‘Hallo?’ he said.‘Hallo. Anyone there? What ho?’
There was a distant, forlorn soughing, as of wind at the end of a tunnel.
‘Come out. come out, wherever you are,’ said Windle, his voice trembling with mad cheerfulness.‘Don’t worry. I’m quite looking forward to it, to tell the truth.’
He clapped his spiritual hands and rubbed them together with forced enthusiasm.
‘Get a move on. Some of us have got new lives to go to,’ he said.
The darkness remained inert. There was no shape, no sound. It was void, without form. The spirit of Windle Poons moved on the face of the darkness.
It shook its head.‘Blow this for a lark,’ it muttered.‘This isn’t right at all.’
It hung around for a while and then, because there didn’t seem anything else for it, headed for the only home it had ever known.
It was a home he’d occupied for one hundred and thirty years. It wasn’t expecting him back and put up a lot of resistance. You either had to be very determined or very powerful to overcome that sort of thing, but Windle Poons had been a wizard for more than a century. Besides, it was like breaking into your own house, the old familiar property that you’d lived in for years. You knew where the metaphorical window was that didn’t shut properly.
In short, Windle Poons went back to Windle Poons.
Wizards don’t believe in gods in the same way that most people don’t find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. They know they’re there, they know they’re there for a purpose, they’d probably agree that they have a place in a well-organised universe, but they wouldn’t see the point of believing, of going around saying, ‘O great table, without whom we are as naught’. Anyway, either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of the belief, so either way you might as well ignore the
whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.
Nevertheless, there is a small chapel off the University’s Great Hall, because while the wizards stand right behind the philosophy as outlined above, you don’t become a success~ wizard by getting up gods’ noses even if those noses only exist in an ethereal or metaphorical sense. Because while wizards don’t believe in gods they know for a fact that gods believe in gods.
And in this chapel lay the body of Windle Poons.
The University had instituted twenty-four hours ???‘ting-in-state ever since the embarrassing affair thirty years previously with the late Prissal ‘Merry Rankster’ Teatar.
The body of Windle Poons opened its eyes. Two coins jingled on to the stone floor.
The hands, crossed over the chest, unclenched.
Windle raised his head. Some idiot had stuck a lily in his stomach.
His eyes swivelled sideways. There was a candle on either side of his head.
He raised his head some more.
There were two more candles down there, too.
Thank goodness for old Teatar, he thought. Otherwise I’d already be looking at the underside of a rather cheap pine lid.
Funny thing, he thought. I’m thinking. Clearly.
Wow.
Windle lay back, feeling his spirit refilling his body like gleaming molten metal ?filling? through a mould.
White-hot thoughts seared across the darkness of his brain, fired sluggish neurones into action.
It was never like this when I was alive.
But I’m not dead.
Not alive and not dead.
Sort of non-alive.
Or un-dead.
Oh dear …
He swung himself upright. Muscles that hadn’t worked properly for seventy or eighty years jerked into overdrive. For the first time in his entire life, he corrected himself, better make that ‘period of existence’, Windle Poons’ body was entirely under Windle Poons’ control. And Windle Poons ‘ spirit wasn’t about to take any lip from a bunch of muscles.
Now the body stood up. The knee joints resisted for a while, but they were no more able to withstand the onslaught of will-power than a sick mosquito can withstand a blowtorch.
The door to the chapel was locked. However, Windle found that the merest pressure was enough to pull the lock out of the woodwork and leave fingerprints in the metal of the door handle.
‘Oh, goodness, ‘ he said.
He piloted himself out into the corridor. The distant clatter of cu~~ery and the buzz of voices suggested that one of the University’s four daily meals was in progress.
He wondered whether you were allowed to eat when you were dead. Probably not, he thought.
And could he eat, anyway? It wasn’t that he wasn’t hungry. It was just that … well, he knew how to think, and walking and moving were just a matter of twitching some fairly obvious nerves, but how exactly did your stomach work?
It began to dawn on Windle that the human body is not run by the brain, despite the brain’s opinion on the matter. In fact it’s run by dozens of complex automatic systems, all whirring and clicking away with the kind of precision that isn’t noticed until it breaks down.
He surveyed himself from the control room of his skull. He looked at the silent chemical factory of his liver with the same sinking feeling as a canoe builder might survey the controls of a computerised super-tanker. The mysteries of his kidneys awaited Windle’s mastery of renal control. What, when you got right down to it, was a spleen? And how did you make it go?
His heart sank.
Or, rather, it didn’t.
‘Oh, gods,’ muttered Windle, and leaned against the wall. How did it work, now? He prodded a few, likely-looking nerves. Was it systolic … diastolic … systolic … diastolic …? And then there were the lungs, too …
Like a conjurer keeping eighteen plates spinning at the same time – like a man trying to programme a video recorder from an instruction manual translated from Japanese into Dutch by a Korean rice-husker – like, in fact, a man finding out what total self-control really means, Windle Poons lurched onwards.
The wizards of Unseen University set great store by big, solid meals. A man couldn’t be expected to get down to some serious wizarding, they held, without soup, fish, game, several huge plates of meat, a pie or two, something big and wobbly with cream on it, little
savoury things on toast, fruit, nuts and a brick-thick mint with the coffee. It gave him a lining to his stomach. It was also important that the meals were served at regular times. It was what gave the day shape, they said.
Except for the Bursar, of course. He didn’t eat much, but lived on his nerves. He was certain he was anorectic, because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and shouting at him.
And it was the Bursar’s unfortunate fate to be sitting opposite the doors when Windle Poons smashed them in because it was easier than fiddling with the handles.
He bit through his wooden spoon.
The wizards revolved on their benches to stare.
Windle Poons swayed for a moment, assembling control of vocal chords, lips and tongue, and then said:
‘I think I may be able to metabolise alcohol.’
The Archchancellor was the first one to recover.
‘Windle!’ he said.‘We thought you were dead!’
He had to admit that it wasn’t a very good line. You didn’t put people on a slab with candles and lilies all round them because you think they’ve got a bit of a headache and want a nice lie down for half an hour.
Windle took a few steps forward. The nearest wizards fell over themselves in an effort to get away.
‘I am dead, you bloody young fool,’ he muttered.‘Think I go around looking like this all the time? Good grief.’ He glared at the assembled wizardry.‘Anyone here know what a spleen is supposed to do?’
He reached the table, and managed to sit down.
‘Probably something to do with the digestion,’ he said.‘Funny thing, you can go through your whole life with the bloody thing ticking away or whatever it does, gurgling or whatever, and you never know what the hell it’s actually for. It’s Like when you’re lying in
bed of a night and you hear your stomach or something go pripple-ipple-goinnng. It’s just a gurgle to you, but who knows what marvellously complex chemical exchange processes are really going -‘
‘You’re an undead?’ said the Bursar, managing to get the words out at last.
‘I didn’t ask to be,’ said the late Windle Poons irritably looking at the food and wondering how the blazes one went about turning it into Windle Poons.‘I only came back because there was nowhere else to go. Think I want to be here?’
‘But surely,’ said the Archchancellor, ‘didn’t … you know the fella, the one with the skull and the scythe -‘
‘Never saw him,’ said Windle, shortly, inspecting the nearest dishes.‘Really takes it out of you, this un-dyin’.’