Good Omens

something about the habits of both goats and bees, and concluded therefore that the magazine was run by a bunch of bib.. overalled maniacs. Besides, it used the word "community" too often; Newt had always suspected that people who regularly used the word "community" were using it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.
    Then he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist.
    To Newt's straightforward mind this was intolerable.
    Newt had not believed in the Cub Scouts and then, when he was old enough, not in the Scouts either.
    He was prepared to believe, though, that the job of wages clerk at United Holdings [Holdings] PLC, was possibly the most boring in the world.
    This is how Newton Pulsifer looked as a man: if he went into a phone booth and changed, he might manage to come out looking like Clark Kent.
    But he found he rather liked Shadwell. People often did, much to Shadwell's annoyance. The Rajits liked him because he always eventually paid his rent and didn't cause any trouble, and was racist in such a glowering, undirected way that it was quite inoffensive; it was simply that Shadwell hated everyone in the world, regardless of caste, color, or creed, and wasn't going to make any exceptions for anyone.
    Madame Tracy liked him. Newt had been amazed to find that the tenant of the other flat was a middle.. aged, motherly soul, whose gentlemen callers called as much for a cup of tea and a nice chat as for what little discipline she was still able to exact. Sometimes, when he'd nursed a half pint of Guinness on a Saturday night, Shadwell would stand in the corridor between their rooms and shout things like "hoor of Babylon!" but she told Newt privately that she'd always felt rather gratified about this even though the closest she'd been to Babylon was Torremolinos. It was like free advertising, she said.
    She said she didn't mind him banging on the wall and swearing during her seance afternoons, either. Her knees had been giving her gyp and she wasn't always up to operating the table rapper, she said, so a bit of muffled thumping came in useful.
    On Sundays she'd leave him a bit of dinner on his doorstep, with another plate over the top of it to keep it warm.
    You couldn't help liking Shadwell, she said. For all the good it did, though, she might as well be flicking bread pellets into a black hole.
    Newt remembered the other cuttings. He pushed them across the stained desk.
    "What are these?" said Shadwell, suspiciously.
    "Phenomena," said Newt. "You said to look for phenomena. There's more phenomena than witches these days, I'm afraid."
    "Anyone bin shootin' hares wi' a silver bullet and next day an old crone in the village is walkin' wi' a limp?" Shadwell said hopefully.
    "I'm afraid not."
    "Any cows droppin' dead after some woman has looked at 'em?"
    "No."
    "What is it, then?" said Shadwell. He shuffled across to the sticky brown cupboard and pulled out a tin of condensed milk.
    "Odd things happening," said Newt.
    He'd spent weeks on this. Shadwell had really let the papers pile up. Some of them went back for years. Newt had quite a good memory, perhaps because in his twenty.. six years very little had happened to fill it up, and he had become quite expert on some very esoteric subjects.
    "Seems to be something new every day," said Newt, flicking through the rectangles of newsprint. "Something weird has been happening to nuclear power stations, and no one seems to know what it is. And some people are claiming that the Lost Continent of Atlantis has risen." He looked proud of his efforts.
    Shadwell's penknife punctured the condensed milk tin. There was the distant sound of a telephone ringing. Both men instinctively ignored it. All the calls were for Madame Tracy anyway and some of them were not intended for the ear of man; Newt had conscientiously answered the phone on his first day, listened carefully to the question, said "Marks and Spencer's 100% Cotton Y.. fronts, actually," and had been left with a dead receiver.
    Shadwell sucked deeply.