He was seeing, hearing and smelling things he’d never seen, heard or smelled before.
The Shades was the oldest part of the city. If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-around immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork the Shades would be represented by a shaft. In fact the Shades was remarkably like the aforesaid well-known astronomical phenomenon: it had a certain strong attraction, no light escaped from it, and it could indeed become a gateway to another world. The next one.
The Shades was a city within a city.
The streets were thronged. Muffled figures slunk past on errands of their own. Strange music wound up from sunken stairwells. So did sharp and exciting smells.
Poons passed goblin delicatessens and dwarf bars, from which came the sounds of singing and fighting, which dwarfs traditionally did at the same time. And there were trolls, moving through the crowds like…like big people moving among little people. They weren’t shambling, either.
Windle had hitherto seen trolls only in the more select parts of the city,* where they moved with exaggerated caution in case they accidentally clubbed someone to death and ate them. In the Shades they strode, unafraid, heads held so high they very nearly rose above their shoulder-blades.
Windle Poons wandered through the crowds like a random shot on a pinball table. Here a blast of smoky sound from a bar spun him back into the street, there a discreet doorway promising unusual and forbidden delights attracted him like a magnet. Windle Poons’ life hadn’t included even very many usual and approved delights. He wasn’t even certain what they were. Some sketches outside one pink-lit, inviting doorway left him even more mystified but incredibly anxious to learn.
He turned around and around in pleased astonishment.
This place! Only ten minutes’ walk or fifteen minutes’ lurch from the University! And he’d never known it was there! All these people! All this noise! All this life!
Several people of various shapes and species jostled him. One or two started to say something, shut their mouths quickly, and hurried off.
They were thinking…his eyes! Like gimlets!
And then a voice from the shadows said: “Hallo, big boy. You want a nice time?”
“Oh, yes!” said Windle Poons, lost in wonder. “Oh, yes! Yes!”
He turned around.
“Bloody hell!” There was the sound of someone hurrying away down an alley.
Windle’s face fell.
Life, obviously, was only for the living. Perhaps this back-to-your-body business had been a mistake after all. He’d been a fool to think otherwise.
He turned and, hardly bothering to keep his own heart beating, went back to the University.
Windle trudged across the quad to the Great Hall. The Archchancellor would know what to do—
“There he is!”
“It’s him!”
“Get him!”
Windle’s train of thought ran over a cliff. He looked around at five red, worried, and above all familiar faces.
“Oh, hallo, Dean,” he said, unhappily. “And is that the Senior Wrangler? Oh, and the Archchancellor, this is—”
“Grab his arm!”
“Don’t look at his eyes!”
“Grab his other arm!”
“This is for your own good, Windle!”
“It’s not Windle! It’s a creature of the Night!”
“I assure you—”