Good Omens

by Terry Pratchett

A demon can get into real trouble, doing the right thing.’ He nudged the angel. ‘Funny if we both got it wrong, eh? Funny if I did the good thing and you did the bad one, eh?’

Aziraphale (An Angel, and part-time rare book dealer)

Crowley (An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)

God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other playersfn1, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

For every mad scientist who’s had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is finished and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who’ve sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime.

Many phenomena – wars, plagues, sudden audits – have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for Exhibit A.

He’d been an angel once. He hadn’t meant to Fall. He’d just hung around with the wrong people.

Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn’t see why anyone else should. But Crowley liked sleep, it was one of the pleasures of the world. Especially after a heavy meal. He’d slept right through most of the nineteenth century, for example. Not because he needed to, simply because he enjoyed it.fn6

Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he’d hoped it would be a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.

They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.

And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.

Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.

On the whole, neither he nor Crowley would have chosen each other’s company, but they were both men, or at least men-shaped creatures, of the world, and the Arrangement had worked to their advantage all this time. Besides, you grew accustomed to the only other face that had been around more or less consistently for six millennia.

Aziraphale felt the occasional pang of guilt about this, but centuries of association with humanity was having the same effect on him as it was on Crowley, except in the other direction.

As they drove past an astonished traffic warden his notebook spontaneously combusted, to Crowley’s amazement. ‘I’m pretty certain I didn’t mean to do that,’ he said. Aziraphale blushed. ‘That was me,’ he said. ‘I had always thought that your people invented them.’ ‘Did you? We thought they were yours.’

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them.

Just because you’re an angel doesn’t mean you have to be a fool.

In the background Crowley and Aziraphale met on the tops of buses, and in art galleries, and at concerts, compared notes, and smiled.

the world was an amazing interesting place which they both wanted to enjoy for as long as possible,

the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn’t have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.

‘Ah, this is more like it. Tchaikovsky,’ said Aziraphale, opening a case and slotting its cassette into the Blaupunkt. ‘You won’t enjoy it,’ sighed Crowley. ‘It’s been in the car for more than a fortnight.’ A heavy bass beat began to thump through the Bentley as they sped past Heathrow. Aziraphale’s brow furrowed. ‘I don’t recognize this,’ he said. ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s Tchaikovsky’s “Another One Bites the Dust”,’ said Crowley, closing his eyes as they went through Slough. To while away the time as they crossed the sleeping Chilterns, they also listened to William Byrd’s ‘We are the Champions’ and Beethoven’s ‘I Want To Break Free’. Neither were as good as Vaughan Williams’s ‘Fat Bottomed Girls’.

Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.

‘Can we get on?’ said Crowley. ‘Goodnight, miss. Get in, angel.’ Ah. Well, that explained it. She had been perfectly safe after all.

Anathema does not know that Aziraphale is an angel. She’s heard Crowley call Aziraphale angel and has assumed it has been said in a loving way, like a pet name between the two men. She knows she’s safe with them as she’s assumed them to be a gay couple.

the really important thing to be was yourself, just as hard as you could.

Aziraphale relaxed. ‘You know, Crowley,’ he said, beaming, ‘I’ve always said that, deep down inside, you’re really quite a—’ ‘All right, all right,’ Crowley snapped. ‘Tell the whole blessed world, why don’t you?’

Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshipped books.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.

Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent. And it was an angelic intelligence which, while not being particularly higher than human intelligence, is much broader and has the advantage of having thousands of years of practice.

He was an angel, after all. You had to do the right thing. It was built-in. You see a wile, you thwart.

he’d known him for thousands of years. They got along. They nearly understood one another. He sometimes suspected they had far more in common with one another than with their respective superiors. They both liked the world, for one thing, rather than viewing it simply as the board on which the cosmic game of chess was being played.

Crowley’s London flat was the epitome of style. It was everything that a flat should be: spacious, white, elegantly furnished, and with that designer unlived-in look that only comes from not being lived-in. This is because Crowley did not live there. It was simply the place he went back to, at the end of the day, when he was in London.

In fact the only things in the flat Crowley devoted any personal attention to were the houseplants. They were huge and green and glorious, with shiny, healthy, lustrous leaves. This was because, once a week, Crowley went around the flat with a green plastic plant mister, spraying the leaves, and talking to the plants. He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn’t look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. ‘Say goodbye to your friend,’ he’d say to them. ‘He just couldn’t cut it …’ Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified.

Now, as Crowley would be the first to protest, most demons weren’t deep down evil. In the great cosmic game they felt they occupied the same position as tax inspectors – doing an unpopular job, maybe, but essential to the overall operation of the whole thing. If it came to that, some angels weren’t paragons of virtue; Crowley had met one or two who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. On the whole, everyone had a job to do, and just did it.

And on the other hand you got people like Ligur and Hastur, who took such a dark delight in unpleasantness you might even have mistaken them for human.

Aziraphale, who had never done other to get rid of demons than to hint to them very strongly that he, Aziraphale, had some work to be getting on with, and wasn’t it getting late? And Crowley had always got the hint.

There was no light at the end of the tunnel – or if there was, it was an oncoming train.

Crowley was an optimist. If there was one rock-hard certainty that had sustained him through the bad times – he thought briefly of the fourteenth century – then it was utter surety that he would come out on top; that the universe would look after him.

Newt did not smoke, because he did not allow nicotine or (until today) alcohol entry to the temple of his body or, more accurately, the small Welsh Methodist tin tabernacle of his body.

‘This has gone on too long,’ said Aziraphale. ‘Sort it out, Crowley, there’s a dear chap.’ ‘Hmm?’ said Crowley. ‘I’m the nice one,’ said Aziraphale. ‘You can’t expect me to — oh, blast it. You try to do the decent thing, and where does it get you?’ He snapped his fingers. There was a pop like an old-fashioned flashbulb, and Sgt Thomas A. Deisenburger disappeared.

‘I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset ’cos they act like people,’ said Adam severely. ‘Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.

He smiled at Crowley. ‘I’d just like to say,’ he said, ‘if we don’t get out of this, that … I’ll have known, deep down inside, that there was a spark of goodness in you.’ ‘That’s right,’ said Crowley bitterly. ‘Make my day.’ Aziraphale held out his hand. ‘Nice knowing you,’ he said. Crowley took it. ‘Here’s to the next time,’ he said. ‘And … Aziraphale?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Just remember I’ll have known that, deep down inside, you were just enough of a bastard to be worth liking.’

Contrary to popular belief, the wings of demons are the same as the wings of angels, although they’re often better groomed.

Crowley nodded gloomily. ‘Let me tempt you to some lunch,’ he hissed. They went to the Ritz again, where a table was mysteriously vacant. And perhaps the recent exertions had had some fallout in the nature of reality because, while they were eating, for the first time ever, a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. No one heard it over the noise of the traffic, but it was there, right enough.