Oh, yes.

He opened his mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed.

This made him feel slightly better.

He lay there a bit longer. Though the tumbled heap of his memories came the recollections of mornings in bed when he was a little boy, desperately subdividing the passing time into smaller and smaller units to put off the terrible moment of getting up and having to face all the problems of life such as, in this case, who he was, where he was, and why he was.

"What are you?" said a voice on the edge of his consciousness.

"I was coming to that," muttered Rincewind.

The room oscillated into focus as he pushed himself up on his elbows.

"I warn you," said the voice, which seemed to be coming from a table, "I am protected by many powerful amulets."

"Jolly good," said Rincewind. "I wish I was."

Details began to distil out of the blur. It was a long, low room, one end of which was occupied by an enormous fireplace. A bench all down one wall contained a selection of glassware apparently created by a drunken glassblower with hiccups, and inside its byzantine coils coloured liquids seethed and bubbled. A skeleton hung from a hook in a relaxed fashion. On a perch beside it someone had nailed a stuffed bird. Whatever sins it had committed in life, it hadn't deserved what the taxidermist had done to it.

Rincewind's gaze swept across the floor. It was obvious that it was the only sweeping the floor had had for some time. Only around him had space been cleared among the debris of broken glass and overturned retorts for -

A magic circle.

It looked an extremely thorough job. Whoever had chalked it was clearly aware that its purpose was to divide the universe into two bits, the inside and the outside.

Rincewind was, of course, inside.

"Ah," he said, feeling a familiar and almost comforting sense of dread sweep over him.