Hogfather

AND IF HE HAS BEEN GOOD I MAY GIVE HIM THIS KLATCHIAN WAR  CHARIOT WITH REAL SPINNING SWORD BLADES?

     'That's right.'

     AND IF HE'S BEEN BAD?

     Albert scratched his  head. 'When I was a lad, you got a bag  of bones. 's'mazing how kids got better behaved towards the end of the year.'

OH DEAR. AND NOW?

     Albert  held  a package up  to  his ear  and rustled  it. 'Sounds  like socks.'

SOCKS.

     'Could be a woolly vest.'

SERVE HIM RIGHT, IF I MAY VENTURE TO EXPRESS AN OPINION...

     Albert: looked across the snowy rooftops and sighed. This wasn't right. He was helping because, well, Death was his master and that's all  there was to it, and if the master had a heart it would be in the right place. But...

     'Are you sure we ought to be doing this, master?'

     Death stopped, halfway out of the chimney.

CAN YOU THINK OF A BETTER ALTERNATIVE, ALBERT?

     And that was it. Albert couldn't.

     Someone had to do it.

     There were bears on the street again.

     Susan ignored them and didn't even make a point of not treading  on the cracks.

     They just stood around, looking a bit puzzled and slightly transparent, visible only to children and  Susan. News  like Susan gets around. The bears had heard  about  the poker. Nuts  and berries,  their expressions seemed to say. That's what  we're here for.  Big sharp teeth? What big  shar--- Oh, these big sharp  teeth? They're just for, er, cracking nuts. And some of these berries can be really vicious.

     The city's clocks were striking six when she got back to the house. She was allowed her own key. It wasn't as if she was a servant, exactly.

     You couldn't be  a duchess and a servant. But it  was all right to be a governess.  It was  understood that it wasn't exactly what you  were, it was merely a way of  passing the time until you did what every girl, or gel, was supposed to do  in life, i.e., marry some  man.  It  was understood that you were playing.

     The parents were in awe of her. She was the daughter of a  duke whereas Mr  Gaiter was a man to be reckoned with  in  the wholesale boots and  shoes business.  Mrs  Gaiter was bucking for  a transfer  into the  Upper Classes, which  she currently  hoped to  achieve  by reading books on etiquette.  She treated Susan  with  the kind  of worried deference she  thought  was due to anyone  who'd  known the difference between  a serviette and a  napkin  from birth.

     Susan had  never before  come  across the idea that you  could rise  in Society by, as it  were,  gaining marks,  especially since  such noblemen as she'd met in her father's house had used neither serviette  nor napkin but a state of mind, which was 'Drop it on the floor, the dogs'll eat it.'

     When Mrs Gaiter had tremulously  asked her how one addressed the second cousin of a queen,

     Susan had replied without thinking, 'We called him Jamie, usually,' and Mrs Gaiter had had to go and have a headache in her room.

     Mr Gaiter just nodded when he met her in a passage and never said  very much to  her. He was pretty sure he knew where he stood  in  boots and shoes and that was that.

     Gawain and Twyla, who'd been named by people who apparently loved them, had been put to bed by the time Susan  got in, at their own insistence. It's a widely held belief at a certain age that going to bed early makes tomorrow come faster.

     She  went  to tidy  up  the  schoolroom  and  get things ready for  the morning, and began to pick up the things the children had left lying around. Then something tapped at a window pane.

     She peered out at the darkness,  and then opened the window. A drift of snow fell down outside.

     In the summer the  window opened into the branches of a cherry tree. In the winter dark, they were little grey fines where  the snow had settled  on them.

     'Who's that?' said Susan.

     Something hopped through the frozen branches.

     'Tweet tweet tweet, would you believe?' said the raven.

     'Not you again?'

     'You wanted maybe some dear little robin? Listen, your grand-'

     'Go away! '

     Susan slammed  the  window and pulled the curtains across. She put  her back  to them, to make sure, and tried to concentrate on the room. It helped to think about ... normal things.

     There was the Hogswatch tree, a rather smaller version of the grand one in the hall. She'd  helped the  children to make paper  decorations  for it. Yes. Think about that.

     There  were the  paperchains. There were the bits  of holly, thrown out from the main  rooms for not having  enough  berries on them, and  now given fake  modelling clay berries  and  stuck  in anyhow on  shelves  and  behind pictures.

     There were  two stockings  hanging  from the mantelpiece of  the  small schoolroom grate.  There were  Twyla's paintings, all blobby blue  skies and violently  green grass  and red houses with four square  windows. There were

...

     Normal things ...

     She  straightened  up and  stared  at them, her  fingernails beating  a thoughtful tattoo on a wooden pencil case.

     The  door was  pushed  open.  It revealed the  tousled  shape of Twyla, hanging onto the doorknob with one hand.

     'Susan, there's a monster under my bed again...'