Soul Music (9 page)

The Hogfather apparently lived in some kind of horrible slaughterhouse in the mountains, festooned with sausages and black puddings and painted a terrible blood-red.

Which suggested
style
. A nasty style, but at least style of a sort. This place didn't have style of
any
sort.

The Soul Cake Tuesday Duck didn't apparently have any kind of a home. Nor did Old Man Trouble or the Sandman as far as she knew.

She walked around the house, which wasn't much larger than a cottage. Definitely. Whoever lived here had no taste at all.

She found the front door. It was black, with a knocker in the shape of an omega.

Susan reached for it, but the door opened by itself.

And the hall stretched away in front of her, far bigger than the outside of the house could possibly contain. She could distantly make out a stairway wide enough for the tap-dancing finale in a musical.

There was something else wrong with the perspective. There clearly was a wall a long way off but, at the same time, it looked as though it was painted in the air a mere fifteen feet or so away. It was as if distance was optional.

There was a large clock against one wall. Its slow tick filled the immense space.

There's a room
, she thought.
I remember the room of whispers
.

Doors lined the hall at wide intervals. Or short intervals, if you looked at it another way.

She tried to walk towards the nearest one, and gave up after a few wildly teetering steps. Finally she managed to reach it by taking aim and then shutting her eyes.

The door was
at one and the same time
about normal human size and immensely big. There was a highly ornate frame around it, with a skull-and-bones motif.

She pushed the door open.

This
room could have housed a small town.

A small area of carpet occupied the middle distance, no more than a hectare in size. It took Susan several minutes to reach the edge.

It was a room within a room. There was a large, heavy-looking desk on a raised dais, with a leather swivel chair behind it. There was a large model of the Discworld, on a sort of ornament made of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle. There were several bookshelves, the large volumes piled in the haphazard fashion of people who're far too busy using the books ever to arrange them properly. There was even a window, hanging in the air a few feet above the ground.

But there were no walls. There was nothing between the edge of the carpet and the walls of the greater room except floor, and even that was far too precise a word for it. It didn't look like rock and it certainly wasn't wood. It made no sound when Susan walked on it. It was simply surface, in the purely geometrical sense.

The carpet had a skull-and-bones pattern.

It was also black. Everything was black, or a shade of grey. Here and there a tint suggested a very deep purple or ocean-depth blue.

In the distance, towards the walls of the greater room, the metaroom or whatever it was, there was the suggestion of . . . something. Something was casting complicated shadows, too far away to be clearly seen.

Susan got up on to the dais.

There was something odd about the things around her. Of course, there was everything odd about the things around her, but it was a huge major oddness that was simply in their nature. She could ignore it. But there was an oddness on a human level. Everything was just slightly wrong, as if it had been made by someone who hadn't fully comprehended its purpose.

There was a blotter on the oversize desk but it was part of it, fused to the surface. The drawers were just raised areas of wood, impossible to open. Whoever had made the desk had
seen
desks, but hadn't understood deskishness.

There was even some sort of desk ornament. It was just a slab of lead, with a thread hanging down one side and a shiny round metal ball on the end of the thread. If you raised the ball it swung down and thumped into the lead, just once.

She didn't try to sit in the chair. There was a deep pit in the leather. Someone had spent a lot of time sitting there.

She glanced at the spines of the books. They were in a language she couldn't understand.

She trekked back to the distant door, went out into the hall, and tried the next door. A suspicion was beginning to form in her mind.

The door led to another huge room, but this one was full of shelves, floor to distant, cloud-hung ceiling. Every shelf was lined with hourglasses.

The sand pouring from the past to the future filled the room with a sound like surf, a noise made up of a billion small sounds.

Susan walked between the shelves. It was like being in a crowd.

Her eye was caught by a movement on a nearby shelf. In most of the hourglasses the falling sand was a solid silver line but in this one, just as she watched, the line vanished. The last grain of sand tumbled into the bottom bulb.

The hourglass vanished with a small ‘pop'.

A moment later another one appeared in its place, with the faintest of ‘pings'. In front of her eyes, sand began to fall . . .

And she was aware that this process was going on all over the room. Old hourglasses vanished, new ones took their place.

She knew about this, too.

She reached out and picked up a glass, bit her lip thoughtfully, and started to turn the thing upside down . . .

SQUEAK
!

She spun around. The Death of Rats was on the shelf behind her. It raised an admonitory finger.

‘All right,' said Susan. She put the glass back in its place.

‘No. I haven't finished looking.'

Susan set off for the door, with the rat skittering across the floor after her.

The third room turned out to be . . .

. . . the bathroom.

Susan hesitated. You
expected
hourglasses in this place. You expected the skull-and-bones motif. But you didn't expect the very large white porcelain tub, on its own raised podium like a throne, with giant brass taps and – in faded blue letters just over the thing that held the plug chain – the words: C. H. Lavatory & Son, Mollymog St, Ankh-Morpork.

You didn't expect the rubber duck. It was yellow.

You didn't expect the soap. It was suitably bone-white, but looked as if it had never been used. Beside it was a bar of orange soap which certainly
had
been used – it was hardly more than a sliver. It smelled a lot like the vicious stuff used at school.

The bath, though big, was a human thing. There was brown-lined crazing around the plug-hole and a stain where the tap had dripped. But almost everything else had been designed by the person who hadn't understood deskishness, and now hadn't understood ablutionology either.

They had created a towel rail an entire athletics team could have used for training. The black towels on it were fused to it and were quite hard. Whoever actually
used
the bathroom probably dried themselves on the white-and-blue, very worn towel with the initials Y M R-C-I-G-B-S A, A-M on it.

There was even a lavatory, another fine example of C. H. Lavatory's porcelainic art, with an embossed frieze of green and blue flowers on the cistern. And again, like the bath and the soap, it suggested that this room had been built by someone . . . and then
someone else
had come along afterwards to add small details. Someone with a better knowledge of plumbing, for a start. And someone else who understood, really understood, that towels should be soft and capable of drying people, and soap should be capable of bubbles.

You didn't expect any of it until you saw it. And then it was like seeing it
again
.

The bald towel dropped off the rail and skipped across the floor, until it fell away to reveal the Death of Rats.

‘Oh, all right,' said Susan. ‘Where do you want me to go now?'

The rat scurried to the open door and disappeared into the hall.

Susan followed it to yet another door. She turned yet another handle.

Another room within a room lay beyond. There was a tiny area of lighted tiling in the darkness, containing the distant vision of a table, a few chairs, a kitchen dresser—

—and someone. A hunched figure was sitting at the table. As Susan cautiously approached she heard the rattle of cutlery on a plate.

An old man was eating his supper, very noisily. In between forkfuls, he was talking to himself with his mouth full. It was a kind of auto bad manners.

‘'S'not
my
fault! [spray] I was against it from the
start
but, oh no, he has to go and [recover piece of ballistic sausage from table] start gettin' involved, I told him, i's'not as if you're
not
involved [stab unidentified fried object], oh no, that's not his way [spray, jab fork at the air], once you get involved like that, I said, how're you getting out, tell me that [make temporary egg-and-ketchup sandwich] but, oh no—'

Susan walked around the patch of carpet. The man took no notice.

The Death of Rats shinned up the table leg and landed on a slice of fried bread.

‘Oh. It's you.'

The old man looked around.

‘Where? Where?'

Susan stepped onto the carpet. The man stood up so quickly that his chair fell over.

‘Who the hells are
you
?'

‘Could you stop pointing that sharp bacon at me?'

‘I asked you a question, young woman!'

‘I'm Susan.' This didn't sound enough. ‘Duchess of Sto Helit,' she added.

The man's wrinkled face wrinkled still further as he strove to comprehend this. Then he turned away and threw his hands up in the air.

‘Oh, yes!' he bawled, to the room in general. ‘That just puts the entire tin lid on it, that does!'

He waved a finger at the Death of Rats, who leaned backwards.

‘You cheating little rodent! Oh, yes! I smell a rat here!'

The shaking finger stopped suddenly. The man spun around.

‘How did you manage to walk through the wall?'

‘I'm sorry?' said Susan, backing away. ‘I didn't know there was one.'

‘What d'you call this, then, Klatchian mist?' The man slapped the air.

The hippo of memory wallowed . . .

‘. . . Albert . . .' said Susan, ‘right?'

Albert thumped his forehead with the palm of his hand.

‘Worse and worse! What've you been telling her?'

‘He didn't tell me anything except
SQUEAK
and I don't know what that means,' said Susan. ‘But . . . look, there's no wall here, there's just . . .'

Albert wrenched open a drawer.

‘Observe,' he said sharply. ‘Hammer, right? Nail, right? Watch.'

He hammered the nail into the air about five feet up at the edge of the tiled area. It hung there.

‘Wall,' said Albert.

Susan reached out gingerly and touched the nail. It had a sticky feel, a little like static electricity.

‘Well, it doesn't feel like a wall to me,' she managed.

Albert dropped the hammer on the table.

He wasn't a small man, Susan realized. He was quite tall, but he walked with the kind of lopsided stoop normally associated with laboratory assistants of an Igor turn of mind.

‘I give in,' he said, wagging his finger at Susan again. ‘I
told
him no good'd come of it. He started meddlin', and next thing a mere chit of a girl— where'd you go?'

Susan walked over to the table while Albert waved his arms in the air, trying to find her.

There was a cheeseboard on the table, and a snuff box. And a string of sausages. No fresh vegetables at all. Miss Butts advocated avoiding fried foods and eating plenty of vegetables for what she referred to as Daily Health. She put a lot of troubles down to an absence of Daily Health. Albert looked like the embodiment of them all as he scuttled around the kitchen, grabbing at the air.

She sat in the chair as he danced past.

Albert stopped moving, and put his hand over one eye. Then he turned, very carefully. The one visible eye was screwed up in a frantic effort of concentration.

He squinted at the chair, his eye watering with effort.

‘That's pretty good,' he said, quietly. ‘All right. You're here. The rat and the horse brought you. Damn fool things. They think it's the right thing to do.'

‘
What
right thing to do?' said Susan. ‘And I'm not a . . . what you said.'

Albert stared at her.

‘The Master could do that,' he said at last. ‘It's part of the job. I ‘spect you found you could do it a long time ago, eh? Not be noticed when you didn't want to be?'

SQUEAK,
said the Death of Rats.

‘What?' said Albert.

‘He says to tell you,' said Albert wearily, ‘that a chit of a girl means a small girl. He thinks you may have misheard me.'

Susan hunched up in the chair.

Albert pulled up another one and sat down.

‘How old are you?'

‘Sixteen.'

‘Oh, my.' Albert rolled his eyes. ‘How long have you been sixteen?'

‘Since I was fifteen, of course. Are you stupid?'

‘My, my, how the time does pass,' said Albert. ‘Do you know why you're here?'

‘No . . . but,' Susan hesitated, ‘but it's got something to do with . . . it's something like . . . I'm seeing things that people don't see, and I've met someone who's just a story, and I
know
I've been here before . . . and all these skulls and bones on things . . .'