[Good Omens] Envy the Subtle Serpent

Chapter Seven

Six days had elapsed since Crowley had been taken captive. Not his longest experience in a hostage situation by a long shot, but not his shortest either.

That was his best estimate, anyway, given the circumstances. There were no windows in the room where he was being kept with which to orient himself, no sun-ups or sun-downs to count the passage of time with. But this wasn't Crowley's first stint in captivity, and if six millennia worth of experience had taught him anything it was that humans were predictable. Earth was predictable, and there were cues that one could use to count the days, if one only paid attention. For instance, the number of times a person's clothing changed or the growth of a captor's hair and beard. Even the change of seasons in the air, pollen in spring, decay in autumn, could indicate time's passage, though Crowley desperately hoped he would be free long before it came to that.

Unlike the majority of Crowley's experiences in captivity, everything about his circumstances had been designed for maximum suffering: the chill of the room, being stuck in his serpent form, the discomfort of the concrete floor, Blackburn had planned it all down to the last detail. It wasn't a dark, dank dungeon by any means, but Crowley might have found that preferable to the blinding fluorescents and sterility of the room he found himself in now. At least a dungeon would offer familiarity. This, on the other hand, the silver box was detestable in its novelty.

That, and it was unbearably dull. The room was small, the circle smaller still, leaving Crowley almost no room to stretch out. The best he could do was slither in circles, something he had done often enough when he'd first arrived to have irritated the scales on his underbelly on the gritty concrete floor.

Eventually he lost the energy to continue crawling and resigned himself to lying still, coiled in on himself in a circular pile with his snout tucked in the center. Crowley ached to sleep to pass the hours, but his traitorous body would not allow it. Every time he began to drift off his mind would jolt him back into alertness, convinced that if he were to rest his eyes for even a moment it would mean his untimely demise. As if that weren't enough, despite being unable to sleep the cold sapped his energy, and Crowley ended up in a sort of dormant state anyway, barely conscious and relatively immobilized. Thus, he was only dimly aware that a door had opened at some point and Blackburn had reentered.

At length he looked up. A new set of clothes. A fresh shave. It was probably morning, the dawn of what Crowley could only assume to be the seventh day. As Blackburn approached he called Crowley by an old name, an infernal name, the sound of it clunky on his human tongue.

"Crowley," he corrected, though rather dully. "My name is Crowley."

"Not according to this it's not," said Blackburn, and he waved an enormous leatherbound book in one hand. Crowley had failed to notice it upon the man's entrance, but now that he had it was the only thing he had eyes for. It looked positively ancient, the sort of thing copied and illuminated by hand long before Guttenberg and his printing press. As Blackburn hovered over him Crowley imagined it slipping from the man's grasp to crush his head and winced. One little accident like that and he was donezo - finished, kaput. The weakness of this corporation was one of its many drawbacks, all of which had been thrown into sharp relief over the past week.

"Do you know what this is?" the man asked. When Crowley didn't answer Blackburn continued, balancing the tome on his forearm and flipping it open to a bookmarked page. The ancient paper looked as though it might crumble to dust as he turned it, and Crowley imagined Aziraphale's horror at Blackburn's lack of gloves, each touch exposing the delicate pages to the damaging oils of his bare skin. "No? Come on, surely you've seen it before."

"Can't say I have."

"Really? I find that hard to believe, considering this whole book is about you. Well, not just about you, but you are in it an awful lot. Perhaps you're familiar with the authors? Alinardo of Grottaferrata, and his novice Bernadino of Ockham?"