Terry Pratchett.

Hogfather

     Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

     But people have always been dimly  aware of the problem with  the start of things. They wonder aloud how the snowplough driver gets to work,  or how the makers  of dictionaries look up the spelling of  the words. Yet there is the constant desire to find some point in the twisting, knotting,  ravelling nets of space-time on  which a metaphorical finger  can  be  put to indicate that here, here, is the point where it all began...

     Something began when  the Guild of Assassins  enrolled Mister  Teatime, who  saw things differently from other people, and one  of the ways that  he saw things differently  from other  people was  in  seeing  other  people as things  (later, Lord Downey of the Guild said, 'We took  pity on him because he'd  lost both parents  at an  early age.  I think that,  on reflection, we should have wondered a bit more about that.')

     But it was much earlier even than that when most people forgot that the very oldest stories are,  sooner or  later, about blood. Later on  they took the blood out to make the  stories more acceptable to children,  or at least to the people  who had  to  read them  to children  rather than the children themselves (who,  on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided  it's being shed by the deserving[1]), and then wondered where the stories went.

     And earlier still  when  something in the darkness of the deepest caves and  gloomiest forests  thought: what  are  they,  these creatures?  I  will observe them.

     And  much, much earlier  than  that,  when  the Discworld  was  formed, drifting onwards through space atop four elephants on the shell of the giant turtle, Great A'Tuin.

     Possibly, as it moves,  it gets tangled like a blind man in a cobwebbed house in those highly specialized little spacetime strands that try to breed in every  history they  encounter,  stretching  them  and breaking them  and tugging them into new shapes.

     Or possibly not, of course. The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as 'Things just happen. What the hell.'

     The senior wizards of Unseen University stood and looked at the door.

     There was no doubt  that  whoever  had shut it wanted  it to stay shut. Dozens  of nails secured it  to the door frame. Planks had been nailed right across. And finally it had, up until this morning, been hidden by a bookcase that had been put in front of it.

     'And there's the sign, Ridcully,'  said the Dean. 'You have read  it, I assume. You know? The sign which says "Do not, under any circumstances, open this door"?'

     'Of course I've read it,'  said Ridcully. 'Why  d'yer  think  I want it opened?'

     'Er ... why?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

     'To see why they wanted it shut, of course.'[2]

     He gestured to Modo,  the University's gardener  and  oddjob dwarf, who was standing by with a crowbar.

     'Go to it, lad.'

     The gardener saluted. 'Right you are, sir.'

     Against a background of  splintering timber, Ridcully went on: 'It says on the plans that this was a bathroom. There's nothing  frightening  about a bathroom, for gods' sake. I want  a  bathroom. I'm fed up with sluicing down with you fellows. It's  unhygienic. You can catch stuff. My  father told  me that. Where  you get lots of people bathing together, the  Verruca  Gnome is running around with his little sack.'

     'Is that like the Tooth Fairy?' said the Dean sarcastically.

     'I'm in  charge here  and I want a  bathroom  of my own,' said Ridcully firmly. 'And that's all there is to it, all right? I want a bathroom in time for Hogswatchnight, understand?'

     And that's a problem with beginnings, of course. Sometimes, when you're dealing with occult realms that have quite a different attitude to time, you get the effect a little way before the cause.

     From somewhere  on  the edge of  hearing came  a  glingleglingleglingle noise, like little silver bells.

     At  about  the same time as the Archchancellor was laying down the law, Susan Sto-Helit was sitting up in bed, reading by candlelight.

     Frost patterns curled across the windows.

     She enjoyed these early evenings. Once she had put  the children to bed she was more or less left to  herself. Mrs Gaiter was pathetically scared of giving her any instructions even though she paid Susan's wages.

     Not that the wages  were important, of course.  What was  important was that she was being  her Own Person and holding down a  Real job. And being a governess was a real job. The  only  tricky bit  had been  the embarrassment when her employer found out  that she was a duchess, because in Mrs Gaiter's book, which was  a  rather short book  with big handwriting, the upper crust wasn't  supposed to  work. It was supposed to loaf around. It was  all Susan could do to stop her curtseying when they met.

     A flicker made her turn her head.

     The candle flame was streaming out horizontally, as though in a howling wind.

     She looked up. The curtains billowed away from the window, which...

     ...flung itself open with a clatter.

     But there was no wind.

     At least, no wind in this world.

     Images formed in her mind. A red  ball  ... The sharp  smell of snow... And then they were gone, and instead there were...

     'Teeth?' said Susan, aloud. 'Teeth, again?'

     She blinked. When she opened her eyes  the  window was,  as she knew it would be,  firmly  shut. The  curtain  hung  demurely. The candle flame  was innocently upright. Oh, no, not again. Not after all this  time.  Everything had been going so well

     'Thusan?'

     She  looked around. Her door had been pushed open and  a  small  figure stood there, barefoot in a nightdress.

     She sighed. 'Yes, Twyla?'

     'I'm afwaid of the monster in the cellar, Thusan. It's going  to eat me up.'

     Susan shut her book firmly and raised a warning finger.

     'What  have I  told  you  about trying  to  sound  ingratiatingly cute, Twyla?' she said.

     The little girl said, 'You said I  mustn't. You  said  that exaggerated lisping is a hanging offence and I only do it to get attention.'

     'Good. Do you know what monster it is this time?'

     'It's the big hairy one wif-'

     Susan raised the finger. 'Uh?' she warned.

     '-with eight arms,' Twyla corrected herself.

     'What, again? Oh, all right.'

     She got out of bed and put  on her dressing gown, trying to stay  quite calm  while  the child watched her.  So they  were coming back.  Oh, not the monster in the cellar. That was all in a day's work. But it looked as if she was going to start remembering the future again.

     She  shook  her  head.  However  far you  ran away,  you  always caught yourself up.

     But  monsters  were easy,  at least.  She'd  learned  how to  deal with monsters. She  picked up the poker from the nursery fender and went down the back stairs, with Twyla following her.

     The  Gaiters were having  a dinner party.  Muffled voices came from the direction of the dining room.

     Then, as she crept past, a door opened and yellow light spilled out and a  voice  said,  'Ye gawds,  there's a gel in  a nightshirt out here with  a poker!'

     She saw figures silhouetted in the light and made out the  worried face of Mrs Gaiter.

     'Susan? Er ... what are you doing?'

     Susan looked at the poker and then back at the woman. 'Twyla said she's afraid of a monster in the cellar, Mrs Gaiter.'