Reaper Man Read online

  The Archchancellor put his hand over his eyes.

  “All right,” he said quietly. “You know, I’m not surprised? Not surprised at all. What did you get? Lamb chops? A nice piece of pork?”

  “Celery,” said the Bursar.

  “It’s his nerves,” said the Dean, quickly.

  “Celery,” said the Archchancellor, his self-control rigid enough to bend horsehoes around. “Right.”

  The Bursar handed him a soggy green bundle. Ridcully took it.

  “Now, Windle,” he said, “I’d like you to imagine that what I have in my hand—”

  “It’s quite all right,” said Windle.

  “I’m not actually sure I can hammer—”

  “I don’t mind, I assure you,” said Windle.

  “You don’t?”

  “The principle is sound,” said Windle. “If you just hand me the celery but think hammering a stake, that’s probably sufficient.”

  “That’s very decent of you,” said Ridcully. “That shows a very proper spirit.”

  “Esprit de corpse,” said the Senior Wrangler.

  Ridcully glared at him, and thrust the celery dramatically toward Windle.

  “Take that!” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Windle.

  “And now let’s put the lid on and go and have some lunch,” said Ridcully. “Don’t worry, Windle. It’s bound to work. Today is the last day of the rest of your life.”

  Windle lay in the darkness, listening to the hammering. There was a thump and a muffled imprecation against the Dean for not holding the end properly. And then the patter of soil on the lid, getting fainter and more distant.

  After a while a distant rumbling suggested that the commerce of the city was being resumed. He could even hear muffled voices.

  He banged on the coffin lid.

  “Can you keep it down?” he demanded. “There’s people down here trying to be dead!”

  He heard the voices stop. There was the sound of feet hurrying away.

  Windle lay there for some time. He didn’t know how long. He tried stopping all functions, but that just made things uncomfortable. Why was dying so difficult? Other people seemed to manage it, even without practice.

  Also, his leg itched.

  He tried to reach down to scratch it, and his hand touched something small and irregularly shaped. He managed to get his fingers around it.

  It felt like a bundle of matches.

  In a coffin? Did anyone think he’d smoke a quiet cigar to pass the time?

  After a certain amount of effort he managed to push one boot off with the other boot and ease it up until he could just grasp it. This gave him a rough surface to strike the match on—

  Sulphurous light filled his tiny oblong world.

  There was a tiny scrap of cardboard pinned to the inside of the lid.

  He read it.

  He read it again.

  The match went out.

  He lit another one, just to check that what he had read really did exist.

  The message was still as strange, even third time around:

  Dead? Depressed?

  Feel like starting it all again?

  Then why not come along to the

  FRESH START CLUB

  Thursdays, 12pm, 668 Elm Street

  EVERY BODY WELCOME

  The second match went out, taking the last of the oxygen with it.

  Windle lay in the dark for a while, considering his next move and finishing off the celery.

  Who’d have thought it?

  And it suddenly dawned on the late Windle Poons that there was no such thing as somebody else’s problem, and that just when you thought the world had pushed you aside it turned out to be full of strangeness. He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.

  It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane. But It was strange. It had things in it like screws that unscrewed themselves, and little written messages to the dead.

  He resolved to find out what was going on. And then…if Death wasn’t going to come to him, he’d go to Death. He had his rights, after all. Yeah. He’d lead the biggest missing-person hunt of all time.

  Windle grinned in the darkness.

  Missing—believed Death.

  Today was the first day of the rest of his life.

  And Ankh-Morpork lay at his feet. Well, metaphorically. The only way was up.

  He reached up, felt for the card in the dark, and pulled it free. He stuck it between his teeth.

  Windle Poons braced his feet against the end of the box, pushed his hands past his head, and heaved.

  The soggy loam of Ankh-Morpork moved slightly.

  Windle paused out of habit to take a breath, and realized that there was no point. He pushed again. The end of the coffin splintered.

  Windle pulled it toward him and tore the solid pine like paper. He was left with a piece of plank which would have been a totally useless spade for anyone with un-zombie-like strength.

  Turning onto his stomach, tucking the earth around him with his impromptu spade and ramming it back with his feet, Windle Poons dug his way toward a fresh start.

  Picture a landscape, a plain with rolling curves.

  It’s late summer in the octarine grass country below the towering peaks of the high Ramtops, and the predominant colors are umber and gold. Heat sears the landscape. Grasshoppers sizzle, as in a frying pan. Even the air is too hot to move. It’s the hottest summer in living memory and, in these parts, that’s a long, long time.

  Picture a figure on horseback, moving slowly along a road that’s an inch deep in dust between fields of corn that already promise an unusually rich harvest.

  Picture a fence of baked, dead wood. There’s a notice pinned to it. The sun has faded the letters, but they are still readable.

  Picture a shadow, falling across the notice. You can almost hear it reading both the words.

  There’s a track leading off the road, toward a small group of bleached buildings.

  Picture dragging footsteps.

  Picture a door, open.

  Picture a cool, dark room, glimpsed through the open doorway. This isn’t a room that people live in a lot. It’s a room for people who live out-doors but have to come inside sometimes, when it gets dark. It’s a room for harnesses and dogs, a room where oil-skins are hung up to dry. There’s a beer barrel by the door. There are flagstones on the floor and, along the ceiling beams, hooks for bacon. There’s a scrubbed table that thirty hungry men could sit down at.

  There are no men. There are no dogs. There is no beer. There is no bacon.

  There was silence after the knocking, and then the flap-flap of slippers on flagstones. Eventually a skinny old woman with a face the color and texture of a walnut peered around the door.

  “Yes?” she said.

  THE NOTICE SAID “MAN WANTED.”

  “Did it? Did it? That’s been up there since before last winter!”

  I AM SORRY? YOU NEED NO HELP?

  The wrinkled face looked at him thoughtfully.

  “I can’t pay more’n sixpence a week, mind,” it said.

  The tall figure looming against the sunlight appeared to consider this.

  YES, it said, eventually.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start you workin,” either. We haven’t had any proper help here for three years. I just hire the lazy good-fornothin’s from the village when I want ’em.

  YES?

  “You don’t mind, then?”

  I HAVE A HORSE.

  The old woman peered around the stranger. In the yard was the most impressive horse she’d ever seen. Her eyes narrowed.

  “And that’s your horse, is it?”

  YES.

  “With all that silver on the harness and everything?”

  YES.

  “A
nd you want to work for sixpence a week?”

  YES.

  The old woman pursed her lips. She looked from the stranger to the horse to the dilapidation around the farm. She appeared to reach a decision, possibly on the lines that someone who owned no horses probably didn’t have much to fear from a horse thief.

  “You’re to sleep in the barn, understand?” she said.

  SLEEP? YES. OF COURSE. YES, I WILL HAVE TO SLEEP.

  “Couldn’t have you in the house anyway. It wouldn’t be right.”

  THE BARN WILL BE QUITE ADEQUATE, I ASSURE YOU.

  “But you can come into the house for your meals.”

  THANK YOU.

  “My name’s Miss Flitworth.”

  YES.

  She waited.

  “I expect you have a name, too,” she prompted.

  YES. THAT’S RIGHT.

  She waited again.

  “Well?”

  I’M SORRY?

  “What is your name?”

  The stranger stared at her for a moment, and then looked around wildly.

  “Come on,” said Miss Flitworth. “I ain’t employing no one without no name. Mr…?”

  The figure stared upward.

  MR. SKY?

  “No one’s called Mr. Sky.”

  MR…. DOOR?

  She nodded.

  “Could be. Could be Mr. Door. There was a chap called Doors I knew once. Yeah. Mr. Door. And your first name? Don’t tell me you haven’t got one of those too. You’ve got to be a Bill or a Tom or a Bruce or one of those names.”

  YES.

  “What?”

  ONE OF THOSE.

  “Which one?”

  ER. THE FIRST ONE?

  “You’re a Bill?”

  YES?

  Miss Flitworth rolled her eyes.

  “All right, Bill Sky…” she said.

  DOOR.

  “Yeah. Sorry. All right, Bill Door…”

  CALL ME BILL.

  “And you can call me Miss Flitworth. I expect you want some dinner?”

  I WOULD? AH. YES. THE MEAL OF THE EVENING. YES.

  “You look half starved, to tell the truth. More than half, really.” She squinted at the figure. Somehow it was very hard to be certain what Bill Door looked like, or even remember the exact sound of his voice. Clearly he was there, and clearly he had spoken—otherwise why did you remember anything at all?

  “There’s a lot of people in these parts as don’t use the name they were born with,” she said. “I always say there’s nothing to be gained by going around asking pers’nal questions. I suppose you can work, Mr. Bill Door? I’m still getting the hay in off the high meadows and there’ll be a lot of work come harvest. Can you use a scythe?”

  Bill Door seemed to meditate on the question for some time. Then he said, I THINK THE ANSWER TO THAT IS A DEFINITE “YES,” MISS FLITWORTH.

  Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler also never saw the sense in asking personal questions, at least insofar as they applied to him and were on the lines of “Are these things yours to sell?” But no one appeared to be coming forward to berate him for selling off their property, and that was good enough for him. He’d sold more than a thousand of the little globes this morning, and he’d had to employ a troll to keep up a flow from the mysterious source of supply in the cellar.

  People loved them.

  The principle of operation was laughably simple and easily graspable by the average Ankh-Morpork citizen after a few false starts.

  If you gave the globe a shake, a cloud of little white snowflakes swirled up in the liquid inside and settled, delicately, on a tiny model of a famous Ankh-Morpork landmark. In some globes it was the University, or the Tower of Art, or the Brass Bridge, or the Patrician’s Palace. The detail was amazing.

  And then there were no more left. Well, thought Throat, that’s a shame. Since they hadn’t technically belonged to him—although morally, of course, morally they were his—he couldn’t actually complain. Well, he could complain, of course, but only under his breath and not to anybody specific. Maybe it was all for the best, come to think of it. Stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap. Get ’em off your hands—it made it much easier to spread them in a gesture of injured innocence when you said “Who, me?”

  They were really pretty, though. Except, strangely enough, for the writing. It was on the bottom of each globe, in shaky, amateurish letters, as if done by someone who had never seen writing before and was trying to copy some down. On the bottom of every globe, below the intricate little snowflake-covered building, were the words:

  Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was a shameless autocondimentor.* He had his own special cruet put in front of him at every meal. It consisted of salt, three types of pepper, four types of mustard, four types of vinegar, fifteen different kinds of chutney and his special favorite: Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulfur and saltpetre for added potency. Ridcully inherited the formula from his uncle who, after half a pint of sauce on a big meal one evening, had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach, lit his pipe and disappeared in mysterious circumstances, although his shoes were found on the roof the following summer.

  There was cold mutton for lunch. Mutton went well with Wow-Wow Sauce; on the night of Ridcully senior’s death, for example, it had gone at least three miles.

  Mustrum tied his napkin behind his neck, rubbed his hands together, and reached out.

  The cruet moved.

  He reached out again. It slid away.

  Ridcully sighed.

  “All right, you fellows,” he said. “No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who’s playing silly buggers?”

  The other senior wizards stared at him.

  “I, I, I don’t think we can play it anymore,” said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, “I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces…”

  He looked around, giggled, and went back to trying to cut his mutton with a spoon. The other wizards were keeping knives out of his way at present.

  The entire cruet floated up into the air and started to spin slowly. Then it exploded.

  The wizards, dripping vinegar and expensive spices, watched it owlishly.

  “It was probably the sauce,” the Dean ventured. “It was definitely going a bit critical last night.”

  Something dropped on his head and landed in his lunch. It was a black iron screw, several inches long.

  Another one mildly concussed the Bursar.

  After a second or two, a third landed point down on the table by the Archchancellor’s hand and stuck there.

  The wizards turned their eyes upward.

  The Great Hall was lit in the evenings by one massive chandelier, although the word so often associated with glittering prismatic glassware seemed inappropriate for the huge, heavy, black, tallow-encrusted thing that hung from the ceiling like a threatening overdraft. It could hold a thousand candles. It was directly over the senior wizards’ table.

  Another screw tinkled onto the floor by the fireplace.

  The Archchancellor cleared his throat.

  “Run?” he suggested.

  The chandelier dropped.

  Bits of table and crockery smashed into the walls. Lumps of lethal tallow the size of a man’s head whirred through the windows. A whole candle, propelled out of the wreckage at a freak velocity, was driven several inches into a door.

  The Archchancellor disentangled himself from the remains of his chair.

  “Bursar!” he yelled.

  The Bursar was exhumed from the fireplace.

  “Um, yes, Archchancellor?” he quavered.

  “What was the meanin’ of that?”

  Ridcully’s hat rose from his head.

  It was a basic floppy-brimmed, pointy wizarding hat, but adapted to the Archchancellor’s outgoing lifestyle. Fishing flies were stuck in it. A very small
pistol crossbow was shoved in the hatband in case he saw something to shoot while out jogging, and Mustrum Ridcully had found that the pointy bit was just the right size for a small bottle of Bentinck’s Very Old Peculiar Brandy. He was quite attached to his hat.

  But it was no longer attached to him.

  It drifted gently across the room. There was a faint but distinct gurgling noise.

  The Archchancellor leapt to his feet. “Bugger that,” he roared. “That stuff’s nine dollars a fifth!” He made a leap for the hat, missed, and kept on going until he drifted to a halt several feet above the ground.

  The Bursar raised a hand, nervously.

  “Possibly woodworm?” he said.

  “If there is any more of this,” growled Ridcully, “any more at all, d’you hear, I shall get very angry!”

  He was dropped to the floor at the same time as the big doors opened. One of the college porters bustled in, followed by a squad of the Patrician’s palace guard.

  The guard captain looked the Archchancellor up and down with the expression of one to whom the word “civilian” is pronounced in the same general tones as “cockroach.”

  “You the head chap?” he said.

  The Archchancellor smoothed his robe and tried to straighten his beard.

  “I am the Archchancellor of this university, yes,” he said.

  The guard captain looked curiously around the hall. The students were all cowering down the far end. Splashed food covered most of the walls to ceiling height. Bits of furniture lay around the wreckage of the chandelier like trees around ground zero of a meteor strike.

  Then he spoke with all the distaste of someone whose own further education had stopped at age nine, but who’d heard stories…

  “Indulging in a bit of youthful high spirits, were we?” he said. “Throwin’ a few bread rolls around that kind of thing?”

  “May I ask the meaning of this intrusion?” said Ridcully, coldly.

  The guard captain leaned on his spear.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s like this. The Patrician is barricaded in his bedroom on account of the furniture in the palace is zooming around the place like you wouldn’t believe, the cooks won’t even go back in the kitchen on account of what’s happening in there…”

  The wizards tried not to look at the spear’s head. It was starting to unscrew itself.