Reaper Man

and cheese,” she added. “I ain’t doing big cooking twice in one day, and we’re having chicken tonight. Talking of chicken, in fact…come on…”
    She took a cleaver off the rack and went out into the yard. Cyril the cockerel eyed her suspiciously from the top of the midden. His harem of fat and rather elderly hens, who had been scratching up the dust, bounded unsteadily toward Miss Flitworth in the broken-knicker-elastic runs of hens everywhere. She reached down quickly and picked one up.
    It regarded Bill Door with bright, stupid eyes.
    “Do you know how to pluck a chicken?” said Miss Flitworth.
    Bill looked from her to the hen.
    B UT WE FEED THEM , he said helplessly.
    “That’s right. And then they feed us. This one’s been off lay for months. That’s how it goes in the chicken world. Mr. Flitworth used to wring their necks but I never got the knack of that; the cleaver’s messy and they run around a bit afterward, but they’re dead all right, and they know it.”
    Bill Door considered his options. The chicken had focused one beady eye on him. Chickens are a lot more stupid than humans, and don’t have the sophisticated mental filters that prevent them seeing what is truly there. It knew where it was and who was looking at it.
    He looked into its small and simple life and saw the last few seconds pouring away.
    He’d never killed. He’d taken life, but only when it was finished with. There was a difference between theft and stealing by finding.
    N OT THE CLEAVER , he said wearily. G IVE ME THE CHICKEN .
    He turned his back for a moment, then handed the limp body to Miss Flitworth.
    “Well done,” she said, and went back to the kitchen.
    Bill Door felt Cyril’s accusing gaze on him.
    He opened his hand. A tiny spot of light hovered over his palm.
    He blew on it, gently, and it faded away.
    After lunch they put down the rat poison. He felt like a murderer.

    A lot of rats died.
    Down in the runs under the barn—in the deepest one, one tunneled long ago by long-forgotten ancestral rodents—something appeared in the darkness.
    It seemed to have difficulty deciding what shape it was going to be.
    It began as a lump of highly-suspicious cheese. This didn’t seem to work.
    Then it tried something that looked very much like a small, hungry terrier. This was also rejected.
    For a moment it was steel-jawed trap. This was clearly unsuitable.
    It cast around for fresh ideas and much to its surprise one arrived smoothly, as if traveling from no distance at all. Not so much a shape as a memory of a shape.
    It tried it and found that, while totally wrong for the job, in some deeply satisfying way it was the only shape it could possibly be.
    It went to work.

    That evening the men were practicing archery on the green. Bill Door had carefully ensured a local reputation as the worst bowman in the entire history of toxophily; it had never occurred to anyone that putting arrows through the hats of bystanders behind him must logically take a lot more skill than merely sending them through a quite large target a mere fifty yards away.
    It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.
    So he was allowed to sit on a bench outside the inn, with the old men.
    Next door, sparks poured from the chimney of the village smithy and spiraled up into the dusk. There was a ferocious hammering from behind its closed doors. Bill Door wondered why the smithy was always shut. Most smiths worked with their doors open, so that their forge became an unofficial village meeting room. This one was keen on his work—
    “Hallo, skelington.”
    He swiveled around.
    The small child of the house was watching him with the most penetrating gaze he had ever seen.
    “You are a skelington, aren’t you,” she said. “I can tell, because of the bones.”
    Y OU ARE MISTAKEN , SMALL CHILD .
    “You are. People turn into skelingtons when they’re dead. They’re not supposed to walk around afterward.”
    H A . H A . H A . W ILL YOU HARK AT THE CHILD .
    “Why are you walking around, then?”
    Bill Door looked at the old men. They appeared engrossed in the sport.
    I’ LL TELL YOU WHAT , he said desperately, I F YOU WILL GO AWAY , I WILL GIVE YOU A HALF-PENNY .
    “I’ve got a skelington mask for when we go trickle-treating on Soul Cake Night,” she said. “It’s made of paper. You get given sweets.”
    Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with