Reaper Man

by Terry Pratchett

  “Why can’t you have a—” Windle began.

  “Can’t use a mirror,” said Arthur. “I thought the turning-into-a-bat bit would be interesting, but the owls around here are murder. And as for the…you know…with the blood…well…” His voice trailed off.

  “Artore’s never been very good at meetink people,” said Doreen.

  “And the worst part is having to wear evening dress the whole time,” said Arthur. He gave Doreen a sideways glance. “I’m sure it’s not really compulsory.”

  “It iss very important to maintain standerts,” said Doreen. Doreen, in addition to her here-one-minute-and-gone-the-next vampire accent, had decided to complement Arthur’s evening dress with what she considered appropriate for a female vampire: figure-hugging black dress, long dark hair cut into a widow’s peak, and very pallid makeup. Nature had designed her to be small and plump with frizzy hair and a hearty complexion. There were definite signs of conflict.

  “I should have stayed in that coffin,” said Arthur.

  “Oh, no,” said Mr. Shoe. “That’s taking the easy way out. The movement needs people like you, Arthur. We had to set an example. Remember our motto.”

  “Which motto is that, Reg?” said Lupine wearily. “We have so many.”

  “Undead yes—unperson no!” Reg said.

  “You see, he means well,” said Lupine, after the meeting had broken up.

  He and Windle were walking back through the gray dawn. The Notfaroutoes had left earlier to be back home before daylight heaped even more troubles on Arthur, and Mr. Shoe had gone off, he said, to address a meeting.

  “He goes down to the cemetery behind the Temple of Small Gods and shouts,” Lupine explained. “He calls it consciousness raising but I don’t reckon he’s onto much of a certainty.”

  “Who was it under the chair?” said Windle.

  “That was Schleppel,” said Lupine. “We think he’s a bogeyman.”

  “Are bogeymen undead?”

  “He won’t say.”

  “You’ve never seen him? I thought bogeymen hid under things and, er, behind things and sort of leapt out at people.”

  “He’s all right on the hiding. I don’t think he likes the leaping out,” said Lupine.

  Windle thought about this. An agoraphobic bogeyman seemed to complete the full set.

  “Fancy that,” he said, vaguely.

  “We only go along to the club to keep Reg happy,” said Lupine. “Doreen said it’d break his heart if we stopped. You know the worst bit?”

  “Go on,” said Windle.

  “Sometimes he brings a guitar along and makes us sing songs like ‘The Streets of Ankh-Morpork’ and ‘We Shall Overcome.’* It’s terrible.”

  “Can’t sing, eh?” said Windle.

  “Sing? Never mind sing. Have you ever seen a zombie try to play a guitar? It’s helping him find his fingers afterward that’s so embarrassing.” Lupine sighed. “By the way, Sister Drull is a ghoul. If she offers you any of her meat patties, don’t accept.”

  Windle remembered a vague, shy old lady in a shapeless gray dress.

  “Oh, dear,” he said. “You mean she makes them out of human flesh?”

  “What? Oh. No. She just can’t cook very well.”

  “Oh.”

  “And Brother Ixolite is probably the only banshee in the world with a speech impediment, so instead of sitting on roofs and screaming when people are about to die he just writes them a note and slips it under the door—”

  Windle recalled a long, sad face. “He gave me one, too.”

  “We try to encourage him,” said Lupine. “He’s very self-conscious.”

  His arm shot out and flung Windle against a wall.

  “Quiet!”

  “What?”

  Lupine’s ears swiveled. His nostrils flared.

  Motioning Windle to remain where he was, the wereman slunk silently along the alley until he reached its junction with another, even smaller and nastier one. He paused for a moment, and then thrust a hairy hand around the corner.

  There was a yelp. Lupine’s hand came back holding a struggling man. Huge hairy muscles moved under Lupine’s torn shirt as the man was hoisted up to fang level.

  “You were waiting to attack us, weren’t you,” said Lupine.

  “Who, me—?”

  “I could smell you,” said Lupine, evenly.

  “I never—”

  Lupine sighed. “Wolves don’t do this sort of thing, you know,” he said.

  The man dangled.

  “Hey, is that a fact,” he said.

  “It’s all head-on combat, fang against fang, claw against claw,” said Lupine. “You don’t find wolves lurking behind rocks ready to mug a passing badger.”

  “Get away?”

  “Would you like me to tear your throat out?”

  The man stared eye to yellow eye. He estimated his chances against a seven-foot man with teeth like that.

  “Do I get a choice?” he said.

  “My friend here,” said Lupine, indicating Windle, “is a zombie—”

  “Well, I don’t know about actual zombie, I think you have to eat some sort of fish and root to be a zom—”

  “—and you know what zombies do to people, don’t you?”

  The man tried to nod, even though Lupine’s fist was right under his neck.

  “Yeggg,” he managed.

  “Now, he’s going to take a very good look at you, and if he ever sees you again—”

  “I say, hang on,” murmured Windle.

  “—he’ll come after you. Won’t you, Windle?”

  “Eh? Oh, yes. That’s right. Like a shot,” said Windle, unhappily. “Now run along, there’s a good chap. Okay?”

  “OggAy,” said the prospective mugger. He was thinking: Ig eyes! Ike imlets!

  Lupine let go. The man hit the cobbles, gave Windle one last terrified glance, and ran for it.

  “Er, what do zombies do to people?” said Windle. “I suppose I’d better know.”

  “They tear them apart like a sheet of dry paper,” said Lupine.

  “Oh? Right,” said Windle. They strolled on in silence. Windle was thinking: why me? Hundreds of people must die in this city every day. I bet they don’t have this trouble. They just shut their eyes and wake up being born as someone else, or in some sort of heaven or, I suppose, possibly some sort of hell. Or they go and feast with the gods in their hall, which has never seemed a particularly great idea—gods are all right in their way, but not the kind of people a decent man would want to have a meal with. The Yen buddhists think you just become very rich. Some of the Klatchian religions say you go to a lovely garden full of young women, which doesn’t sound very religious to me…

  Windle found himself wondering how you applied for Klatchian nationality after death.

  And at that moment the cobblestones came up to meet him.

  This is usually a poetic way of saying that someone fell flat on their face. In this case, the cobblestones really came up to meet him. They fountained up, circled silently in the air above the alley for a moment, and then dropped like stones.

  Windle stared at them. So did Lupine.

  “That’s something you don’t often see,” said the wereman, after a while. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen stones flying before.”

  “Or dropping like stones,” said Windle. He nudged one with the toe of his boot. It seemed perfectly happy with the role gravity had chosen for it.

  “You’re a wizard—”

  “Were a wizard,” said Windle.

  “You were a wizard. What caused all that?”

  “I think it was probably an inexplicable phenomenon,” said Windle. “There’s a lot of them about, for some reason. I wish I knew why.”

  He prodded a stone again. It showed no inclination to move.

  “I’d better be getting along,” said Lupine.

  “What’s it like, being a wereman?” said Windle.

  Lupine shrugged. “Lonely,” he said.


  “Hmm?”

  “You don’t fit in, you see. When I’m a wolf I remember what it’s like to be a man, and vice versa. Like…I mean…sometimes…sometimes, right, when I’m wolf-shaped, I run up into the hills…in the winter, you know, when there’s a crescent moon in the sky and a crust on the snow and the hills go on forever…and the other wolves, well, they feel what it’s like, of course, but they don’t know like I do. To feel and know at the same time. No one else knows what that’s like. No one else in the whole world could know what that’s like. That’s the bad part. Knowing there’s no one else…”

  Windle became aware of teetering on the edge of a pit of sorrows. He never knew what to say in moments like this.

  Lupine brightened up. “Come to that…what’s it like, being a zombie?”

  “It’s okay. It’s not too bad.”

  Lupine nodded.

  “See you around,” he said, and strode off.

  The streets were beginning to fill up as the population of Ankh-Morpork began its informal shift change between the night people and the day people. All of them avoided Windle. People didn’t bump into a zombie if they could help it.

  He reached the University gates, which were now open, and made his way to his bedroom.

  He’d need money, if he was moving out. He’d saved quite a lot over the years. Had he made a will? He’d been fairly confused the past ten years or so. He might have made one. Had he been confused enough to leave all his money to himself? He hoped so. There’d been practically no known cases of anyone successfully challenging their own will—

  He levered up the floorboard by the end of his bed, and lifted out a bag of coins. He remembered he’d been saving up for his old age.

  There was his diary. It was a five-year diary, he recalled, so in a technical sense Windle had wasted about—he did a quick calculation—yes, about three-fifths of his money.

  Or more, when you came to think about it. After all, there wasn’t much on the pages. Windle hadn’t done anything worth writing down for years, or at least anything he’d been able to remember by the evening. There were just phases of the moon, lists of religious festivals, and the occasional sweet stuck to a page.

  There was something else down there under the floor, too. He fumbled around in the dusty space and found a couple of smooth spheres. He pulled them out and stared at them, mystified. He shook them, and watched the tiny snowfalls. He read the writing, noting how it wasn’t so much writing as a drawing of writing. He reached down and picked up the third object; it was a little bent metal wheel. Just one little metal wheel. And, beside it, a broken sphere.

  Windle stared at them.

  Of course, he had been a bit non-compos mentis in his last thirty years or so, and maybe he’d worn his underwear outside his clothes and dribbled a bit, but…he’d collected souvenirs? And little wheels?

  There was a cough behind him.

  Windle dropped the mysterious objects back into the hole and looked around. The room was empty, but there seemed to be a shadow behind the open door.

  “Hallo?” he said.

  A deep, rumbling, but very diffident voice said, “’S’only me, Mr. Poons.”

  Windle wrinkled his forehead with the effort of recollection.

  “Schleppel?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “The bogeyman?”

  “That’s right?”

  “Behind my door?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a friendly door.”

  Windle walked over to the door and gingerly shut it. There was nothing behind it but old plaster, although he did fancy that he felt an air movement.

  “I’m under the bed now, Mr. Poons,” said Schleppel’s voice from, yes, under the bed. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Well, no. I suppose not. But shouldn’t you be in a closet somewhere? That’s where bogeymen used to hide when I was a lad.”

  “A good closet is hard to find, Mr. Poons.”

  Windle sighed. “All right. The underside of the bed’s yours. Make yourself at home, or whatever.”

  “I’d prefer going back to lurking behind the door, Mr. Poons, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  “Do you mind shutting your eyes a moment?”

  Windle obediently shut his eyes.

  There was another movement of air.

  “You can look now, Mr. Poons.”

  Windle opened his eyes.

  “Gosh,” said Schleppel’s voice, “you’ve even got a coat hook and everything behind here.”

  Windle watched the brass knobs on the end of his bedstead unscrew themselves.

  A tremor shook the floor.

  “What’s going on, Schleppel?” he said.

  “Build up of life force, Mr. Poons.”

  “You mean you know?”

  “Oh, yes. Hey, wow, there’s a lock and a handle and a brass finger plate and everything behind here—”

  “What do you mean, a build up of life force?”

  “—and the hinges, there’s a really good rising butts here, never had a door with—”

  “Schleppel!”

  “Just life force, Mr. Poons. You know. It’s a kind of force what you get in things that are alive? I thought you wizards knew about this sort of thing.”

  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 the 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 decor. 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 wheat-germ 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 colored 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.