“They’ll want to watch this one,” said Throat. “Trust me. Have I ever lied to you?”

Bezam scratched his head. “Well, one night last month you sold me a sausage in a bun and you said—”

“I was speaking rhetorically,” snapped Throat.

“Yeah,” said Detritus.

Bezam sagged. “Oh. Well. I dunno about rhetorically,” he said.

“Right,” said Throat, grinning like a predatory pumpkin.

“Just you open up, and you can sit back and rake in the money.”

“Oh. Good,” said Bezam weakly.

Throat put a friendly arm around the man’s shoulders.

“And now,” he said, “let’s talk about percentages.”

“What’re percentages?”

“Have a cigar,” said Throat.

 

Victor walked slowly up Holy Wood’s nameless main street. There was packed sand under his fingernails.

He wasn’t sure that he had done the right thing.

Probably the man had just been some old beachcomber who’d just gone to sleep one day and hadn’t woken up, although the stained red and gold coat was unusual beach-combing wear. It was hard to tell how long he’d been dead. The dryness and salt air had been a preservative; they’d preserved him just the way he must have looked when he was alive, which was like someone who was dead.

By the look of his hut, he’d beachcombed some odd stuff.

It had occurred to Victor that someone ought to be told, but there was probably no one in Holy Wood who would be interested. Probably only one person in the world had been interested in whether the old man lived or died, and he’d been the first to know.

Victor buried the body in the sand, landward of the driftwood hut.

He saw Borgle’s ahead of him. He’d risk breakfast there, he decided. Besides, he needed somewhere to sit down and read the book.

It wasn’t the sort of thing you expected to find on a beach, in a driftwood hut, clutched in the hand of a dead man.

On the cover were the words The Boke of the Film.

On the first page, in the neat around hand of someone to whom writing doesn’t come easily, were the further words: This is the Chroncal of the Keeprs of the ParaMountain coppied out by me Deccan Beacuase Of the old onne it being fallin Apart.

He turned the stiff pages carefully. They seemed to be crammed with almost identical entries. They were all undated, but that wasn’t very important, since one day had been pretty much like the other.

Gott up. Went to lavatry. Made up fire, announused the Matinee Performanse. Broke fast. Colected woode. Made up fire. Foraged on the hille. Chanted the Evening Performansee. Supper. Sed the Late-Nite Performanse chant. Wnet to lavatry. Bed.

Gott up. Went to lavatry. Made up fire, sed the Matinee Performanse. Broke fast. Crullet the fisherman from Jowser Cove have left 2 fyne see bass. Clected woode. Heralded the Evewning Performanse, made up fire. Howskeepeing. Supper. Chanted the Late Night performanse. Bed. Gott up at Midnigte, went to lavaotry, checked fire, but it was not Needful of Woode.

 

He saw the waitress out of the tail of his eye.

“I’d like a boiled egg,” he said.

“It’s stew. Fish stew.”

He looked up into Ginger’s blazing eyes.

“I didn’t know you were a waitress,” he said.

She made a show of dusting the salt bowl. “Nor did I until yesterday,” she said. “Lucky for me Borgle’s regular morning girl got a chance in the new moving picture that Untied Alchemists are making, isn’t it?” She shrugged. “If I’m really lucky, who knows? I might get to do the afternoon shift too.”

“Look, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s stew. Take it or leave it. Three customers this morning have done both.”

“I’ll take it. Look, you won’t believe it, but I found this book in the hands of—”

“I’m not allowed to dally with customers. This isn’t the best job in town, but you’re not losing it for me,” snapped Ginger. “Fish stew, right?”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.”

He flicked backward through the pages. Before Deccan there was Tento, who also chanted three times a day and also sometimes received gifts of fish and also went to the lavatory, although either he wasn’t so assiduous about it as Deccan or hadn’t thought it always worth writing down. Before that, someone called Meggelin had been the chanter. A whole string of people had lived on the beach, and then if you went back further there was a group of them, and further still the entries had a more official feel. It was hard to tell. They seemed to be written in code, line after line of little complex pictures…

A bowl of primal soup was plonked down in front of him.

“Look,” he said. “What time do you get off—”

“Never,” said Ginger.

“I just wondered if you might know where—”

“No.”

Victor stared at the murky surface of the broth. Borgle worked on the principle that if you find it in water, it’s a fish. There was something purple in there and it had at least ten legs.

He ate it anyway. It was costing him thirty pence.

Then, with Ginger resolutely busying herself at the counter with her back to him lighthouse-fashion, so that however he tried to attract her attention her back was still facing him without her apparently moving, he went to look for another job.

Victor had never worked for anything in his life. In his experience, jobs were things that happened to other people.

 

Bezam Planter adjusted the tray around his wife’s neck.

“All right,” he said. “Got everything?”

“The banged grains have gone soft,” she said. “And there’s no way to keep the sausages hot.”

“It’ll be dark, love. No one’ll notice.” He tweaked the strap and stood back.

“There,” he said. “Now, you know what to do. Halfway through I’ll stop showing the film and put up the card that says ‘Why not Try a Cool Refreshinge Drinke and Some Banged Grains?’ and then you come out of the door over there and walk up the aisle.”

“You might as well mention cool refreshing sausages as well,” said Mrs. Planter.

“And I reckon you should stop using a torch to show people to their seats,” said Bezam. “You’re starting too many fires.”

“It’s the only way I can see in the dark,” she said.

“Yes, but I had to let that dwarf have his money back last night. You know how sensitive they are about their beards. Tell you what, love, I’ll give you a salamander in a cage. They’ve been on the roof since dawn, they should be nice and ready.”

They were. The creatures lay dozing in the bottom of their cages, their bodies vibrating gently as they absorbed the light. Bezam selected six of the ripest, climbed heavily back down to the projection room, and tipped them into the showing-box. He wound Throat Dibbler’s film onto a spool, and then peered out into the darkness.

Oh, well. Might as well see if there was anyone outside.

He shuffled to the front door, yawning.

He reached up, and slid the bolt.

He reached down, and slid the other bolt.

He pulled open the doors.

“All right, all right,” he grumbled. “Let’s be having you…”

He woke up in the projection room, with Mrs. Planter fanning him desperately with her apron.

“What happened?” he whispered, trying to put out of his mind the memories of trampling feet.

“It’s a full house!” she said. “And they’re still queueing up outside! They’re all down the street! It’s them disgusting posters!”

Bezam got up unsteadily but with determination.

“Woman, shut up and get down to the kitchen and bang some more grains!” he shouted. “And then come and help me repaint the signs! If they’re queueing for the fivepenny seats, they’ll queue for tenpence!”

He rolled up his sleeves and grasped the handle.

In the front row the Librarian sat with a bag of peanuts in his lap. After a few minutes he stopped chewing and sat with his mouth open, staring and staring and staring at the flickering images.

 

“Hold your horse, sir? Ma’am?”

“No!”

By mid-day Victor had earned tuppence. It wasn’t that people didn’t have horses that needed holding, it was just that they didn’t seem to want him to hold them.

Eventually a gnarled little man from further along the street sidled up to him, dragging four horses. Victor had been watching him for hours, in frank astonishment that anyone should give the wizened homunculus a kindly smile, let alone a horse. But he’d been doing a brisk trade, while Victor’s broad shoulders, handsome profile and honest, open smile were definitely a drawback in the horse-holding business.

“You’re new to this, right?” said the little man.

“Yes,” said Victor.

“Ah. I could tell. Waitin’ for yer big break in the clicks, right?” He grinned encouragingly.

“No. I’ve had my big break, in fact,” said Victor.

“Why you here then?”

Victor shrugged. “I broke it.”

“Ah, is that so? Yessir, thank’ee sir, godsblessyousir, rightchewaresir,” said the man, accepting another set of reins.

“I suppose you don’t need an assistant?” said Victor wistfully.

 

Bezam Planter stared at the pile of coins in front of him. Throat Dibbler moved his hands and it was a smaller pile of coins, but it was still a bigger pile of coins than Bezam had ever seen while in a waking state.

“And we’re still showing it every quarter of an hour!” breathed Bezam. “I’ve had to hire a boy to turn the handle! I don’t know, what should I do with all this money?”

Throat patted him on the shoulder.

“Buy bigger premises,” he said.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Bezam. “Yeah. Something with fancy pillars out in front. And my daughter Calliope plays the organ really nice, it’d make a good accompaniment. And there should be lots of gold paint and curly bits—”

His eyes glazed.

It had found another mind.

Holy Wood dreams.

—and make it a palace, like the fabulous Rhoxie in Klatch, or the richest temple there ever was, with slave girls to sell the banged grains and peanuts, and Bezam Planter walking about proprietorially in a red velvet jacket with gold string on it—

“Hmm?” he whispered, as the sweat beaded on his forehead.

“I said, I’m off,” said Throat. “Got to keep moving in the moving-picture business, you know.”

“Mrs. Planter says you’ve got to make more pictures with that young man,” said Bezam. “The whole city’s talking about him. She said several ladies swooned when he gave them that smouldery look. She watched it five times,” he added, his voice rimed with sudden suspicion. “And that girl! Wow!”

“Don’t you worry about a thing,” said Throat loftily. “I’ve got them under contr—”

Sudden doubt drifted across his face.

“See you,” he said shortly, and scurried out of the building.

Bezam stood alone and looked around at the cobwebbed interior of the Odium, his overheated imagination peopling its dark corners with potted palms, gold leaf and fat cherubs. Peanut shells and banged grain bags crunched under his feet. Have to get it cleaned up for the next house, he thought. I expect that monkey’ll be first in the queue again.

Then his eye fell on the poster for Sword of Passione. Amazing, really. There hadn’t been much in the way of elephants and volcanoes, and the monsters had been trolls with bits stuck on them, but in that close up…well…all the men had sighed, and then all the women had sighed…It was like magic. He grinned at the images of Victor and Ginger.

Wonder what those two’re doing now? he thought. Prob’ly eating caviar off of gold plates and lounging around up to their knees in velvet cushions, you bet.

 

“You look up to your knees in it, lad,” said the horse-holder.

“I’m afraid I’m not getting the hang of this horse-holding,” said Victor.

“Ah, ’tis a hard trade, horse-holding,” said the man. “It’s learning the proper grovelin’ and the irreverent-but-not-too-impudent cheery ’oss-’older’s banter. People don’t just want you to look after the ’oss, see. They want a ’oss-’olding hexperience.”

“They do?”

“They want an amusin’ encounter and a soup-son of repartee,” said the little man. “It’s not just a matter of ’oldin’ reins.”

Realization began to dawn on Victor.

“It’s a performance,” he said.

The ’oss-’older tapped the side of his strawberry-shaped nose.

“That’s right!” he said.

 

Torches flared in Holy Wood. Victor struggled through the crowds in the main street. Every bar, every tavern, every shop had its doors thrown open. A sea of people ebbed and flowed between them. Victor tried jumping up and down to search the mob of faces.

He was lonely and lost and hungry. He needed someone to talk to, and she wasn’t there.

“Victor!”

He spun around. Rock bore down on him like an avalanche.

“Victor! My friend!” A fist the size and hardness of a foundation stone pounded him playfully on the shoulder.

“Oh, hi,” said Victor weakly. “Er. How’s it going, Rock?”

“Great! Great! Tomorrow we shoot Bad Menace of Troll Valley!”

“I’m very happy for you,” said Victor.

“You my lucky human!” Rock boomed. “Rock! What a name! Come and have a drink!”

Victor accepted. He really didn’t have much of a choice, because Rock gripped his arm and, plowing through the crowds like an icebreaker, half-led, half-dragged him toward the nearest door.

A blue light illuminated a sign. Most Morporkians could read Troll, it was hardly a difficult language. The sharp runes spelled out The Blue Lias.

It was a troll bar.

The smoky glow from the furnaces beyond the slab counter was the only light. It illuminated three trolls playing—well, something percussive, but Victor couldn’t quite make out what because the decibel level was in realms where the sound was a solid force, and it made his eyeballs vibrate. The furnace smoke hid the ceiling.

“What you havin’?” roared Rock.

“I don’t have to drink molten metal, do I?” Victor quavered. He had to quaver at the top of his voice in order to be heard.

“We got all typer human drink!” shouted the female troll behind the bar. It had to be a female. There was no doubt about it. She looked slightly like the statues cavemen used to carve of fertility goddesses thousands of years ago, but mostly like a foothill. “We very cosmopolitan.”

“I’ll have a beer, then!”

“Ana flowers-of-sulfur onna rocks, Ruby!” added Rock.

Victor took the opportunity to look around the bar, now that he was getting accustomed to the gloom and his eardrums had mercifully gone numb.

He was aware of masses of trolls seated at long tables, with here and there a dwarf, which was astonishing. Dwarfs and trolls normally fought like, well, dwarfs and trolls. In their native mountains there was a state of unremitting vendetta. Holy Wood certainly changed things.

“Can I have a quiet word?” Victor shouted in Rock’s pointed ear.

“Sure!” Rock put down his drink. It contained a purple paper umbrella, which was charring in the heat.

“Have you seen Ginger? You know? Ginger?”

“She working at Borgle’s!”

“Only in the mornings! I’ve just been there! Where does she go when she’s not working?”

“Who know where anyone go?”

There was a sudden silence from the combo in the smoke. One of the trolls picked up a small rock and started to pound it gently, producing a slow, sticky rhythm that clung to the walls like smoke. And from the smoke, Ruby emerged like a galleon out of the fog, with a ridiculous feather boa around her neck.

It was continental drift with curves.

She began to sing.

The trolls stood in respectful silence. After a while Victor heard a sob. Tears were rolling down Rock’s face.

“What’s the song about?” he whispered.

Rock leaned down.

“Is ancient folklorique troll song,” he said. “Is about Amber and Jasper. They were—” he hesitated, and waved his hands about vaguely. “Friends. Good friends?”

“I think I know what you mean,” said Victor.

“And one day Amber takes her troll’s dinner down to the cave and finds him—” Rock waved his hands in vague yet thoroughly descriptive motions “—with another lady troll. So she go home and get her club and come back and beat him to death, thump, thump, thump. ’Cos he was her troll and he done her wrong. Is very romantic song.”

Victor stared. Ruby undulated down from the tiny stage and glided among the customers, a small mountain in a four-wheel skid. She must weigh two tons, he thought. If she sits on my knee they’ll have to roll me off the floor like a carpet.

“What did she just say to that troll?” he said, as a deep wave of laughter rolled across the room.

Rock scratched his nose. “Is play on words,” he said. “Very hard to translate. But basically, she say ‘Is that the legendary Sceptre of Magma who was King of the Mountain, Smiter of Thousands, Yea, Even Tens of Thousands, Ruler of the Golden River, Master of the Bridges, Delver in Dark Places, Crusher of Many Enemies,’” he took a deep breath, “‘in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?’”

Victor’s forehead creased.

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“Perhaps I not translate properly,” said Rock. He took a pull of molten sulfur. “I hear Untied Alchemists is casting for—”

“Rock, there’s something very odd about this place,” said Victor urgently. “Can’t you feel it?”

“What odd?”

“Everything seems to, well, fizz. No one acts like they should. Did you know there was a great city here once? Where the sea is. A great city. And it’s just gone!”

Rock rubbed his nose thoughtfully. It looked like a Neanderthal Man’s first attempt at an axe.

“And there’s the way everyone acts!” said Victor. “As if who they are and what they want are the most important things in the world!”

“I’m wondering—” Rock began.

“Yes?” said Victor.

“I’m wondering, would it be worth takin’ half a inch off my nose? My cousin Breccia knows this stonemason, fixed his ears a treat. What do you fink?”

Victor stared dully at him.

“I mean, on the one hand, it’s too big, but on the other hand, it’s definit’ly your stereotyped troll nose, right? I mean, maybe I’ll look better, but in this business maybe it best to look just as troll as you can. Like, Morry’s had his touched up with cement, now he got a face you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night. What you fink? I value your opinion, because you a human with ideas.”

He gave Victor a bright silicon smile.

Eventually Victor said: “It’s a great nose, Rock. With you behind it, it could go a long way.”

Rock gave a big grin, and took another pull of sulfur. He extracted a small steel swizzle stick and sucked the amethyst off it.

“You really fink—” he began, and was then aware of the small area of empty space. Victor had gone.

 

“I don’t know nuffin about no one,” said the horse-holder, looking shiftily at the looming presence of Detritus.

Dibbler chewed on his cigar. It had been a bumpy journey from Ankh, even in his new coach, and he’d missed lunch.

“Tall lad, bit dopey, thin mustache,” he said. “He was working for you, right?” The horse-holder gave in.

“He’ll never make a good ’oss-’older, anyway,” he said.

“Lets his work get on top of him. I think he went to get something to eat.”

 

Victor sat in the dark alley, his back pressed against the wall, and tried to think.

He remembered staying out in the sun too long, once, when he was a boy. The feeling he’d got afterward was something like this.

There was a soft flopping noise in the packed sand by his feet.

Someone had dropped a hat in front of him. He stared at it.

Then someone started playing the harmonica. They weren’t very good at it. Most of the notes were wrong, and those that were right were cracked. There was a tune in there somewhere, in the same way that there’s a bit of beef in a hamburger grinder.

Victor sighed and fumbled in his pocket for a couple of pennies. He tossed them into the hat.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Very good. Now go away.”

He was aware of a strange smell. It was hard to place, but could perhaps have been a very old and slightly damp nursery rug.

He looked up.

“Woof bloody woof,” said Gaspode the Wonder Dog.

 

Borgle’s commissary had decided to experiment with salads tonight. The nearest salad growing district was thirty slow miles away.

“What dis?” demanded a troll, holding up something limp and brown.

Fruntkin the short-order chef hazarded a guess.

“Celery?” he said. He peered closer. “Yeah, celery.”

“It brown.”

“’S’right. ’S’right! Ripe celery ort to be brown,” said Fruntkin, quickly. “Shows it’s ripe,” he added.

“It should be green.”

“Nah. Yore finking about the tomatoes,” said Fruntkin.

“Yeah, and what’s this runny stuff?” said a man in the queue.

Fruntkin drew himself up to his full height.

“That,” he said, “is the mayonnaisey. Made it myself. Out of a book,” he added proudly.

“Yeah, I expect you did,” said the man, prodding it.

“Clearly oil, eggs and vinegar were not involved, right?”

“Specialitay de lar mayson,” said Fruntkin.

“Right, right,” said the man. “Only it’s attacking my lettuce.”

Fruntkin grasped his ladle angrily.

“Look—” he began.

“No, it’s all right,” said the prospective diner. “The slugs have formed a defensive ring.”

There was a commotion by the door. Detritus the troll waded through the diners, with Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler strutting along behind him.

The troll shouldered the queue aside and glared at Fruntkin.

“Mr. Dibbler want a word,” he said, and reached across the counter, lifted the dwarf up by his food-encrusted shirt, and dangled him in front of Throat.

“Anyone seen Victor Tugelbend?” said Throat. “Or that girl Ginger?”

Fruntkin opened his mouth to swear, and thought better of it.

“The boy was in here half an hour ago,” he squeaked.

“Ginger works here mornings. Don’t know where she goes.”

“Where’d Victor go?” said Throat. He pulled a bag out of his pocket. It jingled. Fruntkin’s eyes swiveled toward it as though they were ball bearings and it was a powerful magnet.

“Dunno, Mr. Throat,” he said. “He just went out again when she wasn’t here.”

“Right,” said Throat. “Well, if you see him again, tell him I’m looking for him and I’m going to make him a star, right?”

“Star. Right,” said the dwarf.

Throat reached into his moneybag and produced a ten-dollar piece.

“And I want to order dinner for later on,” he added.

“Dinner. Right,” quavered Fruntkin.

“Steak and prawns, I think,” said Throat. “With a choice of sunkissed vegetables in season, and then strawberries and cream.”

Fruntkin stared at him.

“Er—,” he began.

Detritus poked the dwarf so that he swung backward and forward.

“An’ I,” he said, “will ’ave…er…a well-weathered basalt with a aggregate of fresh-hewn sandstone conglomerates. Right?”

“Er. Yes,” said Fruntkin.

“Put him down, Detritus. He doesn’t want to be hanging around,” said Throat. “And gently.” He looked around at the fascinated faces.

“Remember,” he said, “I’m looking for Victor Tugelbend and I’m going to make him a star. If anyone sees him, you must tell him. Oh, and I’ll have the steak rare, Fruntkin.”

He strode back to the door.

After he had gone the chattering flowed back like a tide.

“Make him a star? What’d he want a star for?”

“I didn’t know you could make stars…I thought they were like, you know, stuck to the sky…”

“I think he meant make him a star. You know, him himself. Turn him into a star.”

“How can you make anyone into a star?”

“I dunno. I suppose you compress them right up small and they burst into this mass of flaming hydrogen?”

“Good grief”

“Yeah! Is that troll mean, or what?”

 

Victor looked at the dog carefully.

It couldn’t have spoken to him. It must have been his imagination. But he’d said that last time, hadn’t he?

“I wonder what your name is?” said Victor, patting it on the head.

“Gaspode,” said Gaspode.

Victor’s hand froze in mid-tousle.

“Tuppence,” said the dog, wearily. “World’s only bloody harmonica-playing dog. Tuppence.”

It is the sun, Victor thought. I haven’t been wearing a hat. In a minute I’ll wake up and there’ll be cool sheets.

“Well, you didn’t play very well. I couldn’t recognize the tune,” he said, stretching his mouth into a terrible grin.

“You’re not supposed to recognize the bloody tune,” said Gaspode, sitting down heavily and industriously scratching one ear with his hind leg. “I’m a dog. You’re supposed to be bloody amazed I can bloody well get a squeak out of the bloody thing.”

How shall I put it? Victor thought. Do I just say: excuse me, you appear to be tal…No, probably not.

“Er,” he said. Hey, you’re quite chatty for…no.

“Fleas,” said Gaspode, changing ears and legs. “Giving me gyp.”

“Oh dear.”

“And all these trolls. Can’t stand ’em. They smell all wrong. Bloody walking stones. You try and bite ’em, next minute you’re spittin’ teef. It’s not natural.”

Talking of natural, I can’t help noticing that—

“Bloody desert, this place,” said Gaspode.

You’re a talking dog.

“I expect you’re wondering,” said Gaspode, turning his penetrating stare on Victor once again, “how come I’m talking.”

“Hadn’t given it a thought,” said Victor.

“Me neither,” said Gaspode. “Until a couple of weeks ago. All my life, never said a bloody word. Worked for a bloke back in the big city. Tricks and that. Balancing a ball on my nose. Walkin’ on me ’ind legs. Jumpin’ through a ’oop. Carried the hat around in my mouf afterward. You know. Show business. Then this woman pats me on me ’ead, says ‘Eow, wot a dear little doggy, he looks like he understands every word we say,’ and I thinks, ‘Ho, ho, I don’t even bother to make the effort anymore, missus,’ and then I realizes I can hear the words, and they’re coming out of me own mouf. So I grabbed the ’at and had it away on my paws pretty damn quick, while they were still starin’.”

“Why?” said Victor.

Gaspode rolled his eyes. “Exactly wot life do you fink a genuine talking dog is going to have?” he said. “Shouldn’t have opened my stupid mouth.”

“But you’re talking to me,” said Victor.

Gaspode gave him a sly look.

“Yeah, but jus’ you try tellin’ anyone,” he said. “Anyway, you’re all right. You’ve got the look. I could tell it a mile orf.”

“What on earth do you mean?” said Victor.

“You don’t fink you really belong to yourself, right?” said the dog. “You’ve ’ad the feeling that something else is doin’ your thinking for you?”

“Good grief.”

“Give you a kind of hunted look,” said Gaspode. He picked up the cap in his mouth. “Tuppence,” he said indistinctly. “I mean, it’s not as if I’ve got any way of spending it, but…tuppence.” He gave a canine shrug.

“What do you mean by a hunted look?” said Victor.

“You’ve all got the look. Many are called and few are chosen, style of fing.”

“What look?”

“Like you’ve been called here and you don’t know why.” Gaspode tried to scratch his ear again. “Saw you acting Cohen the Barbarian,” he said.

“Er…what did you think of it?” said Victor.

“I reckon, so long as ole Cohen never gets to hear about it, you should be OK.”

 

“I said, how long ago was he in here?” shouted Dibbler. On the tiny stage, Ruby was crooning something in a voice like a ship in thick fog and bad trouble.

“GrooOOowwonnogghrhhooOOo—”⁶

“He only just went out!” bellowed Rock. “I’m trying to listen to this song, all right?”

“—OowoowgrhhffrghooOOo—”⁷

Cut-me-own-Throat nudged Detritus, who was taking the weight off his knuckles and watching the floor show with his mouth open.

The old troll’s life had, up to now, been very straightforward; people paid you money, and you hit other people.

Now it was beginning to get complicated. Ruby had winked at him.

Strange and unfamiliar emotions were rampaging through Detritus’ battered heart.

“—groooOOOooohoofooOOoo—”⁸

“Come on,” snapped Throat.

Detritus lumbered to his feet and took one last longing look at the stage.

“—ooOOOgooOOmoo. OOhhhooo.”⁹

Ruby blew him a kiss. Detritus blushed the color of fresh-cut garnet.

 

Gaspode led the way out of the alley and through the dark hinterland of scrubby bushes and sandgrass behind the town.

“There’s definitely something wrong with this place,” he muttered.

“It’s different,” said Victor. “What do you mean, wrong?”

Gaspode looked as though he was going to spit.

“Now, take me,” he said, ignoring the interruption. “A dog. Never dreamed in my life except about chasing fings. And sex, of course. Suddenly I’m dreaming these dreams. In color. Frightened the bloody life out of me. Never seen color before, right? Dogs see in black-an’-white, as I expect you knows, you bein’ a great reader. Red comes as a nasty shock, I can tell you. You fink your dinner is just this white bone with shades of gray on it, suddenly it turns out for years you bin eatin’ this gharsteley red and purple stuff.”

“What kind of dreams?” said Victor.

“It’s bloody embarrassing,” said Gaspode. “Like, in one there’s this bridge that’s been washed away and I have to run and bark a warning, right? And there’s another where this house is on fire and I drag these kids out. And there’s one where some kids are lost in these caves and I find ’em and go and lead the search party to them…and I hates kids. Seems I can’t get me ’ead down these days without rescuin’ people or savin’ people or foilin’ robbers or sunnink. I mean, I’m seven years old, I got hardpad, I got scurf, I got fleas somethin’ dreadful, I don’t need to be a ’ero every time I go to sleep.”

“Gosh. Isn’t life interesting,” said Victor, “when you see it from someone else’s perspective…?”

Gaspode rolled a crusted yellow eye skyward.

“Er. Where are we going?” said Victor.

“We’re goin’ to see a few Holy Wood folk,” said Gaspode. “’Cos there’s something weird goin’ on.”

“Up on the hill? I didn’t know there were any people on the hill.”

“They ain’t people,” said Gaspode.

 

A little twig fire burned on the slope of Holy Wood Hill. Victor had lit it because—well, because it was reassuring. Because it was the sort of thing humans did.

He found it necessary to remember he was human, and probably not crazy.

It wasn’t that he’d been talking to a dog. People often talked to dogs. The same applied to the cat. And maybe even the rabbit. It was the conversation with the mouse and the duck that might be considered odd.

“You think we wanted to talk?” snapped the rabbit. “One minute I’m just another rabbit and happy about it, next minute whazaam, I’m thinking. That’s a major drawback if you’re looking for happiness as a rabbit, let me tell you. You want grass and sex, not thoughts like ‘What’s it all about, when you get right down to it?’”

“Yeah, but at least you eats grass,” Gaspode pointed out.

“At least grass don’t talk back at you. The last thing you needs when you’re hungry is a bloody ethical conundrum on your plate.”

“You think you’ve got problems,” said the cat, apparently reading his mind. “I’m reduched to eating fish. You put a paw on your dinner, it shoutsh ‘Help!’, you got a major predicament.”

There was silence. They looked at Victor. So did the mouse. And the duck. The duck was looking particularly belligerent. It had probably heard about orange sauce.

“Yeah. Take us,” said the mouse. “There’s me, being chased by this,” it indicated the cat looming over it, “around the kitchen. Scrabble, scrabble, squeak, panic. Then there’s this sizzling noise in my head, I see a frying pan—you understand? A second ago I never knew what frying was, now I’m holding the handle, he comes around the corner, clang. Now he’s staggering around saying ‘What hit me?’ I say ‘Me.’ That’s when we both realize. We’re talking.”

“Concheptualishing,” said the cat. It was a black cat, with white paws, ears like shotgun targets, and the scarred face of a cat that has already lived eight lives to the full.

“You tell him, kid,” said the mouse.

“Tell him what you did next,” said Gaspode.

“We came here,” said the cat.

“From Ankh-Morpork?” said Victor.

“Yeah.”

“That’s nearly thirty miles!”

“Yeah, and take it from me,” said the cat, “it’s hard to hitch-hike when you’s a cat.”

“See?” said Gaspode. “It’s happening all the time. All sorts are turnin’ up in Holy Wood. They don’t know why they’ve come, only that it’s important to be here. An’ they don’t act like they do anywhere else in the world. I bin watchin’. Somethin’ weird’s goin’ on.”

The duck quacked. There were words in there somewhere, but so mangled by the incompatibility of beak and larynx that Victor couldn’t understand a word.

The animals gave it a sympathetic audience.

“What’s up, Duck?” said the rabbit.

“The duck says,” translated Gaspode, “that it’s like a migratory thing. Just the same feelin’ as a migration, he says.”

“Yeah? I didn’t have far to come,” the rabbit volunteered.

“We lived on the dunes anyway.” It sighed. “For three happy years and four miserable days,” it added.

A thought struck Victor. “So you’d know about the old man on the beach?” he said.

“Oh, him. Yeah. Him. He was always coming up here.”

“What sort of person was he?” said Victor.

“Listen, buster, up to four days ago I had a vocabulary consisting of two verbs and one noun. What do you think I thought he was? All I know is, he didn’t bother us. We probably thought he was a rock on legs, or something.”

Victor thought about the book in his pocket. Chanting and lighting fires. What sort of person did that?

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I’d like to find out. Look, haven’t you got names? I feel awkward, talking to people without names.”

“Only me,” said Gaspode. “Bein’ a dog. I’m named after the famous Gaspode, you know.”

“A kid called me Puss once,” said the cat doubtfully.

“I thought you had names in your own language,” said Victor. “You know, like ‘Mighty Paws’ or—or ‘Speedy Hunter.’ Or something.”

He smiled encouragingly.

The others gave him a long blank stare.

“He reads books,” explained Gaspode. “See, the thing is,” he added, scratching himself vigorously, “animals don’t normally bother with names. I mean, we know who we are.”

“Mind you, I like ‘Speedy Hunter,’” said the mouse.

“I was thinking that’s more a cat’s name,” said Victor, starting to sweat. “Mice have friendly little names, like—like Squeak.”

“Squeak?” said the mouse, coldly.

The rabbit grinned.

“And, and I always thought rabbits were called Flopsy. Or Mr. Thumpy,” Victor gabbled.

The rabbit stopped grinning and twitched its ears.

“Now look, pal—” it began.

“Y’know,” said Gaspode cheerfully, in an attempt to revive the conversation, “I heard there’s this legend where the first two people in the world named all the animals. Makes you fink, don’t it.”

Victor pulled out the book to cover his embarrassment. Chanting and lighting fires. Three times a day.

“This old man—” he began.

“What’s so important about him?” said the rabbit. “He just used to come up onto the hill and make noises a couple of times every day. You could set your…your,” it hesitated. “It was always the same times. Many times a day.”

“Three times. Three performances. Like a sort of theater?” said Victor, running his finger down the page.

“We can’t count up to three,” said the rabbit sourly. “It goes one…many. Many times.” He glared at Victor. “Mr. Thumpy,” it said, in withering tones.

“And people from other places brought him fish,” said Victor. “There’s no one else living near here. They must have come from miles away. People sailed miles just to bring him fish. It’s as though he didn’t want to eat fish out of the bay here. And it’s teeming with them. When I went swimming I saw lobsters you wouldn’t believe.”

“What did you name them?” said Mr. Thumpy, who wasn’t the kind of rabbit that forgot a grudge. “Mr. Snappy?”

“Yeah, I want this cleared up right now,” squeaked the mouse. “Back home I was top mouse. I could lick any other mouse in the house. I want a proper name, kid. Anyone calls me Squeaky Boots,” he looked up at Victor, “is asking for a head shaped like a frying pan, do I make myself clear?”

The duck quacked at length.

“Hold it,” said Gaspode. “The thing is, the duck says,” said Gaspode, “that all this is part of the same thing. Humans and trolls and everything coming here. Animals suddenly talking. The duck says he thinks it’s caused by something here.”

“How does a duck know that?” said Victor.

“Look, friend,” said the rabbit, “when you can fly all the way across the sea and even end up finding the same bloody continent, you can start badmouthing ducks.”

“Oh,” said Victor. “You mean mysterious animal senses, yes?”

They glared at him.

“Anyway, it’s got to stop,” said Gaspode. “All this cogitatin’ and talkin’ is all right for you humans. You’re used to it. Fing is, see, someone’s got to find out what’s causin’ all this…”

They carried on glaring at him.

“Well,” he said, vaguely, “maybe the book can help? The early bits are in some sort of ancient language. I can’t—,” he paused. Wizards weren’t welcomed in Holy Wood. It probably wasn’t a good idea to mention the University, or his small part in it. “That is,” he continued, choosing his words with care, “I think I know someone in Ankh-Morpork who might be able to read it. He’s an animal, too. An ape.”

“How’s he in the mysterious senses department?” said Gaspode.

“He’s red hot on mysterious senses,” said Victor.

“In that case—” said the rabbit.

“Hold it,” said Gaspode. “Someone’s coming.”

A moving torch was visible coming up the hill. The duck rocketed clumsily into the air and glided away. The others disappeared into the shadows. Only the dog didn’t move.

“Aren’t you going to make yourself scarce?” Victor hissed.

Gaspode raised an eyebrow.

“Woof?” he said.

The torch zig-zagged erratically among the scrub, like a firefly. Sometimes it would stop for a moment, and then wander away in some totally new direction. It was very bright.

“What is it?” said Victor.

Gaspode sniffed. “Human,” he said. “Female. Wearin’ cheap scent.” His nose twitched again. “It’s called Passion’s Plaything.” He sniffed again. “Fresh laundry, no starch. Old shoes. Lot of studio make-up. She’s been in Borgle’s and had—” his nose twitched “—stoo. Not a big plate.”

“I suppose you can tell how tall she is, can you?” said Victor.

“She smells about five foot two, two and a half,” hazarded Gaspode.

“Oh, come on!”

“Walk a mile on these paws and call me a liar.”

Victor kicked sand over his little fire and strolled down the slope.

The light stopped moving as he approached it. For a moment he got a glimpse of a female figure clasping a shawl around her with one hand holding the torch high above her head. Then the light vanished so quickly it left blue and purple after-images dancing across his vision. Behind them, a small figure made a blacker shadow against the dusk.

It said, “What are you doing in my…what am I…why are you in…where…,” and then, as if it had finally got to grips with the situation, changed gear and in a much more familiar voice demanded, “What are you doing here?”

“Ginger?” said Victor.

“Yes?”

Victor paused. What were you supposed to say in circumstances like this?

“Er…” he said. “It’s nice up here in the evenings, don’t you think?”

She glared at Gaspode.

“That’s that horrible dog who’s been hanging around the studio, isn’t it?” she said. “I can’t stand small dogs.”

“Bark, bark,” said Gaspode. Ginger stared at him. Victor could almost read her thoughts: he said Bark, bark. And he’s a dog, and that’s the kind of noise dogs make, isn’t it?

“I’m a cat person, myself,” she said, vaguely.

A low-level voice said: “Yeah? Yeah? Wash in your own spit, do you?”

“What was that?”

Victor backed away, waving his hands frantically. “Don’t look at me!” he said. “I didn’t say it!”

“Oh? I suppose it was the dog, was it?” she demanded.

“Who, me?” said Gaspode.

Ginger froze. Her eyes swiveled around and down, to where Gaspode was idly scratching an ear.

“Woof?” he said.

“That dog spoke—” Ginger began, pointing a shaking finger at him.

“I know,” said Victor. “That means he likes you.” He looked past her. Another light was coming up the hill.

“Did you bring someone with you?” he said.

“Me?” Ginger turned around.

Now the light was accompanied by the cracking of dry twigs, and Dibbler stepped out of the dusk with Detritus trailing behind like a particularly scary shadow.

“Ah-ha!” he said. “The lovebirds surprised, eh?”

Victor gaped at him. “The what?” he said.

“The what?” said Ginger.

“Been looking all over for you two,” said Dibbler. “Someone said he’d seen you come up here. Very romantic. Could do something with that. Look good on the posters. Right.” He draped his arms around them. “Come on,” he said.

“What for?” said Victor.

“We’re shooting first thing in the morning,” said Dibbler.

“But Mr. Silverfish said I wasn’t going to work in this town again—” Victor began.

Dibbler opened his mouth, and hesitated just for a moment. “Ah. Yes. But I’m going to give you another chance,” he said, speaking quite slowly for once. “Yeah. A chance. Like, you’re young people. Headstrong. Young once myself. Dibbler, I thought, even if it means cutting your own throat, give ’em a chance. Lower wages, of course. A dollar a day, how about that?”

Victor saw the look of sudden hope on Ginger’s face.

He opened his mouth.

“Fifteen dollars,” said a voice. It wasn’t his.

He shut his mouth.

“What?” said Dibbler.

Victor opened his mouth.

“Fifteen dollars. Renegot’ble after a week. Fifteen dollars or nuffin’.”

Victor shut his mouth, his eyes rolling.

Dibbler waved a finger under his nose, and then hesitated.

“I like it!” he said eventually. “Tough bargainer! OK. Three dollars.”

“Fifteen.”

“Five’s my last offer, kid. There’s thousands of people down there who’d jump at it, right?”

“Name two, Mr. Dibbler.”

Dibbler glanced at Detritus, who was lost in a reverie concerning Ruby, and then stared at Ginger.

“OK,” he said. “Ten. Because I like you. But it’s cutting my own throat.”

“Done.”

Throat held out a hand. Victor stared at his own as if he was seeing it for the first time, and then shook.

“And now let’s get back down,” said Dibbler. “Lot to organize.”

He strode off through the trees. Victor and Ginger followed meekly behind him, in a state of shock.

“Are you crazy?” Ginger hissed. “Holding out like that! We could have lost our chance!”

“I didn’t say anything! I thought it was you!” said Victor.

“It was you!” said Ginger.

Their eyes met.

They looked down.

“Bark, bark,” said Gaspode the Wonder Dog.

Dibbler turned round.

“What’s that noise?” he said.

“Oh, it’s—it’s just this dog we found,” said Victor hurriedly. “He’s called Gaspode. After the famous Gaspode, you know.”

“He does tricks,” said Ginger, malevolently.

“A performing dog?” Dibbler reached down and patted Gaspode’s bullet head.

“Growl, growl.”

“You’d be amazed, the things he can do,” said Victor.

“Amazed,” echoed Ginger.

“Ugly devil, though,” said Dibbler. He gave Gaspode a long, slow stare, which was like challenging a centipede to an arse-kicking contest. Gaspode could outstare a mirror.

Dibbler seemed to be turning an idea over in his mind. “Mind you…bring him along in the morning. People like a good laugh,” said Dibbler.

“Oh, he’s a laugh all right,” said Victor. “A scream.”

As they walked off Victor heard a quiet voice behind him say, “I’ll get you for that. Anyway, you owe me a dollar.”

“What for?”

“Agent’s fee,” said Gaspode the Wonder Dog.

 

Over Holy Wood, the stars were out. They were huge balls of hydrogen heated to millions of degrees, so hot they could not even burn. Many of them would swell enormously before they died, and then shrink to tiny, resentful dwarfs remembered only by sentimental astronomers. In the meantime, they glowed because of metamorphoses beyond the reach of alchemists, and turned mere boring elements into pure light.

Over Ankh-Morpork, it just rained.

The senior wizards crowded around the elephant vase. It had been put back in the corridor on Ridcully’s strict orders.

“I remember Riktor,” said the Dean. “Skinny man. Bit of a one-track mind. But clever.”

“Heh, heh. I remember his mouse counter,” said Windle Poons, from his ancient wheelchair. “Used to count mice.”

“The pot itself is quite—” the Bursar began, and then said, “What d’you mean, count mice? They were fed into it on a little belt or something?”

“Oh, no. You just wound it up, y’see, and it sat there whirring away, counting all the mice in the building, mm, and these little wheels with numbers on them came up.”

“Why?”

“Mm? I s’pose he just wanted to count mice.”

The Bursar shrugged. “This pot,” he said, peering closely,

“is actually quite an old Ming vase.”

He waited expectantly.

“Why’s it called Ming?” said the Archchancellor, on cue.

The Bursar tapped the pot. It went ming.

“And they spit lead balls at people, do they?” said Ridcully.

“No, Master. He just used it to put the…the machinery in. Whatever it is. Whatever it’s doing.”

…whumm…

“Hold on. It wobbled,” said the Dean.

…whumm…whumm…

The wizards stared at one another in sudden panic…

“What’s happening? What’s happening?” said Windle Poons. “Why won’t anyone, mm, tell me what’s happening?”

…whumm…whumm…

“Run!” suggested the Dean.

“Which way?” quavered the Bursar.

…whummWHUMM…

“I’m an old man and I demand someone tell me what’s—”

Silence.

“Duck!” shouted the Archchancellor.

Plib.

A splinter of stone was knocked off the pillar behind him.

He raised his head.

“Bigods, that was a damn lucky es—”

Plib.

The second pellet knocked the tip off his hat.

The wizards lay trembling on the flagstones for several minutes. After a while the Dean’s muffled voice, “Was that all, do you think?”

The Archchancellor raised his head. His face, always red, was now incandescent.

“Bursaar!”

“Master?”

“That’s what I call shootin’!”

 

Victor turned over.

“Wzstf,” he said.

“It’s six aye-emm, rise and shine, Mr. Dibbler says,” said Detritus, grasping the bedclothes in one hand and dragging them onto the floor.

“Six o’clock? That’s night-time!” groaned Victor.

“It’s going to be a long day, Mr. Dibbler says,” said the troll. “Mr. Dibbler says you got to be on set by half past six. This is goin’ to happen.”

Victor pulled on his trousers.

“I suppose I get to eat breakfast?” he said sarcastically.

“Mr. Dibbler is havin’ food laid on, Mr. Dibbler says,” said Detritus.

There was a wheezing noise from under the bed. Gaspode emerged, in a cloud of old-rugness, and had an early morning scratch.

“Wha—” he began, and then saw the troll. “Bark, bark,” he corrected himself.

“Oh. A little dog. I like little dogs,” said Detritus.

“Woof.”

“Raw,” the troll added. But he couldn’t get the right amount of statutory nastiness into his voice. Visions of Ruby in her feather boa and three acres of red velvet kept undulating across his mind.

Gaspode scratched his ear vigorously.

“Woof,” he said quietly. “In tones of low menace,” he added, after Detritus had gone.

 

The slope of the hill was already alive with people when Victor arrived. A couple of tents had been erected. Someone was holding a camel. Several cages of demons gibbered in the shade of a thorn tree.

In the middle of all this were Dibbler and Silverfish, arguing. Dibbler had his arm around Silverfish’s shoulder.

“A dead giveaway, is that,” said a voice from the level of Victor’s knees. “It means some poor bugger is about to be taken to the cleaners.”

“It’ll be a step up for you, Tom!” Dibbler was saying. “I mean, how many people in Holy Wood can call themselves Vice-President in Charge of Executive Affairs?”

“Yes, but it’s my company!” Silverfish wailed.

“Right! Right!” said Dibbler. “That’s what a name like Vice-President of Executive Affairs means.”

“It does?”

“Have I ever lied to you?”

Silverfish’s brow furrowed. “Well,” he said, “yesterday you said—”

“I mean metaphorically,” said Dibbler quickly.

“Oh. Well. Metaphorically? I suppose not—”

“There you are, then. Now, where’s that artist?” Dibbler spun around, giving the impression that Silverfish had just been switched off.

A man scurried up with a folder under his arm.

“Yessir, Mr. Dibbler?”

Throat pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket.

“I want the posters ready by tonight, understand?” he warned. “Here. This is the name of the click.”

“Shadowe of the Dessert,” the artist read. His brow furrowed. He had been educated beyond the needs of Holy Wood. “It’s about food?” he said.

But Dibbler wasn’t listening. He was advancing on Victor.

“Victor!” he said. “Baby!”

“It’s got him,” said Gaspode quietly. “Got him worse than anyone, I reckon.”

“What has? How can you tell?” Victor hissed.

“Partly a’cos of subtle signs what you don’t seem to be abler recognize,” said Gaspode, “and partly because he’s actin’ like a complete twerp, really.”

“Great to see you!” Dibbler enthused, his eyes glowing manically.

He put his arm around Victor’s shoulder and half walked, half dragged him toward the tents.

“This is going to be a great picture!” he said.

“Oh, good,” said Victor weakly.

“You play this bandit chieftain,” said Dibbler, “only a nice guy, too, kind to women and so forth, and you raid this village and you carry off this slave girl only when you look into her eyes, see, you fall for her, and then there’s this raid and hundreds of men on elephants come charging—”

“Camels,” said a skinny youth behind Dibbler. “It’s camels.”

“I ordered elephants!”

“You got camels.”

“Camels, elephants,” said Dibbler dismissively. “We’re talking exotic here, OK? And—”

“And we’ve only got one,” said the youth.

“One what?”

“Camel. We could only find one camel,” said the youth.

“But I’ve got dozens of guys with bedsheets on their heads waiting for camels!” shouted Dibbler, waving his hands in the air. “Lots of camels, right?”

“We only got one camel ’cos there’s only one camel in Holy Wood and that’s only ’cos a guy from Klatch rode all the way here on it,” said the youth.

“You should have sent away for more!” snapped Dibbler.

“Mr. Silverfish said I wasn’t to.”

Dibbler growled.

“Maybe if it moves around a lot it’ll look like more than one camel,” said the youth optimistically.

“Why not ride the camel past the picture box, and then get the handleman to stop the demons, and lead it back and put a different rider on it, then start up the box again and ride it past again?” said Victor. “Would that work?”

Dibbler looked at him open-mouthed.

“What did I tell you?” he said, to the sky in general. “The lad is a genius! That way we can get a hundred camels for the price of one, right?”

“It means the desert bandits ride in single file, though,” said the youth. “It’s not like, you know, a massed attack.”

“Sure, sure,” said Dibbler dismissively. “Makes sense. We just put a card up where the leader says, he says—” He thought for a second. “He says, ‘Follow me in single file, bwanas, to fool the hated enemy,’ OK?”

He nodded at Victor. “Have you met my nephew Soll?” he said. “Keen lad. Been nearly to school and everything. Brought him out here yesterday. He’s Vice-President in Charge of Making Pictures.”

Soll and Victor exchanged nods.

“I don’t think ‘bwanas’ is the right word, Uncle,” said Soll.

“It’s Klatchian, isn’t it?” said Dibbler.

“Well, technically, but I think it’s the wrong part of Klatch and maybe ‘effendies’ or something—”

“Just so long as it’s foreign,” said Dibbler with an air that suggested the matter was settled. He patted Victor on the back again. “OK, kid, get into costume.” He chuckled. “A hundred camels! What a mind!”

“Excuse me, Mr. Dibbler,” said the poster artist, who had been hovering uneasily, “I don’t understand this bit here…”

Dibbler snatched the paper from him.

“Which bit?” he snapped.

“Where you’re describing Miss De Syn—”

“It’s obvious,” said Dibbler. “What we want here is to conjure up the exotic, alluring yet distant romance of pyramid-studded Klatch, right, so nat’r’ly we gotta use the symbol of a mysterious and unscrutable continent, see? Do I have to explain everything to everyone all the time?”

“It’s just that I thought—” the artist began.

“Just do it!”

The artist looked down at the paper. “‘She has the face,’” he read, “‘of a Spink.’”

“Right,” said Dibbler. “Right!”

“I thought maybe Sphinx—”

“Will you listen to the man?” said Dibbler, talking to the sky again. He glared at the artist. “She doesn’t look like two of them, does she? One Spink, two Spinks. Now get on with it. I want those posters all around the city first thing tomorrow.”

The artist gave Victor an agonized look he was coming to recognize. Everyone around Dibbler wore them after a while.

“Right you are, Mr. Dibbler,” he said.

“Right.” Dibbler turned to Victor.

“Why aren’t you changed?” he said.

Victor ducked quickly into a tent. A little old lady¹⁰ shaped like a cottage loaf helped him into a costume apparently made of sheets inexpertly dyed black, although given the current state of accommodation in Holy Wood they were probably just sheets taken off a bed at random. Then she handed him a curved sword.

“Why’s it bent?” he asked.

“I think it’s meant to be, dear,” she said doubtfully.

“I thought swords had to be straight,” said Victor. Outside, he could hear Dibbler asking the sky why everyone was so stupid.

“Perhaps they start out straight and go bendy with use,” said the old lady, patting him on the hand. “A lot of things do.”

She gave him a bright smile. “If you’re all right, dear, I’d better go and help the young lady, in case any little dwarfs is peering in at her.”

She waddled out of the tent. From the tent next door came a metallic chinking noise and the sound of Ginger’s voice raised in complaint.

Victor made a few experimental slashes with the sword.

Gaspode watched him with his head on one side.

“What’re you supposed to be?” he said at last.

“A leader of a pack of desert bandits, apparently,” said Victor. “Romantic and dashing.”

“Dashing where?”

“Just dashing generally, I guess. Gaspode, what did you mean when you said it’s got Dibbler?”

The dog gnawed at a paw.

“Look at his eyes,” he said. “They’re even worse than yours.”

“Mine? What’s wrong with mine?”

Detritus the troll stuck his head through the tent flaps.

“Mr. Dibbler says he wants you now,” he said.

“Eyes?” said Victor. “Something about my eyes?”

“Woof.”

“Mr. Dibbler says—” Detritus began.

“All right, all right! I’m coming!”

Victor stepped out of his tent at the same time as Ginger stepped out of hers. He shut his eyes.

“Gosh, I’m sorry,” he babbled. “I’ll go back and wait for you to get dressed…”

“I am dressed.”

“Mr. Dibbler says—” said Detritus, behind them.

“Come on,” said Ginger, grabbing his arm. “We mustn’t keep everyone waiting.”

“But you’re…your…” Victor looked down, which wasn’t a help. “You’ve got a navel in your diamond,” he hazarded.

“I’ve come to terms with that,” said Ginger, flexing her shoulders in an effort to make everything settle. “It’s these two saucepan lids that are giving me problems. Makes you realize what those poor girls in the harems must suffer.”

“And you don’t mind people seeing you like that?” said Victor, amazed.

“Why should I? This is moving pictures. It’s not as if it’s real. Anyway, you’d be amazed at what girls have to do for a lot less than ten dollars a day.”

“Nine,” said Gaspode, who was still trailing at Victor’s heels.

“Right, gather round, people,” shouted Dibbler through a megaphone. “Sons of the Desert over there, please. The slave girls—where are the slave girls? Right. Handlemen?—”

“I’ve never seen so many people in a click,” Ginger whispered. “It must be costing more than a hundred dollars!”

Victor eyed the Sons of the Desert. It looked as though Dibbler had dropped in at Borgle’s and hired the twenty people nearest the door, irrespective of their appropriateness, and had given them each Dibbler’s idea of a desert bandit headdress. There were trollish Sons of the Desert—Rock recognized him, and gave him a little wave—dwarf Sons of the Desert and, shuffling into the end of the line, a small, hairy and furiously-scratching Son in a headdress that reached down to his paws.

“…grab her, become entranced by her beauty, and then throw her over your pommel.” Dibbler’s voice intruded into his consciousness.

Victor desperately re-ran the half-heard instructions past his mind.

“My what?” he said.

“It’s part of your saddle,” Ginger hissed.

“Oh.”

“And then you ride into the night, with all the Sons following you and singing rousing desert bandit songs—”

“No one’ll hear them,” said Soll helpfully. “But if they open and shut their mouths it’ll help create a, you know, amby-ance.”

“But it isn’t night,” said Ginger. “It’s broad daylight.”

Dibbler stared at her.

His mouth opened once or twice.

“Soll!” he shouted.

“We can’t film at night, Uncle,” said the nephew hurriedly.

“The demons wouldn’t be able to see. I don’t see why we can’t put up a card saying ‘Night-time’ at the start of the scene, so that—”

“That’s not the magic of moving pictures!” snapped Dibbler. “That’s just messing about!”

“Excuse me,” said Victor. “Excuse me, but surely it doesn’t matter, because surely the demons can paint the sky black with stars on it?”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Dibbler looked at Gaffer.

“Can they?” he said.

“Nah,” said the handleman. “It’s bloody hard enough to make sure they paint what they do see, never mind what they don’t.”

Dibbler rubbed his nose.

“I might be prepared to negotiate,” he said.

The handleman shrugged. “You don’t understand, Mr. Dibbler. What’d they want money for? They’d only eat it. We start telling them to paint what isn’t there, we’re into all sorts of—”

“Perhaps it’s just a very bright full moon?” said Ginger.

“That’s good thinking,” said Dibbler. “We’ll do a card where Victor says to Ginger something like: ‘How bright the moon is tonight, bwana.’”

“Something like that,” said Soll diplomatically.

 

It was noon. Holy Wood Hill glistened under the sun, like a champagne-flavored wine gum that had been half-sucked. The handlemen turned their handles, the extras charged enthusiastically backward and forward, Dibbler raged at everyone, and cinematographic history was made with a shot of three dwarfs, four men, two trolls and a dog all riding one camel and screaming in terror for it to stop.

Victor was introduced to the camel. It blinked its long eyelashes at him and appeared to chew soap. It was kneeling down and it looked like a camel that had had a long morning and wasn’t about to take any shit from anyone. So far it had kicked three people.

“What’s it called?” he said cautiously.

“We call it Evil-Minded Son of a Bitch,” said the newly-appointed Vice-President in Charge of Camels.

“That doesn’t sound like a name.”

“’S a good name for this camel,” said the handler fervently.

“There’s nothin’ wrong with bein’ a son of a bitch,” said a voice behind him. “I’m a son of a bitch. My father was a son of a bitch, you greasy nightshirt-wearin’ bastard.”

The handler grinned nervously at Victor and turned around. There was no one behind him. He looked down.

“Woof,” said Gaspode, and wagged what was almost a tail.

“Did you just hear someone say something?” said the handler carefully.

“No,” said Victor. He leaned close to one of the camel’s ears and whispered, in case it was a special Holy Wood camel: “Look, I’m a friend, OK?”

Evil-Minded Son of a Bitch flicked a carpet-thick ear. ¹¹

“How do you ride it?” he said.

“When you want to go forward you swear at it and hit it with a stick, and when you want to stop you swear at it and really hit it with a stick.”

“What happens if you want it to turn?”

“Ah, well, you’re on to the Advanced Manual there. Best thing to do is get off and do it round by hand.”

“When you’re ready!” Dibbler bellowed through his megaphone. “Now, you ride up to the tent, leap off the camel, fight the huge eunuchs, burst into the tent, drag the girl out, get back on the camel and away. Got it? Think you can do that?”

“What huge eunuchs?” said Victor, as the camel unfolded itself upward.

One of the huge eunuchs shyly raised a hand.

“It’s me. Morry,” it said.

“Oh. Hi, Morry.”

“Hi, Vic.”

“And me, Rock,” said a second huge eunuch.

“Hi, Rock.”

“Hi, Vic.”

“Places, everyone,” said Dibbler. “We’ll—what is it, Rock?”

“Er, I was just wondering, Mr. Dibbler…what is my motivation for this scene?”

“Motivation?”

“Yes. Er. I got to know, see,” said Rock.

“How about: I’ll fire you if you don’t do it properly?”

Rock grinned. “Right you are, Mr. Dibbler,” he said.

“OK,” said Dibbler. “Everyone ready…turn ’em!”

 

Evil-minded Son of a Bitch turned awkwardly, legs flailing at odd camel angles, and then lumbered into a complicated trot.

The handle turned…

The air glittered.

And Victor awoke. It was like rising slowly out of a pink cloud, or a magnificent dream which, try as you might, drains out of your mind as the daylight shuffles in, leaving a terrible sense of loss; nothing, you know instinctively, nothing you’re going to experience for the rest of the day is going to be one half as good as that dream.

He blinked. The images faded away. He was aware of an ache in his muscles, as if he’d recently been really exerting himself.

“What happened?” he mumbled.

He looked down.

“Wow,” he said. An expanse of barely-clad buttock occupied a view recently occupied by the camel’s neck. It was an improvement.

“Why,” said Ginger icily, “am I lying on a camel?”

“Search me. Didn’t you want to?”

She slid down onto the sand and tried to adjust her costume.

At this point they both became aware of the audience.

There was Dibbler. There was Dibbler’s nephew. There was the handleman. There were the extras. There were the assorted vice-presidents and other people who are apparently called into existence by the mere presence of moving-picture creation. ¹² There was Gaspode the Wonder Dog.

And every one, except for the dog, who was sniggering, had his mouth open.

The handleman’s hand was still turning the handle. He looked down at it as if its presence was new to him, and stopped.

Dibbler seemed to come out of whatever trance he was in.

“Whoo-hoo,” he said. “Blimey.”

“Magic,” breathed Soll. “Real magic.”

Dibbler nudged the handleman.

“Did you get all that?” he said.

“Get what?” said Ginger and Victor together.

Then Victor noticed Morry sitting on the sand. There was a sizeable chip out of his arm; Rock was trowelling something into it. The troll noticed Victor’s expression and gave him a sickly grin.

“Fink you’re Cohen the Barbarian, do you?” he said.

“Yeah,” said Rock. “There was no call to go callin’ him wot you called him. An’ if you’re going to go doin’ fancy swordwork, we’re applyin’ for an extra dollar a day Havin’-Bits-Chopped-Off allowance.”

Victor’s sword had several nicks on the blade. For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine how they had got there.

“Look,” he said desperately. “I don’t understand. I didn’t call anyone anything. Have we started filming yet?”

“One minute I’m sitting in a tent, next minute I’m breathing camel,” said Ginger petulantly. “Is it too much to ask what is going on?”

But no one seemed to be listening to them.

“Why can’t we find a way of getting sound?” said Dibbler. “That was damn good dialogue there. Didn’t understand a word of it, but I know good dialogue when I hear it.”

“Parrots,” said the handleman flatly. “Your common Howondaland Green. Amazing bird. Memory like an elephant. Get a couple of dozen in different sizes and you’ve got a full vocal—”

That launched a detailed technical discussion.

Victor let himself slide off the camel’s back and ducked under its neck to reach Ginger.

“Listen,” he said urgently. “It was just like last time. Only stronger. Like a sort of dream. The handleman started to take pictures and it was just like a dream.”

“Yes, but what did we actually do?” she said.

“What you did,” said Rock, “was gallop the camel up to the tent, leap off, come at us like a windmill—”

“—leapin’ on rocks and laughin’—” said Morry.

“Yeah, you said to Morry, ‘Have at you, you Foul Black Guard,’” said Rock. “And then you caught him a right ding on the arm, cut a hole in the tent—”

“Good sword work, though,” said Morry appraisingly. “A bit showy, but pretty good.”

“But I don’t know how to—” Victor began.

“—and she was lying there all longgrass,” said Rock.

“An’ you swept her up, and she said—”

“Long grass?” said Ginger weakly.

“Languorous,” said Victor. “I think he means languorous.”

“—she said, ‘Why, it is the Thief of…the Thief of…’” Rock hesitated. “Dad’s Bag, I think you said.”

“Bagged Dad,” said Morry, rubbing his arm.

“Yeah, an’ then she said, ‘You are in great danger, for my father has sworn to kill you,’ and Victor said, ‘But now, o fairest rose, I can reveal that I am really the Shadow of the Dessert—’”

“What’s languorous mean?” said Ginger suspiciously.

“An’ he said, ‘Fly with me now to the casbah,’ or something like that, an’ then he gave her this, this, thing humans do with their lips—”

“Whistle?” said Victor, with hopeless hope.

“Nah, the other thing. Sounds like a cork coming out of a bottle,” said Rock.

“Kiss,” said Ginger, coldly.

“Yeah. Not that I’m any judge,” said Rock, “but it seemed to go on for a while. Definitely very, you know, kissy.”

“I thought it was going to be bucket-of-water time myself,” said a quiet canine voice behind Victor. He kicked out backward, but failed to connect.

“And then he was back on the camel and dragged her up and Mr. Dibbler shouted ‘Stop, stop, what the hell’s going on, why won’t anyone tell me what the hell’s going on,’” said Rock. “And then you said ‘What happened?’”

“Don’t know when I last saw swordplay like that,” said Morry.

“Oh,” said Victor. “Well. Thank you.”

“All that shouting ‘Ha!’ and ‘Have at you, you dog.’ Very professional,” said Morry.

“I see,” said Victor. He reached sideways and grabbed Ginger’s arm.

“We’ve got to talk,” he hissed. “Somewhere quiet. Behind the tent.”

“If you think I’m going anywhere alone with you—” she began.

“Listen, this is no time to start acting like—”

A heavy hand settled on Victor’s shoulder. He turned, and saw the shape of Detritus eclipsing the world.

“Mr. Dibbler doesn’t want anyone running off,” he said.

“Everyone has to stay until Mr. Dibbler says.”

“You’re a real pain, you know,” said Victor. Detritus gave him a big, gem-studded grin. ¹³

“Mr. Dibbler says I can be a vice-president,” he said proudly.

“In charge of what?” said Victor.

“Vice-presidents,” said Detritus.

Gaspode the Wonder Dog made a little growling sound at the back of his throat. The camel, which had been idly staring at the sky, sidled around a bit and suddenly lashed out with a kick that caught the troll in the small of the back. Detritus yelped. Gaspode gave the world a look of satisfied innocence.

“Come on,” said Victor grimly. “While he’s trying to find something to hit the camel with.”

They sat down in the shade behind the tent.

“I just want you to know,” said Ginger coldly, “that I have never attempted to look languorous in my life.”

“Could be worth a try,” said Victor, absently.

“What?”

“Sorry. Look, something made us act like that. I don’t know how to use a sword. I’ve always just waved it around. What did you feel like?”

“You know how you feel when you hear someone say something and you realize you’ve been daydreaming?”

“It was like your own life fading away and something else filling up the space.”

They considered this in silence.

“Do you think it’s something to do with Holy Wood?” she said.

Victor nodded. Then he threw himself sideways and landed on Gaspode, who had been watching them intently.

“Yelp,” said Gaspode.

“Now listen,” Victor hissed into his ear, “No more of these hints. What is it that you noticed about us? Otherwise it’s Detritus for you. With mustard.”

The dog squirmed in his grip.

“Or we could make you wear a muzzle,” said Ginger.

“I ain’t dangerous!” wailed Gaspode, scrabbling with his paws in the sand.

“A talking dog sounds pretty dangerous to me,” said Victor.

“Dreadfully,” said Ginger. “You never know what it might say.”

“See? See?” said Gaspode mournfully. “I knew it’d be nothing but trouble, showin’ I can talk. It shouldn’t happen to a dog.”

“But it’s going to,” said Victor.

“Oh, all right. All right. For what good it’ll do,” muttered Gaspode.

Victor relaxed. The dog sat up and shook sand off himself.

“You won’t understand it, anyway,” he grumbled. “Another dog would understand, but you won’t. It’s down to species experience, see. Like kissing. You know what it’s like, but I don’t. It’s not a canine experience.” He noticed the warning look in Victor’s eyes, and plunged on, “It’s the way you look as if you belong here.” He watched them for a moment. “See? See?” he said. “I tole you you wouldn’t understand. It’s—it’s territory, see? You got all the signs of bein’ right where you should be. Nearly everyone else here is a stranger, but you aren’t. Er. Like, you mus’ have noticed where some dogs bark at you when you’re new to a place? It’s not jus’ smell, we got this amazin’ sense of displacement. Like, some humans get uncomfortable when they see a picture hung crooked? It’s like that, only worse. It’s kind of like the only place you ought to be now is here.” He looked at them again, and then industriously scratched an ear.

“What the hell,” he said. “The trouble is, I can explain it in Dog but you only listen in Human.”

“It sounds a bit mystical to me,” said Ginger.

“You said something about my eyes,” said Victor.

“Yeah, well. Have you looked at your own eyes?” Gaspode nodded at Ginger. “You too, miss.”

“Don’t be daft,” said Victor. “How can we look at our own eyes?”

Gaspode shrugged. “You could look at each other’s,” he suggested.

They automatically turned to face each other.

There was a long drawn-out moment. Gaspode employed it to urinate noisily against a tent peg.

Eventually Victor said, “Wow.”

Ginger said, “Mine, too?”

“Yes. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“You should know.”

“There you are, then,” said Gaspode. “And you look at Dibbler next time you see him. Really look, I mean.”

Victor rubbed his eyes, which were beginning to water. “It’s as though Holy Wood has called us here, is doing something to us and has, has—”

“—branded us,” said Ginger bitterly. “That’s what it’s done.”

“It, er, it does look quite attractive, actually,” said Victor gallantly. “Gives them a sort of sparkle.”

A shadow fell across the sand.

“Ah, there you are,” said Dibbler. He put his arms around their shoulders as they stood up, and gave them a sort of hug. “You young people, always going off alone together,” he said archly. “Great business. Great business. Very romantic. But we’ve got a click to make, and I’ve got lets of people standing around waiting for you, so let’s do it.”

“See what I mean?” muttered Gaspode, very quietly.

When you knew what you were looking for, you couldn’t miss it.

In the center of both of Dibbler’s eyes was a tiny golden star.

 

In the heartlands of the great dark continent of Klatch the air was heavy and pregnant with the promise of the coming monsoon.

Bullfrogs croaked in the rushes¹⁴ by the slow brown river. Crocodiles dozed on the mudflats.

Nature was holding its breath.

A cooing broke out in the pigeon loft of Azhural N’choate, stock dealer. He stopped dozing on the veranda, and went over to see what had caused the excitement.

In the vast pens behind the shack a few threadbare bewilderbeests, marked down for a quick sale, yawning and cudding in the heat, looked up in alarm as N’choate leapt the veranda steps in one bound and tore toward them.

He rounded the zebra pens and homed in on his assistant M’Bu, who was peacefully mucking out the ostriches.

“How many—” he stopped, and began to wheeze.

M’Bu, who was twelve years old, dropped his shovel and patted him heavily on the back.

“How many—” he tried again.

“You been overdoing it again, boss?” said M’Bu in a concerned voice.

“How many elephants we got?”

“I just done them,” said M’Bu. “We got three.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, boss,” said M’Bu, evenly. “It’s easy to be sure, with elephants.”

Azhural crouched in the red dust and hurriedly began to scrawl figures with a stick.

“Old Muluccai’s bound to have half a dozen,” he muttered. “And Tazikel’s usually got twenty or so, and then the people on the delta generally have—”

“Someone want elephants, boss?”

“—got fifteen head, he was telling me, plus also there’s a load at the logging camp probably going cheap, call it two dozen—”

“Someone want a lot of elephants, boss?”

“—was saying there’s a herd over T’etse way, shouldn’t be a problem, then there’s all the valleys over toward—”

M’Bu leaned on the fence and waited.

“Maybe two hundred, give or take ten,” said Azhural, throwing down the stick. “Nowhere near enough.”

“You can’t give or take ten elephants, boss,” said M’Bu firmly. He knew that counting elephants was a precision job. A man might be uncertain about how many wives he had, but never about elephants. Either you had one, or you didn’t.

“Our agent in Klatch has an order for,” Azhural swallowed, “a thousand elephants. A thousand! Immediately! Cash on delivery!”

Azhural let the paper drop to the ground. “To a place called Ankh-Morpork,” he said despondently. He sighed. “It would have been nice,” he said.

M’Bu scratched his head and stared at the hammerhead clouds massing over Mt F’twangi. Soon the dry veldt would boom to the thunder of the rains.

Then he reached down and picked up the stick.

“What’re you doing?” said Azhural.

“Drawing a map, boss,” said M’Bu.

Azhural shook his head. “Not worth it, boy. Three thousand miles to Ankh, I reckon. I let myself get carried away. Too many miles, not enough elephants.”

“We could go across the plains, boss,” said M’Bu. “Lot of elephants on the plains. Send messengers ahead. We could pick up plenty more elephants on the way, no problem. That whole plain just about covered in damn elephants.”

“No, we’d have to go around on the coast,” said the dealer, drawing a long curving line in the sand. “The reason being, there’s the jungle just here,” he tapped on the parched ground, “and here,” he tapped again, slightly concussing an emerging locust that had optimistically mistaken the first tap for the onset of the rains. “No roads in the jungle.”

M’Bu took the stick and drew a straight line through the jungle.

“Where a thousand elephants want to go, boss, they don’t need no roads.”

Azhural considered this. Then he took the stick and drew a jagged line by the jungle.

“But here’s the Mountains of the Sun,” he said. “Very high. Lots of deep ravines. And no bridges.”

M’Bu took the stick, indicated the jungle, and grinned.

“I know where there’s a lot of prime timber just been uprooted, boss,” he said.

“Yeah? OK, boy, but we’ve still got to get it into the mountains.”

“It just so happen that a t’ousand real strong elephants’ll be goin’ that way, boss.”

M’Bu grinned again. His tribe went in for sharpening their teeth to points. ¹⁵ He handed back the stick.

Azhural’s mouth opened slowly.

“By the seven moons of Nasreem,” he breathed. “We could do it, you know. It’s only, oh, thirteen or fourteen hundred miles that way. Maybe less, even. Yeah. We could really do it.”

“Yes, boss.”

“Y’know, I’ve always wanted to do something big with my life. Something real,” said Azhural. “I mean, an ostrich here, a giraffe there…it’s not the sort of thing you get remembered for…” He stared at the purple-gray horizon.

“We could do it, couldn’t we?” he said.

“Sure, boss.”

“Right over the mountains!”

“Sure, boss.”

If you looked really hard, you could just see that the purple-gray was topped with white.

“They’re pretty high mountains,” said Azhural, his voice now edged with doubt.

“Slope go up, slope go down,” said M’Bu gnomically.

“That’s true,” said Azhural. “Like, on average, it’s flat all the way.”

He gazed at the mountains again.

“A thousand elephants,” he muttered. “D’you know, boy, when they built the Tomb of King Leonid of Ephebe they used a hundred elephants to cart the stone? And two hundred elephants, history tells us, were employed in the building of the palace of the Rhoxie in Klatch city.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“A thousand elephants,” Azhural repeated. “A thousand elephants. I wonder what they want them for?”

 

The rest of the day passed in a trance for Victor.

There was more galloping and fighting, and more rearranging of time. Victor still found that hard to understand. Apparently the film could be cut up and then stuck together again later, so that things happened in the right order. And some things didn’t have to happen at all. He saw the artist draw one card which said “In thee Kinges’ Palace, One Houre Latre.”

One hour of Time had been vanished, just like that. Of course, he knew that it hadn’t really been surgically removed from his life. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time in books. And on the stage, too. He’d seen a group of strolling players once, and the performance had leapt magically from “A Battlefield in Tsort” to “The Ephebian Fortresse, That Nighte” with no more than a brief descent of the sackcloth curtain and a lot of muffled bumping and cursing as the scenery was changed.

But this was different. Ten minutes after doing a scene, you’d do another scene that was taking place the day before, somewhere else, because Dibbler had rented the tents for both scenes and didn’t want to have to pay anymore rent than necessary. You just had to try and forget about everything but Now, and that was hard when you were also waiting every moment for that fading sensation…

It didn’t come. Just after another half-hearted fight scene Dibbler announced that it was all finished.

“Aren’t we going to do the ending?” said Ginger.

“You did that this morning,” said Soll.

“Oh.”

There was a chattering noise as the demons were let out of their box and sat swinging their little legs on the edge of the lid and passing a tiny cigarette from hand to hand. The extras queued up for their wages. The camel kicked the Vice-President in Charge of Camels. The handlemen wound the great reels of film out of the boxes and went away to whatever arcane cutting and gluing the handlemen got up to in the hours of darkness. Mrs. Cosmopilite, Vice-President in Charge of Wardrobe, gathered up the costumes and toddled off, possibly to put them back on the beds.

A few acres of scrubby backlot stopped being the rolling dunes of the Great Nef and went back to being scrubby backlot again. Victor felt that much the same thing was happening to him.

In ones and twos, the makers of moving-picture magic departed, laughing and joking and arranging to meet at Borgle’s later on.

Ginger and Victor were left alone in a widening circle of emptiness.

“I felt like this the first time the circus went away,” said Ginger.

“Mr. Dibbler said we were going to do another one tomorrow,” said Victor. “I’m sure he just makes them up as he goes along. Still, we got ten dollars each. Minus what we owe Gaspode,” he added conscientiously. He grinned foolishly at her. “Cheer up,” he said. “You’re doing what you’ve always wanted to do.”

“Don’t be stupid. I didn’t even know about moving pictures a couple of months ago. There weren’t any.”

They strolled aimlessly toward the town.

“What did you want to be?” he ventured.

She shrugged. “I didn’t know. I just knew I didn’t want to be a milkmaid.”

There had been milkmaids at home. Victor tried to recollect anything about them. “It always looked quite an interesting job to me, milkmaiding,” he said vaguely. “Buttercups, you know. And fresh air.”

“It’s cold and wet and just as you’ve finished the bloody cow kicks the bucket over. Don’t tell me about milking. Or being a shepherdess. Or a goosegirl. I really hated our farm.”

“Oh.”

“And they expected me to marry my cousin when I was fifteen.”

“Is that allowed?”

“Oh, yes. Everyone marries their cousins where I come from.”

“Why?” said Victor.

“I suppose it saves having to worry about what to do on Saturday nights.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t you want to be anything?” said Ginger, putting a whole sentence-worth of disdain in a mere three letters.

“Not really,” said Victor. “Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job. I bet even people like Cohen the Barbarian get up in the morning thinking, ‘Oh, no, not another day of crushing the jeweled thrones of the world beneath my sandalled feet.’”

“Is that what he does?” said Ginger, interested despite herself.

“According to the stories, yes.”

“Why?”

“Search me. It’s just a job, I guess.”

Ginger picked up a handful of sand. There were tiny white shells in it, which stayed behind as it trickled away between her fingers.

“I remember when the circus came to our village,” she said. “I was ten. There was this girl with spangled tights. She walked a tightrope. She could even do somersaults on it. Everybody cheered and clapped. They wouldn’t let me climb a tree, but they cheered her. That’s when I decided.”

“Ah,” said Victor, trying to keep up with the psychology of this. “You decided you wanted to be someone?”

“Don’t be silly. That’s when I decided I was going to be a lot more than just someone.”

She threw the shells toward the sunset and laughed. “I’m going to be the most famous person in the world, everyone will fall in love with me, and I shall live forever.”

“It’s always best to know your own mind,” said Victor diplomatically.

“You know what the greatest tragedy is in the whole world?” said Ginger, not paying him the least attention. “It’s all the people who never find out what it is they really want to do or what it is they’re really good at. It’s all the sons who become blacksmiths because their fathers were blacksmiths. It’s all the people who could be really fantastic flute players who grow old and die without ever seeing a musical instrument, so they become bad plowmen instead. It’s all the people with talents who never even find out. Maybe they are never even born in a time when it’s even possible to find out.”

She took a deep breath. “It’s all the people who never get to know what it is they can really be. It’s all the wasted chances. Well, Holy Wood is my chance, do you understand? This is my time for getting!”

Victor nodded. “Yes,” he said. Magic for ordinary people, Silverfish had called it. A man turned a handle, and your life got changed.

“And not just for me,” Ginger went on. “It’s a chance for all of us. The people who aren’t wizards and kings and heroes. Holy Wood’s like a big bubbling stew but this time different ingredients float to the top. Suddenly there’s all these new things for people to do. Do you know the theaters don’t allow women to act? But Holy Wood does. And in Holy Wood there’s jobs for trolls that don’t just involve hitting people. And what did the handlemen do before they had handles to turn?”

She waved a hand vaguely in the direction of Ankh-Morpork’s distant glow.

“Now they’re trying to find ways of adding sound to moving pictures,” she said, “and out there are people who’ll turn out to be amazingly good at making, making…making soundies. They don’t even know it yet—but they’re out there. I can feel them. They’re out there.”

Her eyes were glowing gold. It might just be the sunset, Victor thought, but…

“Because of Holy Wood, hundreds of people are finding out what it is they really want to be,” said Ginger. “And thousands and thousands are getting a chance to forget themselves for an hour or so. This whole damn world is being given a shake!”

“That’s it,” said Victor. “That’s what worries me. It’s as though we’re being slotted in. You think we’re using Holy Wood, but Holy Wood is using us. All of us.”

“How? Why?”

“I don’t know, but—”

“Look at wizards,” Ginger went on, vibrating with indignation. “What good has their magic ever done anyone?”

“I think it sort of holds the world together—” Victor began.

“They’re pretty good at magic flames and things, but can they make a loaf of bread?” Ginger wasn’t in the mood for listening to anyone.

“Not for very long,” said Victor helplessly.

“What does that mean?”

“Something real like a loaf of bread contains a lot of…well…I suppose you’d call it energy,” said Victor. “It takes a massive amount of power to create that amount of energy. You’d have to be a pretty good wizard to make a loaf that’d last in this world for more than a tiny part of a second. But that’s not what magic is really about, you see,” he added quickly, “because this world is—”

“Who cares?” said Ginger. “Holy Wood’s really doing things for ordinary people. Silver screen magic.”

“What’s come over you? Last night—”

“That was then,” said Ginger impatiently. “Don’t you see? We could be going somewhere. We could be becoming someone. Because of Holy Wood. The world is our—”

“Lobster,” said Victor.

She waved a hand irritably. “Any shellfish you like,” she said. “I was thinking of oysters, actually.”

“Were you? I was thinking of lobsters.”

 

“Bursaar!”

I shouldn’t have to run around like this at my age, thought the Bursar, scurrying down the corridor in answer to the Archchancellor’s bellow. Why’s he so interested in the damn thing, anyway? Wretched pot!

“Coming, Master,” he trilled.

The Archchancellor’s desk was covered with ancient documents.

When a wizard died, all his papers were stored in one of the outlying reaches of the Library. Shelf after shelf of quietly moldering documents, the haunt of mysterious beetles and dry rot, stretched away into an unguessable distance. Everyone kept telling everyone that there was a wealth of material here for researchers, if only someone could find the time to do it.

The Bursar was annoyed. He couldn’t find the Librarian anywhere. The ape never seemed to be around these days. He’d had to scrabble among the stuff himself.

“I think this is the last, Archchancellor,” he said, tipping an avalanche of dusty paperwork onto the desk. Ridcully flailed at a cloud of moths.

“Paper, paper, paper,” he muttered. “How many damn bits of paper in his stuff, eh?”

“Er…23,813, Archchancellor,” said the Bursar. “He kept a record.”

“Look at this,” said the Archchancellor. “‘Star Enumerator’…‘Rev Counter for Use in Ecclesiastical Areas’…‘Swamp Meter’…Swamp meter! The man was mad!”

“He had a very tidy mind,” said the Bursar.

“Same thing.”

“Is it, er, really important, Archchancellor?” the Bursar ventured.

“Damn thing shot pellets at me,” said Ridcully. “Twice!”

“I’m sure it wasn’t, er, intended—”

“I want to see how it was made, man! Just think of the sportin’ possibilities!”

The Bursar tried to think of the possibilities.

“I’m sure Riktor didn’t intend to make any kind of offensive device,” he ventured, hopelessly.

“Who gives a damn what he intended? Where is the thing now?”

“I had a couple of servants put sandbags around it.”

“Good idea. It’s—”

…whumm…whumm…

It was a muffled sound from the corridor. The two wizards exchanged a meaningful glance.

…whumm…whummWHUMM.

The Bursar held his breath.

Plib

Plib.

Plib.

The Archchancellor peered at the hourglass on the mantelpiece. “It’s doin’ it every five minutes now,” he said.

“And it’s up to three shots,” said the Bursar. “I’ll have to order some more sandbags.”

He flicked through a heap of paper. A word caught his eye.

Reality.

He glanced at the handwriting that flowed across the page. It had a very small, cramped, deliberate look. Someone had told him that this was because Numbers Riktor had been an anal retentive. The Bursar didn’t know what that meant, and hoped never to find out.

Another word was: Measurement. His gaze drifted upward, and took in the underlined title: Some Notes on the Objective Measurement of Reality.

Over the page was a diagram. The Bursar stared at it.

“Found anything?” said the Archchancellor, without looking up.

The Bursar shoved the paper up the sleeve of his robe.

“Nothing important,” he said.

 

Down below, the surf boomed on the beach. (…and below the surface, the lobsters walked backward along the deep, drowned streets…)

Victor threw another piece of driftwood onto the fire. It burned blue with salt.

“I don’t understand her,” he said. “Yesterday she was quite normal, today it’s all gone to her head.”

“Bitches!” said Gaspode, sympathetically.

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” said Victor. “She’s just aloof.”

“Loofs!” said Gaspode.

“That’s what intelligence does for your sex life,” said Don’t-call-me-Mr-Thumpy. “Rabbits never have that sort of trouble. Go, Sow, Thank You Doe.”

“You could try offering her a moushe,” said the cat.

“Preshent company exchepted, of course,” it added guiltily, trying to avoid Definitely-Not-Squeak’s glare.

“Being intelligent hasn’t done my social life any favors, either,” said Mr. Thumpy bitterly. “A week ago, no problems. Now suddenly I want to make conversation, and all they do is sit there wrinklin’ their noses at you. You feel a right idiot.”

There was a strangulated quacking.

“The duck says, have you done anything about the book?” said Gaspode.

“I had a look at it when we broke for lunch,” said Victor.

There was another irritable quack.

“The duck says, yes, but what have you done about it?” said Gaspode.

“Look, I can’t go all the way to Ankh-Morpork just like that,” snapped Victor. “It takes hours! We film all day as it is!”

“Ask for a day off,” said Mr. Thumpy.

“No one asks for a day off in Holy Wood!” said Victor.

“I’ve been fired once, thank you.”

“And he took you on again at more money,” said Gaspode.

“Funny, that.” He scratched an ear. “Tell him your contract says you can have a day off.”

“I haven’t got a contract. You know that. You work, you get paid. It’s simple.”

“Yeah,” said Gaspode. “Yeah. Yeah? A verbal contract. It’s simple. I like it.”

 

Toward the end of the night Detritus the troll lurked awkwardly in the shadows by the back door of the Blue Lias. Strange passions had wracked his body all day. Every time he’d shut his eyes he kept seeing a figure shaped like a small hillock.

He had to face up to it.

Detritus was in love.

Yes, he’d spent many years in Ankh-Morpork hitting people for money. Yes, it had been a friendless, brutalizing life. And a lonely one, too. He’d been resigned to an old-age of bitter bachelorhood and suddenly, now, Holy Wood was handing him a chance he’d never dreamed of.

He’d been strictly brought up and he could dimly remember the lecture he’d been given by his father when he was a young troll. If you saw a girl you liked, you didn’t just rush at her. There were proper ways to go about things.

He’d gone down to the beach and found a rock. But not any old rock. He’d searched carefully, and found a large sea-smoothed one with veins of pink and white quartz. Girls liked that sort of thing.

Now he waited, shyly, for her to finish work.

He tried to think of what he would say. No one had ever told him what to say. It wasn’t as if he was a smart troll like Rock or Morry, who had a way with words. Basically, he’d never needed much of what you might call a vocabulary. He kicked despondently at the sand. What chance did he have with a smart lady like her?

There was a thump of heavy feet, and the door opened. The object of desire stepped out into the night and took a deep breath, which had the same effect on Detritus as an ice cube down the neck.

He gave his rock a panicky look. It didn’t seem anything like big enough now, when you saw the size of her. But maybe it was what you did with it that mattered.

Well, this was it. They said you never forgot your first time…

He wound up his arm with the rock in it and hit her squarely between the eyes.

That’s when it all started to go wrong.

Tradition said that the girl, when she was able to focus again, and if the rock was of an acceptable standard, should immediately be amenable to whatever the troll suggested, i.e., a candle-lit human for two, although of course that sort of thing wasn’t done anymore now, at least if there was any chance of being caught.

She shouldn’t narrow her eyes and catch him a ding across the ear that made his eyeballs rattle.

“You stupid troll!” she shouted, as Detritus staggered around in a circle. “What you do that for? You think I unsophisticated girl just off mountain? Why you not do it right?”

“But, but,” Detritus began, in terror at her rage, “I not able to ask father permission to hit you, not know where he living—”

Ruby drew herself up haughtily.

“All that old-fashioned stuff very uncultured now,” she sniffed. “It’s not the modern way. I not interested in any troll,” she added, “that not up-to-date. A rock on the head may be quite sentimental,” she went on, the certainty draining out of her voice as she surveyed the sentence ahead of her, “but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.” She hesitated. That didn’t sound right, even to her.

It certainly puzzled Detritus.

“What? You want I should knock my teeth out?” he said.

“Well, all right, not diamonds,” Ruby conceded. “But there proper modern ways now. You got to court a girl.”

Detritus brightened. “Ah, but I—” he began.

“That’s court, not caught,” said Ruby wearily. “You got to, to, to—” She paused.

She wasn’t all that sure what you had to do. But Ruby had spent some weeks in Holy Wood, and if Holy Wood did anything, it changed things; in Holy Wood she’d plugged into a vast cross-species female freemasonry she hadn’t suspected existed, and she was learning fast. She’d talked at length to sympathetic human girls. And dwarfs. Even dwarfs had better courtship rituals, for gods’ sake. ¹⁶ And what humans got up to was amazing.

Whereas all a female troll had to look forward to was a quick thump on the head and the rest of her life subduing and cooking anything the male dragged back to the cave.

Well, there were going to be changes. Next time Ruby went home the troll mountains were going to receive their biggest shake-up since the last continental collision. In the meantime, she was going to start with her own life.

She waved a massive hand in a vague way.

“You got to, to sing outside a girl’s window,” she said, “and, and you got to give her oograah.”

“Oograah?”

“Yeah. Pretty oograah.”¹⁷

Detritus scratched his head.

“Why?” he said.

Ruby looked panicky for a moment. She also couldn’t for the life of her imagine why the handing over of inedible vegetation was so important, but she wasn’t about to admit it.

“Fancy you not knowing that,” she said scathingly.

The sarcasm was lost on Detritus. Most things were.

“Right,” he said. “I not so uncultured as you think,” he added. “I bang up to date. You wait and see.”

 

Hammering filled the air. Buildings were spreading backward from the nameless main street into the dunes. No one owned any land in Holy Wood; if it was empty, you built on it.

Dibbler had two offices now. There was one where he shouted at people, and a bigger one just outside it where people shouted at each other. Soll shouted at handlemen. Handlemen shouted at alchemists. Demons wandered over every flat surface and drowned in the coffee cups and shouted at one another. A couple of experimental green parrots shouted at themselves. People wearing odd bits of costume wandered in and just shouted. Silverfish shouted because he couldn’t quite work out why he now had a desk in the outer office even though he owned the studio.

Gaspode sat stolidly by the door to the inner office. In the past five minutes he had attracted one half-hearted kick, a soggy biscuit and a pat on the head. He reckoned he was ahead of the game, dogwise.

He was trying to listen to all the conversation at once. It was extremely instructive. For one thing, some of the people coming in and shouting were carrying bags of money…

“You what?”

The shout had come from the inner office. Gaspode cocked the other ear.

“I, er, want a day off, Mr Dibbler,” said Victor.

“A day off? You don’t want to work?”

“Just for the day, Mr Dibbler.”

“But you don’t think I’m going to go around paying people to have days off, do you? I’m not made of money, you know. It’s not as if we make a profit, even. Hold a crossbow to my head, why don’t you.”

Gaspode looked at the bags in front of Soll, who was furiously adding up piles of coins. He raised a cynical eyebrow.

There was a pause. Oh, no, thought Gaspode. The young idiot’s forgetting his lines.

“I don’t want paying, Mr Dibbler.”

Gaspode relaxed.

“You don’t want paying?”

“No, Mr. Dibbler.”

“But you want a job when you get back, I suppose?” said Dibbler sarcastically.

Gaspode tensed. Victor had taken a lot of coaching.

“Well, I hope so, Mr. Dibbler. But I was thinking of going to see what Untied Alchemists had to offer.”

There was a sound exactly like the sound of a chairback striking the wall. Gaspode grinned evilly.

Another bag of money was dropped in front of Soll.

“Untied Alchemists!”

“They really look as if they’re making progress with soundies, Mr. Dibbler,” said Victor meekly.

“But they’re amateurs! And crooks!”

Gaspode frowned. He hadn’t been able to coach Victor past this stage.

“Well, that’s a relief, Mr. Dibbler.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, it’d be dreadful if they were crooks and professional.”

Gaspode nodded. Nice one. Nice one.

There was the sound of footsteps hurrying around a desk. When Dibbler spoke next, you could have sunk a well in his voice and sold it at ten dollars a barrel.

“Victor! Vic! Haven’t I been like an uncle to you?”

Well, yes, thought Gaspode. He’s like an uncle to most people here. That’s because they’re his nephews.

He stopped listening, partly because Victor was going to get his day off and was very likely going to get paid for it as well, but mainly because another dog had been led into the room.

It was huge and glossy. Its coat shone like honey.

Gaspode recognized it as pure-bred Ramtop hunting dog. When it sat down beside him, it was as if a beautifully sleek racing yacht had slipped into a berth alongside a coal barge.

He heard Soll say, “So that is Uncle’s latest idea, is it? What’s it called?”

“Laddie,” said the handler.

“How much was it?”

“Sixty dollars.”

“For a dog? We’re in the wrong business.”

“It can do all kinds of tricks, the breeder said. Bright as a button, he said. Just what Mr. Dibbler is looking for.”

“Well, tie it up there. And if that other mutt starts a fight, kick it out.”

Gaspode gave Soll a long, thoughtful scrutiny. Then, when the attention was no longer on them, he sidled closer to the newcomer, looked it up and down, and spoke quietly out of the corner of his mouth.

“What you here for?” he said.

The dog gave him a look of handsome incomprehension.

“I mean, do you b’long to someone or what?” said Gaspode.

The dog whined softly.

Gaspode tried Basic Canine, which is a combination of whines and sniffs.

“Hallo?” he ventured. “Anyone in there?”

The dog’s tail thumped uncertainly.

“The grub here’s ruddy awful,” said Gaspode.

The dog raised its highly-bred muzzle.

“What dis place?” it said.

“This is Holy Wood,” said Gaspode conversationally. “I’m Gaspode. Named after the famous Gaspode, you know. Anythin’ you want to know, you just—”

“All dese two-legs here. Dur…What dis place?”

Gaspode stared.

At that moment Dibbler’s door opened. Victor emerged, coughing, at one end of a cigar.

“Great, great,” said Dibbler, following him out. “Knew we could sort it out. Don’t waste it, boy, don’t waste it. They cost a dollar a box. Oh, I see you brought your little doggie.”

“Woof,” said Gaspode, irritably.

The other dog gave a short sharp bark and sat up with obedient alertness radiating from every hair.

“Ah,” said Dibbler, “and I see we’ve got our wonder dog.”

Gaspode’s apology for a tail twitched once or twice.

Then the truth dawned.

He glared at the larger dog, opened his mouth to speak, caught himself just in time, and managed to turn it into a “Bark?”

“I got the idea the other night, when I saw your dog,” said Dibbler. “I thought, people like animals. Me, I like dogs. Good image, the dog. Saving lives, Man’s best friend, that kind of stuff.”

Victor looked at Gaspode’s furious expression.

“Gaspode’s quite bright,” he said.

“Oh, I expect you think he is,” said Dibbler. “But you’ve just got to look at the two of them. On the one hand there’s this bright, alert, handsome animal, and on the other there’s this dust ball with a hangover. I mean, no contest, am I right?”

The wonder dog gave a brisk yap.

“What dis place? Good boy Laddie!”

Gaspode rolled his eyes.

“See what I mean?” said Dibbler. “Give him the right name, a bit a training, and a star is born.” He slapped Victor on the back again. “Nice to see you, nice to see you, drop in again any time, only not too frequently, let’s have lunch sometime, now get out, Soll!”

“Coming, Uncle.”

Victor was suddenly alone, apart from the dogs and the room full of people. He took the cigar out of his mouth, spat on the glowing end, and carefully hid it behind a potted plant.

“A star is whelped,” said a small, withering voice from below.

“What he say? Where dis place?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Victor. “Nothing to do with me.”

“Will you just look at it? I mean, are we talking Thicko City here or what?” sneered Gaspode.

“Good boy Laddie!”

“Come on,” said Victor. “I’m supposed to be on set in five minutes.”

Gaspode trailed after him, muttering under his horrible breath. Victor caught the occasional “old rug” and “Man’s best friend” and “bloody wonder bloody dog.” Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer.

“You’re just jealous,” he said.

“What, of an overgrown puppy with a single-figure IQ?” sneered Gaspode.

“And a glossy coat, cold nose and probably a pedigree as long as your ar—as my arm,” said Victor.

“Pedigree? Pedigree? What’s a pedigree? It’s just breedin’. I had a father too, you know. And two grandads. And four great grandads. And many of ’em were the same dog, even. So don’t you tell me from no pedigree,” said Gaspode.

He paused to cock a leg against one of the supports of the new “Home of Century of the Fruitbat Moving Pictures’ sign.

That was something else that had puzzled Thomas Silverfish. He’d come in this morning, and the hand-painted sign saying “Interesting and Instructive Films” had gone and had been replaced by this huge billboard. He was sitting back in the office with his head in his hands, trying to convince himself that it had been his idea.

“I’m the one Holy Wood called,” Gaspode muttered, in a self-pitying voice. “I came all the way here, and then they chose that great hairy thing. Probably it’ll work for a plate of meat a day, too.”

“Well, look, maybe you weren’t called to Holy Wood to be a wonder dog,” said Victor. “Maybe it’s got something else in mind for you.”

This is ridiculous, he thought. Why are we talking about it like this? A place hasn’t got a mind. It can’t call people to it…well, unless you count things like homesickness. But you can’t be homesick for a place you’ve never been to before, it stands to reason. The last time people were here must have been thousands of years ago.

Gaspode sniffed at a wall.

“Did you tell Dibbler everything I told you?” he said.

“Yes. He was very upset when I mentioned about going to Untied Alchemists.”

Gaspode sniggered.

“An’ you told him what I said about a verbal contract not being worth the paper it’s printed on?”

“Yes. He said he didn’t understand what I meant. But he gave me a cigar. And he said he’d pay for me and Ginger to go to Ankh-Morpork soon. He said he’s got a really big picture planned.”

“What is it?” said Gaspode suspiciously.

“He didn’t say.”

“Listen, lad,” said Gaspode, “Dibbler’s making a fortune. I counted it. There were five thousand, two hundred and seventy-three dollars and fifty-two pence on Soll’s desk. And you earned it. Well, you and Ginger did.”

“Gosh!”

“Now, there’s some new words I want you to learn,” said Gaspode. “Think you can?”

“I hope so.”

“‘Per-cent-age of the gross,’” said Gaspode. “There. Think you can remember it?”

“‘Per-cent-age of the gross,’” said Victor.

“Good lad.”

“What does it mean?”

“Don’t you worry about that,” said Gaspode. “You just have to say it’s what you want, OK. When the time’s right.”

“When will the time be right, then?” said Victor.

Gaspode grinned nastily. “Oh, I reckon when Dibbler’s just got a mouthful of food’d be favorite.”

 

Holy Wood Hill bustled like an ant heap. On the seaward side Fir Wood Studios were making The Third Gnome. Microlithic Pictures, which was run almost entirely by the dwarfs, was hard at work on Golde Diggers of 1457, which was going to be followed by The Golde Rushe. Floating Bladder Pictures was hard at work with Turkey Legs. And Borgle’s was packed out.

“I don’t know what it’s called, but we’re doing one about going to see a wizard. Something about following a yellow sick toad,” a man in one half of a lion suit explained to a companion in the queue.

“No wizards in Holy Wood, I thought.”

“Oh, this one’s all right. He’s not very good at the wizarding.”

“So what’s new?”

Sound! That was the problem. Alchemists toiled in sheds all over Holy Wood, screaming at parrots, pleading with mynah birds, constructing intricate bottles to trap sound and bounce it around harmlessly until it was time for it to be let out. To the sporadic boom of octo-cellulose exploding was added the occasional sob of exhaustion or scream of agony as an enraged parrot mistook a careless thumb for a nut.

The parrots weren’t the success they’d hoped for. It was true that they could remember what they heard and repeat it after a fashion, but there was no way to turn them off and they were in the habit of ad-libbing other sounds they’d heard or, Dibbler suspected, had been taught by mischievous handlemen. Thus, brief snatches of romantic dialogue would be punctuated with cries of “Waaaarrrk! Showusyerknickers!” and Dibbler said he had no intention of making that kind of picture, at least at the moment.

Sound! Whoever got sound first would rule Holy Wood, they said. People were flocking to the clicks now, but people were fickle. Color was different. Color was just a matter of breeding demons who could paint fast enough. It was sound that meant something new.

In the meantime, there were stop-gap measures. The dwarfs’ studio had shunned the general practice of putting the dialogue on cards between scenes and had invented subtitles, which worked fine provided the performers remembered not to step too far forward and knock over the letters.

But if sound was missing, then the screen had to be filled from side to side with a feast for the eyes. The sound of hammering was always Holy Wood’s background noise, but it redoubled now…

The cities of the world were being built in Holy Wood.

Untied Alchemists started it, with a one-tenth-size wood and canvas replica of the Great Pyramid of Tsort. Soon the backlots sprouted whole streets in Ankh-Morpork, palaces from Pseudopolis, castles from the Hublands. In some cases, the streets were painted on the back of the palaces, so that princes and peasants were separated by one thickness of painted sacking.

Victor spent the rest of the morning working on a one-reeler. Ginger hardly said a word to him, even after the obligatory kiss when he rescued her from whatever it was Morry was supposed to be today. Whatever magic Holy Wood worked on them it wasn’t doing it today. He was glad to get away.

Afterward he wandered across the backlot to watch them putting Laddie the Wonder Dog through his paces.

There was no doubt, as the graceful shape streaked like an arrow over obstacles and grabbed a trainer by a well-padded arm, that here was a dog almost designed by Nature for moving pictures. He even barked photogenically.

“An’ do you know what he’s sayin’?” said a disgruntled voice beside Victor. It was Gaspode, a picture of bow-legged misery.

“No. What?” said Victor.

“‘Me Laddie. Me good boy. Good boy Laddie,’” said Gaspode. “Makes you want to throw up, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, but could you leap a six-foot hurdle?” said Victor.

“That’s intelligent, is it?” said Gaspode. “I always walk around—what’s that they’re doing now?”

“Giving him his lunch, I think.”

“They call that lunch, do they?”

Victor watched Gaspode stroll over and peer into the dog’s bowl. Laddie gave him a sideways look. Gaspode barked quietly. Laddie whined. Gaspode barked again.

There was a lengthy exchange of yaps.

Then Gaspode strolled back, and sat down beside Victor.

“Watch this,” he said.

Laddie took the food bowl in his mouth, and turned it upside down.

“Disgustin’ stuff,” said Gaspode. “All tubes and innards. I wouldn’t give it to a dog, and I am one.”

“You made him tip out his own dinner?” said Victor, horrified.

“Very obedient lad, I thought,” said Gaspode smugly.

“What a nasty thing to do!”

“Oh, no. I give ’im some advice, too.”

Laddie barked peremptorily at the people clustering around him. Victor heard them muttering.

“Dog don’t eat his dinner,” came Detritus’ voice, “dog go hungry.”

“Don’t be daft. Mr. Dibbler says he’s worth more than we are!”

“Perhaps it’s not what he’s used to. I mean, a posh dog like him an’ all. It’s a bit yukky, isn’t it?”

“It dog food! That what dogs are supposed to eat!”

“Yeah, but is it wonder dog food? What’re wonder dogs fed on?”

“Mr Dibbler’ll feed you to him if there’s any trouble.”

“All right, all right. Detritus, go around to Borgle’s. See what he’s got. Not the stuff he gives to the usual customers, mind.”

“That IS the stuff he give to usual customers.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Five minutes later Detritus trailed back carrying about nine pounds of raw steak. It was dumped in the dog bowl. The trainers looked at Laddie.

Laddie cocked an eye toward Gaspode, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

The big dog put one foot on one end of the steak, took the other end in his mouth, and tore off a lump. Then he padded over the compound and dropped it respectfully in front of Gaspode, who gave it a long, calculating stare.

“Well, I dunno,” he said at last. “Does that look like ten percent to you, Victor?”

“You negotiated his dinner?”

Gaspode’s voice was muffled by meat. “I reckon ten percent is ver’ fair. Very fair, in the circumstances.”

“You know, you really are a son of a bitch,” said Victor.

“Proud of it,” said Gaspode, indistinctly. He bolted the last of the steak. “What shall we do now?”

“I’m supposed to get an early night. We’re starting for Ankh very early tomorrow,” said Victor doubtfully.

“Still not made any progress with the book?”

“No.”

“Let me have a look, then.”

“Can you read?”

“Dunno. Never tried.”

Victor looked around them. No one was paying him any attention. They never did. Once the handles stopped turning, no one bothered about performers; it was like being temporarily invisible.

He sat down on a pile of lumber, opened the book randomly at an early page, and held it out in front of Gaspode’s critical stare.

Eventually the dog said, “It’s got all marks on it.”

Victor sighed. “That’s writing,” he said.

Gaspode squinted. “What, all them little pictures?”

“Early writing was like that. People drew little pictures to represent ideas.”

“So…if there’s a lot of one picture, it means it’s an important idea?”

“What? Well, yes. I suppose so.”

“Like the dead man.”

Victor was lost.

“The dead man on the beach?”

“No. The dead man on the pages. See? Everywhere, there’s the dead man.”

Victor gave him an odd look, and then turned the book around and peered at it.

“Where? I don’t see any dead men.”

Gaspode snorted.

“Look, all over the page,” he said. “He looks just like those tombs you get in old temples and stuff. You know? Where they do this statchoo of the stiff lyin’ on top of the tomb, with his arms crossed an’ holdin’ his sword. Dead noble.”

“Good grief! You’re right! It does look sort of…dead…”

“Prob’ly all the writing’s goin’ on about what a great guy he was when he was alive,” said Gaspode knowledgeably.

“You know, ‘Slayer of thousands’ stuff. Prob’ly he left a lot of money for priests to say prayers and light candles and sacrifice goats and stuff. There used to be a lot of that sort of thing. You know, you’d get dese guys whorin’ and drinkin’ and carryin’ on regardless their whole life, and then when the old Grim Reaper starts sharpenin’ his scythe they suddenly becomes all pious and pays a lot of priests to give their soul a quick wash-and-brush-up and gen’rally keep on tellin’ the gods what a decent chap they was.”

“Gaspode?” said Victor levelly.

“What?”

“You were a performing dog. How come you know all this stuff?”

“I ain’t just a pretty face.”

“You aren’t even a pretty face, Gaspode.”

The little dog shrugged. “I’ve always had eyes and ears,” he said. “You’d be amazed, the stuff you see and hear when you’re a dog. I dint know what any of it meant at the time, of course. Now I do.”

Victor stared at the pages again. There certainly was a figure which, if you half-closed your eyes, looked very much like a statue of a knight with his hands resting on his sword.

“It might not mean a man,” he said. “Pictographic writing doesn’t work like that. It’s all down to context, you see.” He racked his brains to think of some of the books he’d seen.

“For example, in the Agatean language the signs for ‘woman’ and ‘slave’ written down together actually mean ‘wife.’”

He looked closely at the page. The dead man—or the sleeping man, or the standing man resting his hands on his sword, the figure was so stylized it was hard to be sure—seemed to appear beside another common picture. He ran his finger along the line of pictograms.

“See,” he said, “it could be the man figure is only part of a word. See? It’s always to the right of this other picture, which looks a bit like—a bit like a doorway, or something. So it might really mean—” he hesitated. “‘Doorway/man,’” he hazarded.

He turned the book slightly.

“Could be some old king,” said Gaspode. “Could mean something like The Man with the Sword is Imprisoned, or something. Or maybe it means Watch Out, There’s a Man with a Sword behind the Door. Could mean anything, really.”

Victor squinted at the book again. “It’s funny,” he said. “It doesn’t look dead. Just…not alive. Waiting to be alive? A waiting man with a sword?”

Victor peered at the little man-figure. It had hardly any features, but still managed to look vaguely familiar.

“You know,” he said, “it looks just like my Uncle Osric…”

 

Clickaclickaclicka. Click.

The film spun to a standstill. There was a thunder of applause, a stamping of feet and a barrage of empty banged grain bags.

In the very front row of the Odium the Librarian stared up at the now-empty screen. It was the fourth time that afternoon he’d watched Shadow of the Dessert, because there’s something about a 300lb orangutan that doesn’t encourage people to order it out of the pit between houses. A drift of peanut shells and screwed up paper bags lay around his feet.

The Librarian loved the clicks. They spoke to something in his soul. He’d even started writing a story which he thought would make a very good moving picture. ¹⁸ Everyone he showed it to said it was jolly good, often even before they’d read it.

But something about this click was worrying him. He’d sat through it four times, and he was still worried.

He eased himself out of the three seats he was occupying and knuckled his way up the aisle and into the little room where Bezam was rewinding the film.

Bezam looked up as the door opened.

“Get out—” he began, and then grinned desperately and said, “Hallo, sir. Pretty good click, eh? We’ll be showing it again any minute now and—what the hell are you doing? You can’t do that!”

The Librarian ripped the huge roll of film off the projector and pulled it through his leathery fingers, holding it up to the light. Bezam tried to snatch it back and got a palm in his chest that sat him firmly on the floor, where great coils of film piled up on top of him.

He watched in horror as the great ape grunted, grasped a piece of the film in both hands and, with two bites, edited it. Then the Librarian picked him up, dusted him off, patted him on the head, thrust the great pile of unwound click into his helpless arms, and ambled swiftly out of the room with a few frames of film dangling from one paw.

Bezam stared helplessly after him.

“You’re banned!” he shouted, when he judged the ape to be safely out of earshot.

Then he looked down at the two severed ends.

Breaks in films weren’t unusual. Bezam had spent many a flustered few minutes feverishly cutting and pasting while the audience cheerfully stamped its feet and high-spiritedly threw peanuts, knives and double-headed axes at the screen.

He let the coils fall around him and reached for the scissors and glue. At least—he found, after holding the two ends up to the lantern—the Librarian hadn’t taken a very interesting bit. Odd, that. Bezam wouldn’t have put it past the ape to have taken a bit where the girl was definitely showing too much chest, or one of the fight scenes. But all he’d wanted was a piece that showed the Sons galloping down from their mountain fastness, in single file, on identical camels.

“Dunno what he wanted that for,” he muttered, taking the lid off the glue pot. “It just shows a lot of rocks.”

 

Victor and Gaspode stood among the sand dunes near the beach.

“That’s where the driftwood hut is,” said Victor, pointing,

“and then if you look hard you can see there’s a sort of road pointing straight toward the hill. But there’s nothing on the hill but the old trees.”

Gaspode looked back at Holy Wood Bay.

“Funny it bein’ circular,” he said.

“I thought so,” said Victor.

“I heard once where there was this city that was so wicked that the gods turned it into a puddle of molten glass,” said Gaspode, apropos of nothing. “And the only person who saw it happen was turned into a pillar of salt by day and a cheese shaker by night.”

“Gosh. What had the people been doing?”

“Dunno. Prob’ly not much. It doesn’t take much to annoy gods.”

“Me good boy! Good boy Laddie!”

The dog came streaking over the dunes, a comet of gold and orange hair. It skidded to a halt in front of Gaspode, and then began to dance around excitedly, yapping.

“He’s escaped and he wants me to play with him,” said Gaspode despondently. “Ridiculous, ain’t it? Laddie drop dead.”

Laddie rolled over obediently, all four legs in the air.

“See? He understands every word I say,” muttered Gaspode.

“He likes you,” said Victor.

“Huh,” sniffed Gaspode. “How’re dogs ever goin’ to amount to anything if they bounce around worshipping people just ’cos they’ve been given a meal? What’s he want me to do with this??”

Laddie had dropped a stick in front of Gaspode and was looking at him expectantly.

“He wants you to throw it,” said Victor.

“What for?”

“So he can bring it back.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Gaspode, as Victor picked up the stick and hurled it away, Laddie racing along underneath it, “is how come we’re descended from wolves. I mean, your average wolf, he’s a bright bugger, know what I mean? Chock full of cunnin’ an’ like that. We’re talking gray paws racing over the trackless tundra, is what I’m getting at.”

Gaspode looked wistfully at the distant mountains. “And suddenly a handful of generations later we’ve got Percy the Pup here with a cold nose, bright eyes, glossy coat and the brains of a stunned herring.”

“And you,” said Victor. Laddie whirled back in a storm of sand and dropped the damp stick in front of him. Victor picked it up and threw it again. Laddie bounded off, yapping himself sick with excitement.

“Well, yeah,” said Gaspode, ambling along in a bow-legged swagger. “Only I can look after myself. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. You think Dopey the Mutt there would last five minutes in Ankh-Morpork? He set one paw in some o’ the streets, he’s three sets of fur gloves an’ Crispy Fried No. 27 at the nearest Klatchian all-night carryout.”

Victor threw the stick again.

“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.