Reaper Man

‘I’m really sorry to be such a nuisance,’ said Windle.

The Dean suddenly brightened up.

‘Daylight!’ he said excitedly. ‘That’ll do the trick!’

‘Get the curtain!’

‘Get the other curtain!’

‘One, two, three … now!’

Windle blinked in the invasive sunlight.

The wizards held their breath.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t seem to work.’

They sagged again.

‘Don’t you feel anything?’ said Ridcully.

‘No sensation of crumbling into dust and blowing away?’ said the Senior Wrangler hopefully.

‘My nose tends to peel if I’m out in the sun too long,’ said Windle. ‘I don’t know if that’s any help.’ He tried to smile.

The wizards looked at one another and shrugged.

‘Get out,’ said the Archchancellor. They trooped out.

Ridcully followed them. He paused at the door and waved a finger at Windle.

‘This uncooperative attitude, Windle, is not doing you any good,’ he said, and slammed the door behind him.

After a few seconds the four screws holding the door handle very slowly unscrewed themselves. They rose up and orbited near the ceiling for a while, and then fell.

Windle thought about this for a while.

Memories. He had lots of them. One hundred and thirty years of memories. When he was alive he hadn’t been able to remember one-hundredth of the things he knew but now he was dead, his mind uncluttered with everything except the single silver thread of his thoughts, he could feel them all there. Everything he’d ever read, everything he’d ever seen, everything he’d ever heard. All there, ranged in ranks. Nothing forgotten. Everything in its place.

Three inexplicable phenomena in one day. Four, if you included the fact of his continued existence. That was really inexplicable.

It needed explicating.

Well, that was someone else’s problem. Everything was someone else’s problem now.

The wizards crouched outside the door of Windle’s room.

‘Got everything?’ said Ridcully.

‘Why can’t we get some of the servants to do it?’ muttered the Senior Wrangler. ‘It’s undignified.’

‘Because I want it done properly and with dignity,’ snapped the Archchancellor. ‘If anyone’s going to bury a wizard at a crossroads with a stake hammered through him, then wizards ought to do it. After all, we’re his friends.’

‘What is this thing, anyway?’ said the Dean, inspecting the implement in his hands.

‘It’s called a shovel,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘I’ve seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical.’

Ridcully squinted through the keyhole.

‘He’s lying down again,’ he said. He got up, brushing the dust off his knees, and grasped the door handle. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Take your time from me. One … two …’

Modo the gardener was trundling a barrow load of hedge trimmings to a bonfire behind the new High Energy Magic research building when about half a dozen wizards went past at, for wizards, high speed. Windle Poons was being borne aloft between them.

Modo heard him say, ‘Really, Archchancellor, are you quite sure this one will work—?’

‘We’ve got your best interests at heart,’ said Ridcully.

‘I’m sure, but—’

‘We’ll soon have you feeling your old self again,’ said the Bursar.

‘No, we won’t,’ hissed the Dean. ‘That’s the whole point!’

‘We’ll soon have you not feeling your old self again, that’s the whole point,’ stuttered the Bursar, as they rounded the corner.

Modo picked up the handles of the barrow again and pushed it thoughtfully towards the secluded area where he kept his bonfire, his compost heaps, his leaf-mould pile, and the little shed he sat in when it rained.

He used to be assistant gardener at the palace, but this job was a lot more interesting. You really got to see life.

Ankh-Morpork society is street society. There is always something interesting going on. At the moment, the driver of a two-horse fruit wagon was holding the Dean six inches in the air by the scruff of the Dean’s robe and was threatening to push the Dean’s face through the back of the Dean’s head.

‘It’s peaches, right?’ he kept bellowing. ‘You know what happens to peaches what lies around too long? They get bruised. Lots of things round here are going to get bruised.’

‘I am a wizard, you know,’ said the Dean, his pointy shoes dangling. ‘If it wasn’t for the fact that it would be against the rules for me to use magic in anything except a purely defensive manner, you would definitely be in a lot of trouble.’

‘What you doing, anyway?’ said the driver, lowering the Dean so he could look suspiciously over his shoulder.

‘Yeah,’ said a man trying to control the team pulling a lumber wagon, ‘what’s going on? There’s people here being paid by the hour, you know!’

‘Move along at the front there!’

The lumber driver turned in his seat and addressed the queue of carts behind him. ‘I’m trying to,’ he said. ‘It’s not my fault, is it? There’s a load of wizards digging up the godsdamn street!’

The Archchancellor’s muddy face peered over the edge of the hole.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dean,’ he said, ‘I told you to sort things out!’