Hogfather

     The regular customers didn't ask questions, and not only  because  some of them found anything above a growl hard to articulate. None of them was in the answers business. Everyone in Biers  drank alone. even when they were in groups. Or packs.

     Despite the decorations put  up inexpertly by  Igor the barman to  show willing,[8] Biers was not a family place.

     Family was a subject Susan liked to avoid.

     Currently  she was  being aided in this by a gin and tonic.  In  Biers, unless  you weren't choosy, it paid  to order  a drink that was  transparent because Igor also had undirected ideas about what you could stick on the end of a  cocktail stick. If you saw something spherical and green, you just had to hope that it was an olive.

     She  felt hot breath  on  her ear. A bogeyman had sat down on the stool beside her.

     'Woss  a normo doin' in a place like this, then?' it rumbled, causing a cloud of vaporized alcohol and halitosis to engulf her. 'Hah, you fink  it's cool comin' down here an' swannin' around in  a black dress wid all the lost boys, eh? Dabblin' in a bit of designer darkness, eh?'

     Susan moved her stool away a little. The bogeyman grinned.

     'Want a bogeyman under yer bed, eh?'

     'Now  then, Shlimazel,' said Igor,  without looking up from polishing a glass.

     'Well, woss she down here  for,  eh?' said the bogeyman.  A huge  hairy hand grabbed Susan's arm. 'O' course, maybe what she wants is-'

     'I ain't telling you again, Shlimazel,' said Igor.

     He saw the girl turn to face Shlimazel.

     Igor wasn't in a position to see her face fully, but the bogeyman  was. He shot back so quickly that he fell off his stool.

     And when the girl spoke, what she said was only partly words but also a statement, written in stone, of how the future was going to be.

     ' GO AWAY AND STOP BOTHERING ME.'

     She turned back and  gave Igor a polite and slightly  apologetic smile. The  bogeyman  struggled frantically  out of the  wreckage of his stool  and loped towards the door.

     Susan felt  the drinkers turn  back to their private preoccupations. It was amazing what you could get away with in Biers.

     Igor put down the glass and looked up at the window. For a drinking den that  relied  on darkness it had  rather a  large one but, of  course,  some customers did arrive by air.

     Something was tapping on it now.

     Igor lurched over and opened it.

     Susan looked up.

     'Oh, no . . . '

     The  Death  of  Rats  leapt  down onto  the  counter,  with  the  raven fluttering after it.

     SQUEAK SQUEAK EEK! EEK! SQUEAK IK IK 'HEEK HEEK HEEK'! SQ...

     'Go  away,'  said Susan coldly.  'I'm  not  interested. You're  just  a figment of my imagination.'

     The raven perched on a bowl behind the bar and said, 'Ah, great.'

SQUEAK!

     'What're these?' said the raven, flicking something off the end  of its beak. 'Onions? Pfah!'

     'Go on, go away, the pair of you,' said Susan.

     'The  rat says your granddad's  gone mad,' said  the raven. 'Says  he's pretending to be the Hogfather.'

     'Listen, I just don't... What?'

     'Red cloak, long beard...'

HEEK! HEEK! HEEK!

     ...going "Ho, ho, ho", driving around in the big sledge drawn by the four piggies, the whole thing...'

     'Pigs? What happened to Binky?'

     'Search me. O' course, it can happen,  as I  was telling  the  rat only just now-'

     Susan put her hands over her ears, more for desperate theatrical effect than for the muffling they gave.

     'I don't want to know! I don't have a grandfather!'

     She had to hold on to that.

     The Death of Rats squeaked at length.

     'The rat says you must remember, he's tall, not what you'd call fleshy, he carries a scythe...'

     'Go away! And take the ... the rat with you!'

     She waved  her hand wildly  and, to  her horror and shame,  knocked the little hooded skeleton over an ashtray.

EEK?

     The raven took the rat's  cowl in its beak and tried to  drag him away, but a tiny skeletal fist shook its scythe.

EEK IK EEK SQUEAK!

     'He says, you don't mess with the rat,' said the raven.

     In a flurry of wings they were gone.

     Igor dosed the window. He didn't pass any comment.

     'They  weren't real,' said  Susan, hurriedly.  'Well,  that is ...  the raven's probably real, but he hangs around with the rat...'

     'Which isn't real,' said Igor.

     'That's right!'  said  Susan, gratefully.  'You  probably didn't see  a thing.'

     'That's right,' said Igor. 'Not a thing.'

     'Now ... how much do I owe you?' said Susan.

     Igor counted on his fingers.

     'That'll be a dollar for  the drinks,' he said, 'and  fivepence because the raven that wasn't here messed in the pickles.'

     It was the night before Hogswatch.

     In the Archchancellor's new bathroom Modo wiped his hands on a piece of rag and looked proudly at his handiwork.  Shining porcelain  gleamed back at him. Copper and brass shone in the lamplight.