Hogfather

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.