Hogfather

‘You got to say yes,’ Banjo said.

‘Yes!’

‘D'you like pears? You got to say yes.’

‘All right, yes!’

‘D'you like falling down the stairs?’

Medium Dave held up his hands for quiet.

He glared at the gang.

‘This place is getting to you, right? But we've all been in bad places before, right?’

‘Not this bad,’ said Chickenwire. ‘I've never been anywhere where it hurts to look at the sky. It give me the creeps.’

‘Chick's a little baby, nyer nyer nyer,’ sang Catseye.

They looked at him. He coughed nervously.

‘Sorry… don't know why I said that…’

‘If we stick together we'll be fine—’

‘Teeny meeny minty me…’ mumbled Catseye.

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘Sorry… it just sort of slipped out…’

‘What I'm trying to say,’ said Medium Dave, ‘is that if—’

‘Peachy keeps making faces at me!’

‘I didn't!’

‘Liar, liar, pants on fire!’

Two things happened at this point. Medium Dave lost his temper, and Peachy screamed.

A small wisp of smoke was rising from his trousers.

He hopped around, beating desperately at himself.

‘Who did that? Who did that?’ demanded Medium Dave.

‘I didn't see anyone,’ said Chickenwire. ‘I mean, no one was near him. Catseye said “pants on fire” and next minute—’

‘Now he's sucking his thumb!’ Catseye jeered. ‘Nyer nyer nyer! Crying for Mummy! You know what happens to kids who suck their thumbs, there's this big monster with scissors all—’

‘Will you stop talking like that!’ shouted Medium Dave. ‘Blimey, it is like dealing with a bunch of—’

Someone screamed, high above. It went on for a while and seemed to be getting nearer, but then it stopped and was replaced by a rush of thumping and an occasional sound like a coconut being bounced on a stone floor.

Medium Dave got to the door just in time to see the body of Mr Brown the locksmith tumble past, moving quite fast and not at all neatly. A moment later his bag somersaulted around the curve of the stairs. It split as it bounced and there was a jangle as tools and lockpicks bounced out and followed their late owner.

He'd been moving quite fast. He'd probably roll all the way to the bottom.

Medium Dave looked up. Two turns above him, on the opposite side of the huge shaft, Banjo was watching him.

Banjo didn't know right from wrong. He'd always left that sort of thing to his brother.

‘Er… poor guy must've slipped,’ Medium Dave mumbled.

‘Oh, yeah… slipped,’ said Peachy.

He looked up, too.

It was funny. He hadn't noticed them before. The white tower had seemed to glow from within. But now there were shadows, moving across the stone. In the stone.

‘What was that?’ he said. ‘That sound…’

‘What sound?’

‘It sounded… like knives scraping,’ said Peachy. ‘Really close.’

‘There's only us here!’ said Medium Dave. ‘What're you afraid of? Attack by daisies? Come on… let's go and help him…’

She couldn't walk through the door. It simply resisted any such effort. She ended up merely bruised. So Susan turned the doorknob instead.

She heard the oh god gasp. But she was used to the idea of buildings that were bigger on the inside. Her grandfather had never been able to get a handle on dimensions.

The second thing the eye was drawn to were the staircases. They started opposite one another in what was now a big round tower, its ceiling lost in the haze. The spirals circled into infinity.

Susan's eyes went back to the first thing.

It was a large conical heap in the middle of the floor.

It was white. It glistened in the cool light that shone down from the mists.

‘It's teeth,’ she said.

‘I think I'm going to throw up,’ said the oh god miserably.

‘There's nothing that scary about teeth,’ said Susan. She didn't mean it. The heap was very horrible indeed.

‘Did I say I was scared? I'm just hung over again… Oh, me…’

Susan advanced on the heap, moving warily.

They were small teeth. Children's teeth. Whoever had piled them up hadn't been very careful about it, either. A few had been scattered across the floor. She knew because she trod on one, and the slippery little crunching sound made her desperate not to tread on any more.

Whoever had piled them up had presumably been the one who'd drawn the chalk marks around the obscene heap.

‘There're so many,’ whispered Bilious.

‘At least twenty million, given the size of the average milk tooth,’ said Susan. She was shocked to find that it came almost automatically.

‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘Volume of a cone,’ said Susan. ‘Pi times the square of the radius times the height divided by three. I bet Miss Butts never thought it'd come in handy in a place like this.’

‘That's amazing. You did it in your head?’

‘This isn't right,’ said Susan quietly. ‘I don't think this is what the Tooth Fairy is all about. All that effort to get the teeth, and then just to dump them like this? No. Anyway, there's a cigarette end on the floor. I don't see the Tooth Fairy as someone who rolls her own.’

She stared down at the chalk marks.

Voices high above her made her look up. She thought she saw a head look over the stair rail, and then draw back again. She didn't see much of the face, but what she saw didn't look fairylike.

She glanced back at the circle of chalk around the teeth. Someone had wanted all the teeth in one place and had drawn a circle to show people where they had to go.

There were a few symbols scrawled around the circle.

She had a good memory for small details. It was another family trait. And a small detail stirred in her memory like a sleepy bee.

‘Oh, no,’ she breathed. ‘Surely no one would try to—’

Someone shouted, someone up in the whiteness.

A body rolled down the stairs nearest her. It had been a skinny, middle-aged man. Technically it still was, but the long spiral staircase had not been kind.

It tumbled across the white marble and slid to a boneless halt.

Then, as she hurried towards the body, it faded away, leaving nothing behind but a smear of blood.

A jingle noise made her look back up the stairs. Spinning over and over, making salmon leaps in the air, a crowbar bounded over the last dozen steps and landed point first on a flagstone, staying upright and vibrating.