Moving Pictures

And that was followed by a three-wheeled bathchair that took the corner on only two of them, sparks streaming away behind it. It was loaded down with wizards, all shouting at the tops of their voices. Occasionally one of them would lose his grip and have to run behind until he could get up enough speed to leap on again.

Three of them hadn’t made it. That is, one of them had made it sufficiently to get a grip on the trailing leather cover, and the other two had made it just enough to grab the robe of the one in front, so that now, every time it took a bend, a tail of three wizards going ‘whaaaaa’ snapped wildly across the road behind it.

There were also a number of civilians, but if anything they were shouting louder than the wizards.

The Librarian had seen many weird things in his time, but that was undoubtedly the 57th strangest.[28]

Up here he could very clearly hear the voices.

‘—got to keep it turning! He can only make it work if you keep it turning! It’s Holy Wood magic! He’s making it work in the real world!’ That was a girl’s voice.

‘All right, but the imps get very fractious if—’ That was a man’s voice under extreme pressure.

‘Bugger the imps!’

‘How can he make a horse?’ That was the Dean. The Librarian recognized the whine. ‘That’s high-grade magic!’

‘It’s not a real horse, it’s a moving-picture horse.’ The girl again. ‘You! You’re slowing down!’

‘I’m not! I’m not! Look, I’m turning the handle, I’m turning the handle!’

‘He can’t ride on a horse that isn’t real!’

‘You’re a magician and you really believe that?’

‘Wizard, actually.’

‘Well, whatever. This isn’t your kind of magic.’

The Librarian nodded, and then stopped listening. He had other things to do.

The Thing was almost level with the Tower of Art, and would soon turn to head for the Library. Things always homed in on the nearest source of magic. They needed it.

The Librarian had found a long iron pike in one of the University’s mouldering storerooms. He held it carefully in one foot while he unfastened the rope he’d tied to the weathercock. It stretched all the way up to the top of the Tower; it had taken him all night to fix it up.

He surveyed the city below, and then pounded his chest and roared:

‘AaaaAAAaaaAAA — hngh, hngh.’

Maybe the pounding wasn’t entirely necessary, he thought, while he waited for the buzzing noises and little flashing lights to go away.

He gripped the pike in one hand, the rope in the other, and leapt.

The most graphic way of describing the Librarian’s swing across the buildings of Unseen University is to simply transcribe the noises made during the flight.

First: ‘AaaAAAaaaAAAaaa.’ This is self-explanatory, and refers to the early part of the swing, when everything looked as if it was going well.

Then: ‘Aaarghhhh.’ This was the noise made as he missed the lurching Thing by several metres and was realizing that, if you have tied a rope to the top of a very high and extremely solid stone tower and are now swinging towards it, failing to hit something on the way is an error which you will regret for the rest of your truncated life.

The rope completed its swing. There was a noise exactly like a rubber sack full of butter hitting a stone slab and this was followed, after a moment or two, by a very quiet ‘oook’.

The pike clanged away in the darkness. The Librarian spread-eagled himself star-fish like against the wall, ramming fingers and toes into every available crevice.

He might have been able to climb his way down but the option never became available, because the Thing reached out a flickering hand and plucked him off the wall with a noise like a sink-plunger clearing a difficult blockage.

It held him up to what was currently its face.

The crowds flowed into the square in front of Unseen University, with the Dibblers to the fore.

‘Look at them,’ Cut-me-own-Throat sighed. ‘There must be thousands of them, and no-one’s selling ’em anything.’

The wheelchair slid to a halt in another spray of sparks.

Victor was waiting for it, the spectral horse flickering under him. Not one horse, but a succession of horses. Not moving, but changing from frame to frame.

Lightning flashed again.

‘What’s he doing?’ said the Chair.

‘Trying to keep It from getting to the Library,’ said the Dean, peering through the rain that was beginning to thud on the cobbles. ‘To stay alive in reality, Things need magic to hold themselves together. They’ve got no natural morphogenic field, you see, and—’

‘Do something! Blow it up with magic!’ shouted Ginger. ‘Oh, that poor monkey!’

‘We can’t use magic! That’s like pouring oil on a fire!’ snapped the Dean. ‘Besides … I don’t know how you go about blowing up a fifty-foot woman. It’s not the sort of thing I’ve ever been called upon to do.’

‘It’s not a woman! It’s … it’s a film creature, you idiot! Do you think I’m really that big?’ shouted Ginger. ‘It’s using Holy Wood! It’s a Holy Wood monster! From film land!’

‘Steer, godsdamnit! Steer!’

‘I don’t know how to!’

‘You just have to throw your weight about!’