Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett Read Free Book Online Page B

tell what a homing pigeon is thinking. He just knew that where he ought to be was not where he was.
    And finally, even further down the road, was an eight-horse wagon taking a load of lumber to Holy Wood. Its driver wasn’t thinking about anything very much, although he was slightly puzzled by an incident that occurred just as he was leaving Ankh-Morpork in the darkness before dawn. A voice from the gloom by the road had shouted “Stop in the name of the city guard!” and he had stopped, and when nothing further had transpired he had looked around, and there was no one there.
    The wagon rumbled past, revealing to the eye of the imaginative beholder the small figure of Gaspode the Wonder Dog, trying to make himself comfortable among the balks of timber at the rear. He was going to Holy Wood too.
    And he also didn’t know why.
    But he was determined to find out.

    No one would have believed, in the final years of the Century of the Fruitbat, that Discworld affairs were being watched keenly and impatiently by intelligences greater than Man’s, or at least much nastier; that their affairs were being scrutinized and studied as a man with a three-day appetite might study the All-You-Can-Gobble-For-A-Dollar menu outside Harga’s House of Ribs …
    Well, actually…most wizards would have believed it, if anyone had told them.
    And the Librarian would certainly have believed it.
    And Mrs. Marietta Cosmopilite of 3 Quirm Street, Ankh-Morpork, would have believed it, too. But she believed the world was round, that a sprig of garlic in her underwear drawer kept away vampires, that it did you good to get out and have a laugh occasionally, that there was niceness in everyone if you only knew where to look, and that three horrible little dwarfs peered in at her undressing every night. 4

    Holy Wood!…
    …was nothing very much, yet. Just a hill by the sea, and on the other side of the hill, a lot of sand dunes. It was that special sort of beautiful area which is only beautiful if you can leave after briefly admiring its beauty and go somewhere else where there are hot tubs and cold drinks. Actually staying there for any length of time is a penance.
    Nevertheless, there was a town there…just. Wooden shacks had been built wherever someone had dropped a load of timber, and they were crude, as if the builders had resented the time taken from something more important that they’d much rather be doing. They were square plank boxes.
    Except for the front.
    If you wanted to understand Holy Wood, Victor said years afterward, you had to understand its buildings.
    You’d see a box on the sand. It’s have a roughly peaked roof, but that wasn’t important, because it never rained in Holy Wood. There’d be cracks in the walls, stuffed with old rags. The windows would be holes—glass was too fragile to cart all the way from Ankh-Morpork. And, from behind, the front was just like a huge wooden billboard, held up by a network of struts.
    From the front, it was a fretted, carved, painted, ornate, baroque architectural extravaganza. In Ankh-Morpork, sensible men built their houses plain, so as not to attract attention, and kept the decoration for inside. But Holy Wood wore its houses inside out.
    Victor walked up what passed for the main street in a daze. He had woken up in the early hours out in the dunes. Why? He’d decided to come to Holy Wood, but why? He couldn’t remember. All he could remember was that, at the time, it was the obvious thing to do. There had been hundreds of good reasons.
    If only he could remember one of them.
    Not that his mind had any room to review memories. It was too busy being aware that he was very hungry and acutely thirsty. His pockets had yielded a total of seven pence. That wouldn’t buy a bowl of soup, let alone a good meal.
    He needed a good meal. Things would look a lot clearer after a good meal.
    He pushed through the crowds. Most of them seemed to be carpenters, but there were others, carrying carboys