Reaper Man

Chapter 8

"Do I get a choice?" he said.
"My friend here," said Lupine, indicating Windle, "is a zombie -"
"Well, I don't know about actual zombie, I think you have to eat some sort of fish and root to be a zom -"
"- and you know what zombies do to people, don't you?"
The man tried to nod, even though Lupine's fist was right under his neck.
"Yeggg, " he managed.
"Now, he's going to take a very good look at you, and if he ever sees you again -"
"I say, hang on," murmured Windle.
"- he'll come after you. Won't you, Windle?"
"Eh? Oh, yes. That's right. Like a shot, " said Windle, unhappily. "Now run along, there's a good chap. OK?"
"OggAy," said the prospective mugger. He was thinking: "Is eyes! Ike imlets!"
Lupine let go. The man hit the cobbles, gave Windle one last terrified glance, and ran for it.
"Er, what do zombies do to people?" said Windle. 'I suppose I'd better know."
"They tear them apart like a sheet of dry paper, " said Lupine.
"Oh? Right," said Windle. They strolled on in silence.
Windle was thinking: why me? Hundreds of people must die in this city every day. I bet they don't have this trouble. They just shut their eyes and wake up being born as someone else, or in some sort of heaven or, I suppose, possibly some sort of hell. Or they go and feast with the gods in their hall, which has never seemed a particularly great idea - gods are all right in their way, but not the kind of people a decent man would want to have a meal with. The Yen buddhists think you just become very rich. Some of the Klatchian religions say you go to a lovely garden full of young women, which doesn't sound very religious to me...
Windle found himself wondering how you applied for Klatchian nationality after death.
And at that moment the cobblestones came up to meet him.
This is usually a poetic way of saying that someone fell flat on their face. In this case, the cobblestones really came up to meet him. They fountained up, circled silently in the air above the alley for a moment, and then dropped like stones.
Windle stared at them. So did Lupine.
"That's something you don't often see," said the wereman, after a while. "I don't think I've ever seen stones flying before."
"Or dropping like stones," said Windle. He nudged one with the toe of his boot. It seemed perfectly happy with the role gravity had chosen for it.
"You're a wizard -"
"Were a wizard," said Windle.
"You were a wizard. What caused all that?"
"I think it is probably an inexplicable phenomenon," said Windle. 'There's a lot of them about, for some reason. I wish I knew why."
He prodded a stone again. It showed no inclination to move.
"I'd better be getting along," said Lupine.
"What's it like, being a wereman?" said Windle.
Lupine shrugged. "Lonely," he said.
"Hmm?"
"You don't fit in, you see. When I'm a wolf I remember what it's like to be a man, and vice versa. Like... I mean... sometimes... sometimes, right, when I'm wolf-shaped, I run up into the hills... in the winter, you know, when there's a crescent moon in the sky and a crust on the snow and the hills go on for ever... and the other wolves, well, they feel what it's like, of course, but they don't know like I do. To feel and know at the same time. No-one else knows what that's like. No-one else in the whole world could know what that's like. That's the bad part. Knowing there's no-one else..."
Windle became aware of teetering on the edge of a pit of sorrows. He never knew what to say in moments like this.
Lupine brightened up. "Come to that... what's it like, being a zombie?"
"It's OK. It's not too bad."
Lupine nodded.
"See you around," he said, and strode off.
The streets were beginning to fill up as the population of Ankh-Morpork began its informal shift change between the night people and the day people.
All of them avoided Windle. People didn't bump into a zombie if they could help it.
He reached the University gates which were now open, and made his way to his bedroom.
He'd need money, if he was moving out. He'd saved quite a lot over the years. Had he made a will? He'd been fairly confused the past ten years or so. He might have made one. Had he been confused enough to leave all his money to himself? He hoped so. There'd been practically no known cases of anyone successfully challenging their own will -
He levered up the floorboard by the end of his bed, and lifted out a bag of coins. He remembered he'd been saving up for his old age.
There was his diary. It was a five-year diary, he recalled, so in a technical sense Windle had wasted about - he did a quick calculation - yes, about three-fifths of his money.
Or more, when you came to think about it. After all, there wasn't much on the pages. Windle hadn't done anything worth writing down for years, or at least anything he'd been able to remember by the evening.
There were just phases of the moon, lists of religious festivals, and the occasional sweet stuck to a page.
There was something else down there under the floor, too. He fumbled around in the dusty space and found a couple of smooth spheres. He pulled them out and stared at them, mystified. He shook them, and watched the tiny snowfalls. He read the writing, noting how it wasn't so much writing as a drawing of writing. He reached down and picked up the third object; it was a little bent metal wheel. Just one little metal wheel. And, beside it, a broken sphere.
Windle stared at them.
Of course, he had been a bit non-compos mentis in his last thirty years or so, and maybe he'd worn his underwear outside his clothes and dribbled a bit, but... he'd collected souvenirs? And little wheels?
There was a cough behind him.
Windle dropped the mysterious objects back into the hole and looked around. The room was empty, but there seemed to be a shadow behind the open door.
"Hallo?" he said.
A deep, rumbling, but very diffident voice said,
"S'only me, Mr. Poons."
Windle wrinkled his forehead with the effort of recollection.
"Schleppel?" he said.
"That's right."
"The bogeyman?"
"That's right?"
"Behind my door?"
"That's right."
"Why?"
"It's a friendly door."
Windle walked over to the door and gingerly shut it.
There was nothing behind it but old plaster, although he did fancy that he felt an air movement.
"I'm under the bed now, Mr. Poons," said Schleppel's voice from, yes, under the bed. "You don't mind, do you?"
"Well, no. I suppose not. But shouldn't you be in a closet somewhere? That's where bogeymen used to hide when I was a lad."
"A good closet is hard to find, Mr. Poons."
Windle sighed. "All right. The underside of the bed's yours. Make yourself at home, or whatever."
"I'd prefer going back to lurking behind the door, Mr. Poons, if it's all the same to you."
"Oh, all right."
"Do you mind shutting your eyes a moment?"
Windle obediently shut his eyes.
There was another movement of air.
"You can look now, Mr. Poons."
Windle opened his eyes.
"Gosh," said Schleppel's voice, "you've even got a coat hook and everything behind here."
Windle watched the brass knobs on the end of his bedstead unscrew themselves.
A tremor shook the floor.
"What's going on, Schleppel?" he said.
"Build up of life force, Mr. Poons."
"You mean you-now?"
"Oh, yes. Hey, wow, there's a lock and a handle and a brass finger plate and everything behind here -"
"What do you mean, a build up of life force?"
"- and the hinges, there's a really good rising butts here, never had a door with -"
"Schleppel!"
"Just life force, Mr. Poons. You know. It's a kind of force what you get in things that are alive? I thought you wizards knew about this sort of thing."
Windle Poons opened his mouth to say something like 'Of course we do," before proceeding diplomatically to find out what the hell the bogeyman was talking about, and then remembered that he didn't have to act like that now. That's what he would have done if he was alive, but despite what Reg Shoe proclaimed, it was quite hard to be proud when you were dead. A bit stiff, perhaps, but not proud.
"Never heard of it," he said. "What's it building up for?"
"Don't know. Very unseasonal. It ought to be dying down around now," said Schleppel.
The floor shook again. Then the loose floorboard that had concealed Windle's little fortune creaked, and started to put out shoots.
"What do you mean, unseasonal?" he said.
"You get a lot of it in the spring," said the voice from behind the door. "Shoving the daffodils up out of the ground and that kind of stuff."
"Never heard of it, " said Windle, fascinated.
"I thought you wizards knew everything about everything."
Windle looked at his wizarding hat. Burial and tunnelling had not been kind to it, but after more than a century of wear it hadn't been the height of haute couture to start with.
"There's always something new to learn, " he said.
It was another day. Cyril the cockerel stirred on his perch.
The chalked words glowed in the half light.
He concentrated.
He took a deep breath.
"Dock-a-loodle-fod!"
Now that the memory problem was solved, there was only the dyslexia to worry about.
Up in the high fields the wind was strong and the sun was close and strong. Bill Door strode back and forth through the stricken grass of the hillside like a shuttle across a green weave.
He wondered if he'd ever felt wind and sunlight before.
Yes, he'd felt them, he must have done. But he'd never experienced them like this; the way wind pushed at you, the way the sun made you hot. The way you could feel Time passing.
Carrying you with it.
There was a timid knocking at the barn door.
YES?
"Come on down here, Bill Door."
He climbed down in the darkness and opened the door cautiously.
Miss FIitworth was shielding a candle with one hand.
"Um. " she said.
I AM SORRY?
"You can come into the house, if you like. For the evening. Not for the night, of course. I mean, I don't like to think of you all alone out here of an evening, when I've got a fire and everything."
Bill Door was no good at reading faces. It was a skill he'd never needed. He stared at Miss Flitworth's frozen, worried, pleading smile like a baboon looking for meaning in the Rosetta Stone.
I THANK YOU, he said.
She scuttled off.
When he arrived at the house she wasn't in the kitchen.
He followed a rustling, scraping noise out into a narrow hallway and through a low doorway. Miss Flitworth was down on her hands and knees in the little room beyond, feverishly lighting the fire.
She looked up, flustered, when he rapped politely on the open door.
"Hardly worth putting a match to it for one," she mumbled, by way of embarrassed explanation. "Sit down. I'll make us some tea."
Bill Door folded himself into one of the narrow chairs by the fire, and looked around the room.
It was an unusual room. Whatever its functions were, being lived in wasn't apparently one of them. Whereas the kitchen was a sort of roofed over outside space and the hub of the farm's activities, this room resembled nothing so much as a mausoleum.
Contrary to general belief, Bill Door wasn't very familiar with funereal decor. Deaths didn't normally take place in tombs, except in rare and unfortunate cases. The open air, the bottoms of rivers, halfway down sharks, any amount of bedrooms, yes - tombs, no.
His business was the separation of the wheatgerm of the soul from the chaff of the mortal body, and that was usually concluded long before any of the rites associated with, when you got right down to it, a reverential form of garbage disposal.
But this room looked like the tombs of those kings who wanted to take it all with them.
Bill Door sat with his hands on his knees, looking around.
First, there were the ornaments. More teapots than one might think possible. China dogs with staring eyes. Strange cake stands. Miscellaneous statues and painted plates with cheery little messages on them: A Present from Quirm, Long Life and Happiness. They covered every flat surface in a state of total democracy, so that a rather valuable antique silver candlestick was next to a bright coloured china dog with a bone in its mouth and an expression of culpable idiocy.
Pictures hid the walls. Most of them were painted in shades of mud and showed depressed cattle standing on wet moorland in a fog.
In fact the ornaments almost concealed the furniture, but this was no loss. Apart from two chairs groaning under the weight of accumulated antimacassars, the rest of the furniture seemed to have no use whatsoever apart from supporting ornaments. There were spindly tables everywhere. The floor was layered in rag rugs. Someone had really liked making rag rugs. And, above all, and around all, and permeating all, was the smell.
It smelled of long, dull afternoons.
On a cloth-draped sideboard were two small wooden chests flanking a larger one. They must be the famous boxes full of treasure, he thought.
He became aware of ticking.
There was a clock on the wall. Someone had once had what they must have thought was the jolly idea of making a clock like an owl. When the pendulum swung, the owl's eyes went backwards and forwards in what the seriously starved of entertainment probably imagined was a humorous way. After a while. your own eyes started to oscillate in sympathy.
Miss Flitworth bustled in with a loaded tray. There was a blur of activity as she performed the alchemical ceremony of making tea, buttering scones, arranging biscuits, hooking sugar tongs on the basin...
She sat back. Then, as if she had been in a state of repose for twenty minutes, she trilled slightly breathlessly: "Well... isn't this nice."
YES, MISS FLITWORTH.
"Don't often have occasion to open up the parlour these days."
NO.
"Not since I lost my dad."
For a moment Bill Door wondered if she'd lost the late Mr. Flitworth in the parlour. Perhaps he'd taken a wrong turning among the ornaments. Then he recalled the funny little ways humans put things.
AH.
"He used to sit in that very chair, reading the almanac."
Bill Door searched his memory.
A TALL MAN, he ventured. WITH A MOUSTACHE? MISSING THE TIP OF THE LITTLE FINGER ON HIS LEFT HAND?
Miss Flitworth stared at him over the top of her cup.
"You knew him?" she said.
I THINK I MET HIM ONCE.
"He never mentioned you," said Miss FIitworth archly. '"Not by name. Not as Bill Door."
I DON'T THINK HE WOULD HAVE MENTIONED ME, said Bill Door slowly.
"It's all right," said Miss Flitworth. "I know all about it. Dad used to do a bit of smuggling, too. Well, this isn't a big farm. It's not what you'd call a living. He always said a body has to do what it can. I expect you were in his line of business. I've been watching you. That was your business, right enough."
Bill Door thought deeply.
GENERAL TRANSPORTATION, he said.
"That sounds like it, yes. Have you got any family, Bill?"
A DAUGHTER.
"That's nice."
I'M AFRAID WE'VE LOST TOUCH.
"That's a shame," said Miss Flitworth, and sounded as though she meant it. 'We used to have some good times here in the old days. That was when my young man was alive, of course."
YOU HAVE A SON? said Bill, who was losing track.
She gave him a sharp look.
"I invite you to think hard about the word "Miss"," she said. "We takes things like that seriously in these parts."
MY APOLOGIES.
"No, Rufus was his name. He was a smuggler, like dad. Not as good, though. I got to admit that. He was more artistic. He used to give me all sorts of things from foreign parts, you know. Bits of jewelry and suchlike. And we used to go dancing. He had very good calves, I remember. I like to see good legs on a man."
She stared at the fire for a while.
"See... he never come back one day. Just before we were going to be wed. Dad said he never should have tried to run the mountains that close to winter, but I know he wanted to do it so's he could bring me a proper present. And he wanted to make some money and impress dad, because dad was against -"
She picked up the poker and gave the fire a more ferocious jab than it deserved.
"Anyway, some folk said he ran away to Farferee or Ankh-Morpork or somewhere, but I know he wouldn't have done something like that."
The penetrating look she gave Bill Door nailed him to the chair.
"What do you think, Bill Door?" she said sharply.
He felt quite proud of himself for spotting the question within the question.
MISS FLITWORTH, THE MOUNTAINS CAN BE VERY TREACHEROUS IN THE WINTER.
She looked relieved. 'That's what I've always said," she said. "And do you know what, Bill Door? Do you know what I thought?"
NO, MISS FLITWORTH.
"It was the day before we were going to be wed, like I said. And then one of his pack ponies came back by itself and then the men went and found the avalanche... and you know what I thought? I thought, that's ridiculous. That's stupid. Terrible, isn't it? Oh, I thought other things afterwards, naturally, but the first thing was that the world shouldn't act as if it was some kind of book. Isn't that a terrible thing to have thought?"
I MYSELF HAVE NEVER TRUSTED DRAMA, MISS FLITWORTH.
She wasn't really listening.
"And I thought, what life expects me to do now is moon around the place in the wedding dress for years and go completely doodly. That's what it wants me to do. Hah! Oh, yes! So I put the dress in the ragtag and we still invited everyone to the wedding breakfast, because it's a crime to let good food go to waste."
She attacked the fire again, and then gave him another megawatt stare.
"I think it's always very important to see what's really real and what isn't, don't you?"
MISS FLITWORTH?
"Yes?"
DO YOU MIND IF I STOP THE CLOCK?
She glanced up at the boggle-eyed owl.
"What? Oh. Why?"
I AM AFRAID IT GETS ON MY NERVES.
"It's not very loud, is it?"
Bill Door wanted to say that every tick was like the hammering of iron clubs on bronze pillars.
H'S JUST RATHER ANNOYING, MISS FLITWORTH.
"Well, stop it if you want to, I'm sure. I only keep it wound up for the company."
Bill Door got up thankfully, stepped gingerly through the forest of ornaments, and grabbed the pinecone shaped pendulum. The wooden owl glared at him and the ticking stopped at least in the realm of common sound. He was aware that, elsewhere, the pounding of Time continued none the less. How could people endure it? They allowed Time in their houses, as though it was a fiend.
He sat down again.
Miss Flitworth had started to knit, ferociously.
The fire rustled in the grate.
Bill Door leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling.
"Your horse enjoying himself?"
PARDON?
"Your horse. He seems to be enjoying himself in the meadow," prompted Miss Flitworth.
OH. YES.
"Running around as if he's never seen grass before."
HE LIKES GRASS.
"And you like animals. I can tell."
Bill Door nodded. His reserves of small talk, never very liquid, had dried up.
He sat silently for the next couple of hours, hands gripping the arms of the chair, until Miss Flitworth announced that she was going to bed. Then he went back to the barn, and slept.
Bill Door hadn't been aware of it coming. But there it was, a grey figure floating in the darkness of the barn.
Somehow it had got hold of the golden timer.
It told him, Bill Door, there has been a mistake.
The glass shattered. Fine golden seconds glittered in the air, for a moment, and then settled.
It told him, Return. You have work to do. There has been a mistake.
The figure faded.
Bill Door nodded. Of course there had been a mistake.
Anyone could see there had been a mistake. He'd known all along it had been a mistake.
He tossed the overalls in a corner and took up the robe of absolute blackness.
Well, it had been an experience. And, he had to admit, one that he didn't want to relive. He felt as though a huge weight had been removed.
Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward?
How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive?
Obviously it was something you had to be born to.
Death saddled his horse and rode out and up over the fields. The corn rippled far below, like the sea. Miss Flitworth would have to find someone else to help her gather in the harvest.
That was odd. There was a feeling there. Regret? Was that it? But it was Bill Door's feeling, and Bill Door was... dead. Had never lived. He was his old self again, safe where there were no feelings and no regrets.
Never any regrets.
And now he was in his study, and that was odd, because he couldn't quite remember how he'd got there. One minute on horseback, the next in the study, with its ledgers and timers and instruments.
And it was bigger than he remembered. The walls lurked on the edge of sight.
That was Bill Door's doing. Of course it would seem big to Bill Door. and there was probably just a bit of him still hanging on. The thing to do was keep busy. Throw himself into his work.
There were already some lifetimers on his desk. He didn't remember putting them there, but that didn't matter, the important thing was to get on with the job...
He picked up the nearest one, and read the name.
"Lod-a-foodle-wok!"
Miss Flitworth sat up in bed. On the edge of dreams she'd heard another noise, which must have woken the cockerel.
She fiddled with a match until she got a candle alight, and then felt under the bed and her fingers found the hilt of a cutlass that had been much employed by the late Mr. Flitworth during his business trips across the mountains.
She hurried down the creaking stairs and out into the chill of the dawn.
She hesitated at the barn door, and then pulled it open just enough to slip inside.
"Mr. Door?"
There was a rustle in the hay, and then an alert silence.
MISS FLITWORTH?
"Did you call out? I'm sure I heard someone shout my name."
There was another rustle, and Bill Door's head appeared over the edge of the loft.
MISS FLITWORTH.
"Yes. Who did you expect? Are you all right?"
ER. YES. YES, I BELIEVE SO.
"You sure you're all right? You woke up Cyril."
YES. YES. IT WAS JUST A - I THOUGHT THAT - YES.
She blew out the candle. There was already enough pre-dawn light to see by.
"Well, if you're sure... Now I'm up I may as well put the porridge on."
Bill Door lay back on the hay until he felt he could trust his legs to carry him, and then climbed down and tottered across the yard to the farmhouse.
He said nothing while she ladled porridge into a bowl in front of him. and drowned it with cream. Finally, he couldn't contain himself any longer. He didn't know how to ask the questions, but he really needed the answers.
MISS FLITWORTH?
"Yes?"
WHAT IS IT... IN THE NIGHT... WHEN YOU SEE THINGS, BUT THEY ARE NOT THE REAL THINGS?
She stood, porridge pot in one hand and ladle in the other.
"You mean dreaming?" she said.
IS THAT WHAT DREAMING IS?