“There you are, Mrs. Abernathy,” he said. “We’ll have all those bits of you back together again in no time.”

With that, he popped out of existence again, and the huge sea creature that had recently swallowed him forgot all about being evil and simply went back to eating things, which was probably for the best.

• • •

There were many advantages to being an entity composed entirely of transparent jelly. Actually, there weren’t, but Crudford, Esq., who was a creature of boundless optimism, tried to find the bright side of any situation, even his own, which was very unbright. Looked at from the outside, he appeared to be on the same level as slime,⁹ and in possession of only a single hat. But in Crudford’s own mind he was a sluglike object on the rise, a wobbling thingummy on the way to greater things. Someday, an opportunity would present itself, and there would be only one gelatinous demon for the job: Crudford, Esq.

Amazingly enough, that day had come when Mrs. Abernathy, the left-hand demon of the Great Malevolence, the most evil being in the Multiverse, had suddenly found herself with each of the billions and billions of individual atoms that made up her body separated from its neighbors and scattered through the Multiverse, all because she had messed with Samuel Johnson, his dog, two policemen, four elves, and an ice-cream salesman.¹⁰ Oh, and four of her own demons, including Nurd the Scourge of Five Deities, who everyone had thought so useless at being a demon that even Crudford was more terrifying than him.

Crudford imagined that being blown apart at the atomic level must have hurt a lot. Unfortunately for Mrs. Abernathy, as Crudford had come to realize, she hadn’t just been blown apart at the atomic level: the protons, neutrons, and electrons that made up her atoms had also become separated from one another, and then the particles within the protons and neutrons, known as quarks, had been scattered for good measure. There were three quarks within each proton and neutron, bound together by other particles called gluons, and all of those various bits and pieces were now scattered throughout the Multiverse. Being blown apart on the subatomic level must have hurt an awful, awful lot, thought Crudford. Still, look on the bright side: at least Mrs. Abernathy was seeing new places.

But cometh the hour, cometh the congealed, hat-wearing jelly being.¹¹ It turned out that Crudford had always been very good at squeezing into small spaces, and oozing through tiny holes. No one in Hell was entirely sure what Crudford was made from, exactly, but it was remarkable stuff, and there was no other creature remotely like him in that awful place.

And Crudford couldn’t just squeeze through cracks in rocks and wood and metal: no, Crudford could ooze through the rips and tears in universes, the holes and flaws between dimensions. It made him the perfect candidate to search for, and gather up, Mrs. Abernathys’s quarks and gluons and occasional reconstituted atoms so that the process of putting her back together again could begin. At last, Crudford had found his purpose. The re-creation of Mrs. Abernathy was his responsibility, and his alone. He was searching for subatomic needles in the universal haystacks of the Multiverse, and he loved it.