Reaper Man

  The rain had stopped, but the storm still marched around the hills. The air sizzled, still seemed oven-hot.

  Bill Door led the way past the henhouse, where Cyril and his elderly harem were crouched back in the darkness, all trying to occupy the same few inches of perch.

  There was a pale green glow hovering around the farmhouse chimney.

  “We call that Mother Carey’s Fire,” said Miss Flitworth. “It’s an omen.”

  AN OMEN OF WHAT?

  “What? Oh, don’t ask me. Just an omen, I suppose. Just basic omenery. Where are we going?”

  INTO THE TOWN.

  “To be near the scythe?”

  YES.

  He disappeared into the barn. After a while he came out leading Binky, saddled and harnessed. He mounted up, then leaned down and pulled both her and the sleeping child onto the horse in front of him.

  IF I’M WRONG, he added, THIS HORSE WILL TAKE YOU WHEREVER YOU WANT TO GO.

  “I shan’t want to go anywhere except back home!”

  WHEREVER.

  Binky broke into a trot as they turned onto the road to the town. Wind blew the leaves off the trees, which tumbled past them and on up the road. The occasional flash of lightning still hissed across the sky.

  Miss Flitworth looked at the hill beyond the farm.

  “Bill—”

  I KNOW.

  “—it’s there again—”

  I KNOW. “Why isn’t it chasing us?”

  WE’RE SAFE UNTIL THE SAND RUNS OUT. “And you die when the sand runs out?” NO. WHEN THE SAND RUNS OUT IS WHEN I SHOULD DIE. I WILL BE IN THE SPACE BETWEEN LIFE AND AFTERLIFE.

  “Bill, it looked as though the thing it was riding…I thought it was a proper horse, just very skinny, but…”

  IT’S A SKELETAL STEED. IMPRESSIVE BUT IMPRACTICAL. I HAD ONE ONCE BUT THE HEAD FELL OFF. “A bit like flogging a dead horse, I should think.”

  HA. HA. MOST AMUSING, MISS FLITWORTH.

  “I think that at a time like this you can stop calling me Miss Flitworth,” said Miss Flitworth.

  RENATA?

  She looked startled. “How did you know my name? Oh. You’ve probably seen it written down, right?”

  ENGRAVED.

  “On one of them hourglasses?”

  YES.

  “With all them sands of time pouring through?”

  YES.

  “Everyone’s got one?”

  YES.

  “So you know how long I’ve—”

  YES.

  “It must be very odd, knowing…the kind of things you know…”

  DO NOT ASK ME.

  “That’s not fair, you know. If we knew when we were going to die, people would lead better lives.”

  IF PEOPLE KNEW WHEN THEY WERE GOING TO DIE, I THINK THEY PROBABLY WOULDN’T LIVE AT ALL.

  “Oh, very gnomic. And what do you know about it, Bill Door?”

  EVERYTHING.

  Binky trotted up one of the town’s meager handful of streets and over the cobbles of the square. There was no one else around. In cities like Ankh-Morpork midnight was just late evening, because there was no civic night at all, just evenings fading into dawns. But here people regulated their lives by things like sunsets and mispronounced cock-crows. Midnight meant what it said.

  Even with the storm stalking the hills, the square itself was hushed. The ticking of the clock in its tower, unnoticable at midday, now seemed to echo off the buildings.

  As they approached, something whirred deep in its cogwheeled innards. The minute hand moved with a clonk, and shuddered to a halt on the 9. A trapdoor opened in the clock face and two little mechanical figures whirred out self-importantly and tapped a small bell with great apparent effort.

  Ting-ting-ting.

  The figures lined up and wobbled back into the clock.

  “They’ve been there ever since I was a girl. Mr. Simnel’s great-great-grandad made them,” said Miss Flitworth, “I always wondered what they did between chimes, you know. I thought they had a little house in there, or something.”

  I DON’T THINK SO. THEY’RE JUST A THING. THEY’RE NOT ALIVE.

  “Hmm. Well, they’ve been there for hundreds of years. Maybe life is something you sort of acquire?”

  YES.

  They waited in silence, except for the occasional thud as the minute hand climbed the night.

  “It’s—been quite nice having you around the place, Bill Door.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “Helping me with the harvest and everything.”

  IT WAS…INTERESTING.

  “It was wrong of me to delay you, just for a lot of corn.”

  NO. THE HARVEST IS IMPORTANT.

  Bill Door unfolded his palm. The timer appeared.

  “I still can’t work out how you do that.”

  IT IS NOT DIFFICULT.

  The hiss of the sand grew until it filled the square.

  “Have you got any last words?”

  YES. I DON’T WANT TO GO.

  “Well. Succinct, anyway.”

  Bill Door was amazed to find she was trying to hold his hand.

  Above him, the hands of midnight came together. There was a whirring from the clock. The door opened. The automata marched out. They clicked to a halt on either side of the hour bell, bowed to one another, and raised their hammers.

  Dong.

  And then there was the sound of a horse trotting.

  Miss Flitworth found the edge of her vision filling with purple and blue blotches, like the flashes of after-image with no image to come after.

  If she jerked her head quickly and peered out of the tail of her eye, she could see small gray-clad shapes hovering around the walls.

  The Revenooers, she thought. They’ve come to make sure it all happens.

  “Bill?” she said.

  He closed his palm over the gold timer.

  NOW IT STARTS.

  The hoofbeats grew louder, and echoed off the buildings behind them.

  REMEMBER: YOU ARE IN NO DANGER.

  Bill Door stepped back into the gloom.

  Then he reappeared momentarily.

  PROBABLY, he added, and retreated into the darkness.

  Miss Flitworth sat down on the steps of the clock, cradling the body of the girl across her knees.

  “Bill?” she ventured.

  A mounted figure rode into the square.

  It was, indeed, on a skeletal horse. Blue flame crackled over the creature’s bones as it trotted forward; Miss Flitworth found herself wondering whether it was a real skeleton, animated in some way, something that had once been the inside of a horse, or a skeletal creature in its own right. It was a ridiculous chain of thought to follow, but it was better than dwelling on the ghastly reality that was approaching.

  Did it get rubbed down, or just given a good polish?

  Its rider dismounted. It was much taller than Bill Door had been, but the darkness of its robe hid any details. It held something that wasn’t exactly a scythe but which might have had a scythe in its ancestry, in the same way that even the most cunningly-fashioned surgical implement has a stick somewhere in its past. It was a long way from any implement that ever touched a straw.

  The figure stalked toward Miss Flitworth, scythe over its shoulder, and stopped.

  Where is He?

  “Don’t know who you’re talking about,” said Miss Flitworth. “And if I was you, young man, I’d feed my horse.”

  The figure appeared to have trouble digesting this information, but finally it seemed to reach a conclusion. It unshipped the scythe and looked down at the child.

  I will find Him, it said. But first—

  It stiffened.

  A voice behind it said:

  DROP THE SCYTHE, AND TURN AROUND SLOWLY.

  Something within the city, Windle thought. Cities grow up full of people, but they’re also full of commerce and shops and religions and…

  This is stupid, he told himself. They’re just things. They’re not alive. r />
  Maybe life is something you acquire.

  Parasites and predators, but not like the sort affecting animals and vegetables. They were some kind of big, slower, metaphorical lifeform, living off cities. But they incubate in the cities, like those, what are they? those icky newman wasp things. He could remember now, just as he could remember everything, reading as a student about creatures that laid their eggs inside other creatures. For months after he’d refused omelettes and caviar, just in case.

  And the eggs would…look like the city, in a way, so that citizens would carry them home. Like cuckoo eggs.

  I wonder how many cities died in the past? Ringed by parasites, like a coral reef surrounded by starfish. They’d just become empty, they’d lose whatever spirit they had.

  He stood up.

  “Where’s everyone gone, Librarian?”

  “Oook oook.”

  “Just like them. I’d have done that. Rush off without thinking. May the gods bless them and help them, if they can find the time from their eternal family squabbles.”

  And then he thought: well, what now? I’ve thought, and what am I going to do?

  Rush off, of course. But slowly.

  The center of the heap of trolleys was no longer visible. Something was going on. A pale blue glow hung over the huge pyramid of twisted metal, and there were occasional flashes of lightning deep within the pile. Trolleys slammed into it like asteroids accreting around the core of a new planet, but a few arrivals did something else. They headed for tunnels that had opened within the structure, and disappeared into the glittering core.

  Then there was a movement at the tip of the mountain and something thrust its way up through the broken metal. It was a glistening spike, supporting a globe about two meters across. It did nothing very much for a minute or two and then, as the breeze dried it out, it split and crumbled.

  White objects cascaded out, were caught by the wind, and fountained over Ankh-Morpork and the watching crowds.

  One of them zig-zagged gently down across the rooftops and landed at the feet of Windle Poons as he lurched outside the Library.

  It was still damp, and there was writing on it. At least, an attempt at writing. It looked like the strange organic inscription of the snowflake balls—words created by something that was not at all at home with words:

  Windle reached the University gateway. People were streaming past.

  Windle knew his fellow citizens. They’d go to look at anything. They were suckers for anything written down with more than one exclamation mark after it.

  He felt someone looking at him, and turned. A trolley was watching from an alleyway; it backed up and whizzed away.

  “What’s happening, Mr. Poons?” said Ludmilla.

  There was something unreal about the expression of the passers-by. They wore an expression of unbudgeable anticipation.

  You didn’t have to be a wizard to know that something was wrong. And Windle’s senses were whining like a dynamo.

  Lupine leapt at a drifting sheet of paper and brought it to him.

  Windle shook his head sadly. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

  And then he heard the music.

  Lupine sat back on his haunches and howled.

  In the cellar under Mrs. Cake’s house, Schleppel the bogeyman paused halfway through his third rat and listened.

  Then he finished his meal and reached for his door.

  Count Arthur Winkings Notfaroutoe was working on the crypt.

  Personally, he could have lived, or re-lived, or unlived, or whatever it was he was supposed to be doing, without a crypt. But you had to have a crypt. Doreen had been very definite about the crypt. It gave the place ton, she said. You had to have a crypt and a vault, otherwise the rest of vampire society would look down their teeth at you.

  They never told you about that sort of thing when you started vampiring. They never told you to build your own crypt out of some cheap two-by-four from Chalky the Troll’s Wholesale Building Supplies. It wasn’t something that happened to most vampires, Arthur reflected. Not your proper vampires. Your actual Count Jugular, for example. No, a toff like him’d have someone for it. When the villagers came to burn the place down, you wouldn’t catch the Count his own self whipping down to the gate to drop the drawbridge. Oh, no. He’d just say, “Igor”—as it might be—“Igor, just svort it out, chop chop.”

  Huh. Well, they’d had an advert in Mr. Keeble’s job shop for months now. Bed, three meals a day, and hump provided if necessary. Not so much as an enquiry. And People said there was all this unemployment around. It made you livid.

  He picked up another piece of wood and measured it, grimacing as he unfolded the ruler.

  Arthur’s back ached from digging the moat. And that was another thing your posh vampire didn’t have to worry about. The moat came with the job, style of thing. And it went all the way round, because other vampires didn’t have the street out in front of them and old Mrs. Pivey complaining on one side and a family of trolls Doreen wasn’t speaking to on the other and therefore they didn’t end up with a moat that just went across the back yard. Arthur kept falling in it.

  And then there was the biting the necks of young women. Or rather, there wasn’t. Arthur was always prepared to see the other person’s point of view, but he felt certain that young women came into the vampiring somewhere, whatever Doreen said. In diaphanous pegnoyers. Arthur wasn’t quite certain what a diaphanous pegnoyer was, but he’d read about them and he definitely felt that he’d like to see one before he died…or whatever…

  And other vampires didn’t suddenly find their wives talking with Vs instead of Ws. The reason being, your natural vampire talked like that anyway.

  Arthur sighed.

  It was no life, or half-life or after-life or whatever it was, being a lower-middle-class wholesale fruit and vegetable merchant with an upper-class condition.

  And then the music filtered in through the hole in the wall that he’d knocked out to put in the barred window.

  “Ow,” he said, and clutched at his jaw. “Doreen?”

  Reg Shoe thumped his portable podium.

  “—and, let me say, we shall not lie back and let the grass grow over our heads,” he bellowed. “So what is your seven-point plan for Equal Opportunities with the living, I hear you cry?”

  The wind blew the dried grasses in the cemetery. The only creature apparently paying any attention to Reg was a solitary raven.

  Reg Shoe shrugged and lowered his voice. “You might at least make some effort,” he said, to the next world at large. “Here’s me wearing my fingers to the bone”—he flexed his hands to demonstrate—“and do I hear a word of thanks?”

  He paused, just in case.

  The raven, which was one of the extra large, fat ones that infested the rooftops of the University, put its head on one side and gave Reg Shoe a thoughtful look.

  “You know,” said Reg, “sometimes I just feel like giving up—”

  The raven cleared its throat.

  Reg Shoe spun around.

  “You say one word,” he said, “just one bloody word…”

  And then he heard the music.

  Ludmilla risked removing her hands from her ears.

  “It’s horrible! What is it, Mr. Poons?”

  Windle tried to pull the remains of his hat over his ears.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “It could be music. If you’d never heard music before.”

  There weren’t notes. There were strung-together noises that might have been intended to be notes, put together as one might draw a map of a country that one had never seen.

  Hnyip. Ynyip. Hwyomp.

  “It’s coming from outside the city,” said Ludmilla. “Where all the people…are…going…They can’t like it, can they?”

  “I can’t imagine why they should,” said Windle.

  “It’s just that…you remember the trouble with the rats last year? That man who said he had a pipe that played music
only rats could hear?”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t really true, it was all a fraud, it was just the Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents—”

  “But supposing it could have been true?”

  Windle shook his head.

  “Music to attract humans? Is that what you’re getting at? But that can’t be true. It’s not attracting us. Quite the reverse, I assure you.”

  “Yes, but you’re not human…exactly,” said Ludmilla. “And—” She stopped, and went red in the face.

  Windle patted her on the shoulder.

  “Good point. Good point,” was all he could think of to say.

  “You know, don’t you,” she said, without looking up.

  “Yes. I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of, if that’s any help.”

  “Mother said it would be dreadful if anyone ever found out!”

  “That probably depends on who it is,” said Windle, glancing at Lupine.

  “Why is your dog staring at me like that?” said Ludmilla.

  “He’s very intelligent,” said Windle.

  Windle felt in his pocket, tipped out a couple of handfuls of soil, and unearthed his diary. Twenty days to next full moon. Still, it’d be something to look forward to.

  The metal debris of the heap started to collapse. Trolleys whirred around it, and a large crowd of Ankh-Morpork’s citizens were standing in a big circle, trying to peer inside. The unmusical music filled the air.

  “There’s Mr. Dibbler,” said Ludmilla, as they pushed their way through the unresisting people.

  “What’s he selling this time?”

  “I don’t think he’s trying to sell anything, Mr. Poons.”

  “It’s that bad? Then we’re probably in lots of trouble.”

  Blue light shone out from one of the holes in the heap. Bits of broken trolley tinkled to the ground like metal leaves.

  Windle bent down stiffly and picked up a pointy hat. It was battered and had been run over by a lot of trolleys, but it was still recognizable as something that by rights should be on someone’s head.

  “There’s wizards in there,” he said.

  Silver light glittered off the metal. It moved like oil. Windle reached out and a fat spark jumped across and grounded itself on his fingers.