Moving Pictures

It flickered slowly. Holy Wood light, Victor thought.
    There was a feeling of dreadful expectation. If a movie set was a dream waiting to be made real, then the town was one step further up the scale—a real place waiting for something new, something that ordinary language couldn’t define.
    “,” he said, and stopped.
    “?” said Ginger.
    “?”
    “!”
    They stared at one another for a moment. Then Victor grabbed her hand and dragged her into the nearest building, which turned out to be the commissary.
    The scene inside was indescribable and remained so until Victor found the blackboard that was used for what was laughingly referred to as the menu.
    He picked up the chalk.
    “ I ’ M TALKING BUT I CANT HERE ME ,” he wrote, and solemnly handed her the chalk.
    “ ME TO . Y ?”
    Victor tossed the chalk up and down thoughtfully, and then wrote: “ I THINK BCOS WE NEVER INVENTED SOUND MOVIES . IF WE DIDN ’ T HAVE IMPS THAT COULD PAINT IN COLOR MAYBE THERE WOULD JUST BE BLAK AND WHITE HERE TOO .”
    They stared at the scene around them. There were untouched or half-eaten meals on almost every table. This wasn’t particularly unusual at Borgle’s, but normally they were accompanied by people complaining bitterly.
    Ginger delicately dipped a finger in the nearest plate.
    “Still warm,” she mouthed.
    “Let’s go,” said Victor quietly, pointing at the door.
    She tried to say something complicated, scowled at his blank expression, and wrote: “ WE SHOUD WAIT FOR THE WIZARDS .”
    Victor stood frozen for a moment. Then his lips shaped a phrase that Ginger would not admit to knowing and he made a dash for the outside.
    The overloaded chair was already bowling along the street with smoke billowing from its axles. He jumped up and down in front of it, waving his arms.
    A long silent conversation went on. There was a lot of chalking on the nearest wall. Finally Ginger couldn’t contain her impatience any longer and hurried over.
    “ YOUVE GOT TO STAY AWAY . IF THEY BRAKE THRU YOU WIL BE A MEAL .”
    “ SO WILL YOU .” This was neater handwriting; it was the Dean’s.
    Victor wrote: “ XCEPT I THINK I KNOW WHAT ’ S HAPNEN . ANYWAY , YOU WILL BE NEEDED IF IT GOES WRONG .”
    He nodded at the Dean and hurried back to Ginger and the Librarian. He gave the ape a worried look. Technically the Librarian was a wizard—at least, when he’d been human he was a wizard, so presumably he still was. On the other hand, he was also an ape, and a handy man to have around in an emergency. He decided to risk it.
    “Come on,” he mouthed.
    It was easy enough to find the way to the hill. Where there had been a path there was now a broad trail, poignantly scattered with the debris of hurried passage. A sandal. A discarded picture box. A trailing red feather boa.
    The door into the hill had been torn off its hinges. A dull glow came from the tunnel. Victor shrugged and marched inside.
    The debris hadn’t been cleared right away, but it had been pushed aside and flattened down to allow the crowd to go through. The ceiling hadn’t fallen in. This wasn’t because of the debris. It was because of Detritus.
    He was holding it up.
    Nearly up. He was already down on one knee.
    Victor and the Librarian stacked boulders around the troll until he could let the weight off his shoulders. He groaned, or at least looked as if he’d groaned, and toppled forward. Ginger helped him up.
    “What happened?” she mouthed at him.
    “??” Detritus looked puzzled at the absence of his voice and tried to squint at his mouth.
    Victor sighed. He had a vision of the Holy Wood people stampeding blindly along the passage, the trolls scrabbling at the blockage. Since Detritus was the toughest, naturally he’d play a major part. And since the only function he normally used his brain for was to stop the top of his head falling in, equally naturally he’d be the one left holding up the weight on the hill. Victor imagined him calling out, unheard, as the rest of them hurried by.
    He wondered whether to write him a cheery message, but in Detritus’ case this was almost certainly a waste of time. Anyway, the troll wasn’t about to hang around. He loped off along the tunnel with a grim look on his face, concentrating fiercely on some private errand of his own. His trailing knuckles left two furrows in the dust.
    The passage opened out into the cavern which was, Victor now realized, a sort of ante-chamber to the pit itself. Maybe thousands of