Reaper Man

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 dawn. 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 a 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 Flitworth 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.

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 décor. 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.