Moving Pictures (29 page)

There’s a bar like it in every town. It’s dimly-lit and the drinkers, although they talk, don’t address their words to one another and they don’t listen, either. They just talk the hurt inside. It’s a bar for the derelict and the unlucky and all of those people who have been temporarily flagged off the racetrack of life and into the pits.

It always does a brisk trade.

On this dawn the mourners sat ranged along the counter, each in his cloud of gloom, each certain that he was the most unfortunate individual in the whole world.

“I
created
it,” said Silverfish, morosely. “I thought it would be educational. It could broaden people’s horizons. I didn’t intend for it to be a, a, a
show
. With a thousand elephants!” he added nastily.

“Yeah,” said Detritus. “She don’t know what she wants. I do what she want, then she say, that not right, you a troll with no finer feelin’, you do not understand what a girl wants. She say, Girl want sticky things to eat in box with bow around, I make box with bow around, she open box, she scream, she say flayed horse not what she mean. She don’t know what she wants.”

“Yeah,” said a voice from under Silverfish’s stool. “It’d serve ’em all right if I went off an’ joined the wolves.”

“I mean, take this
Blown Away
thing,” said Silverfish. “It’s not even real. It’s not like things really were. It’s just lies. Anyone can tell lies.”

“Yeah,” said Detritus. “Like, she say, Girl want music under window, I play music under window, everyone in street wake up and shouting out of house, You bad troll, what you hitting rocks this time of night? And she never even wake up.”

“Yeah,” said Silverfish.

“Yeah,” said Detritus.

“Yeah,” said the voice under the stool.

The man who ran the bar was naturally cheerful. It wasn’t hard to be cheerful, really, when your customers acted like lightning rods for any misery that happened to be floating around. He’d found that it wasn’t a good idea to say things like, “Never mind, look on the bright side,” because there never was one, or “Cheer up, it may never happen,” because often it already had. All that was expected of him was to keep the drink coming.

He was a little puzzled this morning, though. There seemed to be an extra person in the bar, quite apart from whoever it was speaking up from the floor. He kept getting the feeling that he was serving an extra drink, and even getting paid for it, and even talking to the mysterious purchaser. But he couldn’t see him. In fact he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing, or who he was talking to.

He wandered down to the far end of the bar.

A glass slid toward him.

S
AME AGAIN
, said a voice out of the shadows.

“Er,” said the barman. “Yeah. Sure. What was it?”

A
NYTHING
.

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
. S
AME AGAIN
.

“Work in Holy Wood, do you?” said the barman, topping up the glass quickly. It vanished again.

N
OT FOR SOME TIME
. S
AME 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?”

N
O
. B
USY DAY TOMORROW
. K
EEP 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 gray 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 gray 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 strappedon 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 draft 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?”

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.

“Of course, that’ll be Laddie,” said Soll. “What a clever dog!”

Gaspode looked smug.

“Mind you, that’s Laddie in a nutshell,” said Soll, as they set off toward the barking. “I expect he could teach your dog a few tricks, eh?”

Victor didn’t dare look down.

After a few false turns the archway of Century of the Fruitbat passed overhead like a ghost. There were more people here; the site seemed to be filling up with lost wanderers who didn’t know where else to go.

There was a coach waiting outside Dibbler’s office and Dibbler himself stood beside it, stamping his feet.

“Come on, come on,” he said, “I’ve sent Gaffer ahead with the film. Get in, the pair of you.”

“Can we travel in this?” said Victor.

“What’s to go wrong?” said Dibbler. “There’s one road to Ankh-Morpork. Anyway, we’ll probably be well out of this stuff when we leave the coast. I don’t see why everyone’s so nervy. Fog’s fog.”

“That’s what I say,” said Victor, climbing into the coach.

“It’s just a mercy we finished
Blown Away
yesterday,” said Dibbler. “All this is probably just something seasonal. Nothing to worry about at all.”

“You said that before,” said Soll. “You said it at least five times so far this morning.”

Ginger was hunched on one seat, with Laddie lying underneath it. Victor slid along until he was next to her.

“Did you get any sleep?” he whispered.

“Just an hour or two, I think,” she said. “Nothing happened. No dream or anything.”

Victor relaxed.

“Then it really is over,” he said. “I wasn’t sure.”

“And the fog?” she demanded.

“Sorry?” said Victor guiltily.

“What’s causing the
fog
?”

“Well,” said Victor, “as I understand it, when cool air passes over warm ground, water is precipitated out of—”

“You know what I mean! It’s not like normal fog at all! It—sort of drifts oddly,” she finished lamely. “And you can nearly hear voices,” she added.

“You can’t nearly hear voices,” said Victor, in the hope that his own rational mind would believe him. “You either hear them or you don’t. Listen, we’re both just tired. That’s all it is. We’ve been working hard and, er, not getting much sleep, so it’s understandable that we think we’re nearly hearing and seeing things.”

“Oh, so you’re nearly seeing things, are you?” said Ginger triumphantly. “And don’t you go around using that calm and reasonable tone of voice on me,” she added. “I hate it when people go around being calm and reasonable at me.”