Moving Pictures (34 page)

“Just get out!”

He shoved her toward the doors, then turned and saw the two dogs looking at him expectantly.

“And you two, too,” he said.

Laddie barked.

“Dog’s gotta stay by ’is master, style of fing,” said Gaspode, shame-facedly.

Victor looked around in desperation, picked up a fragment of seat, opened the door, threw the wood as far as possible and shouted “Fetch!”

Both dogs bounded away after it, propelled by instinct. On his way past, though, Gaspode had just enough self-control to say, “You bastard!”

Victor pulled open the door of the picture-throwing room and came out with handfuls of
Blown Away
.

The giant Victor was having trouble leaving the screen. The head and one arm had pulled free and were three-dimensional. The arms flailed vaguely at Victor as he methodically threw coils of octo-cellulose over it. He ran back to the booth and pulled out the stacks of clicks that Bezam, in defiance of common sense, had stored under the bench.

Working with the methodical calmness of bowel-twisting terror, he carried the cans by the armload to the screen and heaped them there. The Thing managed to wrench another arm free of two-dimensionality and tried to scrabble at them, but whatever was controlling it was having trouble controlling this new shape. It was probably unused to having only two arms, Victor told himself.

He threw the last can onto the heap.

“In our world you have to obey our rules,” he said. “And I bet you burn just as well as anything else, hey?”

The Thing struggled to pull a leg free.

Victor patted his pockets. He ran back to the booth and scrabbled around madly.

Matches. There weren’t any matches!

He pushed open the doors to the foyer and dashed out into the street, where the crowds were milling around in horrified fascination and watching a fifty-foot Ginger disentangling Itself from the wreckage of a building.

Victor heard a clicking beside him. Gaffer the handleman was intently capturing the scene on film.

The Chair was shouting at Dibbler.

“Of course we can’t use magic against it! They
need
magic! Magic only makes them stronger.”

“You must be able to do
something
!” screamed Dibbler.

“My dear sir,
we
didn’t start meddling with things best left—” the Chair hesitated in mid-snarl, “unmeddled-with,” he finished lamely.

“Matches!” Victor shouted. “Matches! Hurry!”

They all stared at him.

Then the Chair nodded. “Ordinary fire,” he said. “You’re right. That should do it. Good thinking, boy.” He fumbled in a pocket and produced the bundle of matches that chain-smoking wizards always carried.

“You can’t burn the
Odium
,” snapped Dibbler. “There’s heaps of film in there!”

Victor ripped a poster off the wall, wrapped it in a crude torch, and lit one end.

“That’s what I’m going to burn,” he said.

“’
Scuse me
—”

“Stupid! Stupid!” shouted Dibbler. “That stuff burns really
fast!
”

“’
Scuse me
—

“So what? I wasn’t intending to hang around in there,” said Victor.

“I mean
really
fast!”

“’Scuse me,” said Gaspode patiently. They looked down at him.

“Me an’ Laddie could do it,” he said. “Four legs’re better ’n two and so forth, y’know? When it comes to savin’ the day.”

Victor looked at Dibbler and raised his eyebrows.

“I suppose they might be able to,” Dibbler conceded. Victor nodded. Laddie leaped gracefully, snatched the torch out of his hand and ran back into the building with Gaspode lurching after him.

“Did I hear things, or can that little dog speak?” said Dibbler.

“He says he can’t,” said Victor.

Dibbler hesitated. The excitement was unhinging him a little. “Well,” he said, “I suppose he should know.”

The dogs bounded toward the screen. The Victor-Thing was nearly through, half-sprawled among the cans.

“Can I light the fire?” said Gaspode. “’Smy job, really.”

Laddie barked obediently and dropped the blazing paper. Gaspode snapped it up and advanced cautiously toward the Thing.

“Savin’ the day,” he said, indistinctly, and dropped the torch on a coil of film. It flared instantly and burned with a sticky white fire, like slow magnesium.

“OK,” he said. “Now, let’s get the hell out of—”

The Thing screamed. What semblance there still was of Victor left it, and something like an explosion in an aquarium twisted among the flames. A tentacle whipped out and grabbed Gaspode by the leg.

He turned and tried to bite it.

Laddie ricocheted back down the stricken hall and launched himself at the flailing arm. It recoiled, knocking him over and spinning Gaspode across the floor.

The little dog sat up, took a few wobbling steps, and fell over.

“Bloody leg’s been gone,” he muttered. Laddie gave him a sorrowful look. Flames crackled around the film cans.

“Go on, get out of here, you stupid mutt,” said Gaspode.

“The whole thing’s goin’ to go up in a minute.
No!
Don’t pick me up! Put me down! You haven’t got time—”

The walls of the
Odium
expanded with apparent slowness, every plank and stone maintaining its position relative to all the others but floating out by itself.

Then Time caught up with events.

Victor threw himself flat on his face.

Boom.

An orange fireball lifted the roof and billowed up into the foggy sky. Wreckage smashed against the walls of other houses. A red-hot film can scythed over the heads of the recumbent wizards, making a menacing
wipwipwip
noise, and exploded against a distant wall.

There was a high, thin keening that stopped abruptly.

The Ginger-Thing rocked in the heat. The gust of hot air lifted its huge skirts in billows around its waist and it stood, flickering and uncertain, as debris rained down around it.

Then it turned awkwardly and lurched onward.

Victor looked at Ginger, who was staring at the thinning clouds of smoke over the pile of rubble that had been the
Odium
.

“That’s wrong,” she was muttering. “It doesn’t happen like that. It never happens like that. Just when you think it’s too late, they come galloping out of the smoke.” She turned dull eyes upon him. “Don’t they?” she pleaded.

“That’s in the clicks,” said Victor. “This is reality.”

“What’s the difference?”

The Chair grabbed Victor’s shoulder and spun him around.

“It’s heading for the Library!” he repeated. “You’ve got to stop it! If it gets there the magic’ll make it invincible! We’ll never beat it! It’ll be able to bring others!”

“You’re wizards,” said Ginger. “Why don’t you stop it?”

Victor shook his head. “The Things
like
our magic,” he said. “If you use it anywhere around them, it only makes them stronger. But I don’t see what I can do…”

His voice trailed off. The crowd was watching him expectantly.

They weren’t looking at him as if he was their only hope. They were looking at him is if he was their certainty.

He heard a small child say, “What happens now, Mum?”

The fat woman holding it said, authoritatively, “It’s easy. He rushes up and stops it just at the last minute. Happens every time. Seen him do it before.”

“I’ve never done it before!” said Victor.

“
Saw
you do it,” said the woman smugly. “In
Sons of the Dessert
. When this lady here,” she gave a brief curtsey in the direction of Ginger, “was on that horse what threw her over the cliff, and
you
galloped up and grabbed her at the last minute. Very impressive, I thought.”

“That wasn’t
Sons of the Dessert
,” said an elderly man pedantically, while he filled his pipe, “that was
Valley of the Trolls
.”

“It was
Sons
,” said a thin woman behind him. “I should know, I watched it twenty-seven times.”

“Yes, it was
very
good, wasn’t it,” said the first woman.

“Every time I see a scene where she leaves him and he turns to her and gives her that look, I burst into tears—”

“Excuse me, but that
wasn’t Sons of the Dessert
,” said the man, speaking slowly and deliberately. “You’re thinking of the famous plaza scene in
Burninge Passiones
.”

The fat woman took Ginger’s unresisting hand and patted it.

“You’ve got a good man there,” she said. “The way he always rescues you every time. If
I
was being dragged off by mad trolls my ole man wouldn’t say a word except to ask where I wanted my clothes sent.”

“
My
husband wouldn’t get out of his chair if I was being et by dragons,” said the thin woman. She gave Ginger a gentle prod. “But you want to wear more clothes, miss. Next time you’re taken off to be rescued, you
insist
they let you take a warm coat. I never see you on the screen without thinking to myself, she’s temptin’ a dose of ’flu, going around like that.”

“Where’s ’is sword?” said the child, kicking its mother on the shin.

“I expect he’ll be off to fetch it directly,” she said, giving Victor an encouraging smile.

“Er. Yes,” he said. “Come on, Ginger.” He grabbed her hand.

“Give the lad room,” shouted the pipe smoker authoritatively.

A space cleared around them. Ginger and Victor saw a thousand expectant faces watching them.

“They think we’re
real
,” moaned Ginger. “No one’s doing anything because they think you’re a hero, for gods’ sake! And we can’t do anything! This Thing is bigger than both of us!”

Victor stared down at the damp cobblestones. I can probably remember some magic, he thought, but ordinary magic’s no good against the Dungeon Dimensions. And I’m pretty sure real heroes don’t hang around in the middle of cheering crowds. They get on with the job. Real heroes are like poor old Gaspode. No one ever notices them until afterward. That’s the reality.

He raised his head slowly.

Or is this the reality?

The air crackled. There was another kind of magic. It was snapping wildly in the world now, like a broken film. If only he could grab it…

Reality didn’t have to be
real
. Maybe if conditions were right, it just had to be what people believed…

“Stand back,” he whispered.

“What’re you going to do?” said Ginger.

“Try some Holy Wood kind of magic.”

“There’s nothing magic about Holy Wood!”

“I…think there is. A
different
sort. We’ve felt it. Magic’s where you find it.”

He took a few deep breaths, and let his mind unravel slowly. That was the secret. You did it, you just didn’t think about it. You just let the instructions come from outside. It was just a job. You just felt the eye of the picture-box on you, and it was a different world, a world that was just a flickering silver square.

That was the secret. The flicker.

Ordinary magic just moved things around. It couldn’t
create
a real thing that’d last for more than a second, because that took a lot of power.

But Holy Wood easily created things over and over again, dozens of times a second. They didn’t have to last for long. They just had to last for long enough.

But you had to work Holy Wood magic by Holy Wood’s rules…

He extended a rock-steady hand toward the dark sky.

“Lights!”

There was a sheet of lightning that illuminated the whole city…

“Picture box!”

Gaffer spun the handle furiously.

“Action!”

No one saw where the horse came from. It was just
there,
leaping over the heads of the crowd. It was white, with lots of impressive silver work on the bridle. Victor swung up into the saddle as it cantered past, then made it rear impressively so that it pawed the air. He drew a sword which hadn’t been there a moment before.

The sword and the horse flickered almost imperceptibly.

Victor smiled. Light glinted off a tooth.
Ting
. A glint, but no sound; they hadn’t invented sound, yet.

Believe it. That was the way. Never stop believing. Fool the eye, fool the brain.

Then he galloped between the cheering lines of spectators toward the University and the big scene.

The handleman relaxed. Ginger tapped him on the shoulder.

“If you stop turning that handle,” she said sweetly, “I’ll break your bloody neck.”

“But he’s nearly out of shot—”

Ginger propelled him toward Windle Poons’ ancient wheelchair and gave Windle a smile that made little clouds of wax boil out of his ears.

“Excuse me,” she said, in a sultry voice that caused all the wizards to curl their toes up in their pointy shoes, “but could we borrow you for a minute?”

“Way-hey! Draw it mild!”

…whumm…whumm…

Ponder Stibbons knew about the vase, of course. All the students had wandered along to have a look at it.

He didn’t pay it much attention as he sneaked along the corridor, attempting once again to make a bid for an evening’s freedom.

…whumm
whumm
WHUMM
WHUMM
WHUMMMM
whumm
.

All he had to do was cut across through the cloisters and…

PLIB.

All eight pottery elephants shot pellets at once. The resograph exploded, turning the roof into something like a pepper shaker.

After a minute or two Ponder got up, very carefully. His hat was simply a collection of holes held together by thread. A piece had been taken out of one of his ears.

“I only wanted a drink,” he said, muzzily. “What’s wrong with that?”

The Librarian crouched on the dome of the Library, watching the crowds scurrying through the streets as the monstrous figure lurched nearer.

He was slightly surprised to see it followed by some sort of spectral horse whose hooves made no sound on the cobbles.

And
that
was followed by a three-wheeled bathchair that took the corner on only two of them, sparks streaming away behind it. It was loaded down with wizards, all shouting at the tops of their voices. Occasionally one of them would lose his grip and have to run behind until he could get up enough speed to leap on again.