bushes and trees in pure white.
There was no noise. The curtains of snow shut out the city lights. A few yards into
the park and she might as wel be in the country.
She stuck her fingers into her mouth and whistled.
Yknow, that could’ve been done with a bit more ceremony,’ said the raven, who’d
perched on a snowencrusted twig.
‘Shut up.’
‘ ‘s good, though. Better than most women could do.’
‘Shut up.’
They waited.
‘Why have you stolen that piece of red paper from a little girl’s present?’ said Susan.
‘I’ve got plans,’ said the raven darkly.
They waited again.
She wondered what would happen if it didn’t work. She wondered if the rat would
snigger. It had the most annoying snigger in the world.
Then there were hoofbeats and the floating snow burst open and the horse was
there.
Binky trotted round in a circle, and then stood and steamed.
He wasn’t saddled. Death’s horse didn’t let you fal .
If I get on, Susan thought, it’l al start again. I’l be out of the light and into the world
beyond this one. I’l fal off the tightrope.
But a voice inside her said, You want to, though
. don’t you . . . ?
Ten seconds later, there was only the snow.
The raven turned to the Death of Rats.
‘Any idea where I can get some string?’
SQUEAK.
She was watched.
One said, Who is she?
One said, Do we remember that Death adopted a daughter? The young woman is
her daughter.
One said, She is human?
One said, Mostly.
One said, Can she be kil ed?
One said, Oh, yes.
One said, Wel , that’s al right, then.
One said, Er … we don’t think we’re going to get into trouble over this, do we? Al this
is not exactly … authorized. We don’t want questions asked.
One said, We have a duty to rid the universe of sloppy thinking.
One said, Everyone wil be grateful when they find out.
Binky touched down lightly on Death’s lawn.
Susan didn’t bother with the front door but went round the back, which was never
locked.
There had been changes. One significant change, at least.
There was a cat-flap in the door.
She stared at it.
After a second or two a ginger cat came through the flap, gave her an I’m-not-
hungryand-you’re-notinteresting look, and padded off into the gardens.
Susan pushed open the door into the kitchen.
Cats of every size and colour covered every surface. Hundreds of eyes swivel ed to
watch her.
It was Mrs Gammage al over again, she thought. The old woman was a regular in
Biers for the company and was quite gaga, and one of the symptoms of those going
completely yoyo was that they broke out in chronic cats. Usual y cats who’d mastered
every detail of feline existence except the whereabouts of the dirt box.
Several of them had their noses in a bowl of cream.
Susan had never been able to see the attraction in cats. They were owned by the
kind of people who liked puddings. There were actual people in the world whose idea
of heaven would be a chocolate cat.
‘Push off, the lot of you,’ she said. ‘I’ve never known him have pets.’
The cats gave her a look to indicate that they were intending to go somewhere else
in any case and strol ed off, licking their chops.
The bowl slowly fil ed up again.
They were obviously living cats. Only life had colour here. Everything else was
created by Death. Colour, along with plumbing and music, were arts that escaped the
grasp of his genius.
She left them in the kitchen and wandered along to the study.
There were changes here, too. By the look of it, he’d been trying to learn to play the
violin again. He’d never been able to understand why he couldn’t play music.
The desk was a mess. Books lay open, piled on one another. They were the ones
Susan had never learned to read. Some of the characters hovered above the pages or
moved in complicated little patterns as they read you while you read them.
Intricate devices had been scattered across the top. They looked vaguely
navigational, but on what oceans and under which stars?
Several pages of parchment had been fil ed up with Death’s own handwriting. It was
immediately recognizable. No one else Susan had ever met had handwriting with
serifs.
It looked as though he’d been trying to work something out.
NOT KLATCH. NOT HOWOWONDALAND. NOT THE EMPIRE.
LET US SAY 20 MILLION CHILDREN AT 2LB OF TOYS PER CHILD.
EQUALS 17,857 TONS. 1,785 TONS PER HOUR.
MEMO: DON’T FORGET THE SOOTY FOOTPRINTS. MORE PRACTICE ON THE
HO HO HO.
CUSHION.
She put the paper back careful y.
Sooner or later it’d get to you. Death was fascinated by humans, and study was
never a one-way thing. A man might spend his life peering at the private life of
elementary particles and then find he either knew who he was or where he was, but
not both. Death had picked
up … humanity. Not the real thing, but something that might pass for it until you
examined it closely.
The house even imitated human houses. Death had created a bedroom for himself,
despite the fact that he never slept. If he real y picked things up from humans, had he
tried insanity? It was very popular, after al .
Perhaps, after al these mil ennia, he wanted to be nice.
She let herself into the Room of Lifetimers. She’d liked the sound of it, when she was
a little girl. But now the hiss of sand from mil ions of hourglasses, and the little pings
and pops as ful ones vanished and new empty ones appeared, was not so enjoyable.
Now she knew what was going on. Of course, everyone died sooner or later. It just
wasn’t right to be listening to it happening.
She was about to leave when she noticed the open door in a place where she had
never seen a door before.
It was disguised. A whole section of shelving, complete with its whispering glasses,
had swung out.
Susan pushed it back and forth with a finger. When it was shut, you’d have to look
hard to see the crack.
There was a much smal er room on the other side. It was merely the size of, say, a
cathedral. And it was lined floor to ceiling with more hourglasses that Susan could just
see dimly in the
light from the big room. She stepped inside and snapped her fingers.
‘Light,’ she commanded. A couple of candles sprang into life.
The hourglasses were … wrong.
The ones in the main room, however metaphorical they might be, were solid-looking
things of wood and brass and glass. But these looked as though they were made of
highlights and shadows with no real substance at al .
She peered at a large one.
The name in it was: OFFLER.
‘The crocodile god?’ she thought.
Wel , gods had a life, presumably. But they never actual y died, as far as she knew.
They just dwindled away to a voice on the wind and a footnote in some textbook on
religion.
There were other gods lined up. She recognized a few of them.
But there were smal er lifetimers on the shelf. When she saw the labels she nearly
burst out laughing.
‘The Tooth Fairy? The Sandman? John Barleycorn? The Soul Cake Duck? The God
of what?’
She stepped back, and something crunched under her feet.
There were shards of glass on the floor. She reached down and picked up the
biggest. Only a few letters remained of the name etched into the glass
HOGFA…
‘Oh, no … it’s true. Granddad, what have you done?’
When she left, the candles winked out. Darkness sprang back.
And in the darkness, among, the spil ed sand, a faint sizzle and a tiny spark of light…
Mustrum Ridcul y adjusted the towel around his waist.
‘How’re we doing, Mr Modo?’
The University gardener saluted.
‘The tanks are ful , Mr Archchancel or sir!’ he said brightly. ‘And I’ve been stoking the
hotwater boilers an day!’
The other senior wizards clustered in the doorway.
‘Real y, Mustrum, I real y think this is most unwise,’ said the Lecturer in Recent
Runes. ‘It was surely sealed up for a purpose.’
‘Remember what it said on the door,’ said the Dean.
‘Oh, they just wrote that on it to keep people out,’ said Ridcul y, opening a fresh bar
of soap.
‘Wen, yes,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘That’s right. That’s what people do.’
‘It’s a bathroom,’ said Ridcul y. ‘You are al acting as if it’s some kind of a torture
chamber.’
‘A bathroom,’ said the Dean, ‘designed by Bloody Stupid Johnson. Archchancel or
Weatherwax only used it once and then had it sealed up! Mustrum, I beg you to