Hogfather

demanded. “And if it’s for business reasons, I will add, then that outfit is in extremely poor taste—”
    THE HOGFATHER IS…UNAVAILABLE.
    “Unavailable? At Hogswatch?”
    YES.
    “Why?”
    HE IS…LET ME SEE…THERE ISN’T AN ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE HUMAN WORD, SO…LET’S SETTLE FOR…DEAD. YES. HE IS DEAD.

    Susan had never hung up a stocking. She’d never looked for eggs laid by the Soul Cake Duck. She’d never put a tooth under her pillow in the serious expectation that a dentally inclined fairy would turn up.
    It wasn’t that her parents didn’t believe in such things. They didn’t need to believe in them. They knew they existed. They just wished they didn’t.
    Oh, there had been presents, at the right time, with a careful label saying who they were from. And a superb egg on Soul Cake Morning, filled with sweets. Juvenile teeth earned no less than a dollar each from her father, without argument. * But it was all straightforward.
    She knew now that they’d been trying to protect her. She hadn’t known then that her father had been Death’s apprentice for a while, and that her mother was Death’s adopted daughter. She’d had very dim recollections of being taken a few times to see someone who’d been quite, well, jolly, in a strange, thin way. And the visits had suddenly stopped. And she’d met him later and, yes, he had his good side, and for a while she’d wondered why her parents had been so unfeeling and—
    She knew now why they’d tried to keep her away. There was far more to genetics than little squirmy spirals.
    She could walk through walls when she really had to. She could use a tone of voice that was more like actions than words, that somehow reached inside people and operated all the right switches. And her hair…
    That had only happened recently, though. It used to be unmanageable, but at around the age of seventeen she had found it more or less managed itself.
    That had lost her several young men. Someone’s hair rearranging itself into a new style, the tresses curling around themselves like a nest of kittens, could definitely put the crimp on any relationship.
    She’d been making good progress, though. She could go for days now without feeling anything other than entirely human.
    But it was always the case, wasn’t it? You could go out into the world, succeed on your own terms, and sooner or later some embarrassing old relative was bound to turn up.

    Grunting and swearing, the gnome clambered out of another drain pipe, jammed its hat firmly on its head, threw its sack onto a snowdrift and jumped down after it.
    “’s a good one,” he said. “Ha, take ’im weeks to get rid of that one!”
    He took a crumpled piece of paper out of a pocket and examined it closely. Then he looked at an elderly figure working away quietly at the next house.
    It was standing by a window, drawing with great concentration on the glass.
    The gnome wandered up, interested, and watched critically.
    “Why just fern patterns?” he said, after a while. “Pretty, yeah, but you wouldn’t catch me puttin’ a penny in your hat for fern patterns.”
    The figure turned, brush in hand.
    “I happen to like fern patterns,” said Jack Frost coldly.
    “It’s just that people expect, you know, sad big-eyed kids, kittens lookin’ out of boots, little doggies, that sort of thing.”
    “I do ferns.”
    “Or big pots of sunflowers, happy seaside scenes…”
    “And ferns.”
    “I mean, s’posing some big high priest wanted you to paint the temple ceiling with gods ’n’ angels and such like, what’d you do then?”
    “He could have as many gods and angels as he liked, provided they—”
    “—looked like ferns?”
    “I resent the implication that I am solely fern fixated,” said Jack Frost. “I can also do a very nice paisley pattern.”
    “What’s that look like, then?”
    “Well…it does, admittedly, have a certain ferny quality to the uninitiated eye.” Frost leaned forward. “Who’re you?”
    The gnome took a step backward.
    “You’re not a tooth fairy, are you? I see more and more of them about these days. Nice girls.”
    “Nah. Nah. Not teeth,” said the gnome, clutching his sack.
    “What, then?”
    The gnome told him.
    “Really?” said Jack Frost. “I thought they just turned up.”
    “Well, come to that, I thought frost on the windows just happened all by itself,” said the gnome. “’ere, you don’t half look spiky. I bet you go through a lot of bed