The cellar behind the demolished wall had some barrels in it and looked as if it was regularly used. There was a proper door, too. Dull, repetitive music filtered down between the boards of the ceiling. There was a trap door in them.
‘O-kay,’ said Angua. ‘There’s people up there, I can smell them—’
‘I can count fifty-seven hearts beating,’ said Sally.
Angua gave her a Look. ‘You know, that’s one particular talent I’d keep to myself, if I was you,’ she said.
‘Sorry, sergeant.’
‘It’s not the sort of thing people want to hear,’ Angua went on. ‘I mean, I personally am quite capable of cracking a man’s skull in my jaws, but I don’t go around telling everyone.’
‘I shall make a note of it, sergeant,’ said Sally, with a meekness that was quite possibly feigned.
‘Good. Now… what do we look like? Swamp monsters?’
‘Yes, sergeant. Your hair looks dreadful. Just like a great lump of green slime.’
‘Green?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘And my emergency dress is back down there somewhere,’ said Angua. ‘It’s past dawn, too. Can you, er, go bats now?’
‘In daylight? One hundred and fifty-five disorientated bits of me? No! But you could get out as a wolf, couldn’t you?’
‘I’d kind of prefer not to be a slime monster coming through the floor, if it’s all the same to you,’ said Angua.
‘Yes, I can see that. It does not pay to advertise.’ Sally flicked away a lump of ooze. ‘Ugh, this stuff is foul.’
‘So the best we can hope for is that when we make a run for it no one will recognize us,’ said Angua, pulling a lump of wobbly green stuff from her hair. ‘At least we— Oh, no…’
‘What’s wrong?’ said Sally.
‘Nobby Nobbs! He’s up there! I can smell him!’ She pointed urgently at the boards overhead.
‘You mean Corporal Nobbs? The little… man with the spots?’ said Sally.
‘We’re not under a Watch House, are we?’ said Angua, looking around in panic.
‘I don’t think so. Someone’s dancing, by the sound of it. But look, how can you smell one human in the middle of all… this?’
‘It never leaves you, believe me.’ The smells of old cabbage, acne ointment and non-malignant skin disease became transmuted, in Corporal Nobbs, into a strange odour that lay across the nose like a saw blade on a harp. It wasn’t bad as such, but it was like its host: strange, ubiquitous and hellishly difficult to forget.
‘Well, he’s a fellow officer, isn’t he? Won’t he help us?’ said Sally.
‘We are naked, lance-constable!’
‘Only technically. This mud really sticks.’
‘I mean underneath the mud!’ said Angua.
‘Yes, but if we had clothes on we’d be naked underneath them, too!’ Sally pointed out.
‘This is not the time for logic! This is the time for not seeing Nobby grinning at me!’
‘But he’s seen you when you’re wolf-shaped, hasn’t he?’ said Sally.
‘So?’ snapped Angua.
‘Well, technically you’re naked then, aren’t you?’
‘Never tell him that!’
Nobby Nobbs, a shadow in the warm red gloom, nudged Sergeant Colon.
‘You don’t have to keep your eyes shut, sarge,’ he said. ‘It’s all legit. It’s an artistic celebration of the female body, Tawneee says. Anyway, she’s got clothes on.’
‘Two tassels and a folded hanky is not clothes, Nobby,’ said Fred, sinking down in his seat. The Pink PussyCat! Now, fair’s fair, he’d been in the army and Watch and you couldn’t spend all that time in uniform without seeing a thing or two — or three, now he came to recollect — and it was true, as Nobby had pointed out, that the ballerinas down at the opera house didn’t leave a lot to the imagination, at least not to Nobby’s, but when all was said and done ballet had to be Art even though it was a bit short on plinths and urns, on account of being expensive to look at, and moreover ballerinas didn’t whizz around upside down. And the worst of it was, he’d already spotted two people he knew in the audience. Fortunately they hadn’t seen him, which was to say that whenever he’d sneaked a glance their way they were looking in completely the opposite direction.
‘Now this bit is really hard,’ whispered Nobby conversationally.
‘Er… is it?’ Fred Colon closed his eyes again.
‘Oh, yes. It’s the Triple Corkscrew—’
‘Look, don’t the management object to you coming in here?’ Fred managed, shifting even further down in his seat.
‘Oh, no. They like having a watchman in,’ said Nobby, still watching the stage. ‘They say it makes people behave. Anyway, I only come in so’s I can walk Betty home.’
‘Betty being —?’
‘Tawneee’s actually only her pole name,’ Nobby said. ‘She says no one would be interested in an exotic dancer with a name like Betty. She says it sounds like she’d be better with a bowl of cake mixture.’
Colon shut his eyes, trying to banish a mental conjunction of the bronzed lithe figure on stage and a bowl of cake mixture. ‘I think I could do with a breath of fresh air,’ he groaned.
‘Oh, not yet, sarge. Broccolee’s on next. She can touch the back of her head with her foot, you know—’
‘I don’t believe that!’ said Fred Colon.
‘She can, sarge, I’ve seen—’
‘I don’t believe there’s a dancer called Broccoli!’
‘Well, she did use to be called Candi, sarge, but then she heard that broccoli is better for you—’
‘Corporal Nobbs!’
The sound appeared to be coming from under the table.
Nobby stared at Fred Colon, and then looked down. ‘Yes?’ he ventured, with caution.
‘This is Sergeant Angua,’ said the floor.
‘Oh?’ said Nobby.
‘What is this place?’ the voice continued.
‘The Pink PussyCat Club, sergeant,’ said Nobby obediently.
‘Oh, gods.’ There was some conversation down below, and then the voice said: ‘Are there women up there?’
‘Yes, sergeant. Er, what are you doing down there, sarge?’
‘Giving you orders, Nobby,’ said the voice from below. ‘Are there women up there?’
‘Yes, sarge. Lots.’
‘Good. Please ask one to come down into the beer cellar. We’ll need a couple of buckets of warm water and some towels, got that?’
Nobby was aware that the musicians had stopped playing and Tawneee had paused in mid drop-and-split. Everyone was listening to the talking floor.
‘Yes, sergeant,’ said Nobby. ‘I’ve got it.’
‘And some clean clothes. And’ — there was subterranean whispering — ‘make that several buckets of water. And a scrubbing brush. And a comb. And another comb. And more towels. Oh, and two pairs of shoes, size six and… four and a half? Really? Okay. And is Fred Colon with you, or is that a stupid question?’
Fred cleared his throat. ‘I’m here, sergeant,’ he reported. ‘But I only came along to—’
‘Good. I want to borrow a set of your stripes. I’ve got a bad feeling about the next few hours and I don’t want anyone to forget I’m a sergeant. Got that, the pair of you?’
‘It’s full moon,’ Fred whispered to Nobby, as one man to another, and then he said aloud: ‘Yes, sergeant. This may take a while—’
‘No! It won’t. Because you’ve got a werewolf and a vampire down here, understand? I’m having a really bad hair day and she’s got toothache! We come up in ten minutes looking human or we come up anyway! What?’ There was more whispering. ‘Why a beetroot? Why in gods’ names is a girly show likely to contain a beetroot? What? Okay. Will an apple do? Nobby, Lance-Constable Humpeding needs an apple, urgently. Or something else that she can bite. Now, jump to it!’