Hogfather (8 page)

There it was again. The change in the weather of the mind, a sensation of tangible time…

The Death of Rats nodded.

There was a scrabbling sound far overhead. A few flakes of soot dropped down the chimney.

SQUEAK, said the rat, but very quietly.

Susan was aware of a new sensation, as a fish might be aware of a new tide, a spring of fresh water flowing into the sea. Time was pouring into the world.

She glanced up at the clock. It was just on half past six.

The raven scratched its beak.

“The rat says…The rat says: you’d better watch out…”

There were others at work on this shining Hogswatch Eve. The Sandman was out and about, dragging his sack from bed to bed. Jack Frost wandered from window pane to window pane, making icy patterns.

And one tiny hunched shape slid and slithered along the gutter, squelching its feet in slush and swearing under its breath.

It wore a stained black suit and, on its head, the type of hat known in various parts of the multiverse as “bowler,” “derby” or “the one that makes you look a bit of a twit.” The hat had been pressed down very firmly and, since the creature had long pointy ears, these had been forced out sideways and gave it the look of a small malignant wing nut.

The thing was a gnome by shape but a fairy by profession. Fairies aren’t necessarily little twinkly creatures. It’s purely a job description, and the commonest ones aren’t even visible.
*
A fairy is simply any creature currently employed under supernatural laws to take things away or, as in the case of the small creature presently climbing up the inside of a drain pipe and swearing, to bring things.

Oh, yes. He does. Someone has to do it, and he looks the right gnome for the job.

Oh, yes.

Sideney was worried. He didn’t like violence, and there had been a lot of it in the last few days, if days passed in this place. The men…well, they only seemed to find life interesting when they were doing something sharp to someone else and, while they didn’t bother him much in the same way that lions don’t trouble themselves with ants, they certainly worried him.

But not as much as Teatime did. Even the brute called Chickenwire treated Teatime with caution, if not respect, and the monster called Banjo just followed him around like a puppy.

The enormous man was watching him now.

He reminded Sideney too much of Ronnie Jenks, the bully who’d made his life miserable at Gammer Wimblestone’s dame school. Ronnie hadn’t been a pupil. He was the old woman’s grandson or nephew or something, which gave him a license to hang around the place and beat up any kid smaller or weaker or brighter than he was, which more or less meant he had the whole world to choose from. In those circumstances, it was particularly unfair that he always chose Sideney.

Sideney hadn’t hated Ronnie. He’d been too frightened. He’d wanted to be his friend. Oh, so much. Because that way, just possibly, he wouldn’t have his head trodden on such a lot and would actually get to eat his lunch instead of having it thrown in the privy. And it had been a good day when it had been his lunch.

And then, despite all Ronnie’s best efforts, Sideney had grown up and gone to university. Occasionally his mother told him how Ronnie was getting on (she assumed, in the way of mothers, that because they had been small boys at school together they had been friends). Apparently he ran a fruit stall and was married to a girl called Angie.
*
This was not enough punishment, Sideney considered.

Banjo even breathed like Ronnie, who had to concentrate on such an intellectual exercise and always had one blocked nostril. And his mouth open all the time. He looked as though he was living on invisible plankton.

He tried to keep his mind on what he was doing and ignore the labored gurgling behind him. A change in its tone made him look up.

“Fascinating,” said Teatime. “You make it look so easy.”

Sideney sat back, nervously.

“Um…it should be fine now, sir,” he said. “It just got a bit scuffed when we were piling up the…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it, he even had to avert his eyes from the heap, it was the sound they’d made. “…the things,” he finished.

“We don’t need to repeat the spell?” said Teatime.

“Oh, it’ll keep going forever,” said Sideney. “The simple ones do. It’s just a state change, powered by the…the…it just keeps going…”

He swallowed.

“So,” he said, “I was thinking…since you don’t actually need me, sir, perhaps…”

“Mr. Brown seems to be having some trouble with the locks on the top floor,” said Teatime. “That door we couldn’t open, remember? I’m sure you’ll want to help.”

Sideney’s face fell.

“Um, I’m not a locksmith…”

“They appear to be magical.”

Sideney opened his mouth to say, “But I’m very bad at magical locks,” and then thought much better of it. He had already fathomed that if Teatime wanted you to do something, and you weren’t very good at it, then your best plan, in fact quite possibly your only plan, was to learn to be good at it very quickly. Sideney was not a fool. He’d seen the way the others reacted around Teatime, and they were men who did things he’d only dreamed of.
*

At which point he was relieved to see Medium Dave walk down the stairs, and it said a lot for the effect of Teatime’s stare that anyone could be relieved to have it punctuated by someone like Medium Dave.

“We’ve found another guard, sir. Up on the sixth floor. He’s been hiding.”

Teatime stood up. “Oh dear,” he said. “Not trying to be heroic, was he?”

“He’s just scared. Shall we let him go?”

“Let him go?” said Teatime. “Far too messy. I’ll go up there. Come along, Mr. Wizard.”

Sideney followed him reluctantly up the stairs.

The tower—if that’s what it was, he thought; he was used to the odd architecture at Unseen University and this made UU look normal—was a hollow tube. No fewer than four spiral staircases climbed the inside, crisscrossing on landings and occasionally passing through one another in defiance of generally accepted physics. But that was practically normal for an alumnus of Unseen University, although technically Sideney had not alumed. What threw the eye was the absence of shadows. You didn’t notice shadows, how they delineated things, how they gave texture to the world, until they weren’t there. The white marble, if that’s what it was, seemed to glow from the inside. Even when the impossible sun shone through a window it barely caused faint gray smudges where honest shadows should be. The tower seemed to avoid darkness.

That was even more frightening than the times when, after a complicated landing, you found yourself walking up by stepping down the underside of a stair and the distant floor now hung overhead like a ceiling. He’d noticed that even the other men shut their eyes when that happened. Teatime, though, took those stairs three at a time, laughing like a kid with a new toy.

They reached an upper landing and followed a corridor. The others were gathered by a closed door.

“He’s barricaded himself in,” said Chickenwire.

Teatime tapped on it. “You in there,” he said. “Come on out. You have my word you won’t be harmed.”

“No!”

Teatime stood back. “Banjo, knock it down,” he said.

Banjo lumbered forward. The door withstood a couple of massive kicks and then burst open.

The guard was cowering behind an overturned cabinet. He cringed back as Teatime stepped over it. “What’re you doing here?” he shouted. “Who are you?”

“Ah, I’m glad you asked. I’m your worst nightmare!” said Teatime cheerfully.

The man shuddered.

“You mean…the one with the giant cabbage and the sort of whirring knife thing?”

“Sorry?” Teatime looked momentarily nonplussed.

“Then you’re the one about where I’m falling, only instead of ground underneath it’s all—”

“No, in fact I’m—”

The guard sagged. “Awww, not the one where there’s all this kind of, you know, mud and then everything goes blue—”

“No, I’m—”

“Oh, shit, then you’re the one where there’s this door only there’s no floor beyond it and then there’s these claws—”

“No,” said Teatime. “Not that one.” He withdrew a dagger from his sleeve. “I’m the one where this man comes out of nowhere and kills you stone dead.”

The guard grinned with relief. “Oh, that one,” he said. “But that one’s not very—”

He crumpled around Teatime’s suddenly out-thrust fist. And then, just like the others had done, he faded.

“Rather a charitable act there, I feel,” Teatime said as the man vanished. “But it is nearly Hogswatch, after all.”

Death, pillow slipping gently under his red robe, stood in the middle of the nursery carpet…

It was an old one. Things ended up in the nursery when they had seen a complete tour of duty in the rest of the house. Long ago, someone had made it by carefully knotting long bits of brightly colored rag into a sacking base, giving it the look of a deflated Rastafarian hedgehog. Things lived among the rags. There were old rusks, bits of toy, buckets of dust. It had seen life. It may even have evolved some.

Now the occasional lump of grubby melting snow dropped onto it.

Susan was crimson with anger.

“I mean, why?” she demanded, walking around the figure. “This is Hogswatch! It’s supposed to be jolly, with mistletoe and holly, and—and other things ending in olly! It’s a time when people want to feel good about things and eat until they explode! It’s a time when they want to see all their relatives—”

She stopped that sentence.

“I mean it’s a time when humans are really human,” she said. “And they don’t want a…a skeleton at the feast! Especially one, I might add, who’s wearing a false beard and has got a damn cushion shoved up his robe! I mean, why?”

Death looked nervous.

ALBERT SAID IT WOULD HELP ME GET INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE THING. ER…IT’S GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN—

There was a small squelchy noise.

Susan spun around, grateful right now for any distraction.

“Don’t think I can’t hear you! They’re grapes, understand? And the other things are satsumas! Get out of the fruit bowl!”

“Can’t blame a bird for trying,” said the raven sulkily, from the table.

“And you, you leave those nuts alone! They’re for tomorrow!”

SKQUEAF, said the Death of Rats, swallowing hurriedly.

Susan turned back to Death. The Hogfather’s artificial stomach was now at groin level.

“This is a nice house,” she said. “And this is a good job. And it’s real, with normal people. And I was looking forward to a real life, where normal things happen! And suddenly the old circus comes to town. Look at yourselves. Three Stooges, No Waiting! Well, I don’t know what’s going on, but you can all leave again, right? This is my life. It doesn’t belong to any of you. It’s not going to—”

There was a muffled curse, a rush of soot, and a skinny old man landed in the grate.

“Bum!” he said.

“Good grief!” raged Susan. “And here is Pixie Albert! Well, well, well! Come along in, do! If the real Hogfather doesn’t come soon there’s not going to be room.”

HE WON’T BE JOINING US, said Death. The pillow slid softly onto the rug.

“Oh, and why not? Both of the children did letters to him,” said Susan. “There’re rules, you know.”

YES. THERE ARE RULES. AND THEY’RE ON THE LIST. I CHECKED IT.

Albert pulled the pointy hat off his head and spat out some soot.

“Right. He did. Twice,” he said. “Anything to drink around here?”

“So what have you turned up for?” Susan demanded. “And if it’s for business reasons, I will add, then that outfit is in extremely poor taste—”

THE HOGFATHER IS…UNAVAILABLE.

“Unavailable? At Hogswatch?”

YES.

“Why?”

HE IS…LET ME SEE…THERE ISN’T AN ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE HUMAN WORD, SO…LET’S SETTLE FOR…DEAD. YES. HE IS DEAD.

Susan had never hung up a stocking. She’d never looked for eggs laid by the Soul Cake Duck. She’d never put a tooth under her pillow in the serious expectation that a dentally inclined fairy would turn up.

It wasn’t that her parents didn’t believe in such things. They didn’t need to believe in them. They knew they existed. They just wished they didn’t.

Oh, there had been presents, at the right time, with a careful label saying who they were from. And a superb egg on Soul Cake Morning, filled with sweets. Juvenile teeth earned no less than a dollar each from her father, without argument.
*
But it was all straightforward.

She knew now that they’d been trying to protect her. She hadn’t known then that her father had been Death’s apprentice for a while, and that her mother was Death’s adopted daughter. She’d had very dim recollections of being taken a few times to see someone who’d been quite, well, jolly, in a strange, thin way. And the visits had suddenly stopped. And she’d met him later and, yes, he had his good side, and for a while she’d wondered why her parents had been so unfeeling and—

She knew now why they’d tried to keep her away. There was far more to genetics than little squirmy spirals.

She could walk through walls when she really had to. She could use a tone of voice that was more like actions than words, that somehow reached inside people and operated all the right switches. And her hair…

That had only happened recently, though. It used to be unmanageable, but at around the age of seventeen she had found it more or less managed itself.

That had lost her several young men. Someone’s hair rearranging itself into a new style, the tresses curling around themselves like a nest of kittens, could definitely put the crimp on any relationship.

She’d been making good progress, though. She could go for days now without feeling anything other than entirely human.

But it was always the case, wasn’t it? You could go out into the world, succeed on your own terms, and sooner or later some embarrassing old relative was bound to turn up.

Grunting and swearing, the gnome clambered out of another drain pipe, jammed its hat firmly on its head, threw its sack onto a snowdrift and jumped down after it.