Moving Pictures (Discworld 10)

'You know what's going to happen now, don't you,' said Ginger.

'Yes. Someone's going to start playing music out of a hole in the floor.'

'Was that cave really a picture pit?'

'Sort of, I think,' said Victor, carefully.

'But the screen here is just a screen. It's not . . . well, it's just a screen. Just a better class of sheet. It's not -'

There There was a blast of sound from the front of the hall. With a clanking and the hiss of desperately escaping air, Bezam's daughter Calliope rose slowly out of the floor, attacking the keys on a small organ with all the verve of several hours' practice and the combined efforts of two strong trolls working the bellows behind the scenes. She was a beefy young woman and, whatever piece of music she was playing, it was definitely losing.

Down in the stalls, the Dean passed a bag along to the Chair.

'Have a chocolate-covered raisin,' he said.

'They look like rat droppings,' said the Chair.

The Dean peered at them in the gloom.

'So that's it,' he said. 'The bag fell on the floor a minute ago, and I thought there seemed rather a lot.'

'Shsss!' said a woman in the row behind. Windle Poons' scrawny head turned like a magnet.

'Hoochie koochie!' he cackled. 'Twopence more and up goes the donkey!'

The lights went down further. The screen flickered. Numbers appeared and blinked briefly, counting down.

Calliope peered intently at the score in front of her, rolled up her sleeves, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and launched a spirited attack on what was just discernible as the old Ankh-Morporkian civic anthem.[27]

The lights went out.

The sky flickered. It wasn't like proper fog at all. It shed a silvery, slatey light, flickering internally like a cross between the Aurora Coriolis and summer lightning.

In the direction of Holy Wood the sky blazed with light. It was visible even in the alley behind Sham Harga's House of Ribs, where two dogs were enjoying the All-You-Can-Drag-Out-Of-The-Midden-For-Free Special.

Laddie looked up and growled.

'I don't blame you,' said Gaspode. 'I said it boded. Didn't I say there was boding happening?'

Sparks crackled off his fur.

'Come on,' he said. 'We'd better warn people. You're good at that.'

Clickaclickaclicka . . .

It was the only noise inside the Odium. Calliope had stopped playing and was staring up at the screen.

Mouths hung open, and closed only to bite on handfuls of banged grains.

Victor was dimly aware that he'd fought it. He'd tried to look away. Even now, a little voice in his own head was telling him that things were wrong, but he ignored it. Things were clearly right. He'd shared in the sighs as the heroine tried to preserve the old family mine in a Worlde Gonne Madde . . . He'd shuddered at the fighting in the war. He'd watched the ballroom scene in a romantic haze. He . . .

. . . was aware of a cold sensation against his leg. It was as though a half-melted ice cube was soaking through his trousers. He tried to ignore it, but it had a definite unignorable quality.

He looked down.

' 'Scuse me,' said Gaspode.

Victor's eyes focused. Then his eyes found themselves being dragged back to the screen, where a huge version of himself was kissing a huge version of Ginger.