"Look at that, willya?" said the raven rhetorically. It waved a claw at a bird feeder in the garden below. "They hangs up half a bloody coconut, a lump of bacon rind, a handful of peanuts in a bit of wire and they think they're the gods' gift to the nat'ral world. Huh. Do I see eyeballs? Do I see entrails? I think not. Most intelligent bird in the temperate latitudes an' I gets the cold shoulder just because I can't hang upside down and go twit, twit. Look at robins, now. Stroppy little evil buggers, fight like demons, but all they got to do is go bob-bob-bobbing along and they can't move for bread crumbs. Whereas me myself can recite poems and repeat many hum'rous phrases-"
SQUEAK!.
"Yes? What?"
The Death of Rats pointed at the roof and then the sky and jumped up and down excitedly. The raven swiveled one eye upward.
"Oh, yes. Him," he said. "Turns up at this time of year. Tends to be associated distantly with robins, which-"
SQUEAK! SQUEE IK IK IK! The Death of Rats pantomimed a figure landing in a grate and walking around a room. SQUEAK EEK IK IK, SQUEAK "HEEK HEEK HEEK!" IK IK SQUEAK!
"Been overdoing the Hogswatch cheer, have you? Been rooting around in the brandy butter?"
SQUEAK?.
The raven's eyes revolved.
"Look, Death's Death. It's a full-time job right? It's not as though you can run, like, a window cleaning round on the side or nip round after work cutting people's lawns."
SQUEAK!.
"Oh, please yourself."
The raven crouched a little to allow 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 suggesting-"
Susan didn't like Biers but she went there anyway, when the pressure of being normal got too much. Biers, despite the smell and the drink and the company, had one important virtue. In Biers no one took any notice. Of anything. Hogswatch was traditionally 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 willing,* Biers was not a family place. 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 all 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.
"Well, 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 telling you again, Shlimazel," said Igor.
He saw the girl turn to face Shlimazel.
Igor wasn't in a position to see her face fully, but the bogeyman was. He shot back so quickly that he fell 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 frantically out of the wreckage of his stool and loped toward 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..."
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 sleigh drawn by the four piggies, the whole thing..."
"Pigs? What happened to Binky?"
"Search me. O' course, it can happen, as I was telling 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 onto that.
The Death of Rats squeaked at length.
"The rat says you must remember, he's tall, not what you'd call 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 closed the window. He didn't pass any comment.
"They weren't real," said Susan, hurriedly. "Well, 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, gratefully. "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'll be a dollar for the drinks," he said, "and five pence because the raven that wasn't here messed in the pickles."
It was the night before Hogswatch.
In the Archchancellor'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. Ridcully had said, "I'll test it when I use it," and Modo never argued with the Gentlemen, as he thought of them. He knew that they all 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. Ridcully had been very specific about that.
"Verruca Gnome," he said to himself, giving a 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 bells.
Glingleglingleglingle...
And someone landed abruptly in a snow drift 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 sleigh soared onward 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.
"Well, 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 walls is not right, neither," said the voice from the sacks.
IT WORKS FOR ME.
"It's got to be chimneys. Same as the beard, really."
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 jolly little green hat with a bell 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-colored 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 walls?" it said. "And the 'Ho, ho, ho' could use some more work, if you don't mind my saying so."
HO. HO. HO.