Moving pictures

Victor wrote: 'XCEPT I THINK I KNOW WHAT'S HAPNEN. ANYWAY, YOU WILL BE NEEDED IF IT GOES WRONG.'

He nodded at the Dean and hurried back to Ginger and the Librarian. He gave the ape a worried look. Technically the Librarian was a wizard - at least, when he'd been human he was a wizard, so presumably he still was. On the other hand, he was also an ape, and a handy man to have around in an emergency. He decided to ask it.

'Come on,' he mouthed.

It was easy enough to find the way to the hill. Where there had been a path there was now a broad trail, poignantly scattered with the debris of hurried passage. A sandal. A discarded picture box. A trailing red feather boa.

The door into the hill had been torn off its hinges. A dull glow came from the tunnel. Victor shrugged and marched inside.

The debris hadn't been cleared right away, but it had been pushed aside and flattened down to allow the crowd to go through. The ceiling hadn't fallen in. This wasn't because of the debris. It was because of Detritus.

He was holding it up.

Nearly up. He was already down on one knee.

Victor and the Librarian stacked boulders around the troll until he could let the weight off his shoulders. He groaned, or at least looked as if he'd groaned, and toppled forward. Ginger helped him up.

'What happened?' she mouthed at him.

'??' Detritus looked puzzled at the absence of his voice and tried to squint at his mouth.

Victor sighed. He had a vision of the Holy Wood people stampeding blindly along the passage, the trolls scrabbling at the blockage. Since Detritus was the toughest, naturally he'd play a major part. And since the only function he normally used his brain for was to stop the top of his head falling in, equally naturally he'd be the one left holding up the weight on the hill. Victor imagined him calling out, unheard, as the rest of them hurried by.

He wondered whether to write him a cheery message, but in Detritus' case this was almost certainly a waste of time. Anyway, the troll wasn't about to hang around. He loped off along the tunnel with a grim look on his face, concentrating fiercely on some private errand of his own. His trailing knuckles left two furrows in the dust.

The passage opened out into the cavern which was, Victor now realized, a sort of ante- chamber to the pit itself. Maybe thousands of years ago supplicants had flocked out here to buy . . . what? Consecrated sausages, maybe, and the holy banged grains.

Spectral light filled it now. It was still full of damp and ancient mould wherever Victor looked. Yet wherever he didn't look, at the edges of his vision, he kept getting the feeling that the place was decorated like a palace with red plush draperies and baroque gold decorations. He kept turning his head sharply, trying to trap the ghostly, glittering image.

He met the Librarian's worried frown, and chalked on the cave wall:

'REALITIES MERGING?'

The Librarian nodded.

Victor winced, and led his little group of Holy Wood guerrillas -at least, two guerrillas and one orang-utan up the worn steps into the pit.

Victor realized later that it was Detritus who saved them all.

They took one look at the swirling images on the obscene screen and . . .

Dream. Reality. Believe.

Await . . .

. . . and Detritus tried to walk through them.

Images designed to trap and throw a glamour over any sapient mind bounced off the back of his rocky skull and came right out again. He paid them no attention at all. He had other fish to fry. [29]