Chapter 59: It's Time for the Denouement

I won’t bore you with the details of how we all stumbled out of bed, hung over and dreadful, stinking and smelling of spent or frustrated lust. Or of how Kylie had been up for two hours making the most amazing breakfast ever served to condemned men, which I took one look at and knew I couldn’t touch. Or of how Freddie Flintoff wandered through the house finding the designated soldiers and expeditionaries and giving us all a little black pill, and how we swallowed them and suddenly felt completely fine, and how we then ate, drank coffee and laughed about last night, and how Katharine and David-Mitchell-the-novelist thought no one could see what they were doing under the table. I won’t bother you with the tedious business of getting suited up with hi-tech weapons, of how we dressed our look-alikes and sent them in blacked-out cars to a meeting at Whitehall which we hoped would fool the enemy, at least for a bit, or of how the incursion team took a tunnel to three streets away where we emerging from a manhole and straight through the floors of three specially-adapted white vans which took us to a small facility in the flats to the east of London’s East End. I won’t explain how we circumvented air traffic control in our pair of stealth-adapted helicopters, or how Miss Smallbone told us to enter French airspace through a gap in their radar coverage that was invisible to their maps and computer systems, and which Miss Smallbone had prepared many years ago, just in case, because you never know what might come in useful further down the line. I will also not go through all the things David Tennant said on the flight, recapitulating exactly what it was we were doing and why. It was pretty complicated, and there’s no point in bothering with you with precisely how the Teacher finally realised that the demons’ plan in taking military control of France was nothing to do with expansionism – that was all just a distraction while they gained control of the whizzo new European particle supercollider, which they were sure could produce, if properly managed, a small black hole. I don’t understand the science, so there would be no point in even beginning to describe why that would be a bad thing, and that there is no such thing, really, as a ‘small’ black hole, and that it would still be the end of everything we know. But, according to one reading of the prophecies, it might also open the Gate to Hell (a bad thing), so long as the Master and the Chosen One were present to manage it. I will not repeat all my arguments, which were vigorous, that I should absolutely not be there, for this very reason, or the counter-arguments, which ran along the lines of: the Chosen One, says another reading of the prophecy, won’t help the Master, but will destroy both him and the Gate to Hell, and thus save the world forever. I won’t go on about how I resisted, even now, when the others asked me to tell them about the Teacher, or how I felt when David Tennant looked at me approvingly when I did so. I won’t describe how we did have plans for blasting our way into the supercollider facility if it was necessary, but how we didn’t have to use those plans because we managed to land unseen in a forest. Or how we trekked for an hour to the perimeter and we disabled the guards, how some of us took their uniforms and how we broke into the main building, which looked like one of those cool new tube stations on the Jubilee Line extension, which seemed rather small for such an apocalyptic showdown, but then when we went inside I gasped because it was just the pimple on the surface, and the underground halls of the supercollider seemed to go on forever with lots of white-suited scientists in little golf-carts. I won’t go on about the strange sense I had all the time that we were being followed. I won’t describe how we wasted twenty minutes walking the wrong direction because Jeremy Clarkson held the map the wrong way, or how Jeremy’s wife laughed at him, or how a guard heard her and there was a fight during which the guard was killed, but so was Jeremy Clarkson, with his wife crying and Jeremy saying, ‘Oh no! Ow, no, don’t try and help me, I’m definitely dying. No, darling, don’t worry about me dying to save your life after you just, no!, don’t cry, I’m joking!, it’s a funny story really, think of it like that and look after the kids and tell them how brave I was, yes!, laugh, that’s better!, ow, it’s got cold, hasn’t it?, and why is everyone talking so quietly, and, oh, I love you and… Oh…’ Or how we eventually found our way to the holy of holies, although by this time, as per our plan, we had split up into two groups, and I was in a group with Johnny Depp and David Tennant was in the other group. I won’t describe any of these things because they are basically irrelevant compared to the fact that, as we peered around the corner into the last deep hole, with huge pipes gleaming in the background, David Beckham was standing there waiting for us, saying, ‘Hello, Mary Sue. We have been waiting for you and your little friends. You really didn’t have to do all that skulking. It was inevitable you’d arrive here, that’s the thing about prophecies. And now, it’s time for the denouement.’