coming from all around – from a million million throats, which have not yet groaned these groans, but when they do they will groan them so terribly that you can already hear them, now, in this chamber of stillness surrounded by walls of wind.

  The winds spiral up and up. They form the shape of a vast beehive, closing at last in a purple dome far overhead. All the space within them is filled with bookcases – bookcases as tall as cathedrals, running left, running right, away into infinity. And every shelf is packed with folders that have titles like Ragnarök and Great Plague, Armageddon and Apocalypse 2012 and Pole Shift and Galactic Alignment, on and on, one after another, pages and pages and pages. Each page has been spun from someone’s dying breath, and every one describes, calmly and carefully, how the world will end. They are all different. Although they do repeat each other quite a lot.

  In this stillness, in this unending library of destruction, something moves. A figure like the shadow of a small eclipse, huge and silent, stalks between the shelves. The groaning of as-yet-unslain souls weaves itself in a comet-trail behind him. Robed in fire, shod in flood, he comes. Darkness is on his brow, sickness on his breath, his wings are thunderclouds and his eyes white ice. He is the Archangel Destruction, the Herald of Calamity – the One, who, at the Final Word, shall have the sorrowful task of showing the human race its chequered flag. He has many names. Some call him Azreal. Some call him Thanatos, some call him Grimnir, some Ankou. Quite a lot of people call him ‘Sir’ or ‘My Lord’, especially when they meet him.

  But when his back is turned?

  Well, then it’s a different story. The seraphs who bow before him pull faces and jerk their thumbs if they think he’s not looking. The angels who greet his coming with halleluiahs burst into fits of giggles as soon as he’s passed. He knows it. The reason he looks so stony-faced is not because he is supposed to end billions of human lives. It’s because he’s trying not to notice that the choir has got the hiccups again.

  He knows what they call him too. It’s ‘Daddy Doomsday’.

  In some ways Heaven is like everywhere else. You can be as majestic as you like, as creative, as powerful, as brilliant; but if everything you do ends in failure, too bad. You just don’t get the respect.

  Doomsday’s eye roams the shelves. He reads the names on the folders. He remembers every one. The Babel Project – ah yes, very neat. There had been something poetic in using mankind’s greatest achievement (speech) to sow the seeds of mankind’s destruction. When they had told him it must go no further, he had almost cried.

  The Great Plague 171st edition. Easy and effective. You could always rely on a Great Plague. Except that you never had to.

  Enormous Aardvark Eats the Sun.

  Aha. Ahem. That one, he had to admit, had been a little on the flaky side. His staff had put it together at a time when three of their very best Ends of the World had just been cancelled one after another. Everyone had been upset. Of course it was really a protest. He shouldn’t have let it go, but he had. It had earned him an icy memo from the Governors.

  In its elements, it should have been acceptable. Something eating the Sun was an idea they had used many times. The aardvark was a holy beast to . . . some human tribe or other, he couldn’t quite remember which one. And the flood was perfectly standard as well.

  Although it shouldn’t really have been a flood of aardvark puke. He ought to have known that would cause trouble.

  ‘Sir.’

  Doomsday turned. A smart young angel, clothed in white light, was looking up at him.

  An effort of memory. ‘Ah. Mishamh.’

  He managed not to make the name sound like a question. Mishamh was one of his ass
istants, on loan from the Physics Department. He did know that. But like anyone else who had been around since The Beginning, he had a lot to remember. He could remember it all. It was just that sorting through it took a while.

  ‘It’s ready, sir.’

  The angel held up a folder. Its title was:

  Doomsday took it. He turned the pages slowly. He always showed respect for the work of a colleague – however junior – and for the souls upon whose final breaths the work had been written.

  It was good. It planned for all of the things that were supposed to happen on the Last Day. And it was perfectly clear – which was unusual for anything written by the Physics staff, who normally used words that no one else understood and sentences that had been dragged through a black hole backwards.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Really not bad at all.’

  The angel looked at him hopefully. He was expecting questions. Doomsday tried to think of one.

  ‘Time to impact?’

  ‘Six months, sir. It’s on page one.’

  So it was. Exactly on the deadline that the Governors had passed down to him.

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘I’ve got the flood in, sir,’ said the angel, who was rocking a bit as he stood, as if he wanted to hop from foot to foot in his eagerness. ‘Section fourteen – the impact’s in the northern ocean, sending a great wave around the world. And the fault lines fracture, sir, so we get the fire – that’s the magma coming up from below. And in the appendices there’s an option on everlasting winter – we’d need a go or no-go decision on that by Month Minus Four . . .’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Doomsday carefully. ‘A nod to tradition. I like that.’

  Doomsday knew his assistants thought he was hopelessly old-fashioned (or maybe, just hopelessly old). He did not mind. He made up old-fashioned things to say, said them, and then carefully looked somewhere else so that the lads could roll their eyes and jerk their thumbs behind his back. He did it to humour them. Working on the things they did, they needed all the humouring they could get.

  He did have likes and dislikes. He did not, personally, like asteroids. He felt that the end of the world ought to come from within the world itself. The seeds of destruction should have been there from the very beginning. That was why he preferred projects such as Babel and the Millennium Bug. They were neat. The way they finished things off gave meaning to everything that had gone before. It was difficult to find meaning in a random splat.

  But he did not let his feelings get in the way of his work.

  ‘Good job. You may put it to the Governors.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll go for it, sir?’ Mishamh was hopping from foot to foot now. ‘Do you think they will?’

  Doomsday looked at his colleague thoughtfully.

  The lad was very young. He couldn’t have been more than a century – there was still down on his feathers. He worked surrounded by failed plans for the end of the world, and if he thought anything about them it was that somehow each and every one, in some detail, could not have been good enough. He knew there was no flaw in his own plan. It was simple, and at the same time it had everything. He really thought he had done it. He had found the one piece that had been missing from the Great Curriculum all this time.

  He had as much understanding of Heaven as a fly has of spiders’ webs.

  ‘Come with me,’ said Doomsday, in a voice that was not unkindly.

  He led Mishamh down the aisles between the shelves. Together, they passed through the Door of Tears. They strode along the Passage of Ice, adjusting their pace easily as the floor rose and fell beneath them. (The floor rose and fell because the Geography Department was in a wing of the Heavenly palaces. When you ask the Heavenly Architects to put a ‘wing’ on a building in the sky they think you really mean it.)

  ‘Uh – where are we going, sir?’

  ‘The Appeals Board.’

  Mishamh was young, but he knew better than to ask why. It’s not a question that gets asked in Heaven. To ask ‘Why’ is to ask why love has allowed pain, why order has led to chaos, why perfection has given life to imperfection. It is to probe into the mysteries of the Great Curriculum itself. If you dare to ask the question ‘Why?’ you are going to have to listen to a very long answer. If you’re lucky.

  If you’re unlucky, you might be listening to a very short one.

  Down below them, small and blue and beautiful, turned the world they were going to destroy.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Mr Kingsley. ‘Really not bad at all.’

  Tuesday morning, Classroom C23, Darlington High School. Mr Kingsley’s words were as soft as snowflakes and there was a shiver in them that was as close as he ever came to delight.

  Sally waited.

  The period was over. Everyone else had gone, stuffing their books into their bags and hurrying out into the corridors to make the most of morning break. But Sally had already finished her essay in class, so she had handed it in to Mr Kingsley before leaving. And Mr Kingsley had begun to mark it at once. She could have left him to get on with it but he had seemed to expect her to stay. So she had.

  ‘Hm,’ said Mr Kingsley. He squiggled a line in green ink. Mr Kingsley always used green.

  Outside the sky was blue and the sunlight was pouring all over the sports fields. The colours were bright, the temperature had bounced and deodorants were suddenly essential. Girls lay in clumps on the grass. Boys charged about and wrestled with each other. Some of them had started a football game. The morning break was so short you wouldn’t have thought it was worth it, but they always did it if they could. They could go from bell to ball to rolling in the mud in three minutes flat. Tough luck on whoever would be sitting next to them in third period.

  Sally wanted to be out there too. It was the next thing on her list for the day. Shakespeare essay – ✓, done that. Hand it in – ✓, done that. Spend break in sun – ✓ . . . Hey, what’s the hold-up? Can’t he mark it sometime else?

  (And why’s he squiggling? It should have been Very Good. Easy.)

  Five minutes of break had gone already.

  Another five and she’d have just time to say ‘Hi’ to her group before they all had to come back in again. ‘How was your summer?’ ‘Yeah, great, thanks – I spent the whole of it with Mr Kingsley, getting my English marked.’ (Sarcastic cheers.)

  Alec Gardner was out there, and so were Tony Hicks and Zac Stenton – the three gods of Year Twelve. All of them were lean-faced, lean-bodied and had some secret way of never getting any spots. Alec’s hair was blond and curly. His teeth were white and he smiled a lot. Tony was brown-haired and brown-skinned and had been voted the most perfect tan in the school. Zac was taller, dark, and he actually did notice you from time to time. Sally thought he was nice.

  She wasn’t especially thinking about any of them. That was just where her eyes went. Same as everyone else’s did.

  She was thinking about how to save the world. Weather like this was OK, but it also reminded her that global warming was on its way. Monsoons were coming to Darlington. So were all the poor people from the lands around the Mediterranean which would have turned to desert. Everybody said it and nobody seemed to be doing very much about it. So Sally had added ‘Stop Global Warming’ to her list. And stop it she would. She just needed to get enough people to see what had to be done.

  She was also wondering if she would get Mr Kingsley for English next year. Mr Kingsley was quite mad in at least three different ways. Six terms times three different madnesses equalled eighteen terms of chronic insanity. She didn’t think she could cope.

  But then pretty well all the teachers at Darlington High were mad one way or another. For her GCSE options for next year she was going to have to choose between taking Music with Mr Bright, Drama with Mrs Popham or (shudder) P.E. with Miss Tackle. Mr Bright and Mrs Popham and Miss Tackle were all just as mad as Mr Kingsley. Rumour had it that Miss Tackle had changed her name by deed poll.

  Mr Kingsley’s sorts of madness were: i) being
about thirty but looking sixty; ii) being pale and grey and long-nosed and sitting so slumped in his seat that his back curved like a snail’s shell; and iii) dreaming about the love life he had never had. He also mumbled poetry.

  ‘Hm,’ said Mr Kingsley, and squiggled again.

  Twelve minutes left of break.

  And she was thinking about Viola Matson. She was wondering if Viola really was getting somewhere with Tony. Cassie, Viola and all that group always acted as if they were older and more sophisticated than the other Year Nines. They hung about looking haughty and they went to parties with the sixth-formers (sometimes they were even invited). And word had just come round the Year Nine girls that if anyone else were seen near Tony, that person would live only long enough to regret her mistake very much indeed. Signed, Viola and co. You didn’t usually get one of those unless something was going on.

  But hey, nobody could stop you looking.

  ‘“I, being poor, have only my dreams,”’ sighed Mr Kingsley (in relation to nothing at all, as far as Sally could tell).

  Eleven minutes. Maybe she would have time to walk out there and at least reach her group before they all came back in again. Maybe she would get to say ‘hey’ to Zac or Alec as she passed.

  Maybe she could dye her hair white and make her eyes up in black and undo her top button and yank her tie-knot halfway down her chest and wear a skirt that covered just the top two centimetres of her thigh. And if she did, maybe people like Zac and Alec and Tony would look at her a bit more. If she could somehow possibly do all that and still be for real.

  She was not thinking about the birthday.

  The birthday was on Sunday.

  She was Not Thinking About It.

  ‘Not bad at all,’ said Mr Kingsley at last. ‘Apart from the introduction.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my introduction?’

  Mr Kingsley cleared his throat. ‘“Love, present in every Shakespearian comedy,”’ he read from Sally’s page, ‘“. . . is a theme accessible to all: young and old, rich and poor, man and woman. Midsummer Night’s Dream is not to be found lacking . . .” (indeed it is not). “. . . The first, rather unfortunately warty, example of love I am going to explore is that between Helena and Demetrius . . .”’