Reaper Man (7 page)

“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!”

“Yes, I was just asking this gentleman to back up and go another way,” said the Dean, who was afraid he was beginning to choke.

The fruiterer turned him around so that he could see along the crowded streets. “Ever tried to back up sixty carts all at once?” he demanded. “It’s not easy.
Especially
when everyone can’t move because you guys have got it so’s the carts are backed up all around the block and no one can move because everyone’s in someone else’s way, right?”

The Dean tried to nod. He had wondered himself about the wisdom of digging the hole at the junction of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork. It had seemed logical at the time. Even the most persistent undead ought to stay decently buried under that amount of traffic. The only problem was that no one had thought seriously about the difficulty of digging up a couple of main streets during the busy time of day.

“All right, all right, what’s going on here?”

The crowd of spectators opened to admit the bulky figure of Sergeant Colon of the Watch. He moved through the people unstoppably, his stomach leading the way. When he saw the wizards, waist deep in a hole in the middle of the road, his huge red face brightened up.

“What’s this, then?” he said. “A gang of international crossroads thieves?”

He was overjoyed. His long-term policing strategy was paying off!

The Archchancellor tipped a shovelful of Ankh-Morpork loam over his boots.

“Don’t be stupid, man,” he snapped. “This is vitally important.”

“Oh, yes. That’s what they all say,” said Sergeant Colon, not a man to be easily steered from a particular course of thought once he’d got up to mental speed. “I bet there’s hundreds of villages in heathen places like Klatch that’d pay good money for a nice prestigious crossroads like this, eh?”

Ridcully looked up at him with his mouth open.

“What are you gabbling about, officer?” he said. He pointed irritably to his pointy hat. “Didn’t you hear me? We’re wizards. This is wizard business. So if you could just sort of direct the traffic around us, there’s a good chap—”

“—these peaches bruise as soon as you even
look
at ’em—” said a voice behind Sergeant Colon.

“The old idiots have been holding us up for half an hour,” said a cattle drover who had long ago lost control of forty steers now wandering aimlessly around the nearby streets. “I wants ’em arrested.”

It dawned on the sergeant that he had inadvertently placed himself center stage in a drama involving hundreds of people, some of them wizards and all of them angry.

“What are you doing, then?” he said weakly.

“We’re burying our colleague. What does it look like?” said Ridcully.

Colon’s eyes swiveled to an open coffin by the side of the road. Windle Poons gave him a little wave.

“But…he’s not dead…is he?” he said, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to get ahead of the situation.

“Appearances can be deceptive,” said the Archchancellor.

“But he just waved to me,” said the sergeant, desperately. “So?”

“Well, it’s not normal for—”

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

Sergeant Colon sidled closer to the coffin.

“Didn’t I see you throw yourself into the river last night?” he said, out of the corner of his mouth.

“Yes. You were very helpful,” said Windle.

“And then you threw yourself sort of out again,” said the sergeant.

“I’m afraid so.”

“But you were down there for ages.”

“Well, it was very dark, you see. I couldn’t find the steps.”

Sergeant Colon had to concede the logic of this.

“Well, I suppose you must be dead, then,” he said. “No one could stay down there who wasn’t dead.”

“This is it,” Windle agreed.

“Only why are you waving and talking?” said Colon.

The Senior Wrangler poked his head out of the hole.

“It’s not unknown for a dead body to move and make noises after death, Sergeant,” he volunteered. “It’s all down to involuntary muscular spasms.”

“Actually, Senior Wrangler is right,” said Windle Poons. “I read that somewhere.”

“Oh.” Sergeant Colon looked around. “Right,” he said, uncertainly. “Well…fair enough, I suppose…”

“Okay, we’re done,” said the Archchancellor, scrambling out of the hole, “it’s deep enough. Come on, Windle, down you go.”

“I really am very touched, you know,” said Windle, lying back in the coffin. It was quite a good one, from the mortuary in Elm Street. The Archchancellor had let him choose it himself.

Ridcully picked up a mallet.

Windle sat up again.

“Everyone’s going to so much trouble—”

“Yes, right,” said Ridcully, looking around. “Now—who’s got the stake?”

Everyone looked at the Bursar.

The Bursar looked unhappy.

He fumbled in a bag.

“I couldn’t get any,” he said.

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.

T
HE NOTICE SAID
“M
AN
W
ANTED
.”

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

I
AM SORRY
? Y
OU 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.

Y
ES
, 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.

Y
ES
?

“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?”

Y
ES
.

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

Y
ES
.

“And you want to work for sixpence a week?”

Y
ES
.

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.

S
LEEP
? Y
ES
. O
F COURSE
. Y
ES
, I
WILL HAVE TO SLEEP
.