Moving Pictures

its body.
    “Tally ho! Take us round again, Bursar!”
    The image dissolved. The Thing screeched, threw the Librarian aside like a doll, and lurched at Victor with all tentacles at full stretch. One of them knocked him over, three others dragged the pike from his hands, and then the Thing was rearing up, like a leech, raising the iron pike to knock its tormentors out of the sky.
    Victor raised himself up on his elbows and concentrated.
    Just real for long enough .
    The lightning bolt outlined the Thing in blue-and-white light. After the thunderclap the creature swayed drunkenly, with little tendrils of electricity coruscating across it and making whizzing noises. A few limbs were smoking.
    It was trying to hold itself together against the forces roaring around inside its body. It skewed wildly across the stone, making odd little mewling noises, and then, with one good eye glaring balefully at Victor, stepped off into space.
    Victor pushed himself up on his hands and knees and dragged himself to the edge.
    Even on the way down the Thing wasn’t giving up. It was trying frantic evolutions of feather and hide and membranes in an attempt to find something that would survive the fall—
    Time slowed. The air took on a purple haze. Death swung his scythe.
    Y OU BELONG DEAD , he said.
    —and then there was a sound like wet laundry hitting a wall and, it turned out, the only thing that could survive the fall was a corpse.

    The crowd moved closer in the pouring rain.
    Now that all the control was gone the Thing was dissolving into its component molecules, that were washing into the gutters and down to the river and out into the cold depths of the sea.
    “It’s deliquescing,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
    “Is it?” said the Chair. “I thought that it was some kind of shop.”
    He prodded it with his foot.
    “Careful,” said the Dean. “That is not dead which can eternal lie.”
    The Chair studied it.
    “It looks bloody dead to me,” he said. “Hang on—there’s something moving—”
    One of the outflung tentacles slumped aside.
    “Did it land on someone?” said the Dean.
    It did. They pulled out the twitching body of Ponder Stibbons, and prodded and patted him in a well-meant way until he opened his eyes.
    “What happened?” he said.
    “A fifty-foot monster fell on you,” said the Dean, simply.
    “Are you, er, all right?”
    “I only wanted one drink,” Ponder muttered. “I’d have come straight back, honest.”
    “What are you talking about, lad?”
    Ponder ignored him. He got up, swaying a bit, and staggered off toward the Great Hall, and never, ever, went out again.
    “Funny chap,” said the Chair. They looked back down at the Thing, which had nearly dissolved.
    “’Twas beauty killed the beast,” said the Dean, who liked to say things like that.
    “No it wasn’t,” said the Chair. “It was it splatting into the ground like that.”

    The Librarian sat up and rubbed his head.
    The book was thrust in front of his eyes.
    “Read it!” said Victor.
    “Oook.”
    “Please!”
    The ape opened it at a page of pictograms. He blinked at them for a moment. Then his finger went to the bottom right-hand corner of the page and began to trace the signs from right to left.
    Right to left.
    That was how you were supposed to read them, Victor thought.
    Which meant that he’d been exactly wrong all the time.

    Gaffer the handleman panned his picture box along the row of wizards and then down to the rapidly-dissolving monster.
    The handle stopped turning. He raised his head and gave everyone a bright smile.
    “If you could just bunch up tighter, gentlemen?” he said. The wizards obediently shuffled even closer. “The light’s not very good.”
    Soll wrote down, “Wizards loking at the Corepse, take 3,” on a piece of card.
    “Shame you didn’t get the fall,” he said, the edges of his voice deckled with hysteria. “Maybe we can stunt it up or something?”
    Ginger sat in the shadows by the tower, hugging her knees and trying to stop trembling. Among the shapes the Thing had tried just before the end had been her own.
    She pulled herself upright and, holding onto the rough stonework to steady herself, walked uncertainly away. She wasn’t certain what the future held, but coffee would be involved if she had any say in the matter.
    As she passed the tower door there was a clattering of feet and Victor staggered out, with the Librarian swinging along behind him.
    He opened his mouth