Hogfather Part 31

"I thought I'd see what beer tastes like," said the oh G.o.d guiltily.

"You don't know what beer tastes like?" don't know what beer tastes like?"

"Not on the way down 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 been drunk. I'm sure I explained." 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 G.o.d.

"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 enthrall 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 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 half-dollar piece.

Susan picked it up and tossed it idly. She looked the oh G.o.d 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 stories 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 pedaling for ages!" panted the oh G.o.d.

"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.

"Ah...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 G.o.d 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 upward.

"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 G.o.d, trying out irony.

"Onward!"

Swaying a little, the tower headed down the Bs until: "Stop!"

It rocked as the oh G.o.d kicked the brake block against a wheel.

"I think this is her," said a voice from above. "Okay, 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 G.o.d, as Susan thumbed through the pages. in here?" said the oh G.o.d, as Susan thumbed through the pages.

"Yes."

"Even G.o.ds?"

"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 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 top of the water." of the water."

"Ah. Pollution," said the oh G.o.d.

"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 moldy cheese, do you?"

"And there was blue sky but...she must have got this wrong...it says here there was only blue sky above above..."

"Yep. Best place for the sky," said the oh G.o.d. "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 G.o.d. "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 surrept.i.tiously, dodging behind things whenever she tried to concentrate on it.

"I've seen 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 gra.s.s. With big round petals." 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 gra.s.s. With big round petals."

She stared unseeing at the oh G.o.d again.

"This isn't a proper landscape," she said.

"It doesn't sound too unreal to me," said the oh G.o.d. "Sky. Trees. Flowers. Dead fish."

"Brown tree trunks? Really they're mostly a sort of grayish mossy color. 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." tree trunks? Really they're mostly a sort of grayish mossy color. 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 onto the black gardens. Black bushes, black gra.s.s, black trees. Skeletal fish cruising in the black waters of a pool, under black water lilies.

There was color, in a sense, but it was the kind of color you'd get if you could s.h.i.+ne 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 a.s.sociated with death. He'd got a scythe because agricultural people could spot a decent metaphor. And he lived in a somber 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 G.o.d followed her gaze.

"Can we go after her?" said the oh G.o.d. "I say we 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 G.o.d, running to keep up.

"You don't have have to come," said Susan. "It's not your problem." 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 was a shack, somewhere out on the outskirts of the Plains town of s.c.r.o.t.e. s.c.r.o.t.e 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 embarra.s.sed about big empty s.p.a.ces.

Hogswatch came after the excitement of the cabbage harvest when it was pretty quiet in s.c.r.o.t.e 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.