The Wee Free Men (Discworld 30)

The walls were solid. The floor creaked as it always did. Her slippers were the same as they always were: old, comfortable, and with all the pink fluff worn off.

She stood in the middle of the floor and said, very quietly, “Is there anybody there?”

Sheep baa’d on the distant hillside, but they probably hadn’t heard her.

The door squeaked open and the cat, Ratbag, came in. He rubbed up against her legs, purring like a distant thunderstorm, and then went and curled up on her bed.

Tiffany got dressed thoughtfully, daring the room to do something strange.

When she got downstairs, breakfast was cooking. Her mother was busy at the sink.

Tiffany darted out through the scullery and into the dairy. She scrambled on hands and knees around the floor, peering under the sink and behind cupboards.

“You can come out now, honestly,” she said.

No one came. She was alone in the room. She’d often been alone in the room, and had enjoyed it. It was almost her private territory. But now, somehow, it was too empty, too clean.

When she wandered back into the kitchen, her mother was still standing by the sink, washing dishes, but a plate of steaming porridge had been put down in the one set place on the table.

“I’ll make some more butter today,” said Tiffany carefully, sitting down. “I might as well, while we’re getting all this milk.”

Her mother nodded and put a plate on the drainboard beside the sink.

“I haven’t done anything wrong, have I?” said Tiffany.

Her mother shook her head.

Tiffany sighed. “And then she woke up and it was all a dream.” It was just about the worst ending you could have to any story. But it had all seemed so real. She could remember the smoky smell in the pictsies’ cave, and the way…who was it…oh, yes, he’d been called Rob Anybody…the way Rob Anybody had always been so nervous about talking to her.

It was strange, she thought, that Ratbag had rubbed up against her. He’d sleep on her bed if he could get away with it, but during the day he kept well out of Tiffany’s way. How odd.

There was a rattling noise near the mantelpiece. The china shepherdess on Granny’s shelf was moving sideways of its own accord, and as Tiffany watched with her porridge spoon halfway to her mouth, it slid off and smashed on the floor.

The rattling went on. Now it was coming from the big oven. She could see the door actually shaking on its hinges.

She turned to her mother and saw her put another plate down by the sink. But it wasn’t being held in a hand.

The oven door burst off the hinges and slid across the floor.

“Dinna eat the porridge!”

Nac Mac Feegles spilled out into the room, hundreds of them, pouring across the tiles.

The walls were shifting. The floor moved. And now the thing turning around at the sink was not even human but just…stuff, no more human than a gingerbread man, gray as old dough, changing shape as it lumbered toward Tiffany.

The pictsies surged past her in a flurry of snow.

She looked up at the thing’s tiny black eyes.

The scream came from somewhere deep inside. There was no Second Thought, no First Thought, just a scream. It seemed to spread out as it left Tiffany’s mouth until it became a black tunnel in front of her, and as she fell into it, she heard, in the commotion behind her:

“Who d’yer think ye’re lookin’ at, pal? Crivens, but ye’re gonna get sich a kickin’!”

Tiffany opened her eyes.

She was lying on damp ground in the snowy, gloomy wood. Pictsies were watching her carefully but, she saw, there were others behind them staring outward, into the gloom among the tree trunks.

There was…stuff in the trees. Lumps of stuff. It was gray, and it hung there like old cloth.