Snuff

by Terry Pratchett

  And then there were the frescoes, such that if you were a man easily persuaded then it was a good job there was a cold tap, because not to put too fine a point on it, as it were, there were a large number of fine points all over them, yes indeed, and the ladies were only the start of the problem. There were marble gentlemen, as well, definitely gentlemen, even the ones with goat’s feet. It was surprising that the water in the bath didn’t boil of its own accord. He had asked Sybil about it, and she said that it was an important feature of the Hall, and gentlemen collectors of antiquities would often visit in order to inspect it. Vimes had said that he expected that they did, oh yes indeed. Sybil had said that there was no need for that tone of voice, because she had occasionally taken a bath there from the time she had been twelve and had seen no harm in it. It had, she said, stopped her from being surprised later on.

  And now Vimes lay in the luxurious tub, feeling as if he was trying to fit all the bits of his brain together. He was only vaguely aware of the bathroom door opening, and of hearing Sybil say, “I’ve put Young Sam to bed, and he’s sleeping soundly, although I can’t imagine what he might be dreaming about.”

  Then Vimes floated again in the warm steamy atmosphere and was only just aware of the swish of cloth hitting the floor. Lady Sybil slid in beside him. The water rose, and so, in accordance with the physics of this business, did the spirits of Sam Vimes.

  A few hours later, almost drowning in the pillows on the huge bed and floating just above unconsciousness in a warm pink glow, Sam Vimes was certain that he heard his own voice whispering to him. And it said, “Think of the things that don’t fit. Wonder why the nice lady of the nobby classes wanders down into a goblin cave as if it’s a natural thing to do.” He replied, “Well, Sybil spends half her time at home covered in heavy protective gear and a flameproof helmet because she likes dragons. It’s the sort of thing that nobby ladies tend to do.”

  He considered what he had to say, and responded to himself, “Yes, but dragons are what you might call socially acceptable. Goblins, on the other hand, definitely aren’t. No one has got a good word to say for goblins, except Miss Beedle. Why not take Young Sam along to see her tomorrow? After all, she is the one that got him on to this poo business, and she is a writer, so I expect she’ll be quite glad of the interruption. Yes, that’d be a good idea, and it’d be educational for Young Sam and not an investigation at all…” Thus satisfied, he waited for the onset of sleep, against a chorus of howls, shrieks, mysterious distant bangs, surreptitious rustlings, screeches, disconcerting ticking noises, dreadful scratching sounds, terrible flappings of wings very close, and all the rest of the unholy orchestra that is known as the peace of the countryside.

  He had enjoyed a late-night game of snooker with Willikins, just to keep his hand in, and Vimes, half listening now to the outlandish cacophony, wondered whether the solving of a complex crime, one that needed a certain amount of care, could be compared to a game of snooker. Sure, there were a lot of red balls and they got in the way, so you had to knock them down, but your target, your ultimate target, was going to be the black.

  Powerful people lived in the Shires and so he would tread with care. Metaphorically, Sam Vimes, somewhere in his head, picked up his cue.

  Vimes lay back in the bed, enjoying the wonderful sensation of gradually being eaten by the pillows, and said to Sybil, “Do the Rust family have a place down here?”

  Too late he reflected that this might be a bad move because she might well have told him all about it on one of those occasions when, so unusually for a married man, he was not paying much attention to what his wife was saying, and therefore he might be the cause of grumpiness in those precious, warm minutes before sleep. All he could see of her right now was the very tip of her nose, as the pillows claimed her, but she mumbled, drowsily, “Oh, they bought Hangnail Manor ten years or so ago, after the Marquis of Fantailer murdered his wife with a pruning knife in the pineapple house. Don’t you remember? You spent weeks searching the city for him. In the end everybody seemed to think he’d gone off to Fourecks and disguised himself by not calling himself the Marquis of Fantailer.”

  “Oh yes,” said Vimes, “and I remember that a lot of his chums were quite indignant about the investigation! They said that he’d only done one murder, and it was his wife’s fault for having the bad taste to die after just one little stab!”

  Lady Sybil turned over, which meant that—since she was a woman happily rich in gravitational attraction—as she turned, the pillow closest to Sam, acting like a gear in a chain, spun softly in the opposite direction so that Sam Vimes found himself now lying on his face. He struck out for the surface again and said, “And Rust bought it, did he? It’s unusual for the old fart to spend a penny more than he needs to.”

  “It wasn’t him, dear, it was Gravid.”

  Vimes woke a little more. “The son? The criminal?”

  “I believe, Sam, that the word is entrepreneur, and I’d like to go to sleep now, if it’s all the same to you.”

  Sam Vimes knew that the best thing he could say was nothing, and he sank back into the depths, thinking words like, fiddler, sharp dealer, inserter of a crafty crowbar between what is right and wrong, and mine and thine, wide boy, financier anduntouchable …

  Gently drifting into a nightmare world where the good guys and bad guys so often changed hats without warning, Vimes wrestled sleeplessness to the ground and made certain that it got eight hours.

  Next morning Vimes, hand in hand with his son, walked toward the house of Miss Beedle thoughtfully, not knowing what to expect. He had little experience of the literary world, much preferring the literal one, and he had heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns drinking champagne.* On the other hand, as he approached the place up another little lane, some reconsideration began to take place. For one thing, the “cottage” had a garden that would do credit to a farm. When he looked over the fence he saw lines of vegetables and soft fruit, and there was an orchard and what was probably a pigsty and, over there, a proper outdoor privy, very professionally done, with the very-nearly compulsory crescent-moon shape fretsawed into the door, and the log pile close at hand so that the most efficient use could be made of every trip down the path. The whole place had a sensible and serious air, and certainly wasn’t what you would expect of somebody who just mucked about with words every day.

  Miss Beedle opened the door a fraction of a second after he had knocked. She didn’t look surprised.

  “I was rather expecting you, your grace,” she said, “or is it Mr. Policeman today? From what I hear, it’s always Mr. Policeman one way or the other.” Then she looked down. “And this must be Young Sam.” She glanced up at his father and said, “They tend to get rather tongue-tied, don’t they?”

  “You know, I’ve got lots of poo,” said Young Sam proudly. “I keep it in jam jars and I’ve got a laboratory in the lavatory. Have you got any elephant poo? It goes”—and here he paused for effect—“dung!”

  For a moment Miss Beedle had that slightly glazed sheen often seen on the face of someone meeting Young Sam for the first time. She looked at Vimes. “You must be very proud of him.”

  The proud father said, “It’s very hard to keep up—I know that.”

  Miss Beedle led the way out of the hall and into a room in which chintz played a major part, and drew young Sam over to a large bureau. She opened a drawer and handed the boy what looked like a small book. “This is a bound proof of The Joy of Earwax, and I shall sign it for you if you like.”

  Young Sam took it like one receiving a holy object, and his father, temporarily becoming his mum, said, “What do you say?” To which Young Sam responded with a beam and a thank you and a, “Please don’t scribble on it. I’m not allowed to scribble in books.”

  While Young Sam was happily turning the pages of his new book, his father was introduced to an overstuffed chair. Miss Beedle gave him a smile and hurried off toward the kitchen, leaving Vimes with not much to look a
t except for a room full of bookcases, more overstuffed furniture, a full-size concert harp, and a wall clock made to look like an owl, whose eyes swung backward and forward hypnotically in time with the tick—presumably to the point where you either committed suicide or picked up the poker in the hearth nearby and beat the damn thing until the springs broke.

  While Vimes was warmly contemplating this he realized that he was being watched, and he looked round into the worried face and prognathous jaw of the goblin called Tears of the Mushroom.

  Instinctively he looked at Young Sam, and suddenly the biggest raisin in his cake of apprehension was: what will Young Sam do? How many books has he read? They haven’t told him nasty tales about goblins, have they, or read him too many of those innocent, colorful fairytale books which contained nightmares ready to leap out and some needless fear that would cause trouble one day?

  And what Young Sam did was march across the floor, stop dead in front of the girl and say, “I know a lot about poo. It’s very interesting!”

  Tears of the Mushroom looked frantically for Miss Beedle while Young Sam, totally at ease, began a brief dissertation on sheep poo. In response, with words slapping together like little bricks, she said, “What…is…poo…for?”

  Young Sam frowned at this as if somebody was questioning his life’s work. Then he looked up brightly and said, “Without poo, you would go off bang!” And he stood there beaming, the meaning of life completely solved.

  And Tears of the Mushroom laughed. It was a rather staccato laugh, reminding Vimes of the laughter of certain kinds of women, after certain kinds of too much gin. But it was laughter—straight, genuine and unaffected—and Young Sam bathed in it, giggling, and so did Sam Vimes, with sweat beginning to cool on his neck.

  Then Young Sam said, “I wish I had big hands like you. What’s your name?”

  In that clipped way Vimes was learning to recognize, the goblin girl said, “I am the Tears of the Mushroom.”

  Instantly Young Sam threw his arms around as much of her as he could encompass and shouted, “Mushrooms shouldn’t cry!”

  The look that the goblin girl gave Vimes was one that he had seen many times before on the face of someone in receipt of Young Sam’s hugs: a mixture of surprise and what Vimes had to call non-plussedness.

  At this point Miss Beedle came back into the room holding a plate which she passed to Tears of the Mushroom. “Please be so good as to serve our guests, my dear.”

  Tears of the Mushroom picked up the plate and tentatively pushed it toward Vimes, and said something that sounded like half a dozen coconuts rolling downstairs, but somehow managed to include the syllables you and eat and I make. There seemed to be a pleading in her expression, as if trying to make him understand.

  Vimes stared at her face a while and then thought, Well, I could understand, couldn’t I? It has to be worth a try, and closed his eyes, an errand of some dubiousness when you were face-to-longer-face with a jaw like that. With eyes firmly shut, and one hand over them to cut out the last vestige of light, he said, “Will you say that again, young…lady?” And in the darkness of his skull he heard, quite clearly, “I have baked biscuits today Mr. Po-leees-man. I washed my hands,” she added nervously. “They are clean and tasty. This I have said and it is a thing exact.”

  Baked by a goblin, thought Vimes as he opened his eyes and took a knobbly but appetizing-looking biscuit from the plate in front of him, then shut his eyes again and asked, “Why does the mushroom cry?”

  In the dark he heard the goblin girl gasp, and then say, “It cries so that there are many more mushrooms. This is a certain thing.”

  Vimes heard the faint chink of crockery behind him, but as he took his hands away from his eyes Miss Beedle said, “No, stay in darkness, commander. So it’s true what the dwarfs say about you.”

  “I wouldn’t know. What do the dwarfs say about me, Miss Beedle?”

  Vimes opened his eyes. Miss Beedle sat down on a chair almost opposite, while Tears of the Mushroom waited for more biscuit activity with the air of someone who would probably wait forever or until told not to. She looked imploringly at Vimes and then at Young Sam, who was studying Tears of the Mushroom with interest, although, knowing Young Sam, most of the interest had to do with the plate of biscuits. So he said, “Okay, lad, you may ask the lady for a biscuit, but mind your manners.”

  “They say that the dark is in you, commander, but you keep it in a cage. A present from Koom Valley, they say.”

  Vimes blinked in the light. “A dwarf superstition in a goblin cave? You know a lot about dwarfs?”

  “Quite a lot,” said Miss Beedle, “but far more about goblins, and they believe in the Summoning Dark, just like the dwarfs, after all, they are both creatures of the caves and the Summoning Dark is real. It’s not all in your head, commander: no matter what you hear, I sometimes hear it too. Oh dear, you of all people must recognize a substition when you’re possessed by it? It’s the opposite of a superstition: it’s real even if you don’t believe in it. My mother taught me that; she was a goblin.”

  Vimes looked at the pleasant brown-haired woman in front of him and said, politely, “No.”

  “All right, perhaps you’ll allow me a little theatricality and misdirection for effect? Truthfully, my mother was found as a child when she was three and raised by goblins in Uberwald. Until she was about eleven—and I say about because she was never quite certain about the passage of time—she pretty much thought and acted like a goblin and picked up their language, which is insanely difficult to learn if you’re not brought up to it. She ate with them, had her own plot in the mushroom farm and was very highly thought of among them for the way she looked after the rat farm. She once told me that until she met my father, all her best recollections were of those years in the goblin cave.”

  Miss Beedle stirred her coffee and continued. “And she also told me her worst recollections, the ones that haunted her nightmares and, I might say, haunt mine now: of one day after some nearby humans had found out that there was a golden-haired, pink-cheeked human girl running around underground with evil, treacherous brutes who, as everybody knows, eat babies. Well, she screamed and fought as they tried to take her away, especially since people who she had thought of as family were being slaughtered around her.”

  There was a pause. And Vimes glanced somewhat fearfully at Young Sam, who, thankfully, had returned to The Joy of Earwax and was therefore oblivious of all else.

  “You haven’t touched your coffee, commander. You’re just holding it in your hand and looking at me.”

  Vimes took a deep draft of very hot coffee, which at the moment suited him just fine. He said, “This is true? I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say.”

  Tears of the Mushroom was watching him carefully, ready should he feel a biscuit attack coming on. They were in fact pretty good, and to hide his confusion he thanked her and took another one.

  “Best not to say anything, then,” said Miss Beedle. “All slaughtered, for no reason. It happens. Everybody knows they’re a worthless people, don’t they? I tell you, commander, it’s true that some of the most terrible things in the world are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they’re doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved. Well, it took a lot of those things, and quite a lot of time, to convince a little girl that she wasn’t one of the nasty goblins anymore and was really one of the human beings who were not nasty at all, because one day they were certain she would understand that all this terrible business with the bucket of cold water and the beatings every time she spoke in the goblin tongue, or started absentmindedly to sing a goblin song, was in her best interest. Fortunately, although she probably didn’t think so at the time, she was strong and clever and she learned: learned to be a good girl, learned to wear proper dresses and eat with a knife and fork and kneel down to pray her thanks for all that she was receiving, including the beatings. And she learned not to be a goblin so successfully that they allowed her to work in the gar
den, where she vaulted over the wall. They never broke her, and she said to me that there would always be some goblin in her. I never met my father. According to my mother he was a decent and hardworking man, and a considerate and understanding one too, I suspect.”

  Miss Beedle stood up and brushed at her dress, as if trying to remove the crumbs of history. Standing there, in the chintzy room with the harp in it, she said, “I don’t know who those people were who killed the goblins and beat my mother, but if I ever found out I would slaughter them without a thought, because good people have no business being so bad. Goodness is about what you do. Not what you pray to. And that’s how it went,” she said. “My father was a jeweler, and he soon found out that my mother was absolutely gifted in that respect, probably because of her goblin background that led her to have a feel for stones. I’m sure that made up for having a wife who would swear in goblin when she was annoyed—and let me tell you a good goblin swear can go on for at least a quarter of an hour. She wasn’t one for the books, as you might expect, but my dad had been, and one day I thought, “How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be and, the and I and it, and so on, and there’s a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has already been done for you. That was fifty-seven books ago. It seems to have worked.”

  Miss Beedle sat back down in her chair and leaned forward. “They have the most complex language you could possibly imagine, commander. The meaning of every word is contingent on the words around it, the speaker, the listener, the time of year, the weather, oh, and so many other things. They have something equivalent to what we think of as poetry; they use and control fire…And about three years ago nearly all of them in this countryside were rounded up and carted away, because they were a nuisance. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  Vimes took a deep breath. “Actually, Miss Beedle, I came here to see my wife’s family estate and let my lad learn about the countryside. In the process of which I’ve already been arrested on suspicion of killing a blacksmith and have seen the brutally slaughtered body of a goblin woman. On top of this I have no knowledge of the whereabouts of said blacksmith and, Miss Beedle, would like somebody to enlighten me, preferably yourself.”