Moving Pictures (20 page)

“Tell me,” he said, “who
was
the famous Gaspode you’re named after?”

“You never heard of him?”

“No.”

“He was dead famous.”

“He was a dog?”

“Yeah. It was years and years ago. There was this ole bloke in Ankh who snuffed it, and he belonged to one of them religions where they bury you after you’re dead, an’ they did, and he had this ole dog—”

“—called Gaspode—?”

“Yeah, and this ole dog had been his only companion and after they buried the man he lay down on his grave and howled and howled for a couple of weeks. Growled at everybody who came near. An’ then died.”

Victor paused in the act of throwing the stick again.

“That’s very sad,” he said. He threw. Laddie tore along underneath it, and disappeared into a stand of scrubby trees on the hillside.

“Yeah. Everyone says it demonstrates a dog’s innocent and undyin’ love for ’is master,” said Gaspode, spitting the words out as if they were ashes.

“You don’t believe that, then?”

“Not really. I b’lieve any bloody dog will stay still an’ howl when you’ve just lowered the gravestone on his tail,” said Gaspode.

There was a ferocious barking.

“Don’t worry about it. He’s probably found a threatening rock or something,” said Gaspode.

He’d found Ginger.

The Librarian knuckled purposefully through the maze of Unseen University’s library and descended the steps toward the maximum-security shelves.

Nearly all the books in the Library were, being magical, considerably more dangerous than ordinary books; most of them were chained to the bookcases to stop them flapping around.

But the lower levels…

…there they kept the
rogue
books, the books whose behavior or mere contents demanded a whole shelf, a whole
room
to themselves. Cannibal books, books which, it left on a shelf with their weaker brethren, would be found looking considerably fatter and more smug in the smoking ashes next morning. Books whose mere contents pages could reduce the unprotected mind to gray cheese. Books that were not just books of magic, but magical books.

There’s a lot of loose thinking about magic. People go around talking about mystic harmonies and cosmic balances and unicorns, all of which is to real magic what a glove puppet is to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns
all the way down to the pommel
. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.

At least, that’s what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingeingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff.

But down here, in the dark tunnels, there was no hiding behind amulets and starry robes and pointy hats. Down here, you either had it or you didn’t. And if you hadn’t got it, you’d had it.

There were sounds from behind the heavily barred doors as the Librarian shuffled along. Once or twice something heavy threw itself against a door, making the hinges rattle.

There were noises.

The orangutan stopped in front of an arched doorway that was blocked with a door made not of wood but of stone, balanced so that it could easily be opened from outside but could withstand massive pressure from within.

He paused for a moment, and then reached into a little alcove and removed a mask of iron and smoked glass, which he put on, and a pair of heavy leather gloves reinforced with steel mesh. There was also a torch made of oil-soaked rags; he lit this from one of the flickering braziers in the tunnel.

At the back of the alcove was a brass key.

He took the key, and then he took a deep breath.

All the Books of Power had their own particular natures.
The Octavo
was harsh and imperious.
The Bumper Fun Grimoire
went in for deadly practical jokes.
The Joy of Tantric Sex
had to be kept under iced water. The Librarian knew them all, and how to deal with them.

This one was different. Usually people saw only tenth-or twelfth-hand copies, as like the real thing as a painting or an explosion was to, well, to an explosion. This was a book that had absorbed the sheer, graphite-gray evil of its subject matter.

Its name was hacked in letters over the arch, lest men and apes forget.

NECROTELICOMNICON.

He put the key in the lock, and offered up a prayer to the gods.

“Oook,” he said fervently. “Oook.”

The door swung open.

In the darkness within, a chain gave a faint clink.

“She’s still breathing,” said Victor. Laddie leapt around them, barking furiously.

“Maybe you should loosen her clothing or something,” said Gaspode. “It’s just a thought,” he added. “You don’t have to glare at me like that. I’m a dog, what do I know?”

“She seems all right, but…look at her hands,” said Victor. “What the hell has she been trying to do?”

“Tryin’ to open that door,” said Gaspode.

“What door?”

“That door
there
.”

Part of the hill had slipped away. Huge blocks of masonry protruded from the sand. There were the stubs of ancient pillars, sticking up like fluoridated teeth.

Between two of them was an arched doorway, three times as high as Victor. It was sealed with a pair of pale gray doors, either of stone or of wood that had become as hard as stone over the years. One of them was slightly open, but had been prevented from opening further by the drifts of sand in front of it. Frantically scrabbled furrows had been dug deep into the sand. Ginger had been trying to shift it with her bare hands.

“Stupid thing to do in this heat,” said Victor, vaguely. He looked from the door to the sea, and then down at Gaspode.

Laddie scrambled up the sand and barked excitedly at the crack between the doors.

“What’s he doing that for?” said Victor, suddenly feeling spooked. “All his hair is standing up. You don’t think he’s got one of those mysterious animal premonitions of evil, do you?”

“I think he’s a pillock,” said Gaspode.
“Laddie shut up!”

There was a yelp. Laddie recoiled from the door, lost his balance on the shifting sand, and rolled down the slope. He leapt to his feet and started barking again; not ordinary stupid-dog barking this time, but the genuine treed-cat variety.

Victor leaned forward and touched the door.

It felt very cold, despite the perpetual heat of Holy Wood, and there was just the faint suspicion of vibration.

He ran his fingers over the surface. There was a roughness there, as though there had been a carving that had been worn into obscurity over the years.

“A door like that,” said Gaspode, behind him, “a door like that, if you want my opinion, a door like that, a door like that,” he took a deep breath,
“bodes.”

“Hmm? What? Bodes what?”

“It don’t have to bode anything,” said Gaspode. “Just basic bodingness is bad enough, take it from me.”

“It must have been important. Looks a bit temple-ish,” said Victor. “Why’d she want to open it?”

“Bits of cliff sliding down an’ mysterious doors appearin’,” said Gaspode, shaking his head. “That’s a lot of boding. Let’s go somewhere far away and really think about it, eh?”

Ginger gave a groan. Victor crouched down.

“What’d she say?”

“Dunno,” said Gaspode.

“It sounded like ‘I want to be a lawn,’ I thought?”

“Daft. Touch of the sun there, I reckon,” said Gaspode knowledgeably.

“Maybe you’re right. Her head certainly feels very hot.” He picked her up, staggering a little under the weight.

“Come on,” he managed. “Let’s get down into the town. It’ll be getting dark soon.” He looked around at the stunted trees. The door lay in a sort of hollow, which presumably caught enough dew to make the growth there slightly less desiccated than elsewhere.

“You know, this place looks familiar,” he said. “We did our first click here. It’s where I first met her.”

“Very romantic,” said Gaspode distantly, hurrying away with Laddie bounding happily around him. “If something ’orrible comes out of that door, you can fink of it as Our Monster.”

“Hey! Wait!”

“Hurry up, then.”

“What would she want to be a lawn for, do you think?”

“Beats me…”

After they had gone silence poured back into the hollow.

A little later, the sun set. Its long light hit the door, turning the merest scratches into deep relief. With the help of imagination, they might just have formed the image of a man.

With a sword.

There was the faintest of noises as, grain by grain, sand trickled away from the door. By midnight it had opened by at least a sixteenth of an inch.

Holy Wood dreamed
.

It dreamed of waking up.

Ruby damped down the fires under the vats, put the benches on the tables, and prepared to shut the Blue Lias. But just before blowing out the last lamp she hesitated in front of the mirror.

He’d be waiting out there again tonight. Just like every night. He’d been in during the evening, grinning to himself. He was planning something.

Ruby had been taking advice from some of the girls who worked in the clicks, and in addition to her feather boa she’d now invested in a broad-rimmed hat with some sort of oograah, cherries she thought they were called, in it. She’d been assured that the effect was stunning.

The trouble, she had to admit, was that he was, well, a very hunky troll. For millions of years troll women had been naturally attracted to trolls built like a monolith with an apple on top. Ruby’s treacherous instincts were firing messages up her spine, insidiously insisting that in those long fangs and bandy legs was everything a troll girl could wish for in a mate.

Trolls like Rock or Morry, of course, were far more modern and could do things like use a knife and fork, but there was something, well,
reassuring
about Detritus. Perhaps it was the way his knuckles touched the ground so dynamically. And apart from anything else, she was sure she was brighter than he was. There was a sort of gormless unstoppability about him that she found rather fascinating. That was the instincts at work again—intelligence has never been a particularly valuable survival trait in a troll.

And she had to admit that, whatever she might attempt in the way of feather boas and fancy hats, she was pushing 140 and was 400 lbs above the fashionable weight.

If only he’d buck his ideas up.

Or at least, buck one idea up.

Maybe this make-up the girls had been talking about could be worth a try.

She sighed, blew out the lamp, opened the door and stepped out into a maze of roots.

A gigantic tree stretched the whole length of the alley. He must have dragged it for miles. The few surviving branches poked through windows or waved forlornly in the air.

In the middle of it all was Detritus, perched proudly on the trunk, his face split in a watermelon grin, his arms spread wide.

“Tra-laa!” he said.

Ruby heaved a gigantic sigh. Romance wasn’t easy, when you were a troll.

The Librarian forced the page open and chained it down. The book tried to snap at him.

Its contents had made it what it was. Evil and treacherous.

It contained forbidden knowledge.

Well, not actually
forbidden
. No one had ever gone so far as forbidding it. Apart from anything else, in order to forbid it you’d have to know what it was, which was forbidden. But it definitely contained the sort of information which, once you knew it, you wished you hadn’t.
¹⁹

Legend said that any mortal man who read more than a few lines of the original copy would die insane.

This was certainly true.

Legend also said that the book contained illustrations that would make a strong man’s brain dribble out of his ears.

This was probably true, too.

Legend went on to say that merely opening the
Necrotelicomnicon
would cause a man’s flesh to crawl off his hand and up his arm.

No one actually knew if this was true, but it sounded horrible enough to be true and no one was about to try any experiments.

Legend had a lot to say about the
Necrotelicomnicon
, in fact, but absolutely nothing to say about orangutans, who could tear the book into little bits and chew it for all legend cared. The worst that had ever happened to the Librarian after looking at it was a mild migraine and a touch of eczema, but that was no reason to take chances. He adjusted the smoked glass of the visor and ran one black-leather finger down the Index; the words bridled as the digit slid past, and tried to bite it.

Occasionally he’d hold the strip of film up to the light of the flickering torch.

The wind and sand had blurred them, but there was no doubt that there were carvings on the rock. And the Librarian had seen designs like that before.

He found the reference he was looking for and, after a brief struggle during which he had to threaten the
Necrotelicomnicon
with the torch, forced the book to turn to the page.

He peered closer.

Good old Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches…

“…and in that hill, it is said, a Door out of the World was found, and people of the city watched What was Seen therein, knowing not that Dread waited between the universes…”

The Librarian’s fingertip dragged from right to left across the pictures, and skipped to the next paragraph.

“…for
Others
found the Gate of Holy Wood and fell upon the World, and in one nighte All Manner of Madnesse befell, and Chaos prevailed, and the City sank beneath the Sea, and all became one withe the fishes and the lobsters save for the few who fled…”

He curled a lip, and looked further down the page.

“…a Golden Warrior, who drove the Fiends back and saved the World, and said, Where the Gate is, There Am I Also; I Am He that was Born of Holy Wood, to guard the Wild Idea. And they said, What must we do to Destroy the Gate Forever, and he said unto them, This you Cannot Do, for it is Not a Thing, but I will Guard the Gate for you. And they, not having been Born yesterday, and fearing the Cure more than the Malady, said to him, What will you Take from Us, that you will Guard the Door. And he grew until he was the height of a tree and said, Only your Remembrance, that I do Not Sleep. Three times a day will you remember Holy Wood. Else The Cities of the World Will Tremble and Fall, and you will See the Greatest of them All in Flames. And with that the Golden Man took up his golden sword and went into the Hill and stood at the Gate, forever.

“And the People said to one another, Funny, he lookes just like my Uncle Osbert…”

The Librarian turned the page.

“…But there were among them, humans and animals alike, those touched by the magic of Holy Wood. It goeth through the generations like an ancient curse, until the priests cease in their Remembrance and the Golden Man sleepeth. Then let the world Beware…”

The Librarian let the book snap shut.

It wasn’t an uncommon legend. He’d read it before—at least, had read most of it—in books considerably less dangerous than this. You came across variants in all the cities of the Sto Plain. There had been a city once, in the mists of pre-history—bigger than Ankh-Morpork, if that were possible. And the inhabitants had done
something
, some sort of unspeakable crime not just against Mankind or the gods but against the very nature of the universe itself, which had been so dreadful that it had sunk beneath the sea one stormy night. Only a few people had survived to carry to the barbarian peoples in the less-advanced parts of the Disc all the arts and crafts of civilization, such as usury and macrame.

No one had ever really taken it seriously. It was just one of those usual “If you don’t stop it you’ll go blind” myths that civilizations tended to hand on to their descendants. After all, Ankh-Morpork itself was generally considered as wicked a city as you could hope to find in a year of shore leaves, and seemed to have avoided any kind of supernatural vengeance, although it was always possible that it had taken place and no one had noticed.

Legend had always put the nameless city far away and long ago.

No one knew where it was, or even if it had existed.

The Librarian glanced at the symbols again.

They were very familiar. They were on the old ruins all over Holy Wood.

Azhural stood on a low hill, watching the sea of elephants move below him. Here and there a supply wagon bobbed between the dusty gray bodies like a rudderless boat. A mile of veldt was being churned into a soggy mud wallow, bare of grass—although, by the smell of it, it’d be the greenest patch on the Disc after the rains came.

He dabbed at his eyes with a corner of his robe.

Three hundred and sixty-three! Who’d have thought it?

The air was solid with the piqued trumpeting of three hundred and sixty-three elephants. And with the hunting and trapping parties already going on ahead, there should be plenty more. According to M’Bu, anyway. And he wasn’t going to argue.

Funny, that. For years he’d thought of M’Bu as a sort of mobile smile. A handy lad with a brush and shovel, but not what you might call a major achiever.

And then suddenly someone somewhere wanted a thousand elephants, and the lad had raised his head and a gleam had come into his eye and you could
see
that under that grin was a skilled kilopachydermatolist ready to answer the call. Funny. You could know someone for their whole life and not realize that the gods had put them in this world to move a thousand elephants around the place.

Azhural had no sons. He’d already made up his mind to leave everything to his assistant. Everything he had at this point amounted to three hundred and sixty-three elephants and, ahaha, a mammoth overdraft, but it was the thought that counted.

M’Bu trotted up the path toward him, his clipboard held firmly under one arm.

“Everything ready, boss,” he said. “You just got to say the word.”

Azhural drew himself up. He looked around at the heaving plain, the distant baobab trees, the purple mountains. Oh, yes. The mountains. He’d had misgivings about the mountains. He’d mentioned them to M’Bu, who said, “We’ll cross them bridges when we get to ’em, boss,” and when Azhural had pointed out that there
weren’t
any bridges, had looked him squarely in the eye and said firmly, “First we build them bridge, then we cross ’em.”

Far beyond the mountains was the Circle Sea and Ankh-Morpork and this Holy Wood place. Far-away places with strange sounding names.

A wind blew across the veldt, carrying faint whispers, even here.

Azhural raised his staff.

“It’s fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork,” he said. “We’ve got three hundred and sixty-three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the monsoon’s about to break and we’re wearing…we’re wearing…sort of things, like glass, only dark…dark glass things on our eyes…” His voice trailed off. His brow furrowed, as if he’d just been listening to his own voice and hadn’t understood it.

The air seemed to glitter.

He saw M’Bu staring at him.

He shrugged. “Let’s go,” he said.

M’Bu cupped his hands. He’d spent all night working out the order of the march.

“Blue Section bilong Uncle N’gru—
forward
!” he shouted. “Yellow Section bilong Aunti Googool—
forward!
Green Section bilong Second-cousin! Kck!—
forward
…”

An hour later the veldt in front of the low hill was deserted except for a billion flies and one dung beetle who couldn’t believe his luck.

Something went “plop” on the red dust, throwing up a little crater.

And again, and again.

Lightning split the trunk of a nearby baobab.

The rains began.

Victor’s back was beginning to ache. Carrying young women to safety looked a good idea on paper, but had major drawbacks after the first hundred yards.

“Have you any idea where she lives?” he said. “And is it somewhere close?”

“No idea,” said Gaspode.

“She once said something about it being over a clothes shop,” said Victor.

“That’ll be in the alley alongside Borgle’s then,” said Gaspode.

Gaspode and Laddie led the way through the alleys and up a rickety outside staircase. Maybe they smelled out Ginger’s room. Victor wasn’t going to argue with mysterious animal senses.

Victor went up the back stairs as quietly as possible. He was dimly aware that where people stayed was often infested by the Common or Greatly Suspicious Landlady, and he felt that he had enough problems as it was.

He used Ginger’s feet to push open the door.

It was a small room, low-ceilinged and furnished with the sad, washed-out furniture found in rented rooms across the multiverse. At least, that’s how it had started out.

What it was furnished with now was Ginger.

She had saved every poster. Even those from early clicks, when she was just in very small print as A Girl. They were thumb-tacked to the walls. Ginger’s face—and his own—stared at him from every angle.

There was a large mirror at one end of the poky room, and a couple of half-burned candles in front of him.

Victor deposited the girl carefully on the narrow bed and then stared around him, very carefully. His sixth, seventh and eighth senses were screaming at him. He was in a place of magic.

“It’s like a sort of temple,” he said. “A temple to…herself.”

“It gives me the willies,” said Gaspode.

Victor stared. Maybe he’d always successfully avoided being awarded the pointy hat and big staff, but he had acquired wizard instincts. He had a sudden vision of a city under the sea, with octopuses curling stealthily through the drowned doorways and lobsters watching the streets.

“Fate don’t like it when people take up more space than they ought to. Everyone knows that.”

I’m going to be the most famous person in the whole world
, thought Victor.
That’s what she said
. He shook his head.

“No,” he said aloud. “She just likes posters. It’s just ordinary vanity.”

It didn’t sound believable, even to him. The room fairly hummed with…

…what? He hadn’t felt anything like it before. Power of some sort, certainly. Something that was brushing tantalizingly against his senses. Not exactly magic. At least, not the kind he was used to. But something that seemed similar while not being the same, like sugar compared with salt; the same shape and the same color, but…

Ambition wasn’t magical. Powerful, yes, but not magical…surely?

Magic wasn’t difficult. That was the big secret that the whole baroque edifice of wizardry had been set up to conceal. Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.

The trick was to do magic and
get away with it
.

Because it was as if the human race was a field of corn and magic helped the users grow just that bit taller, so that they stood out. That attracted the attention of the gods and—Victor hesitated—other Things outside this world. People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.

All over the entire room, sometimes.

He pictured Ginger, back on the beach.
I want to be the most famous person in the whole world
. Perhaps that was something new, come to think of it. Not ambition for gold, or power, or land or all the things that were familiar parts of the human world. Just ambition to be yourself, as big as possible. Not ambition
for
, but to
be
.

He shook his head. He was just in some room in some cheap building in some town that was about as real as, as, as, well, as the thickness of a click. It wasn’t the place to have thoughts like this.

The important thing was to remember that Holy Wood wasn’t a real place at all.

He stared at the posters again. You just get one chance, she said. You live for maybe seventy years, and if you’re lucky you get one chance. Think of all the natural skiers who are born in deserts. Think of all the genius blacksmiths who were born hundreds of years before anyone invented the horse. All the skills that are never used. All the wasted chances.

How lucky for me, he thought gloomily, that I happen to be alive at this time.

Ginger turned over in her sleep. At least her breathing was more regular now.

“Come
on
,” said Gaspode. “It’s not right, you being alone in a lady’s boodwah.”

“I’m not alone,” Victor said. “She’s with me.”

“That’s the point,” said Gaspode.

“Woof,” Laddie added, loyally.

“You know,” said Victor, following the dogs down the stairs, “I’m beginning to feel there’s something
wrong
here. There’s something going on and I don’t know what it is. Why was she trying to get into the hill?”

“Prob’ly in league with dread Powers,” said Gaspode.

“The city and the hill and the old book and everything,” said Victor, ignoring this. “It all makes sense if only I knew what was connecting it.”

He stepped out into the early evening, into the lights and noise of Holy Wood.

“Tomorrow we’ll go up there in the daylight and sort this out once and for all,” he said.

“No, we won’t,” said Gaspode. “The reason being, tomorrow we’re goin’ to Ankh-Morpork, remember?”

“We?” said Victor. “Ginger and I are going. I didn’t know about you.”

“Laddie goin’, too,” said Gaspode. “I—”

“Good boy Laddie!”

“Yeah, yeah. I heard the trainers say. So I’ve got to go with him to see he don’t get into any trouble, style of fing.”

Victor yawned. “Well, I’m going to go to bed. We’ll probably have to start early.”

Gaspode looked innocently up and down the alley. Somewhere a door opened and there was the sound of drunken laughter.

“I fought I might have a bit of a stroll before turnin’ in,” he said. “Show Laddie—”

“Laddie good boy!”

“—the sights and that.”

Victor looked doubtful.

“Don’t keep him out too late,” he said. “People will worry.”

“Yeah, right,” said Gaspode. “G’night.”

He sat and watched Victor wander off.

“Huh,” he said, under his dreadful breath. “Catch anyone worryin’ about
me
.” He glared up at Laddie, who sprang to obedient attention.

“Right, young fella-me-pup,” he said. “’S time you got educated. Lesson One, Glomming Free Drinks in Bars. It’s lucky for you,” he added, “that you met me.”

Two canine shapes staggered uncertainly up the midnight street.

“We’re poor li’l lambs,” Gaspode howled, “wot have loorst our way…”

“Woof! Woof! Woof!”

“We’re li’l loorst sheeps wot have—wot have…” Gaspode sagged down, and scratched an ear, or at least where he vaguely thought an ear might be. His leg waved uncertainly in the air. Laddie gave him a sympathetic look.