Father Christmas’s Fake Beard Page 5

  ‘I just don’t know how we’re going to manage until next Christmas,’ said Mrs Christmas.

  Just then there was a knock at the door. It was the job man, very breathless, holding the form that Father Christmas had filled in.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were six hundred years old?’ he said.

  ‘Is it important then?’

  ‘Of course – you ought to be getting the State Pension! Come to think of it, you ought to get a bit for the five hundred and thirty-five years you missed too. That’d be thousands and thousands of pounds!’

  ‘A State Pension?’ wondered Father Christmas. ‘Fancy that! Come in and have a cup of tea!’

  And so they did.

  Imagine that all around you, hidden from sight, there are thousands of tiny people. They are four inches tall, brave, stubborn and resourceful.

  They are the nomes – and this is the first book of their adventures:

  Turn the page for an opening extract …

  Nomes are small. On the whole, small creatures don’t live for a long time. But perhaps they do live fast. Let me explain.

  One of the shortest-lived creatures on the planet Earth is the adult common mayfly. It lasts for one day. The longest-living things are bristlecone pine trees, at 4,700 years and still counting.

  This may seem tough on mayflies. But the important thing is not how long your life is, but how long it seems.

  To a mayfly, a single hour may last as long as a century. Perhaps old mayflies sit around complaining about how life this minute isn’t a patch on the good old minutes of long ago, when the world was young and the sun seemed so much brighter and larvae showed you a bit of respect. Whereas the trees, which are not famous for their quick reactions, may just have time to notice the way the sky keeps flickering before the dry rot and woodworm set in.

  It’s all a sort of relativity. The faster you live, the more time stretches out. To a nome, a year lasts as long as ten years does to a human. Remember it. Don’t let it concern you. They don’t. They don’t even know.

  In the beginning …

  I. There was the Site.

  II. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) Moved upon the face of the Site, and Saw that it had Potential.

  III. For it was In the High Street.

  IV. Yea, it was also Handy for the Buses.

  V. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) said, Let there be a Store, And Let it be a Store such as the World has not Seen hitherto;

  VI. Let the length of it be from Palmer Street even unto the Fish Market, and the Width of It, from the High Street right back to Disraeli Road;

  VII. Let it be High even Unto Five Storeys plus Basement, And bright with Lifts; let there be the Eternal Fires of the Boiler-Room in the sub-basement and, above all other floors, let there be Customer Accounts to Order All Things;

  VIII. For this must be what all shall Know of Arnold Bros (est.1905): All Things Under One Roof. And it shall be called: the Store of Arnold Bros (est. 1905).

  IX. And Thus it Was.

  X. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) divided the Store into Departments, of lronmongery, Corsetry, Modes and others After their Kind, and Created Humans to fill them with All Things saying, Yea, All Things Are Here. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) said, Let there be Lorries, and Let their Colours be Red and Gold, and Let them Go Forth so that All May Know Arnold Bros (est. 1905), By Appointment, delivers All Things;

  XI. Let there be Santa’s Grottoes and Winter Sales and Summer Bargains and Back to SchoolWeek and All Commodities in their Season;

  XII. And into the Store came the Nomes, that it would be their Place, for Ever and Ever.

  From The Book of Nome, Basements v.I–XII

  This is the story of the Going Home.

  This is the story of the Critical Path.

  This is the story of the lorry roaring through the sleeping city and out into the country lanes, smashing through street lamps and swinging from side to side and shattering shop windows and rolling to a halt when the police chased it. And when the baffled men went back to their car to report Listen, will you, listen? There isn’t anyone driving it!, it became the story of the lorry that started up again, rolled away from the astonished men, and vanished into the night.

  But the story didn’t end there.

  It didn’t start there, either.

  The sky rained dismal. It rained humdrum. It rained the kind of rain that is so much wetter than normal rain, the kind of rain that comes down in big drops and splats, the kind of rain that is merely an upright sea with slots in it.

  It rained a tattoo on the old hamburger boxes and chip papers in the wire basket that was giving Masklin a temporary hiding place.

  Look at him. Wet. Cold. Extremely worried. And four inches high.

  The waste-bin was usually a good hunting ground, even in winter. There were often a few cold chips in their wrapping, sometimes even a chicken bone. Once or twice there had been a rat too. It had been a really good day when there had last been a rat – it had kept them going for a week. The trouble was that you could get pretty fed up with rat by the third day. By the third mouthful, come to that.

  Masklin scanned the lorry park.

  And here it came, right on time, crashing through the puddles and pulling up with a hiss of brakes.

  He’d watched this lorry arrive every Tuesday and Thursday morning for the last four weeks. He timed the driver’s stop carefully.

  They had exactly three minutes. To someone the size of a nome, that’s more than half an hour.

  He scrambled down through the greasy paper, dropped out of the bottom of the bin, and ran for the bushes at the edge of the park where Grimma and the old folk were waiting.

  ‘It’s here!’ he said. ‘Come on!’

  They got to their feet, groaning and grumbling. He’d taken them through this dozens of times. He knew it wasn’t any good shouting. They just got upset and confused, and then they’d grumble some more. They grumbled about cold chips, even when Grimma warmed them up. They moaned about rat. He’d seriously thought about leaving alone, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. They needed him. They needed someone to grumble at.

  But they were too slow. He felt like bursting into tears.

  He turned to Grimma instead.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Give them a prod, or something. They’ll never get moving!’

  She patted his hand.

  ‘They’re frightened,’ she said. ‘You go on. I’ll bring them out.’

  There wasn’t time to argue. Masklin ran back across the soaking mud of the park, unslinging the rope and grapnel. It had taken him a week to make the hook, out of a bit of wire teased off a fence, and he’d spent days practising; he was already swinging it around his head as he reached the lorry’s wheel.

  The hook caught the tarpaulin high above him at the second try. He tested it once or twice and then, his feet scrabbling for a grip on the tyre, pulled himself up.

  He’d done it before. Oh, he’d done it three or four times. He scrambled under the heavy tarpaulin and into the darkness beyond, pulling out more line and tying it as tightly as possible around one of the ropes that were as thick as his arm.

  Then he slid back to the edge and, thank goodness, Grimma was herding the old people across the gravel. He could hear them complaining about the puddles.

  Masklin jumped up and down with impatience.

  It seemed to take hours. He explained it to them millions of times, but people hadn’t been pulled up onto the backs of lorries when they were children and they didn’t see why they should start now. Old Granny Morkie insisted that all the men look the other way so that they wouldn’t see up her skirts, for example, and old Torrit whimpered so much that Masklin had to lower him again so that Grimma could blindfold him. It wasn’t so bad after he’d hauled the first few up, because they were able to help on the rope, but time still stretched out.

  He pulled Grimma up last. She was light. They were all light, if it came to that. You didn’t get rat every day.<
br />
  It was amazing. They were all on board. He’d worked with an ear cocked for the sound of footsteps on gravel and the slamming of the driver’s door, and it hadn’t happened.

  ‘Right,’ he said, shaking with the effort. ‘That’s it, then. Now if we just go—’

  ‘I dropped the Thing,’ said old Torrit. ‘The Thing. I dropped it, d’you see? I dropped it down by the wheel when she was blindfoldin’ me. You go and get it, boy.’

  Masklin looked at him in horror. Then he poked his head out from under the tarpaulin and, yes, there it was, far below. A tiny black cube on the ground.

  The Thing.

  It was lying in a puddle, although that wouldn’t affect it. Nothing touched the Thing. It wouldn’t even burn.

  And then he heard the sound of slow footsteps on the gravel.

  ‘There’s no time,’ he whispered. ‘There really is no time.’

  ‘We can’t go without it,’ said Grimma.

  ‘Of course we can. It’s just a, a thing. We won’t need the wretched object where we’re going.’

  He felt guilty as soon as he’d said it, amazed at his own lips for uttering such words. Grimma looked horrified. Granny Morkie drew herself up to her full, quivering height.

  ‘May you be forgiven!’ she barked. ‘What a terrible thing to say! You tell him, Torrit.’ She nudged Torrit in the ribs.

  ‘If we ain’t taking the Thing, I ain’t going,’ said Torrit sulkily. ‘It’s not—’

  ‘That’s your leader talkin’ to you,’ interrupted Granny Morkie. ‘So you do what you’re told. Leave it behind, indeed! It wouldn’t be decent. It wouldn’t be right. So you go and get it, this minute.’

  Masklin stared wordlessly down at the soaking mud and then, with a desperate motion, threw the line over the edge and slid down it.

  It was raining harder now, with a touch of sleet. The wind whipped at him as he dropped past the great arc of the wheel and landed heavily in the puddle. He reached out and scooped up the Thing—

  And the lorry started to move.

  First there was a roar, so loud that it went beyond sound and became a solid wall of noise. Then there was a blast of stinking air and a vibration that shook the ground.

  He pulled sharply on the line and yelled at them to pull him up, and realized that even he couldn’t hear his own voice. But Grimma or someone must have got the idea because, just as the big wheel began to turn, the rope tightened and he felt his feet lifted off the mud.

  He bounced and spun back and forth as, with painful slowness, they pulled him past the wheel. It turned only a few inches away from him, a black, chilly blur, and all the time the hammering sound battered at his head.

  I’m not scared, he told himself. This is much worse than anything I’ve ever faced, and it’s not frightening. It’s too terrible to be frightening.

  He felt as though he was in a tiny, warm cocoon, away from all the noise and the wind. I’m going to die, he thought, just because of this Thing which has never helped us at all, something that’s just a lump of stuff, and now I’m going to die and go to the Heavens. I wonder if old Torrit is right about what happens when you die? It seems a bit severe to have to die to find out. I’ve looked at the sky every night for years and I’ve never seen any nomes up there …

  But it didn’t really matter, it was all outside him, it wasn’t real—

  Hands reached down and caught him under the arms and dragged him into the booming space under the tarpaulin and, with some difficulty, prised the Thing out of his grip.

  Behind the speeding lorry fresh curtains of grey rain dragged across the empty fields.

  And, across the whole country, there were no more nomes.

  About the Author

  Sir Terry Pratchett (yes, he’s a real-life knight!) is one of the world’s funniest and most popular writers.

  He started writing the stories in this collection when he was just seventeen, and his first full-length novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971. He is perhaps best known for his Discworld® series – all about a world that happens to be carried on the back of a giant turtle floating through space.

  Terry Pratchett’s books have been translated into thirty-eight languages and have sold more than eighty million copies worldwide (but who’s counting?). He died in March 2015.

  Also by Terry Pratchett

  The Carpet People

  The Bromeliad Trilogy:

  Truckers

  Diggers

  Wings

  The Johnny Maxwell Trilogy:

  Only You Can Save Mankind

  Johnny and the Dead

  Johnny and the Bomb

  Dragons at Crumbling Castle and Other Stories

  The Witch’s Vacuum Cleaner and Other Stories

  For young adults and above:

  The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

  (A Discworld® novel)

  The Tiffany Aching Sequence (Discworld® novels):

  The Wee Free Men

  A Hat Full of Sky

  Wintersmith

  I Shall Wear Midnight

  Nation

  Dodger

  Dodger’s Guide to London

  A full list of Terry Pratchett’s books

  can be found on www.terrypratchett.co.uk

  RHCP DIGITAL

  UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

  India | New Zealand | South Africa

  RHCP Digital is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  www.penguin.co.uk

  www.puffin.co.uk

  www.ladybird.co.uk

  First published by Doubleday 2017

  Text copyright © Terry and Lyn Pratchett, 2017

  Illustrations by Mark Beech

  Illustrations copyright © The Random House Group Ltd, 2017

  Cover and interior illustrations by Mark Beech

  The stories contained in this collection were originally published as follows:

  ‘Father Christmas’s Fake Beard’ – Western Daily Press (1989, original title: ‘Santa Claus’s Chaos … when he behaves just like Father Christmas should in a toy shop’s grotto’); ‘The Blackbury Pie’ – Bucks Free Press (1967, original title: ‘The Story of the Blackbury Pie’); ‘Prod-Ye-A’Diddle Oh!’ – Western Daily Press (1971); ‘A Very Short Ice Age’ – Bath & West Evening Chronicle (1978, original title: ‘Snow, Snow, Thick Thick Snow’); ‘The Computer Who Wrote to Father Christmas’ – Western Daily Press (1988, original title: ‘The Computer Who Wrote to Santa Claus’); ‘Good King Wences-lost’* – Bucks Free Press (1969); ‘The Weatherchick’* – Bucks Free Press (1972); ‘Judgement Day for Father Christmas’ – Western Daily Press (1992, original title: ‘Judgement Day for Santa Claus’); ‘The Abominable Snow-baby’* – Bucks Free Press (1968); ‘The Twelve Gifts of Christmas’* – Bucks Free Press (1968); ‘Father Christmas Goes to Work at the Zoo’* – Bucks Free Press (1973)

  * These stories were previously untitled, and so these titles have been attributed for the purposes of this collection

  Discworld® is a trademark registered by Terry Pratchett

  The moral right of the author and illustrator has been asserted

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978–1–448–19850–4

  All correspondence to:

  RHCP Digital

  Penguin Random House Children’s

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL

  Prod-Ye-A’Diddle Oh!

  fn1 You didn’t get to be a mayor in Umbridge without being a bit crafty, if not downright sly.

  fn2 And a very fine Diddle indeed it was, leaving several of Blackbury’s finest face down in the snow, clutching at various body parts.

  A Very Short Ice Age

  fn1 Commendable until he tried to use them, anyway, at which point he found himself having to spit out a mouthful of snow as he fell over.

  fn2 You might not
share his delight.

  The Abominable Snow-baby

  fn1 Though Albert Scruggins had never actually been inside a ping-pong ball, so he did not know if in fact it may have been full of very tiny creatures having a noisy party!

  fn2 Very colourful pants they were too, with pink spots and a picture of a cartoon mouse saying something rather rude.

  Father Christmas Goes to Work at the Zoo

  fn1 Actually, that year, Father Christmas brought every nine-year-old a train set.

  fn2 Last seen heading over the English Channel in the direction of Africa. The hippos had got fed up with being studied and saved, and fancied saving themselves.

  fn3 At last! A use for all those glacé cherries.