Hogfather by Terry Pratchett Page B

garden. “Look at Old Man Trouble, for one—”
    SQUEAK.
    “Oh, I’m not suggesting—”

    Susan didn’t like Biers but she went there anyway, when the pressure of being normal got too much. Biers, despite the smell and the drink and the company, had one important virtue. In Biers no one took any notice. Of anything. Hogswatch was traditionally supposed to be a time for families but the people who drank in Biers probably didn’t have families; some of them looked as though they might have had litters, or clutches. Some of them looked as though they’d probably eaten their relatives, or at least someone’s relatives.
    Biers was where the undead drank. And when Igor the barman was asked for a Bloody Mary, he didn’t mix a metaphor.
    The regular customers didn’t ask questions, and not only because some of them found anything above a growl hard to articulate. None of them was in the answers business. Everyone in Biers drank alone, even when they were in groups. Or packs.
    Despite the decorations put up inexpertly by Igor the barman to show willing, * Biers was not a family place.
    Family was a subject Susan liked to avoid.
    Currently she was being aided in this by a gin and tonic. In Biers, unless you weren’t choosy, it paid to order a drink that was transparent because Igor also had undirected ideas about what you could stick on the end of a cocktail stick. If you saw something spherical and green, you just had to hope that it was an olive.
    She felt hot breath on her ear. A bogeyman had sat down on the stool beside her.
    “Woss a normo doin’ in a place like this, then?” it rumbled, causing a cloud of vaporized alcohol and halitosis to engulf her. “Hah, you fink it’s cool comin’ down here an’ swannin’ around in a black dress wid all the lost boys, eh? Dabblin’ in a bit of designer darkness, eh?”
    Susan moved her stool away a little. The bogeyman grinned.
    “Want a bogeyman under yer bed, eh?”
    “Now then, Shlimazel,” said Igor, without looking up from polishing a glass.
    “Well, woss she down here for, eh?” said the bogeyman. A huge hairy hand grabbed Susan’s arm. “O’course, maybe what she wants is—”
    “I ain’t telling you again, Shlimazel,” said Igor.
    He saw the girl turn to face Shlimazel.
    Igor wasn’t in a position to see her face fully, but the bogeyman was. He shot back so quickly that he fell off his stool.
    And when the girl spoke, what she said was only partly words but also a statement, written in stone, of how the future was going to be.
    “GO AWAY AND STOP BOTHERING ME.”
    She turned back and gave Igor a polite and slightly apologetic smile. The bogeyman struggled frantically out of the wreckage of his stool and loped toward the door.
    Susan felt the drinkers turn back to their private preoccupations. It was amazing what you could get away with in Biers.
    Igor put down the glass and looked up at the window. For a drinking den that relied on darkness it had rather a large one but, of course, some customers did arrive by air.
    Something was tapping on it now.
    Igor lurched over and opened it.
    Susan looked up.
    “Oh, no…”
    The Death of Rats leapt down onto the counter, with the raven fluttering after it.
    SQUEAK SQUEAK EEK! EEK! SQUEAK IK IK “HEEK HEEK HEEK!” SQ—
    “Go away,” said Susan coldly. “I’m not interested. You’re just a figment of my imagination.”
    The raven perched on a bowl behind the bar and said, “Ah, great.”
    SQUEAK!
    “What’re these?” said the raven, flicking something off the end of its beak. “Onions? Pfah!”
    “Go on, go away, the pair of you,” said Susan.
    “The rat says your granddad’s gone mad,” said the raven. “Says he’s pretending to be the Hogfather.”
    “Listen, I just don’t—What?”
    “Red cloak, long beard—”
    HEEK! HEEK! HEEK!
    “—going ‘ho, ho, ho,’ driving around in the big sleigh drawn by the four piggies, the whole thing…”
    “Pigs? What happened to