Hogfather

‘This one is an Impostor!’ he declared. ‘Yes, that’s right! He smashed his way into here!’

‘Y’know, I always thought that,’ said Nobby. ‘I thought, every year, the Hogfather spends a fortnight sitting in a wooden grotto in a shop in Ankh-Morpork? At his busy time, too? Hah! Not likely! Probably just some old man in a beard, I thought.’

‘I meant … he’s not the Hogfather we usually have,’ said Crumley, struggling for firmer ground. ‘He just barged in here!’

‘Oh, a different impostor? Not the real impostor at all?’

‘Well … yes … no …’

‘And started giving stuff away?’ said Corporal Nobbs.

‘That’s what I said! That’s got to be a Crime, hasn’t it?’

Corporal Nobbs rubbed his nose.

‘Well, nearly,’ he conceded, not wishing to totally relinquish the chance of any festive remuneration. Realization dawned. ‘He’s giving away your stuff, sir?’

‘No! No, he brought it in with him!’

‘Ah? Giving away your stuff, now, if he was doing that, yes, I could see the problem. That’s a sure sign of crime, stuff going missing. Stuff turning up, weerlll, that’s a tricky one. Unless it’s stuff like arms and legs, o’ course. We’d be on safer ground if he was nicking stuff, sir, to tell you the truth.’

‘This is a shop,’ said Mr Crumley, finally getting to the root of the problem. ‘We do not give Merchandise away. How can we expect people to buy things if some Person is giving them away? Now please go and get him out of here.’

‘Arrest the Hogfather, style of thing?’

‘Yes!’

‘On Hogswatchnight?’

‘Yes!’

‘In your shop?’

‘Yes!’

‘In front of all those kiddies?’

‘Y—’ Mr Crumley hesitated. To his horror, he realized that Corporal Nobbs, against all expectation, had a point. ‘You think that will look bad?’ he said.

‘Hard to see how it could look good, sir.’

‘Could you not do it surreptitiously?’ he said.

‘Ah, well, surreptition, yes, we could give that a try,’ said Corporal Nobbs. The sentence hung in the air with its hand out.

‘You won’t find me ungrateful,’ said Mr Crumley, at last.

‘Just you leave it to us,’ said Corporal Nobbs, magnanimous in victory. ‘You just nip down to your office and treat yourself to a nice cup of tea and we’ll sort this out in no time. You’ll be ever so grateful.’

Crumley gave him a look of a man in the grip of serious doubt, but staggered away nonetheless. Corporal Nobbs rubbed his hands together.

‘You don’t have Hogswatch back where you come from, do you, Washpot?’ he said, as they climbed the stairs to the first floor. ‘Look at this carpet, you’d think a pig’d pissed on it …’

‘We call it the Fast of St Ossory,’ said Visit, who was from Omnia. ‘But it is not an occasion for superstition and crass commercialism. We simply get together in family groups for a prayer meeting and a fast.’

‘What, turkey and chicken and that?’

‘A fast, Corporal Nobbs. We don’t eat anything.’

‘Oh, right. Well, each to his own, I s’pose. And at least you don’t have to get up early in the morning and find that the nothing you’ve got is too big to fit in the oven. No presents neither?’

They stood aside hurriedly as two children scuttled down the stairs carrying a large toy boat between them.

‘It is sometimes appropriate to exchange new religious pamphlets, and of course there are usually copies of the Book of Ossory for the children,’ said Constable Visit. ‘Sometimes with illustrations,’ he added, in the guarded way of a man hinting at licentious pleasures.

A small girl went past carrying a teddy bear larger than herself. It was pink.

‘They always gives me bath salts,’ complained Nobby. ‘And bath soap and bubble bath and herbal bath lumps and tons of bath stuff and I can’t think why, ’cos it’s not as if I hardly ever has a bath. You’d think they’d take the hint, wouldn’t you?’

‘Abominable, I call it,’ said Constable Visit.

The first floor was a mob.

‘Huh, look at them. Mr Hogfather never brought me anything when I was a kid,’ said Corporal Nobbs, eyeing the children gloomily. ‘I used to hang up my stocking every Hogswatch, regular. All that ever happened was my dad was sick in it once.’ He removed his helmet.

Nobby was not by any measure a hero, but there was the sudden gleam in his eye of someone who’d seen altogether too many empty stockings plus one rather full and dripping one. A scab had been knocked off some wound in the corrugated little organ of his soul.

‘I’m going in,’ he said.

In between the University’s Great Hall and its main door is a rather smaller circular hall or vestibule known as Archchancellor Bowell’s Remembrance, although no one now knows why, or why an extant bequest pays for one small currant bun and one copper penny to be placed on a high stone shelf on one wall every second Wednesday.[16] Ridcully stood in the middle of the floor, looking upwards.

‘Tell me, Senior Wrangler, we never invited any women to the Hogswatchnight Feast, did we?’