Reaper Man

laughed nervously and apologized.
    “That’s just her fancy,” he said. “The things children say, eh? Get on with you back to bed, Sal. And say you’re sorry to Mr. Door.”
    “He’s a skelington with clothes on,” said the child. “Why doesn’t all the drink fall through?”
    He’d almost panicked. His intrinsic powers were fading, then. People could not normally see him—he occupied a blind spot in their senses, which they filled in somewhere inside their heads with something they preferred to encounter. But the adults’ inability to see him clearly wasn’t proof against this sort of insistent declaration, and he could feel the puzzlement around him. Then, just in time, its mother had come in from the back room and had taken the child away. There’d been muffled complaints on the lines of “—a skelington, with all bones on—” disappearing around the bend in the stairs.
    And all the time the ancient clock over the fireplace had been ticking, ticking, chopping seconds off his life. There’d seemed so many of them, not long ago…
    There was a faint knocking at the barn door, below the hayloft. He heard it pushed open.
    “Are you decent, Bill Door?” said Miss Flitworth’s voice in the darkness.
    Bill Door analyzed the sentence for meaning within context.
    Y ES ? he ventured.
    “I’ve brought you a hot milk drink.”
    Y ES ?
    “Come on, quick now. Otherwise it’ll go cold.”
    Bill Door cautiously climbed down the wooden ladder. Miss Flitworth was holding a lantern, and had a shawl around her shoulders.
    “It’s got cinnamon on it. My Ralph always liked cinnamon.” She sighed.
    Bill Door was aware of undertones and overtones in the same way that an astronaut is aware of weather patterns below him; they’re all visible, all there, all laid out for study and all totally divorced from actual experience.
    T HANK YOU , he said.
    Miss Flitworth looked around.
    “You’ve really made yourself at home here,” she said brightly.
    Y ES .
    She pulled the shawl around her shoulders.
    “I’ll be getting back to the house, then,” she said. “You can bring the mug back in the morning.”
    She sped away into the night.
    Bill Door took the drink up to the loft. He put it on a low beam and sat and watched it long after it grew cold and the candle had gone out.
    After a while he was aware of an insistent hissing. He took out the golden timer and put it right at the other end of the loft, under a pile of hay.
    It made no difference at all.

    Windle Poons peered at the house numbers—a hundred Counting Pines had died for this street alone—and then realized he didn’t have to. He was being shortsighted out of habit. He improved his eyesight.
    Number 668 took some while to find because it was in fact on the first floor above a tailor’s shop. Entrance was via an alleyway. There was a wooden door at the end of the alley. On its peeling paintwork someone had pinned a notice which read, in optimistic lettering.
“Come in! Come in!! The Fresh Start Club. Being Dead is only the Beginning!!!”
    The door opened onto a flight of stairs that smelled of old paint and dead flies. They creaked even more than Windle’s knees.
    Someone had been drawing on the walls. The phraseology was exotic but the general tone was familiar enough: Spooks of the world Arise, You have Nothing to lose but your Chains and The Silent Majority want Dead Rights and End vitalism now!!!
    At the top was a landing, with one door opening off it. Once upon a time someone had hung on oil lamp from the ceiling, but it looked as though it had never been lit for thousands of years. An ancient spider, possibly living on the remains of the oil, watched him warily from its eyrie.
    Windle looked at the card again, took a deep breath out of habit, and knocked.

    The Archchancellor strode back into College in a fury, with the others trailing desperately behind him.
    “Who is he going to call! We’re the wizards around here!”
    “Yes, but we don’t actually know what’s happening, do we?” said the Dean.
    “So we’re going to find out!” Ridcully growled. “I don’t know who he’s going to call, but I’m damn sure who I’m going to call.”
    He halted abruptly. The rest of the wizards piled into him.
    “Oh, no,” said the Senior Wrangler. “Please, not that!”
    “Nothing to it,” said Ridcully. “Nothing to worry about. Read up on it last night, ’s’matterofact. You can do it with three bits of wood and—”
    “Four