Moving Pictures - Terry Pratchett [114]
“It’s you!”
“I’m me! It’s…something else! It’s just having to use my shape!”
“What shape does it normally use?”
“You don’t want to know!”
“Yes I do! Why do you think I asked?” she yelled, as they stumbled through the broken seats.
“It looks worse than you can imagine!”
“I can imagine some pretty bad things!”
“That’s why I said worse!”
“Oh.”
The giant spectral Ginger passed them, flickering like a strobe light, and smashed its way out through the wall. There were screams from the outside.
“It looks like it’s getting bigger,” whispered Ginger.
“Go outside,” said Victor. “Get the wizards to stop it.”
“What’re you going to do?”
Victor drew himself up to his full height. “There are some Things,” he said, “that a man has to do by himself.”
She gave him a look of irritated incomprehension.
“What? What? Do you want to go to the lavatory or something?”
“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