His laboured footsteps led him deeper into the Shades. Only they weren’t so laboured now.
For more than a century Windle Poons had lived inside the walls of Unseen University. In terms of accumulated years, he may have lived a long time. In terms of experience, he was about thirteen.
He was seeing, hearing and smelling things he’d never seen, heard or smelled before.
The Shades was the oldest part of the city. If you could do a sort of relief map of sinfulness, wickedness and all-round immorality, rather like those representations of the gravitational field around a Black Hole, then even in Ankh-Morpork the Shades would be represented by a shaft. In fact the Shades was remarkably like the aforesaid well-known astronomical phenomenon: it had a certain strong attraction, no light escaped from it, and it could indeed become a gateway to another world. The next one.
The Shades was a city within a city.
The streets were thronged. Muffled figures slunk past on errands of their own. Strange music wound up
from sunken stairwells. So did sharp and exciting smells.
Poons passed goblin delicatessens and dwarf bars from which came the sounds of singing and fighting which dwarfs traditionally did at the same time. And there were trolls, moving through the crowds like … like big people moving among little people. They weren’t shambling, either.
Windle had hitherto seen trolls only in the more select parts of the city, where they moved with exaggerated caution in case they accidentally clubbed someone to death and ate them. In the Shades they strode, unafraid, heads held so high they very nearly rose above their shoulder-blades.
Windle Poons wandered through the crowds like random shot on a pinball table. Here a blast of smoky sound from a bar spun him back into the street, there a discreet doorway promising unusual and forbidden delights attracted him like a magnet. Windle Poons’ life hadn’t included even very many usual an approved delights. He wasn’t even certain what they were. Some sketches outside one pink-lit, inviting doorway left him even more mystified but incredible anxious to learn.
He turned around and around in pleased astonishment.
This place! Only ten minutes walk or fifteen minutes * lurch from the University! And he’d never known it was there! All these people! All this noise. All this life!
Several people of various shapes and species jostle him. One or two started to say something, shut their mouths quickly, and hurried off.
They were thinking … his eyes! Like gimlets!
And then a voice from the shadows said: ‘Hallo, bigboy. You want a nice time?’
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* i.e., everywhere outside the Shades.
‘Oh, yes!’ said Windle Poons, lost in wonder.‘Oh, yes! Yes!’
He turned around.
‘Bloody hell!’ There was the sound of someone hurrying away down an alley.
Windle’s face fell.
Life, obviously, was only for the living. Perhaps this back-to-your-body business had been a mistake after all. He’d been a fool to think otherwise.
He turned and, hardly bothering to keep his own heart beating, went back to the University.
Windle trudged across the quad to the Great Hall.
The Archchancellor would know what to do
‘There he is!’
‘It’s him!’
‘Get him!’
Windle’s trained thought ran over a cliff. He looked around at five red, worried, and above all familiar faces.
‘Oh, hallo, Dean,’ he said, unhappily.‘And is that the Senior Wrangler? Oh, and the Archchancellor, this is -‘
‘Grab his arm!’
‘Don’t look at his eyes!’
‘Grab his other arm!’
‘This is for your own good, Windle!’
‘It’s not Windle! It’s a creature of the Night!’
‘I assure you -‘
‘Have you got his legs?’
‘Grab his leg!’
‘Grab his other leg!’
‘Have you grabbed everything?’ roared the Archchancellor.
The wizards nodded.
Mustrum Ridcully reached into the massive recesses of his robe.
‘Right, fiend in human shape,’ he growled, what d’you think of this, then? Ah-ha!’
Windle squinted at the small object that was thrust triumphantly under his nose.
‘Well, er …’ he said diffidently, ‘I’d say … yes … hmm … yes, the smell is very distinctive, isn’t it … yes, quite definitely. Allium sativum. The common domestic garlic. Yes?’
The wizards stared at him. They stared at the little white clove. They stared at Windle again.
‘I am right, aren’t I?’ he said, and made an attempt at a smile.
‘Er,’ said the Archchancellor.‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’ Ridcully cast around for something to add.
‘Well done, ‘ he said.
‘Thank you for trying,’ said Windle.‘I really appreciate it.’ He stepped forward. The wizards might as well have tried to hold back a glacier.
‘And now I ‘m going to have a lie down, ‘ he said.’ It’s been a long day.’
He lurched into the building and creaked along the corridors until he reached his room. Someone else seemed to have moved some of their stuff into it, but Windle dealt with that by simply picking it all up in one sweep of his arms and throwing it out into the corridor.
Then he lay down on the bed.
Sleep. Well, he was tired. That was a start. But sleeping meant letting go of control, and he wasn’t too certain that all the systems were fully functional yet.
Anyway, when you got right down to it, did he have to sleep at all? After all, he was dead. That was supposed to be just like sleeping, only even more so. They said that dying was just like going to sleep, although of course if you weren’t careful bits of you could rot and drop off.
What were you supposed to do when you slept, anyway? Dreaming … wasn’t that all to do with sorting out your memories, or something? How did you go about it?
He stared at the ceiling.
‘I never thought being dead would be so much trouble, ‘ he said aloud.
After a while a faint but insistent squeaking noise made him turn his head.
Over the fireplace was an ornamental candlestick, fixed to a bracket on the wall. It was such a familiar piece of furniture that Windle hadn’t really seen it for fifty years.
It was coming unscrewed. It spun around slowly, squeaking once a turn. After half a dozen turns it fell off and clattered to the floor.
Inexplicable phenomena were not in themselves unusual on the Discworld. * It was just that they normally had more point, or at least were a bit more interesting.
Nothing else seemed to be about to move. Windle relaxed, and went back to organising his memories. There was stuff in there he’d completely forgotten about.
There was a brief whispering outside, and then the door burst open –
‘Get his legs! Get his legs!’
‘Hold his arms!’
Windle tried to sit up.‘Oh, hallo, everyone, ‘ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’
The Archchancellor, standing at the foot of the bed, fumbled in a sack and produced a large, heavy object.
He held it aloft.
‘Ah-ha!’ he said.
Windle peered at it.
‘Yes?’ he said, helpfully.
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* Rains of fish. for example, were so common in the little landlocked village of Pine Dressers that it had a flourishing smoking, canning and kipper-filleting industry. And in the mountain regions of Syrrit many sheep, left out in the fields all night, would be found in the morning to be facing the other ulay, without the apparent intervention of any human agency.
‘Ah-ha,’ said the Archchancellor again, but with slightly less conviction.
‘It’s a symbolic double-handled axe from the cult of Blind Io,’ said Windle.
The Archchancellor gave him a blank look.
‘Er, yes,’ he said, ‘that’s right.’ He threw it over his shoulder, almost removing the Dean’s left ear, and fished in the sack again.
‘Ah-ha!’
‘That’s a rather fine example of the Mystic Tooth of Offler the Crocodile God, ‘ said Windle.
‘Ah-ha!’
‘And that’s a … let me see now … yes, that’s the matched set of sacred Flying Ducks of Ordpor the Tasteless. I say, eh ?it? is fun!’
‘Ah-ha.’
‘That’s … don’t tell me, don’t tell me … that’s the holy linglongrrf the notorious Sootee cult, isn’t it?’
‘Ah-ha?’
‘I think that one’s the three-headed fish of the Howanda three-headed fish religion,’ said Windle.
‘This is ridiculous,’ said the Archchancellor. dropping the fish.
The wizards sagged. Religious objects weren’t such a surefire undead cure after all.
‘I’m really sorry to be such a nuisance, ‘ said Windle.
The Dean suddenly brightened up.
‘Daylight!’ he said excitedly.‘That’ll do the trick!’
‘Get the curtain!’
‘Get the other curtain!’
‘One, two, three … now!’
Windle blinked in the invasive sunlight.
The wizards held their breath.
‘I ‘m sorry,’ he said.‘It doesn’t seem to work.’
They sagged again.
‘Don’t you feel anything?’ said Ridcully.
‘No sensation of crumbling into dust and blowing away?’ said the Senior Wrangler hopefully.
‘My nose tends to peel if I ‘m out in the sun too long,’ said Windle.‘I don ‘t know if that’s any help.’ He tried to smile.