Snuff

professionally done, with the very-nearly compulsory crescent-moon shape fretsawed into the door, and the log pile close at hand so that the most efficient use could be made of every trip down the path. The whole place had a sensible and serious air, and certainly wasn’t what you would expect of somebody who just mucked about with words every day.
    Miss Beedle opened the door a fraction of a second after he had knocked. She didn’t look surprised.
    â€œI was rather expecting you, your grace,” she said, “or is it Mr. Policeman today? From what I hear, it’s always Mr. Policeman one way or the other.” Then she looked down. “And this must be Young Sam.” She glanced up at his father and said, “They tend to get rather tongue-tied, don’t they?”
    â€œYou know, I’ve got lots of poo,” said Young Sam proudly. “I keep it in jam jars and I’ve got a laboratory in the lavatory. Have you got any elephant poo? It goes”—and here he paused for effect—“ dung !”
    For a moment Miss Beedle had that slightly glazed sheen often seen on the face of someone meeting Young Sam for the first time. She looked at Vimes. “You must be very proud of him.”
    The proud father said, “It’s very hard to keep up—I know that.”
    Miss Beedle led the way out of the hall and into a room in which chintz played a major part, and drew young Sam over to a large bureau. She opened a drawer and handed the boy what looked like a small book. “This is a bound proof of The Joy of Earwax , and I shall sign it for you if you like.”
    Young Sam took it like one receiving a holy object, and his father, temporarily becoming his mum, said, “What do you say?” To which Young Sam responded with a beam and a thank you and a, “Please don’t scribble on it. I’m not allowed to scribble in books.”
    While Young Sam was happily turning the pages of his new book, his father was introduced to an overstuffed chair. Miss Beedle gave him a smile and hurried off toward the kitchen, leaving Vimes with not much to look at except for a room full of bookcases, more overstuffed furniture, a full-size concert harp, and a wall clock made to look like an owl, whose eyes swung backward and forward hypnotically in time with the tick—presumably to the point where you either committed suicide or picked up the poker in the hearth nearby and beat the damn thing until the springs broke.
    While Vimes was warmly contemplating this he realized that he was being watched, and he looked round into the worried face and prognathous jaw of the goblin called Tears of the Mushroom.
    Instinctively he looked at Young Sam, and suddenly the biggest raisin in his cake of apprehension was: what will Young Sam do? How many books has he read? They haven’t told him nasty tales about goblins, have they, or read him too many of those innocent, colorful fairytale books which contained nightmares ready to leap out and some needless fear that would cause trouble one day?
    And what Young Sam did was march across the floor, stop dead in front of the girl and say, “I know a lot about poo. It’s very interesting!”
    Tears of the Mushroom looked frantically for Miss Beedle while Young Sam, totally at ease, began a brief dissertation on sheep poo. In response, with words slapping together like little bricks, she said, “What…is… poo …for?”
    Young Sam frowned at this as if somebody was questioning his life’s work. Then he looked up brightly and said, “Without poo, you would go off bang!” And he stood there beaming, the meaning of life completely solved.
    And Tears of the Mushroom laughed. It was a rather staccato laugh, reminding Vimes of the laughter of certain kinds of women, after certain kinds of too much gin. But it was laughter—straight, genuine and unaffected—and Young Sam bathed in it, giggling, and so did Sam Vimes, with sweat beginning to cool on his neck.
    Then Young Sam said, “I wish I had big hands like you. What’s your name?”
    In that clipped way Vimes was learning to recognize, the goblin girl said, “I am the Tears of the Mushroom.”
    Instantly Young Sam threw his arms around as much of her as he could encompass and shouted, “Mushrooms shouldn’t cry!”
    The look that the goblin girl gave Vimes was one that he had seen many times before on the face of