Good Omens

reached the title page. It was probably a good job Crowley couldn’t see his expression.
    â€œI suppose you could always send it to the post office there,” said Crowley, “if you really feel you must. Address it to the mad woman with the bicycle. Never trust a woman who gives funny names to means of transport—”
    â€œYes, yes, certainly,” said the angel. He fumbled for his keys, dropped them on the pavement, picked them up, dropped them again, and hurried to the shop door.
    â€œWe’ll be in touch then, shall we?” Crowley called after him.
    Aziraphale paused in the act of turning the key.
    â€œWhat?” he said. “Oh. Oh. Yes. Fine. Jolly good.” And he slammed the door.
    â€œRight,” mumbled Crowley, suddenly feeling very alone.
TORCHLIGHT FLICKED IN THE LANES.
    The trouble with trying to find a brown-covered book among brown leaves and brown water at the bottom of a ditch of brown earth in the brown, well, grayish light of dawn, was that you couldn’t.
    It wasn’t there.
    Anathema tried every method of search she could think of. There was the methodical quartering of the ground. There was the slapdash poking at the bracken by the roadside. There was the nonchalant sidling up to it and looking out of the side of her eye. She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.
    It didn’t.
    Which meant, as she had feared all along, that it was probably in the back of a car belonging to two consenting cycle repairmen.
    She could feel generations of Agnes Nutter’s descendants laughing at her.
    Even if those two were honest enough to want to return it, they’d hardly go to all the trouble of finding a cottage they’d barely seen in the dark.
    The only hope was that they wouldn’t know what it was they’d got.
    AZIRAPHALE, LIKE MANY Soho merchants who specialized in hard-to-find books for the discerning connoisseur, had a back room, but what was in there was far more esoteric than anything normally found inside a shrink-wrapped bag for the Customer Who Knows What He Wants.
    He was particularly proud of his books of prophecy.
    First editions, usually.
    And every one was signed.
    He’d got Robert Nixon, 16 and Martha the Gypsy, and Ignatius Sybilla, and Old Ottwell Binns. Nostradamus had signed, “To myne olde friend Azerafel, with Beste wishes”; Mother Shipton had spilled drink on his copy; and in a climate-controlled cabinet in one corner was the original scroll in the shaky handwriting of St. John the Divine of Patmos, whose “Revelation” had been the all-time best seller. Aziraphale had found him a nice chap, if a bit too fond of odd mushrooms.
    What the collection did not have was a copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter , and Aziraphale walked into the room holding it as a keen philatelist might hold a Mauritius Blue that had just turned up on a postcard from his aunt.
    He’d never even seen a copy before, but he’d heard about it. Everyone in the trade, which considering it was a highly specialized trade meant about a dozen people, had heard of it. Its existence was a sort of vacuum around which all sorts of strange stories had been orbiting for hundreds of years. Aziraphale realized he wasn’t sure if you could orbit a vacuum, and didn’t care; The Nice and Accurate Prophecies made the Hitler Diaries look like, well, a bunch of forgeries.
    His hands hardly shook at all as he laid it down on a bench, pulled on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and opened it reverentially. Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshiped books.
    The title page said:
    THE NIFE AND ACCURATE PROPHEFIES
OF AGNES NUTTER
    In slightly smaller type:
    Being a Certaine and Prefice Hiftory from the Prefent Day
Unto the Endinge of this World .
    In slightly larger type:
    Containing therein Many Diuerse Wonders and
precepts for the Wife
    In a different type:
    More complete than ever yet before publifhed
    In smaller type but in capitals:
    CONCERNING THE STRANGE TIMES AHEADE
    In slightly desperate italics:
    And events of a Wonderful Nature
    In larger type once more:
    â€˜Reminifent of Noftradamus at hif beft’—Ursula Shipton
    The prophecies were numbered, and there were more