The Gates

“Er, what is it, then?” said Mr. Hume.

“Well, if you look closely…”

Despite his better judgment, Mr. Hume found himself leaning forward to examine the pin.

“… really closely…”

Mr. Hume squinted. Someone had once given him a grain of rice with his name written upon it, which Mr. Hume had considered interesting but pointless, and he wondered if Samuel had somehow managed a similar trick.

“… you might just be able to see an infinite number of angels dancing on the head of this pin,” finished Samuel. [8]

Mr. Hume looked at Samuel. Samuel looked back at him.

“Are you trying to be fu

This was a question Samuel heard quite often, usually when he wasn’t trying to be fu

“No,” said Samuel. “I read it somewhere. Theoretically, you can fit an infinite number of angels on the head of a pin.”

“That doesn’t mean that they’re actually there,” said Mr. Hume.

“No, but they might be,” said Samuel reasonably.

“Equally, they might not.”

“You can’t prove that they’re not there, though,” said Samuel.

“But you can’t prove that they are.”

Samuel thought about this for a couple of seconds, then said, “You can’t prove a negative proposition.”

“What?” asked Mr. Hume.

“You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist. You can only prove that something does exist.”

“Did you read that somewhere too?” Mr. Hume was having trouble keeping the sarcasm from his voice.

“I think so,” said Samuel, who, like most honest, straightforward people, had trouble recognizing sarcasm. “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” said Mr. Hume. He realized that he sounded distinctly sulky, so he coughed, then said with more force, “Yes, I suppose you’re right.” [9]

Samuel continued. “Which means that I have as much chance of proving that there are angels on the head of this pin as you have of proving that there aren’t.”

“Are you sure you’re only eleven?” asked Mr. Hume.

“Positive,” said Samuel.

Mr. Hume shook his head wearily.

“Thank you for that, Samuel. You can take your pin-and your angels-back to your desk now.”

“Are you certain you don’t want to keep it?” asked Samuel.

“Yes, I’m certain.”

“I have lots more.”

“Sit down, Samuel,” said Mr. Hume, who had a way of making a hiss sound like a shout, a sign of barely controlled rage that even Samuel was able to recognize. He went back to his chair and carefully impaled his desk with the pin, so that the angels, if they were actually there, wouldn’t fall off.

“Anyone else got anything they’d like to share with us?” asked Mr. Hume. “An imaginary bu

Everyone laughed. Bobby Goddard kicked the back of Samuel’s seat.

Samuel sighed.

So that was why Mr. Hume had called Samuel’s mother, and afterward she had given Samuel a talking-to about taking school seriously, and not teasing Mr. Hume, who appeared to be, she said, “a little sensitive.”

Samuel glanced at his watch. His mother would be gone by now, which meant that Stephanie the babysitter would be waiting for him when he returned. Stephanie had been fine when she had first started looking after Samuel a couple of years before, but recently she had become horrible in the way that only certain teenage girls can. She had a boyfriend named Garth who would sometimes come over to “keep her company,” which meant that Samuel would be rushed off to bed well before his bedtime. Even when Garth wasn’t around, Stephanie would spend hours talking on the phone while watching reality TV shows in which people competed to become models, singers, dancers, actors, train drivers, or anything other than what they really were, and she preferred to do so without the benefit of Samuel’s company.

It was now dark. Samuel should have been home fifteen minutes ago, but the house wasn’t the same anymore. He missed his dad, but he was also angry with him and his mum.

“We should be getting back,” he told Boswell. Boswell wagged his tail. It was getting chilly, and Boswell didn’t like the cold.

At which point there was a bright blue flash from somewhere behind them, accompanied by a smell like a fire in a rotten-egg factory. Boswell nearly fell off the wall in shock, saved only by Samuel’s arms.

“Right,” said Samuel, sensing an opportunity to delay returning home, “let’s go and see what that was…”

In the basement of 666 Crowley Road, a number of cloaked figures were covering their faces with their sleeves and spluttering.

“Oh, that’s disgusting,” said Mrs. Renfield. “How horrid!”

The smell really was terrible, particularly in such an enclosed space, even though Mr. Abernathy had earlier opened the basement window a crack to let some air in. Now he rushed to open it wider, and, slowly, the stench began to weaken, or perhaps it was just that there was now something else to distract the attention of the four people in the basement from it.

Hanging in the air at the very center of the room was a small, rotating circle of pale blue light. It twinkled, then grew in strength and size. Slowly, it became a perfect disk, about two feet in diameter, from which wisps of smoke were emerging.

It was Mrs. Abernathy who took the first step forward.

“Careful, dear,” said her husband.

“Oh, do be quiet,” said Mrs. Abernathy.

She kept advancing until she was mere inches from the circle. “I think I can see something,” she said. “Wait a minute.” She drew closer. “There’s… land there. It’s like a window. I can see mud, and stones, and the bars of some huge gates.

“And now there’s something moving-”

Outside, Samuel crouched by the small window, looking down on the basement. Boswell, who was a very intelligent dog, was hiding by the hedge. In fact Boswell was under the hedge, and had he been a larger dog, one capable of restraining an eleven-year-old boy, for example, Samuel would have been right there beside him; that, or both of them would have been well on their way home, where there were no nasty smells, no flashing blue lights, and no hints that something bad had just happened, and was likely to get considerably worse, Boswell also being a melancholic, even pessimistic, dog by nature.

The window was only a foot long, and opened barely two inches on its metal hinge, but the gap was wide enough for Samuel to be able to view and hear all that was going on inside. He was a little surprised to see the Abernathys and two other people wearing what looked like black bathrobes in a cold basement, but he had long ago learned not to be too shocked by anything adults did. He heard Mrs. Abernathy describe what she was seeing, but all that was visible to Samuel was the glowing circle itself. It seemed to be filled with a white fog, as if someone had blown a big, dense smoke ring in the Abernathys’ basement.

Samuel was very anxious to discover what else Mrs. Abernathy might have been able to glimpse. Unfortunately, those details were destined to remain unknown, apart from the fact that something on the other side had gray, scaly skin and three large, clawed fingers, for that was what reached out from the circle, grabbed Mrs. Abernathy’s head, and dragged her through. She didn’t even have time to scream.

Mrs. Renfield screamed instead. Mr. Abernathy ran toward the glowing circle, then seemed to think better of whatever he was pla

“Evelyn?” he said. “Are you all right?”

There was no response from the hole, but he could hear an unpleasant sound from within, like someone squishing ripe fruit. His wife had been correct, though: something was visible through the hole. It did indeed look like a pair of enormous gates, ones that had developed a small hole and were now bubbling with molten metal. Through it, Mr. Abernathy could see a dreadful landscape, all ruined trees and black mud. Shapes moved across it, shadowy figures that had no place except in horror stories and nightmares. Of his wife, there was no sign.

[8] It was St. Thomas Aquinas, a most learned man who died in 1274, who was supposed to have suggested that an infinite number of angels could dance on the head of a pin. In fact he didn’t, although he spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not angels had bodies (he seemed to think that they didn’t), and how many of them there might be up in heaven (quite a lot, he concluded). The problem with St. Thomas Aquinas was that he liked arguing with himself, and it’s very hard to nail down exactly what he thought about anything at all. Still, the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is probably of interest mainly to philosophers and, one presumes, dancing angels, since the last thing an angel doing the foxtrot wants to worry about is how crowded the pin is getting, and the possibility of falling off the edge and doing himself an injury.

[9] Actually, this is not entirely true. It may well be the case that one ca

In addition, again according to quantum theory, there is a probability that all possible events, no matter how strange, may occur, so there is a probability, however small, that Herbert may exist after all.

Still, it’s a good argument with which to confuse schoolteachers and parents, and on that basis alone Samuel is to be applauded.