Had there been a soul inside Mrs. Abernathy for her to examine, or had her vanity and lust for power and revenge not clouded her insight, she might have come to understand that she did not so much hate Samuel Johnson as fear him. There was an essential goodness to him that she could not touch, a decency that remained untainted by all that he had experienced so far in his short life. Samuel Johnson was human, with all of the flaws and foibles that came with his species. He could be jealous and sad, angry and selfish, but in him a little part of the best of humanity glowed brightly, just as it illuminates so many of us if we choose to let it. What Mrs. Abernathy did not grasp was that, despite all that she or her master might visit upon him, she would never, ever defeat Samuel Johnson, and no matter how deep or dark the place in which he was interred, his soul would continue to shine.

The wagon ascended an incline, and as it reached the top Samuel gasped, for arrayed on the plain before him was another mighty army: row upon row of demon legionnaires, their long shields catching the reflection of the bolts of lightning that broke through the clouds above with greater and greater frequency and ferocity, as though the angry spirits in the skies were urging on the opposing forces, seeking on the battlefield below a reflection of their own wrath. Mounted cavalry were moving into position, the eyes of their skinless steeds like hot coals set in ash, their hooves striking sparks from the stony ground.

Behind the main ranks strode the monsters of the underworld: Cyclopses, and minotaurs, and snake-headed hydrae; gigantic Gorgons, their faces masked with plates of gold until the order came to reveal themselves, but their serpentine locks already writhing in anticipation of the fighting to come; and lurching, predatory creatures with the bodies of men and the heads of vicious animals. Many of the beasts seemed familiar to Samuel, and not merely because they had formed part of the huge force originally destined to conquer the Earth. These were the monsters that shadowed all of the Earth’s mythologies and religions, the beings that had appeared to the ancients in nightmares and had found their way into legends and fairy tales.

Allied with them were jumbled entities that had never been imagined before, for only madness could have conjured up such visions: heads on legs, scuttling sideways like crabs, sharp teeth snapping; creatures that were hybrids of shark and spider, of toad and bat, of earwig and dog, as though segments of every animal that ever existed on Earth had been tossed in a great vat and allowed to fuse with one another.