The horse dropped through the smoky air and landed neatly and at the trot in an alley, which was otherwise empty except for a closed door and a sign with a torch over it.

Susan read:

CURRY GARDENS.

KITCHREN E ENTLANCE-KEEP O OUT. RIS M MEANS Y YOU.

Binky seemed to be waiting for something.

Susan had expected a more exotic destination.

She knew about curry. They had curry at school, under the name of Bogey and Rice. It was yellow. There were soggy raisins and peas in it.

Binky whinnied, and stamped a hoof.

A hatch in the door flew open. Susan got a brief impression of a face against the fiery atmosphere of the kitchen.

"Ooorrrh, nooorrrh! Binkorrr! Binkorrr!"

The hatch slammed shut again.

Obviously something was meant to happen.

She stared at a menu nailed to the wall. It was misspelled, of course, because the menu of the folkier kind of restaurant always has to have misspellings in it, so that customers can be lured into a false sense of superiority. She couldn't recognize the names of most of the dishes, which included:

Curry with Vegetable 8p Curry with Sweat, and Sore Balls of Pig 10p Curry with Sweer and Sour, Ball of Fish 10p Curry with Meat 10p Curry with Named Meat 15p Extra Curry 5p Porn cracker 4p

EAT I IT H HERE O OR,.

TAKE I IT A AWAY.

The hatch snapped open again and a large brown bag of allegedly but not really waterproof paper was dumped on the little ledge in front of it. Then the hatch slammed shut again.

Susan reached out carefully. The smell rising from the bag had a sort of thermic lance quality that warned against metal cutlery. But tea had been a long time ago.

She realized she didn't have any money on her. On the other hand, no one had asked her for any. But the world would go to wrack and ruin if people didn't recognize their responsibilities.

She leaned forward and knocked on the door "Excuse me...don't you want anything-?"

There was shouting and a crash from inside, as if half a dozen people were fighting to get under the same table.

"Oh. How nice. Thank you. Thank you very much," said Susan, politely.

Binky walked away, slowly. This time there was no bunched leap of muscle power-he trotted into the air carefully, as if sometime in the past he'd been scolded for spilling something.

Susan tried the curry several hundred feet above the speeding landscape, and then threw it away as politely as possible.

"It was very...unusual," she said. "And that's it? You carried me all the way up here for take-away food?"

The ground skimmed past faster, and it crept over her that the horse was going a lot faster now, a full gallop instead of the easy canter. A bunching of muscle...

...and then the sky ahead of her erupted blue for a moment.

Behind her, unseen because light was standing around red with embarrassment, asking itself what had happened, a pair of hoofprints burned in the air for a moment and then faded.

It was a landscape, hanging in space.

There was a squat little house, with a garden around it. There were fields, and distant mountains. Susan stared at it as Binky slowed.

There was no depth. As the horse swung around for a landing, the landscape was revealed as a mere surface, a thin shaped film of...existence...imposed on nothingness.

She expected it to tear when the horse landed, but there was only a faint crunch and a scatter of gravel.

Binky trotted around the house and into the stable yard, where he stood and waited.

Susan got off, gingerly. The ground felt solid enough under her feet. She reached down and scratched at the gravel; there was more gravel underneath.

She'd heard that the Tooth Fairy collected teeth. Think about it logically...the only other people who collected any bits of bodies did so for very suspicious purposes, and usually to harm or control other people. The Tooth Fairies must have half the children in the world under their control. And this didn't look like the house of that sort of person.

The Hogfather apparently lived in some kind of horrible slaughterhouse in the mountains, festooned with sausages and black puddings and painted a terrible blood red.

Which suggested style style. A nasty style, but at least style of a sort. This place didn't have style of any any sort. sort.

The Soul Cake Tuesday Duck didn't apparently have any kind of a home. Nor did Old Man Trouble or the Sandman, as far as she knew.

She walked around the house, which wasn't much larger than a cottage. Definitely. Whoever lived here had no taste at all.

She found the front door. It was black, with a knocker in the shape of an omega.

Susan reached for it, but the door opened by itself.

And the hall stretched away in front of her, far bigger than the outside of the house could possibly contain. She could distantly make out a stairway wide enough for the tap dancing finale in a musical.

There was something else wrong with the perspective. There clearly was a wall a long way off but, at the same time, it looked as though it was painted in the air a mere fifteen feet or so away. It was as if distance was optional.

There was a large clock against one wall. Its slow tick filled the immense space.

There's a room, she thought. I remember the room of whispers I remember the room of whispers.

Doors lined the hall at wide intervals. Or short intervals, if you looked at it another way.

She tried to walk toward the nearest one, and gave up after a few wildly teetering steps. Finally she managed to reach it by taking aim and then shutting her eyes.

The door was at one and the same time at one and the same time about normal human size and immensely big. There was a highly ornate frame around it, with a skull-and-bones motif. about normal human size and immensely big. There was a highly ornate frame around it, with a skull-and-bones motif.

She pushed the door open.

This room could have housed a small town. room could have housed a small town.

A small area of carpet occupied the middle distance, no more than a hectare in size. It took Susan several minutes to reach the edge.

It was a room within a room. There was a large, heavy-looking desk on a raised dais, with a leather swivel chair behind it. There was a large model of the Discworld, on a sort of ornament made of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle. There were several bookshelves, the large volumes piled in the haphazard fashion of people who're far too busy using the books ever to arrange them properly. There was even a window, hanging in the air a few feet above the ground.

But there were no walls. There was nothing between the edge of the carpet and the walls of the greater room except floor, and even that was far too precise a word for it. It didn't look like rock and it certainly wasn't wood. It made no sound when Susan walked on it. It was simply surface, in the purely geometrical sense.

The carpet had a skull-and-bones pattern.

It was also black. Everything was black, or a shade of grey. Here and there a tint suggested a very deep purple or ocean-depth blue.

In the distance, toward the walls of the greater room, the metaroom or whatever it was, there was the suggestion of...something. Something was casting complicated shadows, too far away to be clearly seen.

Susan got up onto the dais.

There was something odd about the things around her. Of course, there was everything odd about the things around her, but it was a huge major oddness that was simply in their nature. She could ignore it. But there was an oddness on a human level. Everything was just slightly wrong, as if it had been made by someone who hadn't fully comprehended its purpose.

There was a blotter on the oversize desk but it was part of it, fused to the surface. The drawers were just raised areas of wood, impossible to open. Whoever had made the desk had seen seen desks, but hadn't understood deskishness. desks, but hadn't understood deskishness.

There was even some sort of desk ornament. It was just a slab of lead, with a thread hanging down one side and a shiny round metal ball on the end of the thread. If you raised the ball it swung down and thumped into the lead, just once.

She didn't try to sit in the chair. There was a deep pit in the leather. Someone had spent a lot of time sitting there.

She glanced at the spines of the books. They were in a language she couldn't understand.

She trekked back to the distant door, went out into the hall, and tried the next door. A suspicion was beginning to form in her mind.

The door led to another huge room, but this one was full of shelves, floor to distant, cloud-hung ceiling. Every shelf was lined with hourglasses.

The sand pouring from the past to the future filled the room with a sound like surf, a noise made up of a billion small sounds.

Susan walked between the shelves. It was like being in a crowd.

Her eye was caught by a movement on a nearby shelf. In most of the hourglasses the falling sand was a solid silver line but in this one, just as she watched, the line vanished. The last grain of sand tumbled into the bottom bulb.

The hourglass vanished, with a small "pop."

A moment later another one appeared in its place, with the faintest of "pings." In front of her eyes, sand began to fall...

And she was aware that this process was going on all over the room. Old hourglasses vanished, new ones took their place.

She knew about this, too.

She reached out and picked up a glass, bit her lip thoughtfully, and started to turn the thing upside down...

SQUEAK!.

She spun around. The Death of Rats was on the shelf behind her. It raised an admonitory finger.

"All right," said Susan. She put the glass back in its place.

SQUEAK.

"No. I haven't finished looking."

Susan set off for the door, with the rat skrittering across the floor after her.

The third room turned out to be...

...the bathroom.

Susan hesitated. You expected expected hourglasses in this place. You expected the skull-and-bones motif. But you didn't expect the very large white porcelain tub, on its own raised podium like a throne, with giant brass taps and-in faded blue letters just over the thing that held the plug chain-the words: C. H. Lavatory & Son, Mollymog St, Ankh-Morpork. hourglasses in this place. You expected the skull-and-bones motif. But you didn't expect the very large white porcelain tub, on its own raised podium like a throne, with giant brass taps and-in faded blue letters just over the thing that held the plug chain-the words: C. H. Lavatory & Son, Mollymog St, Ankh-Morpork.

You didn't expect the rubber duck. It was yellow.

You didn't expect the soap. It was suitably bone white, but looked as if it had never been used. Beside it was a bar of orange soap which certainly had had been used-it was hardly more than a sliver. It smelled a lot like the vicious stuff used at school. been used-it was hardly more than a sliver. It smelled a lot like the vicious stuff used at school.

The bath, though big, was a human thing. There was brown-lined crazing around the plug hole and a stain where the tap had dripped. But almost everything else had been designed by the person who hadn't understood deskishness, and now hadn't understood ablutionology either.

They had created a towel rail an entire athletics team could have used for training. The black towels on it were fused onto it and were quite hard. Whoever actually used used the bathroom probably dried themselves on one white-and-blue, very worn towel with the initials Y.M.R-C-I-G-B-S A, A-M. on it. the bathroom probably dried themselves on one white-and-blue, very worn towel with the initials Y.M.R-C-I-G-B-S A, A-M. on it.

There was even a lavatory, another fine example of C. H. Lavatory's porcelainic art, with an embossed frieze of green-and-blue flowers on the cistern. And again, like the bath and the soap, it suggested that this room had been built by someone...and then someone else someone else had come along afterward to add small details. Someone with a better knowledge of plumbing, for a start. And someone else who understood, really understood, that towels should be soft and capable of drying people, and soap should be capable of bubbles. had come along afterward to add small details. Someone with a better knowledge of plumbing, for a start. And someone else who understood, really understood, that towels should be soft and capable of drying people, and soap should be capable of bubbles.

You didn't expect any of it until you saw it. And then it was like seeing it again again.

The bald towel dropped off the rail and skipped across the floor, until it fell away to reveal the Death of Rats.