'No!'

     Teatime stood back. 'Banjo, knock it down,' he said.

     Banjo  lumbered  forward. The door withstood a couple  of massive kicks and then burst open.

     The guard was cowering behind an overturned cabinet. He cringed back as Teatime  stepped over it. 'What're you doing here?'  he  shouted. 'Who are you?'

     'Ah,  I'm  glad  you asked.  I'm your worst  nightmare!'  said  Teatime cheerfully.

     The man shuddered.

     'You  mean ... the one with the giant cabbage and  the sort of whirring knife thing?'

     'Sorry?' Teatime looked momentarily nonplussed.

     'Then you're the one about  where I'm falling,  only instead  of ground underneath it's all...'

     'No, in fact I'm...'

     The  guard sagged. 'Awww, not the  one where there's all this kind  of, you know, mud and then everything goes blue...'

     'No, I'm...'

     'Oh, shit,  then you're the one where there's this door only there's no floor beyond it and then there's these claws...'

     'No,'  said  Teatime. 'Not  that  one.' He withdrew  a  dagger from his sleeve. 'I'm the one where this man comes out of nowhere and kills you stone dead.'

     The guard grinned with relief. 'Oh, that one,' he said. 'But that one's not very...'

     He  crumpled around  Teatime's  suddenly outthrust fist. And then, just like the others had done, he faded.

     'Rather  a charitable  act  there, I feel,'  Teatime said  as  the  man vanished. 'But it is nearly Hogswatch, after all.'

     Death,  pillow slipping gently under his red robe, stood in  the middle of the nursery carpet ...

     It was an old one. Things ended up in the  nursery when they had seen a complete tour of duty in the rest  of the house. Long ago, someone had  made it by carefully knotting long bits  of brightly coloured rag into a sacking base,  giving it the look of a deflated Rastafarian hedgehog. Things lived among the rags. There were old rusks, bits of toy, buckets of dust.  It had seen life. It may even have evolved some.

     Now the occasional lump of grubby melting snow dropped onto it.

     Susan was crimson with anger.

     'I  mean,  why?'  she  demanded, walking  around the figure.  'This  is Hogswatch! It's supposed  to be jolly, with mistletoe  and holly, and -  and other things ending in olly! It's a time when people want to feel good about things  and  eat until they explode!  It's a  time when they want to see all their relatives...'

     She stopped that sentence.

     'I mean it's a time  when humans are really human,' she said. 'And they don't want a ... a skeleton at the feast! Especially one, I might add, who's wearing a false beard and has got a damn cushion shoved up his robe! I mean, why?'

     Death looked nervous.

ALBERT SAID IT WOULD HELP ME GET INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE THING. ER AGAIN

     There was a small squelchy noise.

     Susan spun around, grateful right now for any distraction.

     'Don't  think I  can't hear  you! They're  grapes, understand?  And the other things are satsumas! Get out of the fruit bowl!'

     'Can't blame  a bird  for trying,' said  the  raven  sulkily, from  the table.

     'And you, you leave those nuts alone! They're for tomorrow!'

     SKQUEAF, said the Death of Rats, swallowing hurriedly.

     Susan turned back to  Death. The Hogfather's artificial stomach was now at groin level.

     'This is a nice house,' she said. 'And this is a ...

     .. IT'S GOOD TO SEE YOU

     ... good job. And it's real, with  normal people. And I was looking forward to a  real  life,  where  normal things happen! And suddenly  the old circus comes to town. Look at yourselves. Three Stooges, No Waiting! Well, I  don't know what's going on, but you can  all leave again, right? This is my  life. It doesn't belong to any of you. It's not going to ...'

     There was a muffled curse, a  rush of soot, and a skinny old man landed in the grate.

     'Bum!' he said.

     'Good  grief! ' raged  Susan. 'And here  is  Pixie  Albert! Well, well, well! Come along in, do! If the real Hogfather doesn't come soon there's not going to be room.'

     HE WON'T BE JOINING US, said Death.  The pillow slid  softly on to  the rug.

     'Oh, and why not? Both of the children did letters to him,' said Susan. 'There's rules, you know.'

     YES. THERE ARE RULES. AND THEY'RE ON THE LIST. I CHECKED IT.

     Albert pulled the pointy hat off his head and spat out some soot.

     'Right. He did. Twice,' he said. 'Anything to drink around here?'

     'So what  have you turned up for?'  Susan demanded. 'And  if  it's  for business reasons, I will add, then that outfit is in extremely poor taste ...'

THE HOGFATHER IS ... UNAVAILABLE.

     'Unavailable? At Hogswatch?'

YES.

     'Why?'

     HE IS ... LET ME SEE ... THERE ISN'T AN ENTIRELY APPROPRIATE HUMAN WORD, SO ... LET'S SETTLE FOR ... DEAD. YES. HE IS DEAD.

     Susan had never hung up a stocking. She'd never looked for eggs laid by the Soul Cake Duck. She'd never put a tooth  under her pillow in the serious expectation that a dentally inclined fairy would turn up.

     It wasn't that her  parents didn't believe in such things. They  didn't need to  believe in them.  They  knew they existed.  They  just wished  they didn't.

     Oh, there had been presents, at the right  time,  with a careful  label saying  who they were from. And a  superb egg on  Soul Cake Morning,  filled with  sweets. Juvenile teeth  earned  no less than a dollar  each  from  her father, without argument.[12] But it was all straightforward.

     She knew now that they'd been trying  to protect her. She  hadn't known then  that her father  had been Death's apprentice for a while, and that her mother  was  Death's  adopted daughter. She'd  had very dim recollections of being taken  a few  times to see someone who'd been quite, well, jolly, in a strange,  thin  way. And the visits had suddenly stopped. And she'd met  him later and, yes, he had his good side, and for a while she'd wondered why her parents had been so unfeeling and

     She knew now why they'd  tried to keep her away.  There was far more to genetics than little squirmy spirals.

     She could walk through walls  when she  really had to. She could  use a tone of voice that  was more like actions  than words, that  somehow reached inside people and operated all the right switches. And her hair ...

     That  had only happened  recently,  though. It used to be unmanageable, but  at  around  the age of seventeen she had found  it more or less managed itself.

     That had  lost her several young men. Someone's hair rearranging itself into  a  new style, the  tresses curling around themselves like a nest of kittens, could definitely put the crimp on any relationship.

     She'd been  making good progress, though. She  could  go  for  days now without feeling anything other than entirely human.

     But it was always the case, wasn't it? You could go out into the world, succeed  on your own terms,  and  sooner  or  later  some  embarrassing  old relative was bound to turn up.

     Grunting and  swearing,  the gnome clambered out of  another drainpipe, jammed  its hat  firmly  on its  head, threw its  sack onto a snowdrift  and jumped down after it.

     ' 's a good one,' he said. 'Ha, take 'im weeks to get rid of that one!'

     He took  a crumpled piece of paper out of  a  pocket  and  examined  it closely. Then he looked at an elderly  figure working  away  quietly at  the next house.

     It was standing by a window,  drawing  with great concentration  on the glass.