Moving Pictures

to speak, and started to gasp for air. The orangutan pushed him aside and grabbed Ginger firmly by the arm. It was a warm, soft grip, but with just a hint that, if he really ever needed to, the Librarian could easily turn any arm into a tube of jelly with bits in it.
    “Oook!”
    “Look, it’s over,” said Ginger. “The monster’s dead. That’s how things end, OK? And now I’m going to get something to drink.”
    “Oook!”
    “Oook yourself.”
    Victor raised his head.
    “It’s…not over,” he said.
    “It is for me. I just saw myself turn into a…a THING with tentacles. A Thing like that has a bit of an effect on a girl, you know.”
    “It’s not important!” Victor managed. “We got it wrong! Look, they’ll keep on coming now! You’ve got to come back to Holy Wood! They’ll be coming through there, too!”
    “Oook!” the Librarian agreed, jabbing the book with a purple fingernail.
    “Well, they can do it without me,” said Ginger.
    “No, they can’t! I mean, they will anyway! But you can stop them! Oh, stop looking at me like that!” He nudged the Librarian. “Go on, tell her,” he said.
    “Oook,” said the Librarian, patiently. “Oook.”
    “I can’t understand him!” wailed Ginger.
    Victor’s brow wrinkled. “You can’t?”
    “It’s all just monkey noises to me!”
    Victor’s eyes swiveled sideways. “Er—”
    The Librarian stood like a small prehistoric statue for a moment. Then he took Ginger’s hand, very gently, and patted it.
    “Oook,” he said, graciously.
    “Sorry,” said Ginger.
    “Listen!” said Victor. “I got it wrong! You weren’t trying to help Them, you were trying to stop them! I read it the wrong way round! It’s not a man behind a gate, it’s a man in front of a gate! And a man in front of a gate,” he took a deep breath, “is a guard !”
    “Yes, but we can’t get to Holy Wood! It’s miles away!”
    Victor shrugged. “Go and get the handleman,” he said.

    The land around Ankh-Morpork is fertile and largely given over to the cabbage fields that help to give the city its distinctive odor.
    The gray light of pre-dawn unrolled over the blue-green expanse, and around a couple of farmers who were making an early start on the spinach harvest.
    They looked up, not at a sound, but at a traveling point of silence where sound ought to have been.
    It was a man and a woman and something like a size five man in a size twelve fur coat, all in a chariot that flickered as it moved. It bowled along the road toward Holy Wood and was soon out of sight.
    A minute or two later it was followed by a wheelchair. Its axle glowed red-hot. It was full of people screaming at one another. One of them was turning a handle on a box.
    It was so overburdened that wizards occasionally fell off and ran along after it, shouting, until they had a chance to jump on again and start screaming.
    Whoever was attempting to steer was not succeeding, and it weaved back and forth across the road and eventually hurtled off it completely and through the side of a barn.
    One of the farmers nudged the other.
    “Oi’ve seen this on the clicks,” he said. “It’s always the same. They crash into a barn and they allus comes out the other side covered in squawking chickens.”
    His companion leaned reflectively on his hoe.
    “It’d be a sight worth seeing that,” he said.
    “Sure would.”
    “’Cos all there is in there, boy, is twenty ton of cabbage.”
    There was a crash, and the chair erupted from the barn in a shower of chickens and headed madly toward the road.
    The farmers looked at one another.
    “Well, dang me,” said one of them.

    Holy Wood was a glow on the horizon. The earth tremors were stronger now.
    The flickering chariot came out of a stand of trees and paused at the top of the incline that led down to the town.
    Mist wreathed Holy Wood. From out of it spears of light criss-crossed the sky.
    “We’re too late?” said Ginger hopefully.
    “Almost too late,” said Victor.
    “Oook,” said the Librarian. His fingernail raced back and forth as he read the ancient pictograms—right to left, right to left.
    “I knew there was something not right,” Victor had said.
    “That sleeping statue…the guard. The old priests sang songs and did ceremonies to keep him awake. They remembered Holy Wood as best they could.”
    “But I don’t know anything about a guard!”
    “Yes, you do. Like, deep down inside.”
    “Oook,” said the Librarian, tapping a page.