He wandered down to the far end of the bar.
A glass slid towards him.
SAME AGAIN, said a voice out of the shadows.
‘Er,’ said the barman. ‘Yeah. Sure. What was it?’
ANYTHING.
The barman filled it with rum. It was pulled away.
The barman sought for something to say. For some reason, he was feeling terrified.
‘Don’t see you in here, much,’ he managed.
I COME FOR THE ATMOSPHERE. SAME AGAIN.
‘Work in Holy Wood, do you?’said the barman, topping up the glass quickly. It vanished again.
NOT FOR SOME TIME. SAME AGAIN.
The barman hesitated. He was, at heart, a kindly soul. ‘You don’t think you’ve had enough, do you?’ he said.
I KNOW EXACTLY WHEN I’VE HAD ENOUGH.
‘Everyone says that, though.’
I KNOW WHEN. EVERYONE’S HAD ENOUGH.
There was something very odd about that voice. The barman wasn’t quite sure that he was hearing it with his ears. ‘Oh. Well, er,’ he said. ‘Same again?’
NO. BUSY DAY TOMORROW. KEEP THE CHANGE.
A handful of coins slid across the counter. They felt icy cold, and most of them were heavily corroded.
‘Oh, er-‘ the barman began.
The door opened and shut, letting in a cold blast of air despite the warmth of the night.
The barman wiped the top of the bar in a distracted way, carefully avoiding the coins.
‘You see some funny types, running a bar,’ he muttered. A voice by his ear said, I FORGOT. A PACKET OF NUTS, PLEASE.
Snow glittered on the rimward outriders of the Ramtop mountains, that great world-spanning range which, where it curves around the Circle Sea, forms a natural wall between Klatch and the great flat Sto plains.
It was the home of rogue glaciers and prowling avalanches and high, silent fields of snow.
And yetis. Yetis are a high-altitude species of troll, and quite unaware that eating people is out of fashion. Their view is: if it moves, eat it. If it doesn’t, then wait for it to move. And then eat it.
They’d been listening all day to the sounds. Echoes had bounced from peak to peak along the frozen ranges until, now, it was a steady dull rumble.
‘My cousin’, said one of them, idly probing a hollow tooth with a claw, ‘said they was enormous grey animals. Elephants.’
‘Bigger’n us?’ said the other yeti.
‘Nearly as bigger’n us,’ said the first yeti. ‘Loads of them, he said. More than he could count.’
The second yeti sniffed the wind and appeared to consider this.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said, gloomily. ‘Your cousin can’t count above one.’
‘He said there was lots of big ones. Big fat grey elephants, all climbing, all roped together. Big and slow. All carrying lots of oograah.’
Ah.
The first yeti indicated the vast sloping snowfield.
‘Good and deep today,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s gonna move fast in this, right? We lie down in the snow, they won’t see us till they’re right on top of us, we panic ’em, it’s Big Eats time.’ He waved his enormous paws in the air. ‘Very heavy, my cousin said. They’ll not move fast, you mark my words.’
The other yeti shrugged.
‘Let’s do it,’ he said, against the sound of distant, terrified trumpeting.
They lay down in the snow, their white hides turning them into two unsuspicious mounds. It was a technique that had worked time and again, and had been handed down from yeti to yeti for thousands of years, although it wasn’t going to be handed much further.
They waited.
There was a distant bellowing as the herd approached.
Eventually the first troll said, very slowly, because it had been working this out for a long time. ‘What do you get, right, what do you get if, you cross . . . a mountain with a elephant?’
It never got an answer.
The yetis had been right.
When five hundred crude two-elephant bobsleighs crested the ridge ten feet away at sixty miles an hour, their strapped-on occupants trumpeting in panic, they never saw the yetis until they were right on top of them.
Victor got only two hours’ sleep but got up feeling remarkably refreshed and optimistic.
It was all over. Things were going to be a whole lot better now. Ginger had been quite nice to him last night – well, a few hours ago -and whatever it was in the hill had been well and truly buried.
You got that sort of thing sometimes, he thought, as he poured some water into the cracked basin and had a quick wash. Some wicked old king or wizard gets buried and their spirit creeps about, trying to put things right or something. Well-known effect. But now there must be a million tons of rock blocking the tunnel, and I can’t see anyone doing any creeping through that.
The unpleasantly alive screen surfaced briefly in his memory, but even that didn’t seem so bad now. It had been dark in there, there had been lots of moving shadows, he had been wound up like a spring in any case, no wonder his eyes had played tricks on him. There had been the skeletons, too, but even they now lacked the power to terrify. Victor had heard of tribal leaders up on the cold plains who’d be buried with whole armies of mounted horsemen, so that their souls would live on in the next world. Maybe there was something like that
here, once. Yes, it all seemed much less horrifying in the cold light of day.
And that’s just what it was. Cold light.
The room was full of the kind of light you got when you woke up on a winter’s morning and knew, by the light, that it had snowed. It was a light without shadows.
He went to the window and looked out on a pale silver glow.
Holy Wood had vanished.
The visions of the night fountained up in his mind again, as the darkness returns when the light goes out.
Hang on, hang on, he thought, fighting the panic. It’s only fog. You’re bound to get fog sometimes, this close to the sea. And it’s glowing like that because the sun’s out. There’s nothing occult about fog. It’s just fine drops of water floating in the air. That’s all it is.
He dragged his clothes on and threw open the door to the passage and almost tripped over Gaspode, who had been lying full length in front of the door like the world’s most unwashed draught excluder.
The little dog raised himself unsteadily on his front paws, fixed Victor with a yellow eye and said, ‘I jus’ want you to know, right, that I ain’t lyin’ in front of your door ‘cos of any of this loyal-dog�protectin’-his-master nonsense, OK, it’s jus’ that when I got back here-‘
‘Shut up, Gaspode.’
Victor opened the outer door. Fog drifted in. It seemed to have an exploratory feel to it; it came in as if it had been waiting for just this opportunity.
‘Fog’s just fog,’ he said aloud. ‘Come on. We’re going to Ankh�-Morpork today, remember?’
‘My head,’ said Gaspode, ‘my head feels like the bottom of a cat’s basket.’
‘You can sleep on the coach. I can sleep on the coach, if it comes to that.’
He took a few steps into the silvery glow, and was almost immediately lost. Buildings loomed vaguely at him in the thick clammy air.
‘Gaspode?’ he said hesitantly. Fog’s just fog, he repeated. But it feels crowded. It feels like that, if it suddenly went away, I’d see lots of people watching me. From outside. And that’s ridiculous, because I am outside, so there’s nothing outside of outside. And it’s flickering.
‘I expect you’ll be wantin’ me to lead the way,’ said a smug voice by his knee.
‘It’s very quiet, isn’t it?’ said Victor, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘I expect it’s the fog muffling everything.’
‘O’corse, maybe gharstely creatures have come up out o’ the sea and murthered every mortal soul except us,’ said Gaspode conversationally.
‘Shut up!’
Something loomed up out of the brightness. As it got closer it got smaller, and the tentacles and antennae that Victor’s imagination had been furnishing became the more-or-less ordinary arms and legs of Soll Dibbler.
‘Victor?’ he said uncertainly.
Soll’s relief was visible. ‘Can’t see a thing in this stuff,’ he said. ‘We thought you’d got lost. Come on, it’s nearly noon. We’re more or less ready to go.’
‘I’m ready.’
‘Good.’ Fog droplets had condensed on Soll’s hair and clothing. ‘Er,’ he said. ‘Where are we, exactly?’
Victor turned around. His lodgings had been behind him.
‘The fog changes everything, doesn’t it?’ said Soll unhappily. ‘Er, do you think your little dog can find his way to the studio? He seems quite bright.’
‘Growl, growl,’ said Gaspode, and sat up and begged in what Victor at least recognized as a sarcastic way.
‘My word,’ said Soll. ‘It’s as if he understands, isn’t it?’
Gaspode barked sharply. After a second or two there was a barrage of excited answering barks.