after work cutting people’s lawns.’
SQUEAK!
‘Oh, please yourself.’
The raven crouched a little to al ow the tiny figure to hop on to its back, and then
lumbered into the air.
‘Of course, they can go mental, your occult types,’ it said, as it swooped over the
moonlit garden. ‘Look at Old Man Trouble, for one-‘
SQUEAK.
‘Oh, I’m not suggestin—‘
Susan didn’t like Biers but she went there anyway, when the pressure of being
normal got too much. Biers, despite the smel and the drink and the company, had one
important virtue. In Biers no one took any notice. Of anything. Hogswatch was
traditional y supposed to be a time for families but the people who drank in Biers
probably didn’t have families; some of them looked as though they might have had
litters, or clutches. Some of them looked as though they’d probably eaten their
relatives, or at least someone’s relatives.
Biers was where the undead drank. And when Igor the barman was asked for a
Bloody Mary, he didn’t mix a metaphor.
The regular customers didn’t ask questions, and not only because some of them
found anything above a growl hard to articulate. None of them was in the answers
business. Everyone in Biers drank alone. even when they were in groups. Or packs.
Despite the decorations put up inexpertly by Igor the barman to show wil ing,8 Biers
was not a family place.
Family was a subject Susan liked to avoid.
Currently she was being aided in this by a gin and tonic. In Biers, unless you weren’t
choosy, it paid to order a drink that was transparent because Igor also had undirected
ideas about what you could stick on the end of a cocktail stick. If you saw something
spherical and green, you just had to hope that it was an olive.
She felt hot breath on her ear. A bogeyman had sat down on the stool beside her.
‘Woss a normo doin’ in a place like this, then?’ it rumbled, causing a cloud of
vaporized alcohol and halitosis to engulf her. ‘Hah, you fink it’s cool comin’ down here
an’ swannin’ around in a black dress wid al the lost boys, eh? Dabblin’ in a bit of
designer darkness, eh?’
Susan moved her stool away a little. The bogeyman grinned.
‘Want a bogeyman under yer bed, eh?’
‘Now then, Shlimazel,’ said Igor, without looking up from polishing a glass.
‘Wel , woss she down here for, eh?’ said the bogeyman. A huge hairy hand grabbed
Susan’s arm. ‘O’ course, maybe what she wants is-‘
‘I ain’t tel ing you again, Shlimazel,’ said Igor.
He saw the girl turn to face Shlimazel.
Igor wasn’t in a position to see her face ful y, but the bogeyman was. He shot back
so quickly that he fel off his stool.
And when the girl spoke, what she said was only partly words but also a statement,
written in stone, of how the future was going to be.
‘ GO AWAY AND STOP BOTHERING ME.’
She turned back and gave Igor a polite and slightly apologetic smile. The bogeyman
struggled frantical y out of the wreckage of his stool and loped towards the door.
Susan felt the drinkers turn back to their private preoccupations. It was amazing what
you could get away with in Biers.
Igor put down the glass and looked up at the window. For a drinking den that relied
on darkness it had rather a large one but, of course, some customers did arrive by air.
Something was tapping on it now.
Igor lurched over and opened it.
Susan looked up.
‘Oh, no . . . ‘
8 He’d done his best. But black and purple and vomit yellow weren’t a good colour combination for paperchains, and no Hogswatch fairy doll should be nailed up by its head
The Death of Rats leapt down onto the counter, with the raven fluttering after it.
SQUEAK SQUEAK EEK! EEK! SQUEAK IK IK ‘HEEK HEEK HEEK’! SQ
‘Go away,’ said Susan coldly. ‘I’m not interested. You’re just a figment of my
imagination.’
The raven perched on a bowl behind the bar and said, ‘Ah, great.’
SQUEAK!
‘What’re these?’ said the raven, flicking something off the end of its beak. ‘ Onions?
Pfah!’
‘Go on, go away, the pair of you,’ said Susan.
‘The rat says your granddad’s gone mad,’ said the raven. ‘Says he’s pretending to be
the Hogfather.’
‘Listen, I just don’t- What?’
‘Red cloak, long beard-’
HEEK! HEEK! HEEK!
-going “Ho, ho, ho”, driving around in the big sledge drawn by the four piggies, the
whole thing . . .’
‘Pigs? What happened to Binky?’
‘Search me. O’ course, it can happen, as I was tel ing the rat only just now-‘
Susan put her hands over her ears, more for desperate theatrical effect than for the
muffling they gave.
‘I don’t want to know! I don’t have a grandfather!’
She had to hold on to that.
The Death of Rats squeaked at length.
‘The rat says you must remember, he’s tal , not what you’d cal fleshy, he carries a
scythe-‘
‘Go away! And take the … the rat with you!’
She waved her hand wildly and, to her horror and shame, knocked the little hooded
skeleton over an ashtray.
EEK?
The raven took the rat’s cowl in its beak and tried to drag him away, but a tiny
skeletal fist shook its scythe.
EEK IK EEK SQUEAK!
‘He says, you don’t mess with the rat,’ said the raven.
In a flurry of wings they were gone.
Igor dosed the window. He didn’t pass any comment.
‘They weren’t real,’ said Susan, hurriedly. ‘Wel , that is … the raven’s probably real,
but he hangs around with the rat–’
‘Which isn’t real,’ said Igor.
‘That’s right!’ said Susan, grateful y. ‘You probably didn’t see a thing.’
‘That’s right,’ said Igor. ‘Not a thing.’
‘Now … how much do I owe you?’ said Susan.
Igor counted on his fingers.
‘That’l be a dol ar for the drinks,’ he said, ‘and fivepence because the raven that
wasn’t here messed in the pickles.’
It was the night before Hogswatch.
In the Archchancel or’s new bathroom Modo wiped his hands on a piece of rag and
looked proudly at his handiwork. Shining porcelain gleamed back at him. Copper and
brass shone in the lamplight.
He was a little worried that he hadn’t been able to test everything, but Mr Ridcul y
had said, ‘I’l test it when I use it,’ and Modo never argued with the Gentlemen, as he
thought of them. He knew that they al knew a lot more than he knew, and was quite
happy knowing this. He didn’t meddle with the fabric of time and space, and they kept out of his greenhouses. The way he saw it, it was a partnership.
He’d been particularly careful to scrub the floors. Mr Ridcul y had been very specific
about that.
‘Verruca Gnome,’ he said to himself, giving
tap a last polish. ‘What an imagination the Gentlemen do have.’
Far off, unheard by anyone, was a faint little noise, like the ringing of tiny silver bel s.
Glingleglingleglingle…
And someone landed abruptly in a snowdrift and said, ‘Bugger!’, which is a terrible
thing to say as your first word ever.
Overhead, heedless of the new and somewhat angry life that was even now dusting
itself off, the sledge soared onwards through time and space.
I’M FINDING THE BEARD A BIT OF A TRIAL, said Death.
‘Why’ve you got to have the beard?’ said the voice from among the sacks. ‘I thought
you said people see what they expect to see.’
CHILDREN DON’T. TOO OFTEN THEY SEE WHAT’S THERE.
‘Wel , at least it’s keeping you in the right
frame of mind, master. In character, sort of thing.’
BUT GOING DOWN THE CHIMNEY? WHERE’S THE SENSE IN THAT? I CAN
JUST WALK THROUGH THE WALLS.
‘Walking through the wal s is not right, neither,’ said the voice from the sacks.
IT WORKS FOR ME.
‘It’s got to be chimneys. Same as the beard, real y.’
A head thrust itself out from the pile. It appeared to belong to the oldest, most
unpleasant pixie in the universe. The fact that it was underneath a jol y little green hat
with a bel on it did not do anything to improve matters.
It waved a crabbed hand containing a thick wad of letters, many of them on pastel-
coloured paper, often with bunnies and teddy bears on them, and written mostly in
crayon.
‘You reckon these little buggers’d be writing to someone who walked through wal s?’
it said. ‘And the “Ho, ho, ho” could use some more work, if you don’t mind my saying
so.’
HO. HO. HO.
‘No, no, no!’ said Albert. ‘You got to put a bit of life in it, sir, no offence intended. It’s
got to be a big fat laugh. You got to … you got to sound like you’re pissing brandy and