Good Omens

and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe. In Germany the bonfires were built and burned with regular Teutonic thoroughness. Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings. But the English never seemed to have the heart for it.
    One reason for this may have to do with the manner of Agnes Nutter’s death, which more or less marked the end of the serious witch-hunting craze in England. A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people, arrived at her house one April evening to find her sitting with her coat on, waiting for them.
    â€œYe’re tardie,” she said to them. “I shoulde have beene aflame ten minutes since.”
    Then she got up and hobbled slowly through the suddenly silent crowd, out of the cottage, and to the bonfire that had been hastily thrown together on the village green. Legend says that she climbed awkwardly onto the pyre and thrust her arms around the stake behind her.
    â€œTye yt well,” she said to the astonished witchfinder. And then, as the villagers sidled toward the pyre, she raised her handsome head in the firelight and said, “Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judgéd, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne deathe be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do notte understande .”
    And, apparently, she smiled and looked up at the sky over the village and added, “That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole.”
    And after that strange blasphemy she said no more. She let them gag her, and stood imperiously as the torches were put to the dry wood.
    The crowd grew nearer, one or two of its members a little uncertain as to whether they’d done the right thing, now they came to think about it.
    Thirty seconds later an explosion took out the village green, scythed the valley clean of every living thing, and was seen as far away as Halifax.
    There was much subsequent debate as to whether this had been sent by God or by Satan, but a note later found in Agnes Nutter’s cottage indicated that any divine or devilish intervention had been materially helped by the contents of Agnes’s petticoats, wherein she had with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roofing nails.
    What Agnes also left behind, on the kitchen table beside a note canceling the milk, was a box and a book. There were specific instructions as to what should be done with the box, and equally specific instructions about what should be done with the book; it was to be sent to Agnes’s son, John Device.
    The people who found it—who were from the next village, and had been woken up by the explosion—considered ignoring the instructions and just burning the cottage, and then looked around at the twinkling fires and nail-studded wreckage and decided not to. Besides, Agnes’s note included painfully precise predictions about what would happen to people who did not carry out her orders.
    The man who put the torch to Agnes Nutter was a Witchfinder Major. They found his hat in a tree two miles away.
    His name, stitched inside on a fairly large piece of tape, was Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer, one of England’s most assiduous witchfinders, and it might have afforded him some satisfaction to know that his last surviving descendant was now, even if unawares, heading toward Agnes Nutter’s last surviving descendant. He might have felt that some ancient revenge was at last going to be discharged.
    If he’d known what was actually going to happen when that descendant met her he would have turned in his grave, except that he had never got one.
    FIRSTLY, HOWEVER, Newt had to do something about the flying saucer.
    It landed in the road ahead of him just as he was trying to find the Lower Tadfield turning and had the map spread over the steering wheel. He had to brake hard.
    It looked like every cartoon of a flying saucer Newt had ever seen.
    As he stared over the top of his map, a door in the saucer slid aside with a satisfying whoosh, revealing a gleaming walkway