Reaper Man

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
    And then he heard the music.
    Lupine sat back on his haunches and howled.

    In the cellar under Mrs. Cake’s house, Schleppel the bogeyman paused halfway through his third rat and listened.
    Then he finished his meal and reached for his door.

    Count Arthur Winkings Notfaroutoe was working on the crypt.
    Personally, he could have lived, or re-lived, or unlived, or whatever it was he was supposed to be doing, without a crypt. But you had to have a crypt. Doreen had been very definite about the crypt. It gave the place ton , she said. You had to have a crypt and a vault, otherwise the rest of vampire society would look down their teeth at you.
    They never told you about that sort of thing when you started vampiring. They never told you to build your own crypt out of some cheap two-by-four from Chalky the Troll’s Wholesale Building Supplies. It wasn’t something that happened to most vampires, Arthur reflected. Not your proper vampires. Your actual Count Jugular, for example. No, a toff like him’d have someone for it. When the villagers came to burn the place down, you wouldn’t catch the Count his own self whipping down to the gate to drop the drawbridge. Oh, no. He’d just say, “Igor”—as it might be—“Igor, just svort it out, chop chop.”
    Huh. Well, they’d had an advert in Mr. Keeble’s job shop for months now. Bed, three meals a day, and hump provided if necessary. Not so much as an enquiry. And People said there was all this unemployment around. It made you livid.
    He picked up another piece of wood and measured it, grimacing as he unfolded the ruler.
    Arthur’s back ached from digging the moat. And that was another thing your posh vampire didn’t have to worry about. The moat came with the job, style of thing. And it went all the way round, because other vampires didn’t have the street out in front of them and old Mrs. Pivey complaining on one side and a family of trolls Doreen wasn’t speaking to on the other and therefore they didn’t end up with a moat that just went across the back yard. Arthur kept falling in it.
    And then there was the biting the necks of young women. Or rather, there wasn’t. Arthur was always prepared to see the other person’s point of view, but he felt certain that young women came into the vampiring somewhere, whatever Doreen said. In diaphanous pegnoyers. Arthur wasn’t quite certain what a diaphanous pegnoyer was, but he’d read about them and he definitely felt that he’d like to see one before he died…or whatever…
    And other vampires didn’t suddenly find their wives talking with Vs instead of Ws. The reason being, your natural vampire talked like that anyway.
    Arthur sighed.
    It was no life, or half-life or after-life or whatever it was, being a lower-middle-class wholesale fruit and vegetable merchant with an upper-class condition.
    And then the music filtered in through the hole in the wall that he’d knocked out to put in the barred window.
    “Ow,” he said, and clutched at his jaw. “Doreen?”

    Reg Shoe thumped his portable podium.
    “—and, let me say, we shall not lie back and let the grass grow over our heads,” he bellowed. “So what is your seven-point plan for Equal Opportunities with the living, I hear you cry?”
    The wind blew the dried grasses in the cemetery. The only creature apparently paying any attention to Reg was a solitary raven.
    Reg Shoe shrugged and lowered his voice. “You might at least make some effort,” he said, to the next world at large. “Here’s me wearing my fingers to the bone”—he flexed his hands to demonstrate—“and do I hear a word of thanks?”
    He paused, just in case.
    The raven, which was one of the extra large, fat ones that infested the rooftops of the University, put its head on one side and gave Reg Shoe a thoughtful look.
    “You know,” said Reg, “sometimes I just feel like giving up—”
    The raven cleared its throat.
    Reg Shoe spun around.
    “You say one word,” he said, “just one bloody word …”
    And then he heard the music.

Ludmilla risked removing her hands from her ears.
    “It’s horrible! What is it, Mr. Poons?”
    Windle tried to pull the remains of his hat over his ears.
    “Don’t know,” he said. “It could be music. If you’d never heard music before.”
    There weren’t notes. There were strung-together noises that might have been intended to be notes, put together as one might draw a map