Reaper Man

by Terry Pratchett

  “What do you want for breakfast?” said the old woman. “Not that it’ll make any difference, ’cos it’s porridge.”

  Later she thought: he must have eaten it, because the bowl is empty. Why can’t I remember?

  And then there was the matter of the scythe. He looked at it as if he’d never seen one before. She pointed out the grass nail and the handles. He looked at them politely.

  HOW DO YOU SHARPEN IT, MISS FLITWORTH?

  “It’s sharp enough, for goodness sake.”

  HOW DO YOU SHARPEN IT MORE?

  “You can’t. Sharp’s sharp. You can’t get sharper than that.”

  He’d swished it aimlessly, and made a disappointed hissing noise.

  And there was the grass, too.

  The hay meadow was high on the hill behind the farm, overlooking the cornfield. She watched him for a while.

  It was the most interesting technique she had ever witnessed. She wouldn’t even have thought that it was technically possible.

  Eventually she said: “It’s good. You’ve got the swing and everything.”

  THANK YOU, MISS FLITWORTH.

  “But why one blade of grass at a time?”

  Bill Door regarded the neat row of stalks for some while.

  THERE IS ANOTHER WAY?

  “You can do lots in one go, you know.”

  NO. NO. ONE BLADE AT A TIME. ONE TIME, ONE BLADE.

  “You won’t cut many that way,” said Miss Flitworth.

  EVERY LAST ONE, MISS FLITWORTH.

  “Yes?”

  TRUST ME ON THIS.

  Miss Flitworth left him to it and went back to the farmhouse. She stood at the kitchen window and watched the distant dark figure for a while, as it moved over the hillside.

  I wonder what he did? she thought. He’s got a Past. He’s one of them Men of Mystery, I expect. Perhaps he did a robbery and is Lying Low.

  He’s cut a whole row already. One at a time, but somehow faster than a man cutting swathe by swathe…

  Miss Flitworth’s only reading matter was the Farmer’s Almanac and Seed Catalogue, which could last a whole year in the privy if no one was ill. In addition to sober information about phases of the moon and seed sowings it took a certain grisly relish in recounting the various mass murders, vicious robberies and natural disasters that befell mankind, on the lines of “June 15, Year of the Impromptu Stoat: On this Day 150 yrs. since, a Man killed by Freak shower of Goulash in Quirm” or “14 die at hands of Chume, the Notorious Herring Thrower.”

  The important thing about all these was that they happened a long way away, possibly by some kind of divine intervention. The only things that usually happened locally were the occasional theft of a chicken, and the occasional wandering troll. Of course, there were also robbers and bandits in the hills but they got on well with the actual residents and were essential to the local economy. Even so, she felt she’d certainly feel safer with someone else about the place.

  The dark figure on the hillside was well into the second row. Behind it, the cut grass withered in the sun.

  I HAVE FINISHED, MISS FLITWORTH.

  “Go and feed the pig, then. She’s called Nancy.”

  NANCY, said Bill, turning the word around in his mouth as though he was trying to see it from all sides.

  “After my mother.”

  I WILL GO AND FEED THE PIG NANCY, MISS FLITWORTH.

  It seemed to Miss Flitworth that mere seconds went by.

  I HAVE FINISHED, MISS FLITWORTH.

  She squinted at him. Then, slowly and deliberately, she wiped her hands on a cloth, stepped out into the yard and headed for the pigsty.

  Nancy was eyeball-deep in the swill trough.

  Miss Flitworth wondered exactly what comment she should make. Finally she said, “Very good. Very good. You, you, you certainly work…fast.”

  MISS FLITWORTH, WHY DOES NOT THE COCKEREL CROW PROPERLY?

  “Oh, that’s just Cyril. He hasn’t got a very good memory. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I wish he’d get it right.”

  Bill Door found a piece of chalk in the farm’s old smithy, located a piece of board among the debris, and wrote very carefully for some time. Then he wedged the board in front of the henhouse and pointed Cyril toward it.

  THIS YOU WILL READ, he said.

  Cyril peered myopically at the “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo” in heavy gothic script. Somewhere in his tiny mad chicken mind a very distinct and chilly understanding formed that he’d better learn to read very, very quickly.

  Bill Door sat back among the hay and thought about the day. It seemed to have been quite a full one. He’d cut hay and fed animals and mended a window. He’d found some old overalls hanging in the barn. They seemed far more appropriate for a Bill Door than a robe woven of absolute darkness, so he’d put them on. And Miss Flitworth had given him a broad-brimmed straw hat.

  And he’d ventured the half-mile walk into the town. It wasn’t even a one horse town. If anyone had a horse, they’d have eaten it. The residents appeared to make a living by stealing one another’s washing.

  There was a town square, which was ridiculous. It was really only an enlarged crossroads, with a clock tower. And there was a tavern. He’d gone inside.

  After the initial pause while everyone’s mind had refocused to allow him room, they’d been cautiously hospitable; news travels even faster on a vine with few grapes.

  “You’d be the new man up at Miss Flitworth’s,” said the barman. “A Mr. Door, I did hear.”

  CALL ME BILL.

  “Ah? Used to be a tidy old farm, once upon a time. We never thought the old girl’d stay on.”

  “Ah,” agreed a couple of old men by the fireplace.

  AH.

  “New to these parts, then?” said the barman.

  The sudden silence of the other men in the bar was like a black hole.

  NOT PRECISELY.

  “Been here before, have you?”

  JUST PASSING THROUGH.

  “They say old Miss Flitworth’s a loony,” said one of the figures on the benches around the smoke-blackened walls.

  “But sharp as a knife, mind,” said another hunched drinker.

  “Oh, yes. She’s sharp all right. But still a loony.”

  “And they say she’s got boxes full of treasure in that old parlor of hers.”

  “She’m tight with money, I know that.”

  “That proves it. Rich folk are always tight with money.”

  “All right. Sharp and rich. But still a loony.”

  “You can’t be loony and rich. You’ve got to be eccentric if you’re rich.”

  The silence returned and hovered. Bill Door sought desperately for something to say. He had never been very good at small talk. He’d never had much occasion to use it.

  What did people say at times like this? Ah. Yes.

  I WILL BUY EVERYONE A DRINK, he announced.

  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 apologized.

  “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 analyzed 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 Ralph 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 realized he didn’t have to. He was being shortsighted 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 onto 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!!!

  At the top was a landing, with one door opening off it. Once upon a time someone had hung on oil lamp from the ceiling, but it looked as though it had never been lit for thousands of years. An ancient spider, possibly living on the remains of the oil, watched him warily from its eyrie.

  Windle looked at the card again, took a deep breath out of habit, and knocked.

  The Archchancellor strode back into College in a fury, with the others trailing desperately behind him.

  “Who is he going to call! We’re the wizards around here!”

  “Yes, but we don’t actually know what’s happening, do we?” said the Dean.

  “So we’re going to find out!” Ridcully growled. “I don’t know who he’s going to call, but I’m damn sure who I’m going to call.”

  He halted abruptly. The rest of the wizards piled into him.

  “Oh, no,” said the Senior Wrangler. “Please, not that!”

  “Nothing to it,” said Ridcully. “Nothing to worry about. Read up on it last night, ’s’matterofact. You can do it with three bits of wood and—”

  “Four cc of mouse blood,” said the Senior Wrangler mournfully. “You don’t even need that. You can use two bits of wood and an egg. It has to be a fresh egg, though.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose the mouse feels happier about it.”

  “No, I mean the egg.”

  “Oh, who knows how an egg feels?”

  “Anyway,” said the Dean, “it’s dangerous. I’ve always felt that he only stays in the octogram for the look of the thing. I hate it when he peers at you and seems to be counting.”

  “Yes,” said the Senior Wrangler. “We don’t need to do that. We get over most things. Dragons, monsters. Rats. Remember the rats last year? Seemed to be everywhere. Lord Vetinari wouldn’t listen to us, oh no. He paid that glib bugger in the red and yellow tights a thousand gold pieces to get rid of ’em.”

  “It worked, though,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

  “Of course it bloody worked,” said the Dean. “It worked in Quirm and Sto Lat as well. He’d have got away with it in Pseudopolis as well if someone hadn’t recognized him. Mr. so-called Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents!”

  “It’s no good trying to change the subject,” said Ridcully. “We’re going to do the Rite of AshKente. Right?”

  “And summon Death,” said the Dean. “Oh, dear.”

  “Nothing wrong with Death,” said Ridcully. “Professional fellow. Job to do. Fair and square. Play a straight bat, no problem. He’ll know what’s happening.”

  “Oh, dear,” said the Dean again.

  They reached the gateway. Mrs. Cake stepped forward, blocking the Archchancellor’s path.

  Ridcully raised his eyebrows.

  The Archchancellor was not the kind of man who takes a special pleasure in being brusque and rude to women. Or, to put it another way, he was brusque and rude to absolutely everyone, regardless of sex, which was equality of a sort. And if the following conversation had not been taking place between someone who listened to what people said several seconds before they said it, and someone who didn’t listen to what people said at all, everything might have been a lot different. Or perhaps it wouldn’t.

  Mrs. Cake led with an answer.

  “I’m not your good woman!” she snapped.

  “And who are you, my good woman?” said the Archchancellor.

  “Well, that’s no way to talk to a respectable person,” said Mrs. Cake.

  “There’s no need to be offended,” said Ridcully.

  “Oh blow, is that what I’m doin’?” said Mrs. Cake.

  “Madam, why are you answering me before I’ve even said something?”

  “What?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What?”

  They stared at one another, fixed in an unbreakable conversational deadlock. Then Mrs. Cake realized.

  “Oi’m prematurely premoniting again,” she said. She stuck a finger in her ear and wiggled it around with a squelching noise. “It’s all orlright now. Now, the reason—”

  But Ridcully had had enough.

  “Bursar,” he said, “give this woman a penny and send her about her business, will you?”

  “What?” said Mrs. Cake, suddenly enraged beyond belief.

&nb
sp; “There’s too much of this sort of thing these days,” said Ridcully to the Dean, as they strolled away.

  “It’s the pressures and stresses of living in a big city,” said the Senior Wrangler. “I read that somewhere. It takes people in a funny way.”

  They stepped through the wicket gate in one of the big doors and the Dean shut it in Mrs. Cake’s face.

  “He might not come,” said the Senior Wrangler, as they crossed the quadrangle. “He didn’t come for poor old Windle’s farewell party.”

  “He’ll come for the Rite,” said Ridcully. “It doesn’t just send him an invitation, it puts a bloody RSVP on it!”

  “Oh, good. I like sherry,” said the Bursar.

  “Shut up, Bursar.”

  There was an alley, somewhere in the Shades, which was the most alley-ridden part of an alley-ridden city.

  Something small and shiny rolled into it, and vanished in the darkness.

  After a while, there were faint metallic noises.

  The atmosphere in the Archchancellor’s study was very cold.

  Eventually the Bursar quavered: “Maybe he’s busy?”

  “Shut up,” said the wizards, in unison.

  Something was happening. The floor inside the chalked magic octogram was going white with frost.

  “It’s never done that before,” said the Senior Wrangler.

  “This is all wrong, you know,” said the Dean. “We should have some candles and some cauldrons and some stuff bubbling in crucibles and some glitter dust and some colored smoke—”

  “The Rite doesn’t need any of that stuff,” said Ridcully sharply.

  “It might not need them, but I do,” muttered the Dean. “Doing it without the right paraphernalia is like taking all your clothes off to have a bath.”

  “That’s what I do,” said Ridcully.

  “Humph. Well, each to his own, of course, but some of us like to think that we’re maintaining standards.”

  “Perhaps he’s on holiday?” said the Bursar.

  “Oh, yes,” sneered the Dean. “On a beach somewhere? A few iced drinks and a Kiss Me Quick hat?”

  “Hold on. Hold on. Someone’s coming,” hissed the Senior Wrangler.

  The faint outlines of a hooded figure appeared above the octogram. It wavered constantly, as if it was being seen through superheated air.