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-now?’
‘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 day. 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 FIitworth 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.
I 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 wheatgerm 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 coloured 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.