‘—I didn't mean to go upsetting anyone, its just that I never asked no one for nothing—’ mumbled the old man, in a small humble world of his own, his hands tangling themselves together out of nervousness.
‘Best if you leave this one to me, master, if you don't mind,’ said Albert. ‘I'll be back in just a tick.’ Loose ends, he thought, that's my job. Tying up loose ends. The master never thinks things through.
He caught up with the king outside.
‘Ah, there you are, your sire,’ he said. ‘Just before you go, won't keep you a minute, just a minor point—’ Albert leaned close to the stunned monarch. ‘If anyone was thinking about making a mistake, you know, like maybe sending the guards down here tomorrow, tipping the old man out of his hovel, chuckin' him in prison, anything like that… werrlll… that's the kind of mistake he ought to treasure on account of it being the last mistake he'll ever make. A word to the wise men, right?’ He tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. ‘Happy Hogswatch.’
Then he hurried back into the hovel.
The feast had vanished. The old man was looking blearily at the bare table.
HALF-EATEN LEAVINGS, said Death. WE COULD CERTAINLY DO BETTER THAN THIS. He reached into the sack.
Albert grabbed his arm before he could withdraw his hand.
‘Mind taking a bit of advice, master? I was brung up in a place like this.’
DOES IT BRING TEARS TO YOUR EYES?
‘A box of matches to me hand, more like. Listen.’
The old man was only dimly aware of some whispering. He sat hunched up, staring at nothing.
WELL, IF YOU ARE SURE …
‘Been there, done that, chewed the bones,’ said Albert. ‘Charity ain't giving people what you wants to give, it's giving people what they need to get.’
VERY WELL.
Death reached into the sack again.
HAPPY HOGSWATCH. HO. HO. HO.
There was a string of sausages. There was a side of bacon. And a small tub of salt pork. And a mass of chitterlings wrapped up in greased paper. There was a black pudding. There were several other tubs of disgusting yet savoury pork-adjacent items highly prized in any pig-based economy. And, laid on the table with a soft thump, there was —
‘A pig's head,’ breathed the old man. ‘A whole one! Ain't had brawn in years! And a basin of pig knuckles! And a bowl of pork dripping!’
HO. HO. HO.
‘Amazing,’ said Albert. ‘How did you get the head's expression to look like the king?’
I THINK THAT'S ACCIDENTAL.
Albert patted the old man on the back.
‘Have yourself a ball,’ he said. ‘In fact, have two. Now I think we ought to be going, master.’
They left the old man staring at the laden board.
WASN'T THAT NICE? said Death, as the hogs accelerated.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Albert, shaking his head. ‘Poor old devil. Beans at Hogswatch? Unlucky, that. Not a night for a man to find a bean in his bowl.’
I FEEL I WAS CUT OUT FOR THIS SORT OF THING, YOU KNOW.
‘Really, master?’
IT'S NICE TO DO A JOB WHERE PEOPLE LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING YOU.
‘Ah,’ said Albert glumly.
THEY DON'T NORMALLY LOOK FORWARD TO SEEING ME.
‘Yes, I expect so.’
EXCEPT IN SPECIAL AND RATHER UNFORTUNATE CIRCUMSTANCES.
‘Right, right.’
AND THEY SELDOM LEAVE A GLASS OF SHERRY OUT.
‘I expect they don't, no.’
I COULD GET INTO THE HABIT OF DOING THIS, IN FACT.
‘But you won't need to, will you, master?’ said Albert hurriedly, with the horrible prospect of being a permanent Pixie Albert looming in his mind again. ‘Because we'll get the Hogfather back, right? That's what you said we were going to do, right? And young Susan's probably bustling around…’
YES. OF COURSE.
‘Not that you asked her to, of course.’
Albert's jittery ears didn't detect any enthusiasm.
Oh dear, he thought.
I HAVE ALWAYS CHOSEN THE PATH OF DUTY.
‘Right, master.’
The sleigh sped on.
I AM THOROUGHLY IN CONTROL AND FIRM OF PURPOSE.
‘No problem there, then, master.’ said Albert.
NO NEED TO WORRY AT ALL.
‘Pleased to hear it, master.’
IF I HAD A FIRST NAME, ‘DUTY’ WOULD BE MY MIDDLE NAME.
‘Good.’
NEVERTHELESS …
Albert strained his ears and thought he heard, just on the edge of hearing, a voice whisper sadly.
HO. HO. HO.
There was a party going on. It seemed to occupy the entire building.
‘Certainly very energetic young men,’ said the oh god carefully, stepping over a wet towel. ‘Are women allowed in here?’
‘No,’ said Susan. She stepped through a wall into the superintendent's office.
A group of young men went past, manhandling a barrel of beer.
‘You'll feel bad about it in the morning,’ said Bilious. ‘Strong drink is a mocker, you know.’
They set it up on a table and knocked out the bung.
‘Someone's going to have to be sick after all that,’ he said, raising his voice above the hubbub. ‘I hope you realize that. You think it's clever, do you, reducing yourself to the level of the beasts of the field… er… or the level they'd sink to if they drank, I mean.’
They moved away, leaving one mug of beer by the barrel.
The oh god glanced at it, and picked it up and sniffed at it.
‘Ugh.’
Susan stepped out of the wall.
‘He hasn't been back for— What're you doing?’
‘I thought I'd see what beer tastes like,’ said the oh god guiltily.
‘You don't know what beer tastes like?’
‘Not on the way down, no. It's… quite different by the time it gets to me,’ he said sourly. He took another sip, and then a longer one. ‘I can't see what all the fuss is about,’ he added.
He tipped up the empty pot.
‘I suppose it comes out of this tap here,’ he said. ‘You know, for once in my existence I'd like to get drunk.’
‘Aren't you always?’ said Susan, who wasn't really paying attention.
‘No. I've always been drunk. I'm sure I explained.’
‘He's been gone a couple of days,’ said Susan. ‘That's odd. And he didn't say where he was going. The last night he was here was the night he was on Violet's list. But he paid for his room for the week, and I've got the number.’
‘And the key?’ said the oh god.
‘What a strange idea.’
Mr Lilywhite's room was small. That wasn't surprising. What was surprising was how neat it was, how carefully the little bed had been made, how well the floor had been swept. It was hard to imagine anyone living in it, but there were a few signs. On the simple table by the bed was a small, rather crude portrait of a bulldog in a wig, although on closer inspection it might have been a woman. This tentative hypothesis was borne out by the inscription ‘To a Good Boy, from his Mother’ on the back.
A book lay next to it. Susan wondered what kind of reading someone with Mr Banjo's background would buy.
It turned out to be a book of six pages, one of those that were supposed to enthral children with the magic of the printed word by pointing out that they could See Spot Run.
There were no more than ten words on each page and yet, carefully placed between pages four and five, was a bookmark.
She turned back to the cover. The book was called Happy Tales. There was a blue sky and trees and a couple of impossibly pink children playing with a jolly-looking dog.
It looked as though it had been read frequently, if slowly.
And that was it.
A dead end.
No. Perhaps not …
On the floor by the bed, as if it had been accidentally dropped, was a small, silvery halfdollar piece.
Susan picked it up and tossed it idly. She looked the oh god up and down. He was swilling a mouthful of beer from cheek to cheek and looking thoughtfully at the ceiling.
She wondered about his likelihood of survival incarnate in Ankh-Morpork at Hogswatch, especially if the cure wore off. After all, the only purpose of his existence was to have a headache and throw up. There were not a great many postgraduate jobs for which these were the main qualifications.
‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Have you ever ridden a horse?’
‘I don't know. What's a horse?’
In the depths of the library of Death, a squeaking noise.
It was not loud, but it appeared louder than mere decibels would suggest in the furtive, scribbling hush of the books.
Everyone, it is said, has a book inside them. In this library, everyone was inside a book.
The squeaking got louder. It had a rhythmical, circular quality.
Book on book, shelf on shelf… and in every one, at the page of the ever-moving now, a scribble of handwriting following the narrative of every life …
The squeaking came round the corner.
It was issuing from what looked like a very rickety edifice, several storeys high. It looked rather like a siege tower, open at the sides. At the base, between the wheels, was a pair of geared treadles which moved the whole thing.
Susan clung to the railing of the topmost platform.
‘Can't you hurry up?’ she said. ‘We're only at the Bi's at the moment.’
‘I've been pedalling for ages!’ panted the oh god.
‘Well, “A” is a very popular letter.’
Susan stared up at the shelves. A was for Anon, among other things. All those people who, for one reason or another, never officially got a name.
They tended to be short books.
‘M… Bo… Bod… Bog… turn left…’
The library tower squeaked ponderously around the next corner.
‘Ah, Bo… blast, the Bots are at least twenty shelves up.’
‘Oh, how nice,’ said the oh god grimly.
He heaved on the lever that moved the drive chain from one sprocket to another, and started to pedal again.
Very ponderously, the creaking tower began to telescope upwards.
‘Right, we're there,’ Susan shouted down, after a few minutes of slow rise. ‘Here's… let's see… Aabana Bottler…’
‘I expect Violet will be a lot further,’ said the oh god, trying out irony.
‘Onwards!’
Swaying a little, the tower headed down the Bs until.
‘Stop!’
It rocked as the oh god kicked the brake block against a wheel.
‘I think this is her,’ said a voice from above. ‘OK, you can lower away.’
A big wheel with ponderous lead weights on it spun slowly as the tower concertina'd back, creaking and grinding. Susan climbed down the last few feet.
‘Everyone's in here?’ said the oh god, as she thumbed through the pages.
‘Yes.’
‘Even gods?’
‘Anything that's alive and self-aware,’ said Susan, not looking up. ‘This is… odd. It looks as though she's in some sort of… prison. Who'd want to lock up a tooth fairy?’
‘Someone with very sensitive teeth?’
Susan flicked back a few pages. ‘It's all… hoods over her head and people carrying her and so on. But…’ she turned a page ‘…it says the last job she did was on Banjo and… yes, she got the tooth… and then she felt as though someone was behind her and… there's a ride on a cart… and the hood's come off… and there's a causeway… and…’
‘All that's in a book?’
‘The autobiography. Everyone has one. It writes down your life as you go along.’
‘I've got one?’
‘I expect so.’
‘Oh, dear. “Got up, was sick, wanted to die.” Not a gripping read, really.’
Susan turned the page.
‘A tower,’ she said. ‘She's in a tower. From what she saw, it was tall and white inside… but not outside? It didn't look real. There were apple trees around it, but the trees, the trees didn't look right. And a river, but that wasn't right either. There were goldfish in it… but they were on top of the water.’
‘Ah. Pollution,’ said the oh god.
‘I don't think so. It says here she saw them swimming!’
‘Swimming on top of the water?’
‘That's how she thinks she saw it.’
‘Really? You don't think she'd been eating any of that mouldy cheese, do you?’
‘And there was blue sky but… she must have got this wrong… it says here there was only blue sky above…’
‘Yep. Best place for the sky,’ said the oh god. ‘Sky underneath you, that probably means trouble.’
Susan flicked a page back and forth. ‘She means… sky overhead but not around the edges, I think no sky on the horizon.’
‘Excuse me,’ said the oh god. ‘I'm not long in this world, I appreciate that, but I think you have to have sky on the horizon. That's how you can tell it's the horizon.’
A sense of familiarity was creeping up on Susan, but surreptitiously, dodging behind things whenever she tried to concentrate on it.
‘I've seen this place,’ she said, tapping the page. ‘If only she'd looked harder at the trees… She says they've got brown trunks and green leaves and it says here she thought they were odd. And… She concentrated on the next paragraph. ‘Flowers. Growing in the grass. With big round petals.’
She stared unseeing at the oh god again.
‘This isn't a proper landscape,’ she said.
‘It doesn't sound too unreal to me,’ said the oh god. ‘Sky. Trees. Flowers. Dead fish.’
‘Brown tree trunks? Really they're mostly a sort of greyish mossy colour. You only ever see brown tree trunks in one place,’ said Susan. ‘And it's the same place where the sky is only ever overhead. The blue never comes down to the ground.’
She looked up. At the far end of the corridor was one of the very tall, very thin windows. It looked out on to the black gardens. Black bushes, black grass, black trees. Skeletal fish cruising in the black waters of a pool, under black water lilies.
There was colour, in a sense, but it was the kind of colour you'd get if you could shine a beam of black through a prism. There were hints of tints, here and there a black you might persuade yourself was a very deep purple or a midnight blue. But it was basically black, under a black sky, because this was the world belonging to Death and that was all there was to it.
The shape of Death was the shape people had created for him, over the centuries. Why bony? Because bones were associated with death. He'd got a scythe because agricultural people could spot a decent metaphor. And he lived in a sombre land because the human imagination would be rather stretched to let him live somewhere nice with flowers.
People like Death lived in the human imagination, and got their shape there, too. He wasn't the only one …
…but he didn't like the script, did he? He'd started to take an interest in people. Was that a thought, or just a memory of something that hadn't happened yet?
The oh god followed her gaze.
‘Can we go after her?’ said the oh god. ‘I say we, I think I've just got drafted in because I was in the wrong place.’
‘She's alive. That means she is mortal,’ said Susan. ‘That means I can find her, too.’ She turned and started to walk out of the library.
‘If she says the sky is just blue overhead, what's between it and the horizon?’ said the oh god, running to keep up.
‘You don't have to come,’ said Susan. ‘It's not your problem.’
‘Yes, but given that my problem is that my whole purpose in life is to feel rotten, anything's an improvement.’
‘It could be dangerous. I don't think she's there of her own free will. Would you be any good in a fight?’
‘Yes. I could be sick on people.’
It wa
s a shack, somewhere out on the outskirts of the Plains town of Scrote. Scrote had a lot of outskirts, spread so widely — a busted cart here, a dead dog there that often people went through it without even knowing it was there, and really it only appeared on the maps because cartographers get embarrassed about big empty spaces.
Hogswatch came after the excitement of the cabbage harvest when it was pretty quiet in Scrote and there was nothing much to look forward to until the fun of the sprout festival.
This shack had an iron stove, with a pipe that went up through the thick cabbage-leaf thatch.
Voices echoed faintly within the pipe.
THIS IS REALLY, REALLY STUPID.
‘I think the tradition got started when everyone had them big chimneys, master.’ This voice sounded as though it was coming from someone standing on the roof and shouting down the pipe.
INDEED? IT'S ONLY A MERCY IT'S UNLIT.
There was some muffled scratching and banging, and then a thump from within the pot belly of the stove.
DAMN.
‘What's up, master?’
THE DOOR HAS NO HANDLE ON THE INSIDE. I CALL THAT INCONSIDERATE.
There were some more bumps, and then a scrape as the stove lid was lifted up and pushed sideways. An arm came out and felt around the front of the stove until it found the handle.
It played with it for a while, but it was obvious that the hand did not belong to a person used to opening things.
In short, Death came out of the stove. Exactly how would be difficult to describe without folding the page. Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.
‘Let us in, master,’ a pitiful voice echoed down from the roof. ‘It's brass monkeys out here.’
Death went over to the door. Snow was blowing underneath it. He peered nervously at the woodwork. There was a thump outside and Albert's voice sounded a lot closer.
‘What's up, master?’
Death stuck his head through the wood of the door.
THERE'S THESE METAL THINGS
‘Bolts, master. You slide them,’ said Albert, sticking his hands under his armpits to keep them warm.
AH.
Death's head disappeared. Albert stamped his feet and watched his breath cloud in the air while he listened to the pathetic scrabbling on the other side of the door.
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