The landlord, who by now Bill Door knew to be called Lifton, had laughed nervously and apologised.
‘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 analysed 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 realised he didn’t have to. He was being short-sighted 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 on to 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 DeadRights and End vitalism now!?!
At the top was ?dolanding?, with one door opening off it.
Once upon a time someone had hung an 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 recognised 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 realised.
‘O I’m prematurely premoniting again,’ she said.
She stuck a finger in her ear and wiggled it around with a squelching noise.‘It’s all alright 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.
‘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
‘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 coloured smoke -‘