A Blink of the Screen: Collected Short Fiction

by Terry Pratchett

  [ 6 ] Aknon Smyth (The Dimmers)

  Stalwart of the Dimmers, Holy Aknon, as he is known, belongs to a small sect that has to say prayers every fifteen minutes. Fans are used to him dropping to his knees in the middle of the game which, coincidentally, trips up at least one opposing player. Following this, the game has to go on hold until he finishes his prayers, after which he will spring away in some hitherto unknown direction. The Ankh-Morpork Football Association is wrestling with this conundrum.

  David ‘Dave’ Likely (Education: none)

  Deceased. All-time holder of the highest lifetime score (four goals) in the street version of the game. Dave Likely is the archetypical footballer, from his huge baggy shorts to his hobnail boots. Unfortunately he refused to wear any head protection at all, which is why he is the late Dave Likely.

  [ 2 ] Andy Shank (The Dimmers)

  Andy Shank is a leading ‘face’ amongst the Dimwell supporters as well as in the Ankh-Morpork Shove. His father is the feared captain of the Dimwell team and Andy may well inherit the title due to his unbridled savagery and skill in all forms of close combat. He inspires fear in his associates almost as much as in his enemies. Known to the City Watch as a particularly bad lot he is certainly one to keep an eye out for, all the time if possible.

  [ 8 ] Joseph Hoggett (Captain – Pigsty Hill Pork Packers)

  A skilled player of the old game of street football (aka Poor Boys’ Fun, the Game, the Shove). Elected captain of United at the meeting of the captains of all the city’s major football teams. Very strong – it is reputed that he can lift a pig carcass in each hand.

  [ 6 ] Swithin Dustworthy (Captain – The Cockbill Boars)

  [ 9 ] Harry Capstick (The Cockbill Boars)

  Other players: Tosher Atkinson, Jimmy the Spoon, Spanner, Mrs Atkinson, Willy Piltdown, Micky Pulford, The Brisket Boys (F and Q)

  Referee

  Archchancellor of Brazeneck (formerly known as The Dean)

  The visit by the Archchancellor of the new red-brick university in Pseudopolis to his former colleagues at Unseen Unversity opportunely coincided with the inaugural foot-the-ball match. He was appointed referee and so got to use the haunted whistle of Gryffid Tabernacle Jones, the long deceased sports master of UU. No sportsman, he was known as ‘two chairs’ in his old Alma Mater due to his immense girth and love of gargantuan meals.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  All illustrations are by Josh Kirby unless otherwise stated.

  1. hand-painted Christmas card, c. 1971. Written on the back: ‘No. 1 in a limited edition of 2. T. Pratchett.’ Courtesy Colin Smythe.

  2. Turntables of the Night. Jacket illustration for The Flying Sorcerers, ed. Peter Haining, Souvenir Press, London, 1997.

  3. #ifdefDEBUG + ‘world/enough’ + ‘time’. Jacket illustration for Retter der Ewigkeit, eds. Erik Simon and Friedal Wahren, Heyne, Munich, 2001.

  4. Hollywood Chickens. Jacket illustration for Knights of Madness, ed. Peter Haining, Souvenir Press, London, 1998.

  5. detail of Theatre of Cruelty. Cover illustration for W. H. Smith’s July/August 1993 issue of Bookcase magazine.

  6. Discworld.

  7. the first and second versions of the illustration for ‘The Sea and Little Fishes’. The first scene Josh Kirby illustrated was removed from the story when published in Legends, ed. Robert Silverberg, Tor Fantasy/Tom Doherty Associates, New York, 1998. See Appendix for the exiled text.

  8. The Witches from the CD inlay of Dave Greenslade’s music From the Discworld, Virgin Records, 1994.

  9. The Unseen University from the CD inlay of Dave Greenslade’s music From the Discworld, Virgin Records, 1994.

  10. Paul Kidby’s illustrations for a set of cigarette cards issued by the Discworld Emporium for the launch of Unseen Academicals, 2009.

  11. detail of Rincewind, the Luggage and Death. Poster, ISIS Publishing, Oxford, 1996.

  12. Mort. Jacket illustration for the book of the same name, Victor Gollancz, London, 1987.

  13. Ankh-Morpork. Commissioned for but not used in the CD inlay of Dave Greenslade’s music From the Discworld. Published in Josh Kirby: A Cosmic Cornucopia, text by David Langford, Paper Tiger, London, 1999.

  14. jacket illustration for The First Discworld Novels, Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross, 1999.

  15. Terry Pratchett with Some Discworld Characters. Painted for the Weekend Guardian, 23 October 1993.

  Appendix

  DELETED EXTRACT FROM ‘THE SEA AND LITTLE FISHES’

  Granny Weatherwax rose well before dawn next morning, when the frost rimed the trees and she had to take a hammer to the water barrel before she could wash.

  The air held the sharp taste of snow to come and the acid smell of foxes.

  She went back indoors and prepared one cheese sandwich and made a bottle of cold tea. Then she set out.

  It didn’t take much more than an hour, going at a sharp pace over the snapping leaves, to get beyond the buzz of human thoughts. Half an hour later she skirted the smouldering stacks of a charcoal burner, and picked up a hint of his dreams and the sharp, deceitful little mind of the cat he kept for company, hunting among the woodpiles.

  Then there was no track any more, only a trail among many. Minds out here were sharper and simpler, and generally thinking of only one thing at a time. Almost always it was food – how to get more, and not be some. Sometimes it was sex, and Granny Weatherwax took care to keep her mind firmly closed at those times. Even squirrels deserved their privacy, the dirty little devils.

  For a while she followed the banks of a river, her boots clattering from rock to rock, forever going upward.

  Her mind worked better here. When she was down there among people there was the constant whispering of their minds. She couldn’t hear what they were thinking, except by dint of enormous concentration. Even the owners of the minds concerned seldom knew what, in the welter of concerns, emotions, worries and hope, they were actually thinking at any time. Humans had the mushiest minds in the world. It was a relief to be free of all that mental tinnitus.

  But there was still a faint buzz, as distracting as the whining of a mosquito in a bedroom. Hunters did venture this far, she knew. And the dwarfs were down below somewhere, although they knew better than to come –

  – she turned and stepped between two boulders, into a gap you wouldn’t have known was there –

  – into this little valley, long and deep, with early snow lurking in every patch of shade. A few trees had been optimistic enough to attempt to grow here.

  Granny didn’t stop. Her boots splashed through the stream that had carved out this slot in the rocks until she reached the cave. Large though the mouth was, a casual observer might have thought it just another shadow in the wreck of fallen rocks. Then she was in it, facing that sucking silence of all caves everywhere.

  And there, in the shadows, was the Witch.

  Granny bowed to her – witches never curtsy – and edged past, and on into the caves.

  She hadn’t been up here for … what? Ten years?

  The caves wound everywhere under the mountains, and because of the high magical potential in the Ramtops they did not necessarily confine their ramblings to the normal four dimensions. If you entered some of them, it was rumoured, you would never be seen again. At least, not here. And not now.

  But Granny headed directly for one quite near this entrance. It had a particular quality that she felt she needed. Perhaps it was something to do with its shape, or the little crystalline specks that glinted in its walls, but this cave was impervious to thought.

  Thought couldn’t get in, or out.

  She sat down on the sandy floor, alone with her own thoughts.

  After a while, they turned up.

  There’d been that man down in Sparkle, the one that’d killed those little kids. The people’d sent for her and she’d looked at him and seen the guilt writhing in his head like a red worm, and then she’d taken them to his farm and showed them where to dig, and he’d th
rown himself down and asked her for mercy, because he said he’d been drunk and it’d all been done in alcohol.

  Her words came back to her. She’d said, in sobriety: end it in hemp.

  And they’d dragged him off and hanged him and she’d gone to watch because she owed him that much, and he’d cursed, which was unfair because hanging is a clean death, or at least cleaner than the one he’d have got if the villagers had dared defy her, and she’d seen the shadow of Death come for him, and then behind Death came the smaller, brighter figures, and then –

  In the darkness, she rocked.

  The villagers had said justice had been done, and she’d lost patience and told them to go home, then, and pray to whatever gods they believed in that it was never done to them. Because the smug face of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as wickedness revealed.

  The odd thing was, quite a lot of villagers had turned up to his funeral, and there had been mutterings on the lines of, yes, well, but overall he wasn’t such a bad chap … and anyway, maybe she made him say it. And she’d got the dark looks.

  Supposing there was justice for all, after all? For every unheeded beggar, every harsh word, every neglected duty, every slight …

  Who’d come to her funeral when she died?

  Other memories jostled. Other figures marched out into the darkness of the cave.

  She’d done things and been places, and found ways to turn anger outwards that had surprised even her. She’d faced down others far more powerful than she was, if only she’d allowed them to believe it. She’d given up so much, but she’d earned a lot. And she’d never, never declare that she doubted her choices. And yet … if, all those years ago, she’d made the other choices … she wouldn’t have known. She’d have led a quiet life. She was certain of this, because sometimes she could sense those other selves, off in the alternatives of time. After all, if you could read minds at a distance, you should certainly be able to pick up your own. A nice quiet life, and then death.

  But she’d never set out to be nice. When you went up against some of the opponents she’d met, nice people would finish last, or not even finish.

  In truth, deep down, she was aware of a dark desire. Sometimes, the world really had it coming, and endeavouring to see that it didn’t get it was a white-knuckle task, every day of her life. Letice would never know that she had been an inch away from … from something very, very unpleasant happening to her. But it was an inch that Esme Weatherwax had spent a lifetime constructing, and she’d thought it was tougher than steel. Knowing how bad you could be is a great encouragement to be good.

  So she’d been good. She was good at justice. She was good at medicine, particularly that type of medicine which started in the head. She was good at winning. She was good, though she said it herself, at most of the things she set her mind at.

  But not nice. She had to admit it. And it seemed that people preferred nice to good.

  And there was a terrible temptation. Better witches than her had succumbed. The more you faced the light the brighter it grew, and one day for the brief respite that it brought you’d look over your shoulder. And you’d see how lovely and rich and dark and beguiling your shadow had become …

  Nanny Ogg was sitting out in her back garden in the no-nonsense way of old ladies everywhere, legs wide apart for the healthy circulation of the air. She was keeping an eye on one of her sons and two of her grandsons, who were digging her vegetable garden, and occasionally she would give them shouts of encouragement or point out bits that hadn’t been done properly.

  In her broad lap was a heap of golden leaves from her tobacco harvest, which she was shredding and dipping into her special herbal and honey mixture. After it had matured in her press over the winter, people would come a long way for Ogg’s Nutty Shag, Not To be Smoked for At Least Three Hundred Years before Operating Heavy Machinery.

  And occasionally she’d take a swig from the pint pot beside her.

  This time, as she reached down for it, she saw the bubbles clear and the surface turn as calm as old tea.

  ‘Flat already?’ she said aloud.

  She glanced across the village. Rooks were swarming up out of the elm trees in battle order, cawing loudly.

  Nanny Ogg ambled into her cottage and went to the scullery, where the milk jugs cooled in the sink. One sniff was enough. What they contained was practically cheese. And it’d been fresh milk an hour ago.

  A faint rustling made her look down. Dozens of beetles were running under the door and scuttling into the cracks between the flagstones.

  A witch lived by the little signs. Butter wouldn’t come, wine became vinegar, spiders ran for cover … people thought it meant there was a storm coming, and in a way they were right.

  And a witch used what was to hand, too. All that fiddlin’ with coloured candles and crystal balls and whatnot, that was fine for them as needed it, but at a pinch you used what you could reach.

  In this case she reached down and lifted the heavy wooden lid of the well and looked down into the dark waters.

  There was nothing there. But there was never anything in a crystal, either. There was simply emptiness, which said: fill me up.

  Nanny’s inner eye saw snow, and rock, and the outline of a hooked nose made of stone …

  ‘Oh, the daft ole fool,’ she muttered.

  A moment later her son and grandsons saw her burst from the house, carrying her broomstick. She leapt aboard and applied the magic so hard that it bobbed along almost vertically before she was able to force the handle down and point it towards the mountains.

  Ten minutes later snow billowed up as she touched down in the little valley. It was hard to find, even from the air. She patted the guardian Witch as she hurried past. She’d never found her frightening, even when she was young.

  Some young wizard who’d spent his holidays up here, knocking at rocks with a little hammer, had said the Witch at the mouth of the cave was just the result of dissolved rock dripping and dripping and piling up in a stalagmite for thousands of years. As if that explained anything. It just said how she was made, not why she was here. And the man hadn’t gone very far into the cave, she recalled. He’d remembered other things he had to do. The place took men that way.

  Her boots splashed into the rock pools as she left the light behind.

  She’d tried being alone with her thoughts once, but had never tried it again. It had been too dull.

  Oh yes, the things she was ashamed of were here, but she’d never tried to hide them from herself and they were simply memories and held no terror. And here were all the things she’d done that she should have done, and mostly they’d been enjoyable. And there were all the things she’d done that she shouldn’t have done, and they’d been fun too. More fun, in many cases. And she’d never regretted them, either, except maybe sometimes when, a little wistfully, she’d regretted she hadn’t done them sooner and that occasions for doing them now did not, as it were, arise all that often …

  ‘Oh, Esme? What’ve you done?’

  She reached down and pulled at the slumped figure.

  ‘Come on,’ she said cheerfully, slinging the dead weight across her shoulders. ‘You don’t have to hang around here, thinking. No one ever got anywhere by thinking all the time.’

  When they were outside she managed to heave Granny on to the stick and strapped her safely with her own striped stockings.

  People say things like ‘lost in thought’ and think they mean that state of mind that just precedes ‘Pardon? I was thinking’. But that’s just ‘not paying attention’. Lost in thought means that someone may need to come and find you.

  She took her home, flying slowly a few feet above the trees in the sunset air, and put her to bed.

  About the Author

  Terry Pratchett is the accliamed creator of the global bestselling Discworld® series, the first title of which, The Colour of Magic, was published in 1983. In all, he is the author of over fifty bestselling books. His novels have been w
idely adapted for stage and screen, and he is the winner of multiple prizes, including the Carnegie Medal, as well as being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Worldwide sales of his books now stand at 70 million, and they have been translated into thirty-seven languages.

  www.terrypratchett.co.uk

  Also by Terry Pratchett

  The Discworld® series

  1. THE COLOUR OF MAGIC

  2. THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

  3. EQUAL RITES

  4. MORT

  5. SOURCERY

  6. WYRD SISTERS

  7. PYRAMIDS

  8. GUARDS! GUARDS!

  9. ERIC

  (illustrated by Josh Kirby)

  10. MOVING PICTURES

  11. REAPER MAN

  12. WITCHES ABROAD

  13. SMALL GODS

  14. LORDS AND LADIES

  15. MEN AT ARMS

  16. SOUL MUSIC

  17. INTERESTING TIMES

  18. MASKERADE

  19. FEET OF CLAY

  20. HOGFATHER

  21. JINGO

  22. THE LAST CONTINENT

  23. CARPE JUGULUM

  24. THE FIFTH ELEPHANT

  25. THE TRUTH

  26. THIEF OF TIME

  27. THE LAST HERO

  (illustrated by Paul Kidby)

  28. THE AMAZING MAURICE AND HIS EDUCATED RODENTS

  (for young adults)

  29. NIGHT WATCH

  30. THE WEE FREE MEN

  (for young adults)

  31. MONSTROUS REGIMENT

  32. A HAT FULL OF SKY

  (for young adults)

  33. GOING POSTAL

  34. THUD

  35. WINTERSMITH

  (for young adults)

  36. MAKING MONEY

  37. UNSEEN ACADEMICALS

  38. I SHALL WEAR MIDNIGHT

  (for young adults)

  39. SNUFF

  Other books about Discworld