A Blink of the Screen

might need to be done and then you came back here, a place that was real. Nanny Ogg was happy in small places.
    Of course, she reflected as she crossed the lawn, she didn’t have this view out of her window. Nanny lived down in the town, but Granny could look out across the forest and over the plains and all the way to the great round horizon of the Discworld.
    A view like that, Nanny reasoned, could probably suck your mind right out of your head.
    They’d told her the world was round and flat, which was common sense, and went through space on the back of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle, which didn’t have to make sense. It was all happening Out There somewhere, and it could continue to do so with Nanny’s blessing and uninterest so long as she could live in a personal world about ten miles across, which she carried around with her.
    But Esme Weatherwax needed more than this little kingdom could contain. She was the other kind of witch.
    And Nanny saw it as her job to stop Granny Weatherwax getting bored. The business with the apples was petty enough, a spiteful little triumph when you got down to it, but Esme needed something to make every day worthwhile and if it had to be anger and jealousy then so be it. Granny would now scheme for some little victory, some tiny humiliation that only the two of them would ever know about, and that’d be that. Nanny was confident that she could deal with her friend in a bad mood, but not when she was bored. A witch who is bored might do anything.
    People said things like ‘We had to make our own amusements in those days’, as if this signalled some kind of moral worth, and perhaps it did, but the last thing you wanted a witch to do was get bored and start making her own amusements, because witches sometimes had famously erratic ideas about what was amusing. And Esme was undoubtedly the most powerful witch the mountains had seen for generations.
    Still, the Trials were coming up, and they always set Esme Weatherwax all right for a few weeks. She rose to competition like a trout to a fly.
    Nanny Ogg always looked forward to the Witch Trials. You got a good day out and, of course, there was a big bonfire. Whoever heard of a Witch Trial without a good bonfire afterwards?
    And afterwards you could roast potatoes in the ashes.
    The afternoon melted into the evening, and the shadows in corners and under stools and tables crept out and ran together.
    Granny rocked gently in her chair as the darkness wrapped itself around her. She had a look of deep concentration.
    The logs in the fireplace collapsed into the embers, which winked out one by one.
    The night thickened.
    The old clock ticked on the mantelpiece and, for some length of time, there was no other sound.
    There came a faint rustling. The paper bag on the table moved and then began to crinkle like a deflating balloon. Slowly, the still air filled with a heavy smell of decay.
    After a while the first maggot crawled out.
    Nanny Ogg was back home and just pouring a pint of beer when there was a knock. She put down the jug with a sigh, and went and opened the door.
    ‘Oh, hello, ladies. What’re you doing in these parts? And on such a chilly evening, too?’
    Nanny backed into the room, ahead of three more witches. They wore the black cloaks and pointy hats traditionally associated with their craft, although this served to make each one look different. There is nothing like a uniform for allowing one to express one’s individuality. A tweak here and a tuck there are little details that scream all the louder in the apparent, well, uniformity.
    Gammer Beavis’s hat, for example, had a very flat brim and a point you could clean your ear with. Nanny liked Gammer Beavis. She might be a bit too educated, so that sometimes it overflowed out of her mouth, but she did her own shoe repairs and took snuff and, in Nanny Ogg’s small worldview, things like this meant that someone was All Right.
    Old Mother Dismass’s clothes had that disarray of someone who, because of a detached retina in her second sight, was living in a variety of times all at once. Mental confusion is bad enough in normal people, but much worse when the mind has an occult twist. You just had to hope it was only her underwear she was wearing on the outside.
    It was getting worse, Nanny knew. Sometimes her knock would be heard on the door a few hours before she arrived. Her footprints would turn up several days later.
    Nanny’s heart sank at the