Good Omens

professional, he told himself. You’re a soldier, aren’t you? Well, practically. Then act like a soldier. He thought hard for a fraction of a second. Well, act like a respectable soldier on his best behavior, then. He forced his attention back to the matter at hand.
    â€œWhy Lower Tadfield?” said Newt. “I just got interested because of the weather. Optimal microclimate, they call it. That means it’s a small place with its own personal nice weather.”
    He glanced at her notebooks. There was definitely something odd about the place, even if you ignored Tibetans and UFOs, which seemed to be infesting the whole world these days. The Tadfield area didn’t only have the kind of weather you could set your calendar by, it was also remarkably resistant to change. No one seemed to build new houses there. The population didn’t seem to move much. There seemed to be more woods and hedges than you’d normally expect these days. The only battery farm to open in the area had failed after a year or two, and been replaced by an old-fashioned pig farmer who let his pigs run loose in his apple orchards and sold the pork at premium prices. The two local schools seemed to soldier on in blissful immunity from the changing fashions of education. A motorway which should have turned most of Lower Tadfield into little more than the Junction 18 Happy Porker Rest Area changed course five miles away, detoured in a great semicircle, and continued on its way oblivious to the little island of rural changelessness it had avoided. No one quite seemed to know why; one of the surveyors involved had a nervous breakdown, a second had become a monk, and a third had gone off to Bali to paint nude women.
    It was as if a large part of the twentieth century had marked a few square miles Out of Bounds.
    Anathema pulled another a card out of her index and flicked it across the table.
    2315. Sum say It cometh in London Town, or New Yorke, butte they be Wronge, for the plase is Taddes Fild, Stronge inne hys powr, he cometh like a knight inne the fief, he divideth the Worlde into 4 partes, he bringeth the storme. [. . . 4 years early [New Amsterdam till 1664] … . . . Taddville, Norfolk … . . . Tardesfield, Devon … . . . Tadfield, Oxon … < . . ! . . See Revelation, C6, v10]
    â€œI had to go and look through a lot of county records,” said Anathema.
    â€œWhy’s this one 2315? It’s earlier than the others.”
    â€œAgnes was a bit slapdash about timing. I don’t think she always knew what went where. I told you, we’ve spent ages devising a sort of system for chaining them together.”
    Newt looked at a few cards. For example:
    1111. An the Great Hound sharl coom, and the Two Powers sharl watch in Vane, for it Goeth where is its Master, Where they Wot Notte, and he sharl name it, True to Ittes Nature, and Hell sharl flee it. [? Is this something to do with Bismark? [A F Device, June 8, 1888] . . . ? . . . Schleswig-Holstein?]
    â€œShe’s being unusually obtuse for Agnes,” said Anathema.
    3017. I see Four Riding, bringing the Ende, and the Angells of Hell ride with them, And Three sharl Rise. And Four and Four Together be Four, an the Dark Angel sharl Own Defeat, Yette the Manne sharl claim his Own. [The Apocalyptic Horsemen The Man = Pan, The Devil ( The Witch Trials of Lancashire , Brewster, 1782). ?? I feel good Agnes had drunk well this night, [Quincy Device, Octbr. 15, 1789] I concur. We are all human, alas. [Miss O J Device, Janry. 5, 1854]]
    â€œWhy Nice and Accurate?” said Newt.
    â€œNice as in exact, or precise,” said Anathema, in the weary tones of one who’d explained this before. “That’s what it used to mean.”
    â€œBut look ,” said Newt—
    â€”he’d nearly convinced himself about the non-existence of the UFO, which was clearly a figment of his imagination, and the Tibetan could have been a, well, he was working on it, but whatever it was it wasn’t a Tibetan, but what he was more and more convinced of was that he was in a room with a very attractive woman, who appeared actually to like him, or at least not to dislike him, which was a definite first for Newt. And admittedly there seemed to be a lot of strange stuff going on, but if he really tried, poling the boat of common sense upstream against the raging current of the evidence, he could pretend it was all, well, weather balloons, or