‘That’s pretty good,’ he said, quietly. ‘All right. You’re here. The rat and the horse brought you. Damn fool things. They think it’s the right thing to do.’
‘What right thing to do?’ said Susan. ‘And I’m not a . . . what you said.’
Albert stared at her.
‘The Master could do that,’ he said at last. ‘It’s part of the job. I ‘spect you found you could do it a long time ago, eh? Not be noticed when you didn’t want to be?’
SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats.
‘What?’ said Albert.
SQUEAK.
‘He says to tell you,’ said Albert wearily, ‘that a chit of a girl means a small girl. He thinks you may have misheard me.’
Susan hunched up in the chair.
Albert pulled up another one and sat down.
‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘Oh, my.’ Albert rolled his eyes. ‘How long have you been sixteen?’
‘Since I was fifteen, of course. Are you stupid?’
‘My, my, how the time does pass,’ said Albert. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’
‘No . . . but,’ Susan hesitated, ‘but it’s got something to do with . . . it’s something like . . . I’m seeing things that people don’t see, and I’ve met someone who’s just a story, and I know I’ve been here before . . . and all these skulls and bones on things . . .’
Albert’s rangy, vulture-like shape loomed over her. ‘Would you like a cocoa?’ he said.
It was a lot different from the cocoa at the school, which was like hot brown water. Albert’s cocoa had fat floating in it; if you turned the mug upside down, it would be a little while before anything fell out.
‘Your mum and dad,’ said Albert, when she had a chocolate moustache that was far too young for her, ‘did they ever . . . explain anything to you?’
‘Miss Delcross did that in Biology,’ said Susan. ‘She got it wrong,’ she added.
‘I mean about your grandfather,’ said Albert.
‘I remember things,’ said Susan, ‘but I can’t remember them until I’ve seen them. Like the bathroom. Like you.’
‘Your mum and dad thought it best if you forgot,’ said Albert. ‘Hah! It’s in the bone! They was afraid it was going to happen and it has! You’ve inherited.’
‘Oh, I know about that, too,’ said Susan. ‘It’s all about mice and beans and things.’
Albert gave her a blank look.
‘Look, I’ll try to put it tactful,’ he said.
Susan gave him a polite look.
‘Your grandfather is Death,’ said Albert. ‘You know? The skeleton in the black robe? You rode in on his horse and this is his house. Only he’s . . . gone away. To think things over, or something. What I reckon’s happening is you’re being sucked in. It’s in the bone. You’re old enough now. There’s a hole and it thinks you’re the right shape. I don’t like it any more than you do.’
‘Death,’ said Susan, flatly. ‘Well, I can’t say I didn’t have suspicions. Like the Hogfather and the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy?’
‘Yes.’
SQUEAK.
‘You expect me to believe that, do you?’ said Susan, trying to summon up her most withering scorn.
Albert glared back like someone who’d done all his withering a long time ago.
‘It’s no skin off my nose what you believe, madam,’ he said.
‘You really mean the tall figure with the scythe and everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘Look, Albert,’ said Susan, in the voice one uses to the simpleminded, ‘even if there was a “Death” like that, and frankly it’s quite ridiculous to go anthropomorphizing a simple natural function, no-one can inherit anything from it. I know about heredity. It’s all about having red hair and things. You get it from other people. You don’t get it from . . . myths and legends. Um.’
The Death of Rats had gravitated to the cheeseboard, where he was using his scythe to hack off a lump. Albert sat back.
‘I remember when you got brought here,’ he said. ‘He’d kept on asking, you see. He was curious. He likes kids. Sees a lot of them really, but . . . not to get to know, if you see what I mean. Your mum and dad didn’t want to, but they gave in and brought you all here for tea one day just to keep him quiet. They didn’t like to do it because they thought you’d be scared and scream the place down. But you . . . you didn’t scream. You laughed. Frightened the life out of your dad, that did. They brought you a couple more times when he asked, but then they got scared about what might happen and your dad put his foot down and that was the end of it. He was about the only one who could argue with the Master, your dad. You’d have been about four then, I think.’
Susan raised her hand thoughtfully and touched the pale lines on her cheek.
‘The Master said they were raising you according to,’ Albert sneered, ‘modern methods. Logic. And thinking old stuff is silly. I dunno . . . I suppose they wanted to keep you away from . . . ideas like this . . .’
‘I was given a ride on the horse,’ said Susan, not listening to him. ‘ I had a bath in the big bathroom.’
‘Soap all over the place,’ said Albert. His face contorted into something approaching a smile. ‘I could hear the Master laughing from here. And he made you a swing, too. Tried to, anyway. No magic or anything. With his actual hands.’
Susan sat while memories woke and yawned and unfolded in her head.
‘I remember about that bathroom now,’ she said. ‘It’s all coming back to me.’
‘Nah, it never went away. It just got papered over.’
‘He was no good at plumbing. What does Y M R-C-I-G-B-S A, AM mean?’
‘Young Men’s Reformed-Cultists-of-the-Ichor-God-BelShamharoth Association, Ankh-Morpork,’ said Albert. ‘It’s where I stay if I have to go back down for anything. Soap and suchlike.’
‘But you’re not . . . a young man,’ said Susan, unable to prevent herself.
‘No-one argues,’ he snapped. And Susan thought that was probably true. There was some kind of wiry strength in Albert, as if his whole body was a knuckle.
‘He can make just about anything,’ she said, half to herself, ‘but some things he just doesn’t understand, and one of them’s plumbing.’
‘Right. We had to get a plumber from Ankh-Morpork, hah, he said he might be able to make it a week next Thursday, and you don’t say that kind of thing to the Master,’ said Albert. ‘I’ve never seen a bugger work so fast. Then the Master just made him forget. He can make everyone forget, except-‘ Albert stopped, and frowned.
‘Seems I’ve got to put up with it, ‘ he said. ‘Seems you’ve a right. I expect you’re tired. You can stay here. There’s plenty of rooms.’
‘No, I’ve got to get back! There’ll be terrible trouble if I’m not at school in the morning.’
‘There’s no Time here except what people brings with ’em. Things just happen one after the other. Binky’ll take you right back to the time you left, if you like. But you ought to stop here a while.’
‘You said there’s a hole and I’m being sucked in. I don’t know what that means.’
‘You’ll feel better after a sleep,’ said Albert.
There was no real day or night here. That had given Albert trouble at first. There was just the bright landscape and, above, a black sky with stars. Death had never got the hang of day and night. When the house had human inhabitants it tended to keep a 26-hour day. Humans, left to themselves, adopt a longer diurnal rhythm than the 24-hour day, so they can be reset like a lot of little clocks at sunset. Humans have to put up with Time, but days are a sort of personal option.
Albert went to bed whenever he remembered.
Now he sat up, with one candle alight, staring into space.
‘She remembered about the bathroom,’ he muttered. ‘And she knows about things she couldn’t have seen. She couldn’t have been told. She’s got his memory. She inherited.’
SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats. He tended to sit by the fire at nights.
‘Last time he went off, people stopped dyin’,’ said Albert. ‘But they ain’t stopped dyin’ this time. And the horse went to her. She’s fillin’ the hole.’
Albert glared at the darkness. When he was agitated it showed by a sort of relentless chewing and sucking activity, as if he was trying to extract some forgotten morsel of teatime from the recesses of a tooth. Now he was making a noise like a hairdresser’s U-bend.
He couldn’t remember ever having been young. It must have happened thousands of years ago. He was seventy-nine, but Time in Death’s house was a reusable resource.