Reaper Man

time?
    After a certain amount of effort he managed to push one boot off with the other boot and ease it up until he could just grasp it. This gave him a rough surface to strike the match on—
    Sulphurous light filled his tiny oblong world.
    There was a tiny scrap of cardboard pinned to the inside of the lid.
    He read it.
    He read it again.
    The match went out.
    He lit another one, just to check that what he had read really did exist.
    The message was still as strange, even third time around:
Dead? Depressed?
Feel like starting it all again?
Then why not come along to the
FRESH START CLUB
Thursdays, 12pm, 668 Elm Street
EVERY BODY WELCOME
    The second match went out, taking the last of the oxygen with it.
    Windle lay in the dark for a while, considering his next move and finishing off the celery.
    Who’d have thought it?
    And it suddenly dawned on the late Windle Poons that there was no such thing as somebody else’s problem, and that just when you thought the world had pushed you aside it turned out to be full of strangeness. He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.
    It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane. But It was strange. It had things in it like screws that unscrewed themselves, and little written messages to the dead.
    He resolved to find out what was going on. And then…if Death wasn’t going to come to him, he’d go to Death. He had his rights, after all. Yeah. He’d lead the biggest missing-person hunt of all time.
    Windle grinned in the darkness.
    Missing—believed Death.
    Today was the first day of the rest of his life.
    And Ankh-Morpork lay at his feet. Well, metaphorically. The only way was up.
    He reached up, felt for the card in the dark, and pulled it free. He stuck it between his teeth.
    Windle Poons braced his feet against the end of the box, pushed his hands past his head, and heaved.
    The soggy loam of Ankh-Morpork moved slightly.
    Windle paused out of habit to take a breath, and realized that there was no point. He pushed again. The end of the coffin splintered.
    Windle pulled it toward him and tore the solid pine like paper. He was left with a piece of plank which would have been a totally useless spade for anyone with un-zombie-like strength.
    Turning onto his stomach, tucking the earth around him with his impromptu spade and ramming it back with his feet, Windle Poons dug his way toward a fresh start.

    Picture a landscape, a plain with rolling curves.
    It’s late summer in the octarine grass country below the towering peaks of the high Ramtops, and the predominant colors are umber and gold. Heat sears the landscape. Grasshoppers sizzle, as in a frying pan. Even the air is too hot to move. It’s the hottest summer in living memory and, in these parts, that’s a long, long time.
    Picture a figure on horseback, moving slowly along a road that’s an inch deep in dust between fields of corn that already promise an unusually rich harvest.
    Picture a fence of baked, dead wood. There’s a notice pinned to it. The sun has faded the letters, but they are still readable.
    Picture a shadow, falling across the notice. You can almost hear it reading both the words.
    There’s a track leading off the road, toward a small group of bleached buildings.
    Picture dragging footsteps.
    Picture a door, open.
    Picture a cool, dark room, glimpsed through the open doorway. This isn’t a room that people live in a lot. It’s a room for people who live out-doors but have to come inside sometimes, when it gets dark. It’s a room for harnesses and dogs, a room where oil-skins are hung up to dry. There’s a beer barrel by the door. There are flagstones on the floor and, along the ceiling beams, hooks for bacon. There’s a scrubbed table that thirty hungry men could sit down at.
    There are no men. There are no dogs. There is no beer. There is no bacon.

    There was silence after the knocking, and then the flap-flap of slippers on flagstones. Eventually a skinny old woman with a face the color and texture of a walnut peered around the door.
    “Yes?” she said.
    T HE NOTICE SAID “M AN W ANTED .”
    “Did it? Did it? That’s been up there since before last winter!”
    I AM SORRY ? Y OU NEED NO HELP ?
    The wrinkled face looked at him thoughtfully.
    “I can’t pay more’n sixpence a week,