Reaper Man

Later on they taught him a game that consisted of a table with holes and nets around the edge, and balls carved expertly out of wood, and apparently balls had to bounce off one another and into the holes. It was called Pond. He played it well. In fact, he played it perfectly. At the start, he didn’t know how not to. But after he heard them gasp a few times he corrected himself and started making mistakes with painstaking precision; by the time they taught him darts he was getting really good at them. The more mistakes he made, the more people liked him. So he propelled the little feathery darts with cold skill, never letting one drop within a foot of the targets they urged on him. He even sent one ricocheting off a nail head and a lamp so that it landed in someone’s beer, which made one of the older men laugh so much he had to be taken outside into the fresh air.

They’d called him Good Old Bill.

No-one had ever called him that before.

What a strange evening.

There had been one bad moment, though. He’d heard a small voice say: ‘That man is a skelington,’ and had turned to see a small child in a nightdress watching him over the top of the bar, without terror but with a sort of fascinated horror.

The landlord, who by now Bill Door knew to be called Lifton, had laughed nervously and apologised.

‘That’s just her fancy,’ he said. ‘The things children say, eh? Get on with you back to bed, Sal. And say you’re sorry to Mr Door.’

‘He’s a skelington with clothes on,’ said the child. ‘Why doesn’t all the drink fall through?’

He’d almost panicked. His intrinsic powers were fading, then. People could not normally see him — he occupied a blind spot in their senses, which they filled in somewhere inside their heads with something they preferred to encounter. But the adults’ inability to see him clearly wasn’t proof against this sort of insistent declaration, and he could feel the puzzlement around him. Then, just in time, its mother had come in from the back room and had taken the child away. There’d been muffled complaints on the lines of ‘—a skelington, with all bones on—’ disappearing around the bend in the stairs.

And all the time the ancient clock over the fireplace had been ticking, ticking, chopping seconds off his life. There’d seemed so many of them, not long ago …

There was a faint knocking at the barn door, below the hayloft. He heard it pushed open.

‘Are you decent, Bill Door?’ said Miss Flitworth’s voice in the darkness.

Bill Door analysed the sentence for meaning within context.

YES? he ventured.

‘I’ve brought you a hot milk drink.’

YES?

‘Come on, quick now. Otherwise it’ll go cold.’

Bill Door cautiously climbed down the wooden ladder. Miss Flitworth was holding a lantern, and had a shawl around her shoulders.

‘It’s got cinnamon on it. My Rufus always liked cinnamon.’ She sighed.

Bill Door was aware of undertones and overtones in the same way that an astronaut is aware of weather patterns below him; they’re all visible, all there, all laid out for study and all totally divorced from actual experience.

THANK YOU, he said.

Miss Flitworth looked around.

‘You’ve really made yourself at home here,’ she said brightly.

YES.

She pulled the shawl around her shoulders.

‘I’ll be getting back to the house, then,’ she said. ‘You can bring the mug back in the morning.’

She sped away into the night.

Bill Door took the drink up to the loft. He put it on a low beam and sat and watched it long after it grew cold and the candle had gone out.

After a while he was aware of an insistent hissing. He took out the golden timer and put it right at the other end of the loft, under a pile of hay.

It made no difference at all.

Windle Poons peered at the house numbers — a hundred Counting Pines had died for this street alone — and then realised he didn’t have to. He was being short-sighted out of habit. He improved his eyesight.

Number 668 took some while to find because it was in fact on the first floor above a tailor’s shop. Entrance was via an alleyway. There was a wooden door at the end of the alley. On its peeling paintwork someone had pinned a notice which read, in optimistic lettering:

‘Come in! Come in!! The Fresh Start Club.

Being Dead is only the Beginning!!!’

The door opened on to a flight of stairs that smelled of old paint and dead flies. They creaked even more than Windle’s knees.

Someone had been drawing on the walls. The phraseology was exotic but the general tone was familiar enough: Spooks of the world Arise, You have Nothing to lose but your Chains and The Silent Majority want Dead Rights and End vitalism now!!!