Good Omens

can’t talk now because there’s this outsider here .
    Whereas Sister Mary, on the other hand, had thought that the orderly’s wink was more on the lines of:
    Well done, Sister Mary—switched over the babies all by herself. Now indicate to me the superfluous child and I shall remove it and let you get on with your tea with his Royal Excellency the American Culture .
    And therefore her own wink had meant:
    There you go, dearie; that’s Baby B, now take him away and leave me to chat to his Excellency. I’ve always wanted to ask him why they have those tall buildings with all the mirrors on them .
    The subtleties of all this were quite lost on Mr. Young, who was extremely embarrassed at all this clandestine affection and was thinking: That Mr. Russell, he knew what he was talking about, and no mistake.
    Sister Mary’s error might have been noticed by the other nun had not she herself been severely rattled by the Secret Service men in Mrs. Dowling’s room, who kept looking at her with growing unease. This was because they had been trained to react in a certain way to people in long flowing robes and long flowing headdresses, and were currently suffering from a conflict of signals. Humans suffering from a conflict of signals aren’t the best people to be holding guns, especially when they’ve just witnessed a natural childbirth, which definitely looked an un-American way of bringing new citizens into the world. Also, they’d heard that there were missals in the building.
    Mrs. Young stirred.
    â€œHave you picked a name for him yet?” said Sister Mary archly.
    â€œHmm?” said Mr. Young. “Oh. No, not really. If it was a girl it would have been Lucinda after my mother. Or Germaine. That was Deirdre’s choice.”
    â€œWormwood’s a nice name,” said the nun, remembering her classics. “Or Damien. Damien’s very popular.”
    ANATHEMA DEVICE—her mother, who was not a great student of religious matters, happened to read the word one day and thought it was a lovely name for a girl—was eight and a half years old, and she was reading The Book, under the bedclothes, with a torch.
    Other children learned to read on basic primers with colored pictures of apples, balls, cockroaches, and so forth. Not the Device family. Anathema had learned to read from The Book.
    It didn’t have any apples and balls in it. It did have a rather good eighteenth-century woodcut of Agnes Nutter being burned at the stake and looking rather cheerful about it.
    The first word she could recognize was nice . Very few people at the age of eight and a half know that nice also means “scrupulously exact,” but Anathema was one of them.
    The second word was accurate .
    The first sentence she had ever read out loud was:
    â€œI tell ye thif, and I charge ye with my wordes. Four shalle ryde, and Four shalle alfo ryde, and Three sharl ryde the Skye as twixt, and Wonne shal ryde in flames; and theyr shall be no stopping themme: not fish, nor rayne, nor rode, neither Deville nor Angel. And ye shalle be theyr alfo, Anathema.”
    Anathema liked to read about herself.
    (There were books which caring parents who read the right Sunday papers could purchase with their children’s names printed in as the heroine or hero. This was meant to interest the child in the book. In Anathema’s case, it wasn’t only her in The Book—and it had been spot on so far—but her parents, and her grandparents, and everyone, back to the seventeenth century. She was too young and too self-centered at this point to attach any importance to the fact that there was no mention made of her children, or indeed, any events in her future further away than eleven years’ time. When you’re eight and a half, eleven years is a lifetime, and of course, if you believed The Book, it would be.)
    She was a bright child, with a pale face, and black eyes and hair. As a rule she tended to make people feel uncomfortable, a family trait she had inherited, along with being more psychic than was good for her, from her great-great-great-great-great grandmother.
    She was precocious, and self-possessed. The only thing about Anathema her teachers ever had the nerve to upbraid her for was her spelling, which was not so much appalling as 300 years too late.
    THE NUNS TOOK BABY A and swapped it with Baby B under the noses of the Attaché’s wife and the Secret Service men, by the