Reaper Man

old Teatar—”
    “Yes, but he never actually died, he just used to put green paint on his face and push the lid off the coffin and shout, ‘Surprise, surprise—’”
    “We’ve never had a zombie here.”
    “He’s a zombie?”
    “I think so—”
    “Does that mean he’ll be playing kettle drums and doing that bimbo dancing all night, then?”
    “Is that what they do?”
    “Old Windle? Doesn’t sound like his cup of tea. He never liked dancing much when he was alive—”
    “Anyway, you can’t trust those voodoo gods. Never trust a god who grins all the time and wears a top hat, that’s my motto.”
    “—I’m damned if I’m going to give up my bedroom to a zombie after waiting years for it—”
    “Is it? That’s a funny motto.”

    Windle Poons strolled around the inside of his own head again.
    Strange thing, this. Now he was dead, or not living anymore, or whatever he was, his mind felt clearer than it had ever done.
    And control seemed to be getting easier, too. He hardly had to bother about the whole respiratory thing, the spleen seemed to be working after a fashion, the senses were operating at full speed. The digestive system was still a bit of a mystery, though.
    He looked at himself in a silver plate.
    He still looked dead. Pale face, red under the eyes. A dead body. Operating but still, basically, dead. Was that fair? Was that justice? Was that a proper reward for being a firm believer in reincarnation for almost 130 years? You come back as a corpse?
    No wonder the undead were traditionally considered to be very angry.

    Something wonderful, if you took the long view, was about to happen.
    If you took the short or medium view, something horrible was about to happen.
    It’s like the difference between seeing a beautiful new star in the winter sky and actually being close to the supernova. It’s the difference between the beauty of morning dew on a cobweb and actually being a fly.
    It was something that wouldn’t normally have happened for thousands of years.
    It was about to happen now.
    It was about to happen at the back of a disused cupboard in a tumbledown cellar in the Shades, the oldest and most disreputable part of Ankh-Morpork.
    Plop .
    It was a sound as soft as the first drop of rain on a century of dust.

    “Maybe we could get a black cat to walk across his coffin.”
    “He hasn’t got a coffin!” wailed the Bursar, whose grip on sanity was always slightly tentative.
    “Okay, so we buy him a nice new coffin and then we get a black cat to walk across it?”
    “No, that’s stupid. We’ve got to make him pass water.”
    “What?”
    “Pass water. Undeads can’t do it.”
    The wizards, who had crowded into the Archchancellor’s study, gave this statement their full, fascinated attention.
    “You sure?” said the Dean.
    “Well-known fact,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes flatly.
    “He used to pass water all the time when he was alive,” said the Dean doubtfully.
    “Not when he’s dead, though.”
    “Yeah? Makes sense.”
    “ Running water,” said the Lecturer in Recent Runes suddenly. “It’s running water. Sorry. They can’t cross over it.”
    “Well, I can’t cross running water, either,” said the Dean.
    “Undead! Undead!” The Bursar was becoming a little unglued.
    “Oh, stop teasing him,” said the Lecturer, patting the trembling man on the back.
    “Well, I can’t,” said the Dean. “I sink.”
    “Undead can’t cross running water even on a bridge .”
    “And is he the only one, eh? Are we going to have a plague of them, eh?” said the Lecturer.
    The Archchancellor drummed his fingers on his desk.
    “Dead people walking around is unhygienic,” he said.
    This silenced them. No one had ever looked at it that way, but Mustrum Ridcully was just the sort of man who would.
    Mustrum Ridcully was, depending on your point of view, either the worst or the best Archchancellor that Unseen University had had for a hundred years.
    There was just too much of him, for one thing. It wasn’t that he was particularly big, it was just that he had the kind of huge personality that fits any available space. He’d get roaring drunk at supper and that was fine and acceptable wizardly behavior. But then he’d go back to his room and play darts all night long and leave at five in the morning to go duck hunting. He shouted at people. He tried to jolly them along . And he hardly ever wore proper robes. He’d persuaded Mrs. Whitlow, the University’s