Российское респираторное общество 15 страница

“No. I have actually just saved your life, as a matter of fact.”

Buddy looked around at the otherwise empty night.

“From what?”

Susan bent down and picked up a blackened knife.

“This?” she said.

“I know we’ve had this conversation before, but who are you? Not my fairy godmother, are you?”

“I think you have to be a lot older,” said Susan. She backed away. “And probably a lot nicer, too. Look, I can’t tell you any more. You’re not even supposed to see me. I’m not supposed to be here. Neither are you-,

“You’re not going to tell me to stop playing again, are you?” said Buddy angrily. “Because I won’t! I’m a musician! If I don’t play, what am I then? I might as well be dead! Do you understand? Music is my life! ”

He took a few steps nearer.

“Why’re you following me around? Asphalt said there’d be girls like you!”

“What on Disc do you mean, “girls like me"?”

Buddy subsided a bit, but only a little.

“They follow actors and musicians around,” he said, “because of, you know, the glamour and everything—”

“Glamour? Some smelly cart and a tavern that smells of cabbages? ”

Buddy held up his hands.

“Listen,” he said urgently. “I’m doing all right. I’m working, people are listening to me... I don’t need any more help, all right? I’ve got enough to worry about, so please keep out of my life—”

There was the sound of running feet and Asphalt appeared, with the other members of the band behind him.

“The guitar was screaming,” said Asphalt. “Are you all right?”

“You’d better ask her,” muttered Buddy.

All three of them looked directly at Susan.

“Who?” said Cliff.

“She’s right in front of you.”

Glod waved a stubby hand in the air, missing Susan by inches.

“It was probably dat cabbage,” said Cliff to Asphalt.

Susan stepped backwards quietly.

“She’s right there! But she’s going away now, can’t you see?”

“That’s right, that’s right,” said Glod, taking Buddy’s arm. “She’s going away now, and good riddance, so just you come on back—”

“Now she’s getting on that horse!”

“Yes, yes, a big black horse—”

“It’s white, you idiot!”

Hoofprints burned red on the ground for a moment and then faded.

“And it’s gone now!”

The Band With Rocks In stared into the night.

“Yes, I can see dat, now you mention it,” said Cliff. “Days a horse dat isn’t dere, sure enough.”

“Yes, that’s certainly what a horse that’s gone looks like,” said Asphalt carefully.

“None of you saw her?” said Buddy, as they manoeuvred him gently back through the pre-dawn greyness.

“I heard where musicians, really good musicians, got followed around by these half-naked young women called Muses,” said Glod.

“Like Cantaloupe,” said Cliff.

“We don’t call “em Muses,” said Asphalt, grinning. “I told you, when I worked for Bertie the Balladeer and His Troubadour Rascals, we used to get any amount of young women hanging arou—”

“Amazing how legends get started, when you come to think about it,” said Glod. “Just you come along now, my lad.”

“She was there,” Buddy protested. “She was there.”

“Cantaloupe?” said Asphalt. “You sure, Cliff?”

“Read it in a book once,” said the troll. “Cantaloupe. I’m pretty sure. Something like that.”

“She was there,” said Buddy.

The raven snored gently on top of his skull, counting dead sheep.

The Death of Rats came through the window in an arc, bounced off a dribbly candle, and landed on all fours on the table.

The raven opened one eye.

“Oh, it’s you—”

Then a claw was round its leg, and the Death of Rats jumped off the skull and into infinite space.

There were more cabbage fields next day, although the landscape did begin to change a bit.

“Hey, that’s interesting,” said Glod.

“What is?” said Cliff.

“There’s a field of beans over there.”

They watched it until it was out of sight.

“Nice of the people to give us all this food, though,” said Asphalt. “We shan’t be wanting for cabbages, eh?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Glod. He turned to Buddy, who was sitting with his chin resting on his arms.

“Cheer up, we’ll be in Pseudopolis in a couple of hours,” he said.

“Good,” said Buddy, distantly.

Glod climbed back into the front of the cart and pulled Cliff towards him.

“Notice the way he goes all quiet?” he whispered.

“Yup. Do you think it’ll be... you know... done by the time we get back?”

“You can get anything done in Ankh-Morpork,” said

Glod firmly. “I must have knocked on every damn door in the Street of Cunning Artificers. Twenty-five dollars!”

“You’re complaining? It ain’t your tooth dat’s paying for it.”

They both turned to look at their guitarist.

He was staring out across the endless fields.

“She was there,” he muttered.

Feathers spiralled towards the ground.

“You didn’t have to go and do that,” said the raven, fluttering upright. “You could simply ask.”

SQUEAK.

“All right, but before would have been better.” The raven ruffled its feathers and looked around at the bright landscape under the dark sky.

“This is the place then, is it?” it said. “You’re sure you’re not the Death of Ravens too?”

SQUEAK.

“Shape doesn’t mean much. Anyway, you’ve got a pointy snout. What was it you were wanting?”

The Death of Rats grabbed a wing and pulled.

“All right, all right!”

The raven glanced at a garden gnome. It was fishing in an ornamental pond. The fish were skeletal, but this didn’t seem to interfere with their enjoyment of life, or whatever it was they were enjoying.

It fluttered and hopped along after the rat.

Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler stood back.

Jimbo, Crash, Noddy and Scum looked at him expectantly.

“What’re all the boxes for, Mr Dibbler?” said Crash.

“Yeah,” said Scum.

Dibbler carefully positioned the tenth box on its tripod.

“You boys seen an iconograph?” he said.

“Oh, yes... I mean, yeah,” said Jimbo. “They’ve got a little demon inside them that paints pictures of things you point it at.”

“This is like that, only for sound,” said Dibbler.

Jimbo squinted past the open lid.

“Can’t see any... I mean, can’t see no demon,” he said.

“That’s because there isn’t one,” said Dibbler. It was worrying him, too. He’d have been a little bit happier if there’d been a demon or some sort of magic. Something simple and understandable. He didn’t like the idea of meddling in science.

“Now then... Suck—” he began.

“The Surreptitious Fabric,” said Jimbo.

“What?”

“The Surreptitious Fabric,” Jimbo repeated helpfully. “It’s our new name.”

“Why have you changed it? You haven’t been Suck for twentyfour hours.”

“Yeah, but we thought the name was holding us back.”

“How could it be holding you back? You aren’t moving.” Dibbler glared at them and shrugged. “Anyway, whatever you call yourselves... I want you to sing your best song, what am I saying, in front of these boxes. Not yet... not yet... wait a moment...”

Dibbler retired to the furthest corner of the room and pulled his hat down over his ears.

“All right, you can start,” he said.

He stared in blissful deafness at the group for several minutes until a general cessation of movement suggested that whatever they had been perpetrating had been committed.

Then he inspected the boxes. The wires were vibrating gently, but there was barely any sound.

The Surreptitious Fabric clustered around.

“Is it working, Mr Dibbler?” said Jimbo.

Dibbler shook his head.

“You boys don’t have what it takes,” he said.

“What does it take, Mr Dibbler?”

“You’ve got me there. You’ve got something,” he said, at the sight of their dejected faces, “but not a lot of it, whatever it is.”

“Er... this doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to play at the Free Festival, does it, Mr Dibbler?” said Crash.

“Maybe,” said Dibbler, smiling benevolently.

“Thanks a lot, Mr Dibbler!”

The Surreptitious Fabric wandered out into the street.

“We need to get it together if we’re going to wow them at the Festival,” said Crash.

“What, you mean... like... learn to play?” said Jimbo.

“No! Music With Rocks In just happens. If you go around learning you’ll never get anywhere,” said Crash. “No, I mean...” He looked around. “Better clothes, for one thing. Did you see about them leather coats, Noddy?”

“Sort of,” said Noddy.

“What do you mean, sort of?”

“Sort of leather. I went down the tannery in Phedre Road and they had some leather all right, but it’s a bit... whiffy...

“All right, we can get started on them tonight. And how about those leopardskin trousers, Scum? You know we said leopardskin trousers’d be a great idea.”

A look of transcendental worry crossed Scum’s face.

“I kind of got some,” he said.

“You either got them or you ain’t,” said Crash.

“Yeah, but they’re kind of...” said Scum. “Look, I couldn’t find a shop that’d heard of anything like that but, er, you know that circus that was here last week? Only I had a word with the guy in the top hat and, well, it was a kind of a bargain and—”

“Scum,” said Crash quietly, “what have you bought?”

“Look at it this way,” said Scum with sweating brightness, “it’s sort of leopardskin trousers and a leopardskin shirt and a leopardskin hat.”

“Scum,” said Crash, his voice low with resigned menace, “you’ve bought a leopard, haven’t you?”

“Sort of leopardy, yes.”

“Oh, good grief—”

“But sort of a real steal for twenty dollars,” said Scum. “Nothing important wrong with it, the man said.”

“Why’d he get rid of it, then?” Crash demanded.

“It’s sort of deaf. Can’t hear the lion-tamer, he said.”

“Well, that’s no good to us!”

“Don’t see why. Your trousers don’t have to listen.”

SPARE A COPPER, YOUNG SIR?

“Push off, grandad,” said Crash easily.

GOOD LUCK TO YOU.

“Too many beggars around these days, my father says,” said Crash, as they pushed past. “He says the Beggars’ Guild ought to do something about it.”

“But the beggars all belong to the Guild,” said Jimbo.

“Well, they shouldn’t allow so many people to join.”

“Yes, but it’s better than being on the streets.”

Scum, who out of the whole group had the least amount of cerebral activity to get between him and true observation of the world, was trailing behind. He had an uneasy feeling that he’d just walked over someone’s grave.

“That one looked a bit sort of thin,” he muttered.

The others weren’t paying any attention. They were back to the usual argument.

`I’m fed up with being Surreptitious Fabric,” said Jimbo. “It’s a silly name.”

“Really, really thin,” said Scum. He felt in his pocket.

“Yeah, I liked it best when we were The Whom,” said Noddy.

“But we were only The Whom for half an hour!” said Crash.[25] “Yesterday. In between bein' The Blots and Lead Balloon, remember?”

Scum located a tenpenny piece and turned back.

“There’s bound to be some good name,” said Jimbo. “I just bet we’ll know it’s right just as soon as we see it.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, we’ve got to come up with some name we don’t start arguing about after five minutes,” said Crash. “It’s not doing our career any good if people don’t know who we are.”

“Mr Dibbler says it definitely is,” said Noddy.

“Yes, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, my father says,” said Crash.

“There you go, old man,” said Scum, back down the street.

THANK YOU, said the grateful Death.

Scum hurried to catch up with the others, who were back on the subject of leopards with hearing difficulties.

“Where did you put it, Scum?” said Crash.

“Well, you know your sort of bedroom—”

“How do you kill a leopard?” said Noddy.

“Hey, here’s an idea,” said Crash, gloomily. “We let it choke to death on Scum.”

The raven inspected the hallway clock with the practised eye of one who knows the value of good props.

As Susan had noted, it was not so much small as dimensionally displaced; it looked small, but in the same way that something very big a long way away looks small—that is to say, the mind keeps reminding the eyes that they are wrong. But this was up close as well. It was made of some dark, age-blackened wood. There was a pendulum, which oscillated slowly.

The clock had no hands.

“Impressive,” said the raven. “That scythe blade on the pendulum. Nice touch. Very Gothic. No-one could look at that clock and not think—”

SQUEAK!

“All right, all right, I’m coming.” The raven fluttered across to an ornamental door-frame. There was a skull-and-bones motif on it.

“Excellent taste,” it said.

SQUEAK. SQUEAK.

“Well, anyone can do plumbing, I expect,” said the raven. “Interesting fact. Did you know the lavatory was actually named after Sir Charles Lavatory? Not many people—”

SQUEAK.

The Death of Rats pushed at the big door leading to the kitchen. It swung open with a creak but, here again, there was something not quite right. A listener had the sense that the creak had been added by someone who, feeling that a door like that with a door surround like that ought to creak, had inserted one.

Albert was washing up at the stone sink and staring at nothing.

“Oh,” he said, turning, “it’s you. What’s this thing?”

“I’m a raven,” said the raven, nervously. “Incidentally, one of the most intelligent birds. Most people would say it’s the mynah bird, but—”

SQUEAK!

The raven ruffled its feathers.

“I’m here as an interpreter,” it said.

“Has he found him?” said Albert.

The Death of Rats squeaked at length.

“Looked everywhere. No sign,” said the raven.

“Then he don’t want to be found,” said Albert. He smeared the grease off a plate with a skull pattern on it. “I don’t like that.”

SQUEAK.

“The rat says that’s not the worst thing,” said the raven. “The rat says you ought to know what the granddaughter has been doing...

The rat squeaked. The raven talked.

The plate shattered on the sink.

“I knew it!” Albert shouted. “ Saving him! She hasn’t got the faintest idea! Right! I’m going to sort this out. The Master thinks he can slope off, eh? Not from old Albert! You two wait here!”

There were already posters up in Pseudopolis. News travels fast, especially when C. M. O. T. Dibbler is paying for the horses...

“Hello, Pseudopolis!”

They had to call out the city Watch. They had to organize a bucket chain from the river. Asphalt had to stand outside Buddy’s dressing room with a club. With a nail in it.

Albert, in front of a scrap of mirror in his bedroom, brushed his hair furiously. It was white. At least, long ago it was white. Now it was the colour of a tobacco addict’s index finger.

“It’s my duty, that’s what it is,” he muttered. “Don’t know where he’d be without me. Maybe he does remember the future, but he always gets it wrong! Oh, he can go on worrying about the eternal verities, but who has to sort it out when all’s said and done... Muggins, that’s who.”

He glared at himself in the mirror.

“Right!” he said.

There was a battered shoe-box under the bed. Albert pulled it out very, very carefully and took the top off. It was half full of cotton wool; nestling in the wool, like a rare egg, was a lifetimer.

Engraved on it was the name: Alberto Malich.

The sand inside was frozen, immobile, in mid-pour. There wasn’t much left in the top bulb.

No time passed, here.

It was part of the Arrangement. He worked for Death, and time didn’t pass, except when he went into the World.

There was a scrap of paper by the glass. The figures “91' had been written at the top, but lower numbers trailed down the page after it. 73... 68... 37

Nineteen!

He must have been daft. He’d let his life leak away by hours and minutes, and there had been a lot more of them lately. There’d been all that business with the plumber, of course. And shopping. The Master didn’t like to go shopping. It was hard to get served. And Albert had taken a few holidays, because it was nice to see the sun, any sun, and feel wind and rain; the Master did his best, but he could never get them right. And decent vegetables, he couldn’t do them properly either. They never tasted grown.

Nineteen days left in the world. But more than enough.

Albert slipped the lifetimer into his pocket, put on an overcoat, and stamped back down the stairs.

“You,” he said, pointing to the Death of Rats, “you can’t sense a trace of him? There must be something. Concentrate.”

SQUEAK.

“What did he say?”

“He said all he can remember is something about sand.”

`Sand,” said Albert. “All right. Good start. We search all the sand.”

SQUEAK?

“Wherever the Master is, he’ll make an impression.”

Cliff awoke to a swish-swish sound. The shape of Glod was outlined in the light of dawn, wielding a brush.

“What’re you doing, dwarf?”

“I got Asphalt to get some paint,” said Glod. “These rooms are a disgrace.”

Cliff raised himself on his elbows and looked around.

“What do you call the colour on the door?”

“Eau-de-Nil.”

“Nice.”

“Thank you,” said Glod.

“The curtains are good, too.”

The door creaked open. Asphalt came in, with a tray, and kicked the door shut behind him.

“Oh, sorry,” he said.

“I’ll paint over the mark,” said Glod.

Asphalt put the tray down, trembling with excitement.

`Everyone’s talking about you guys!” he said. “And they’re saying it was about time they built a new theatre anyway. I’ve got you eggs and bacon, eggs and rat, eggs and coke, and... and... what was it... oh, yes. The Captain of the Watch says if you’re still in the city at sunrise he will personally have you buried alive. I’ve got the cart all ready by the back door. Young women have been writing things on it in lipstick. Nice curtains, by the way.”

All three of them looked at Buddy.

“He hasn’t moved,” said Glod. “Flopped down right after the show and out like a light.”

“He was certainly leaping around last night,” said Cliff.

Buddy continued to snore gently.

“When we get back,” said Glod, “we ought to have a nice holiday somewhere.”

“Days right,” said Cliff. “If we get out of dis alive, I’m going to put my rock kit on my back and take a long walk, and the first time someone says to me, “What are dem things on your back?” days where I’m gonna settle down.”

Asphalt peered down into the street.

“Can you all eat fast?” he said. “Only there’s some men in uniform out there. With shovels.”

Back in Ankh-Morpork, Mr Clete was astonished.

“But we hired you!” he said.

“The term is “retained", not “hired",” said Lord Downey, head of the Assassins’ Guild. He looked at Clete with an expression of unconcealed distaste. “Unfortunately, however, we can no longer entertain your contract.”

“They’re musicians,” said Mr Clete. “How hard can they be to kill?”

“My associates are somewhat reluctant to talk about it,” said Lord Downey. “They seem to feel that the clients are protected in some way. Obviously, we will return the balance of your fee.”

“Protected,” muttered Clete, as they stepped thankfully through the archway of the Assassins’ Guild.

“Well, I told you what it was like in the Drum when—” Satchelmouth began.

“That’s just superstition,” snapped Clete. He glanced up at a wall, where three Festival posters flaunted their primary colours.

“It was stupid of you to think Assassins would be any good outside the city,” muttered Clete.

“Me? I never—”

“Get them more than five miles from a decent tailor and a mirror, and they go all to pieces,” Clete added.

He stared at the poster.

“ Free,” he muttered. “Did you put it about that anyone who plays at this Festival is right out of the Guild?”

“Yes, sir. I don’t think they’re worrying, sir. I mean, some of “em have been getting together, sir. See, they say since there’s a lot more people want to be musicians than we’ll allow in the Guild then we should—”

“It’s mob rule!” said Clete. “Banding together to force unacceptable rules on a defenceless city!”

“Trouble is, sir,” said Satchelmouth, “if there’s a lot of them... if they think of talking to the palace... well, you know the Patrician, sir...”

Clete nodded glumly. Any Guild was powerful just so long as it self-evidently spoke for its constituency. He thought of hundreds of musicians flocking to the palace. Hundreds of nonGuild musicians...

The Patrician was a pragmatist. He never tried to fix things that worked. Things that didn’t work, however, got broken.

The only glimmer of hope was that they’d all be too busy messing around with music to think about the bigger picture. It had certainly worked for Clete.

Then he remembered that the blasted Dibbler man was involved.

Expecting Dibbler not to think about anything concerning money was like expecting rocks not to think about gravity.

“Hello? Albert?”

Susan pushed open the kitchen door. The huge room was empty.

“Albert?”

She tried upstairs. There was her own room, and there was a corridor of doors that didn’t open and possibly never could—the doors and frames had an all-in-one, moulded-together look. Presumably Death had a bedroom, although proverbially Death never slept. Perhaps he just lay in bed reading.

She tried the handles until she found one that turned.

Death did have a bedroom.

He’d got many of the details right. Of course. After all, he saw quite a lot of bedrooms. In the middle of the acres of floor was a large four-poster bed, although when Susan gave it an experimental prod it turned out that the sheets were as solid as rock.

There was a full-length mirror, and a wardrobe. She had a look inside, just in case there was a selection of robes, but there was nothing in there except a few old shoes in the bottom.[26]

A dressing table held a jug-and-basin set with a motif of skulls and omegas, and a variety of bottles and other items.

She picked them up, one by one. After-shave lotion. Pomade. Breath freshener. A pair of silver-backed hairbrushes.

It was all rather sad. Death clearly had picked up an idea of what a gentleman should have on his dressing table, without confronting one or two fundamental questions.

Eventually she found a smaller, narrower staircase.

“Albert?”

There was a door at the top.

“Albert? Anyone?”

It’s not actually barging in if I call out first, she told herself. She pushed open the door.

It was a very small room. Really small. It contained a few sticks of bedroom furniture and a small narrow bed. A small bookcase contained a handful of small uninteresting-looking books. There was a piece of ancient paper on the floor which, when Susan picked it up, turned out to be covered with numbers, all crossed out except the last one, which was: 19.

One of the books was Gardening In Difficult Conditions.

She went back down to the study. She’d known that there was no-one in the house. There was a dead feeling in the air.

There was the same feeling in the gardens. Death could create most things, except for plumbing. But he couldn’t create life itself. That had to be added, like yeast in bread. Without it, everything was beautifully neat and tidy and boring, boring, boring.

This is what it must have been like, she thought. And then, one day, he adopted my mother. He was curious.

She took the path through to the orchard again.

And when I was born Mum and Dad were so afraid that I felt at home here they brought me up to be... welt... a Susan. What kind of name is that for Death’s granddaughter? A girl like that should have better cheekbones, straight hair and a name with Vs and Xs in it.

And there, once again, was the thing he’d made for her. All by himself. Working it all out from first principles...

A swing. A simple swing.

It was already burning hot in the desert between Klatch and Hersheba.

The air shimmied, and then there was a pop. Albert appeared on a sand-dune. There was a clay-brick fort on the horizon.

“The Klatchian Foreign Legion,” he muttered, as sand began its inexorable progress into his boots.

Albert trudged towards it with the Death of Rats sitting on his shoulder.

He knocked on the door, which had a number of arrows in it. After a while a small hatch slid back.

“What do you want, offendi?” said a voice from somewhere behind it.

Albert held up a card.

“Have you seen someone who didn’t look like this?” he demanded.

There was silence.

“Then let’s say: have you seen some mysterious stranger who didn’t talk about his past?” said Albert.

“This is the Klatchian Foreign Legion, offendi. People don’t talk about their past. They join up to... to...

It dawned on Albert as the pause lengthened that it was up to him to get the conversation going again.

“Forget?”

“Right. Forget. Yes.”

“So have you had any recent recruits who were a little, shall we say, odd?”

“Might have done,” said the voice slowly. “Can’t remember.”

The hatchway slammed shut.

Albert hammered on it again. The hatchway opened. “Yes, what is it?”

“Are you sure you can’t remember?”

“Remember what?”

Albert took a deep breath.

“I demand to see your commanding officer!”

The hatch shut. The hatch opened.

“Sorry. It appears that I am the commanding officer. You’re not a D’reg or a Hershebian, are you?”

“Don’t you know?”

“I’m... pretty sure I must have done. Once. You know how it is... head like... thing, you know... With holes in... You drain lettuce in it... er...”

There was the sound of bolts being pulled back, and a wicket door opened in the gateway.

The possible officer was a sergeant, in so far as Albert was at all familiar with Klatchian ranks. He had the look about him of someone who, among the things he couldn’t remember, would include a good night’s sleep. If he could remember to.

There were a few other Klatchian soldiers inside the fort, sitting or, just barely, standing. Many were bandaged. And there was a rather greater number of soldiers slumped or lying on the packed sand who’d never need a night’s sleep ever again.

“What’s been happening here?” said Albert. His tone was so authoritative that the sergeant found himself saluting.

“We were attacked by Dregs, sir,” he said, swaying slightly. “Hundreds of them! They outnumbered us... er... what’s the number after nine? Got a one in it.”

“Ten.”

“Ten to one, sir.”

“I see you survived, though,” said Albert.

“Ah,” said the sergeant. “Yes. Er. Yes. That’s where it all gets a bit complicated, in fact. Er. Corporal? That’s you. No, you just next to him. The one with the two stripes?”

“Me?” said a small fat soldier.

“Yes. Tell him what happened.”

“Oh. Right. Er. Well, the bastards had shot us full of arrows, right? An' it looked like it was all up with us. Then someone suggested sticking bodies up on the battlements with their spears and crossbows and everything so’s the bastards’d think we was still up to strength—”

“It’s not an original idea, mind you,” said the sergeant. “Been done dozens of times.”

“Yeah,” said the corporal awkwardly. “That’s what they must’ve thought. And then... and then... when they was galloping down the sand-dunes... when they was almost on us, laughing and everything, saying stuff like “that old trick again”... someone shouted “Fire!” and they did. ”

“The dead men-?”

“I joined the Legion to... er... you know, with your mind...” the corporal began.

“Forget?” said Albert.

“That’s right. Forget. And I’ve been getting good at it. But I’m not going to forget my old mate Nudger Malik stuck full of arrows and still giving the enemy what for,” said the corporal. “Not for a long time. I’m going to give it a try, mind you.”

Albert looked up at the battlements. They were empty.

“Someone formed “em up in formation and they all marched out, afterwards,” said the corporal. “And I went out to look just now and there was just graves. They must have dug them for one another...”

“Tell me,” said Albert, “who is this “someone” to whom you keep referring?”

The soldiers looked at one another.

“We’ve just been talking about that,” said the sergeant. “We’ve been trying to remember. He was in... the Pit... when it started...”