Read Online Once More With Footnotes by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online

And?"
     
                  "Listen," she said.
     
                  And he heard the voice of the fiend, distant and wretched:
     
                  "... frightfully sorry ... normally, no problem ... oh god, this has never happened to me before ..."
     

First published in G.M. The Independent Fantasy Roleplaying Magazine, October 1988.
     
    I've tinkered with it since, and I can see it needs further tinkering. Once or twice I've thought about extending it into a novel, and then thought better of it. But I've always had a soft spot for this story.
     
     
     
     
     
F inal R eward
     
                  Dogger answered the door when he was still in his dressing gown. Something unbelievable was on the doorstep.
     
                  "There's a simple explanation," thought Dogger. "I've gone mad."
     
                  This seemed a satisfactory enough rationalisation at seven o'clock in the mo rning. He shut the door again and shuffled down the passage, while outside the kitchen window the Northern Line rattled with carriages full of people who weren't mad, despite appearances.
     
                  There is a blissful period of existence which the Yen Buddhists* ( *Like Zen Buddhists only bigger begging bowls. ) call plinki. It is defined quite precisely as that interval between waking up and being hit on the back of the head by all the problems that kept you awake the night before; it ends when you realise that this was the morning everything was going to look better in, and it doesn't.
     
                  He remembered the row with Nicky. Well, not exactly row. More a kind of angry silence on her part, and an increasingly exasperated burbling on his, and he wasn't quite sure how it h ad started anyway. He recalled saying something about some of her friends looking as though they wove their own bread and baked their own goats, and then it had escalated to the level where he'd probably said things like Since you ask, I do think green 2CV s have the anti-nuclear sticker laminated into their rear window before they leave the factory. If he had been on the usual form he achieved after a pint of white wine he'd probably passed a remark about dungarees on women, too. It had been one of those ro ws where every jocular attempt to extract himself had opened another chasm under his feet.
     
                  And then shed broken, no, shattered the silence with all those comments about Erdan, macho wish-fulfillment for adolescents, and there'd been comments about Rambo, and then he'd found himself arguing the case for people who, in cold sobriety, he detested as much as she did.
     
                  And then he'd come home and written the last chapter of Erdan and the Serpent of the Rim, and out of pique, alcohol, and rebellion he'd killed his hero off on the last page. Crushed under an avalanche. The fans were going to hate him, but he'd felt better afterwards, freed of something that had held him back all these years. And had made him quire rich, incidentally. That was because of compute r s, because half the fans he met now worked in computers, and of course in computers they gave you a wheelbarrow to take your wages home; science fiction fans might break out in pointy ears from time to time, but they bought books by the shovelful and read them round the clock.
     
                  Now he'd have to think of something else for them, write proper science fiction, learn about black holes and quantums ...
     
                  There was another point nagging his mind as he yawned his way back to the kitchen.
     
                  Oh, yes. Erdan the Barb arian had been standing on his doorstep. Funny, that.
     
                  This time the hammering made small bits of plaster detach themselves from the wall around the door, which was an unusual special effect in a hallucination. Dogger