Hogfather

Terry Pratchett. Hogfather

     Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

     But people have always been dimly  aware of the problem with  the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplough driver gets to work,  or how the makers  of dictionaries look up the spelling of  the words. Yet there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting,  ravelling nets of space-time on  which a metaphorical finger  can  be  put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began...

     Something began when  the Guild of Assassins  enrolled Mister  Teatime, who  saw things differently from other people, and one  of the ways that  he saw things differently  from other  people was  in  seeing  other  people as things  (later, Lord Downey of the Guild said, 'We took  pity on him because he'd  lost both parents  at an  early age.  I think that,  on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that.')

     But it was much earlier even than that when most people forgot that the very oldest stories are,  sooner or  later, about blood. Later on  they took the blood out to make the  stories more acceptable to children,  or at least to the people  who had  to  read them  to children  rather than the children themselves (who,  on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided  it's being shed by the deserving[1]), and then wondered where the stories went.

     And earlier still  when  something in the darkness of the deepest caves and  gloomiest forests  thought: what  are  they,  these creatures?  I  will observe them.

     And  much, much earlier  than  that,  when  the Discworld  was  formed, drifting onwards through space atop four elephants on the shell of the giant turtle, Great A'Tuin.

     Possibly, as it moves,  it gets tangled like a blind man in a cobwebbed house in those highly specialized little spacetime strands that try to breed in every  history they  encounter,  stretching  them  and breaking them  and tugging them into new shapes.

     Or possibly not, of course. The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as 'Things just happen. What the hell.'

     The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door.

     There was no doubt  that  whoever  had shut it wanted  it to stay shut. Dozens  of nails secured it  to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it.

     'And there's the sign, Ridcully,'  said the Dean. 'You have read  it, I assume. You know? The sign which says "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door"?'

     'Of course I've read it,'  said Ridcully. 'Why  d'yer  think  I want it opened?'

     'Er ... why?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

     'To see why they wanted it shut, of course.'[2]

     He gestured to Modo,  the University's gardener  and  oddjob dwarf, who was standing by with a crowbar.

     'Go to it, lad.'

     The gardener saluted. 'Right you are, sir.'

     Against a background of  splintering timber, Ridcully went on: 'It says on the plans that this was a bathroom. There's nothing  frightening  about a bathroom, for gods' sake. I want  a  bathroom. I'm fed up with sluicing down with you fellows. It's  unhygienic. You can catch stuff. My  father told  me that. Where  you get lots of people bathing together, the  Verruca  Gnome is running around with his little sack.'

     'Is that like the Tooth Fairy?' said the Dean sarcastically.

     'I'm in  charge here  and I want a  bathroom  of my own,' said Ridcully firmly. 'And that's all there is to it, all right? I want a bathroom in time for Hogswatchnight, understand?'

     And that's a problem with beginnings, of course. Sometimes, when you're dealing with occult realms that have quite a different attitude to time, you get the effect a little way before the cause.

     From somewhere  on  the edge of  hearing came  a  glingleglingleglingle noise, like little silver bells.

     At  about  the same time as the Archchancellor was laying down the law, Susan Sto-Helit was sitting up in bed, reading by candlelight.

     Frost patterns curled across the windows.

     She enjoyed these early evenings. Once she had put  the children to bed she was more or less left to  herself. Mrs Gaiter was pathetically scared of giving her any instructions even though she paid Susan's wages.

     Not that the wages  were important, of course.  What was  important was that she was being  her Own Person and holding down a  Real job. And being a governess was a real job. The  only  tricky bit  had been  the embarrassment when her employer found out  that she was a duchess, because in Mrs Gaiter's book, which was  a  rather short book  with big handwriting, the upper crust wasn't  supposed to  work. It was supposed to loaf around. It was  all Susan could do to stop her curtseying when they met.

     A flicker made her turn her head.

     The candle flame was streaming out horizontally, as though in a howling wind.

     She looked up. The curtains billowed away from the window, which...