Reaper Man

down from the horse. His voice faltered a bit as he tried to analyze the situation.
    “You’re looking very…sparkly…tonight, Miss Flitworth,” he finished, gallantly.
    The air smelled of warm, damp grass. An amateur orchestra was still setting up under an awning.
    There were trestle tables covered with the kind of food that’s normally associated with the word “repast”—pork pies like varnished military fortifications, vats of demonical pickled onions, jacket potatoes wallowing in a cholesterol ocean of melted butter. Some of the local elders had already established themselves on the benches provided, and were chewing stoically if toothlessly through the food with the air of people determined to sit there all night, if necessary.
    “Nice to see the old people enjoying themselves,” said Miss Flitworth.
    Death looked at the eaters. Most of them were younger than Miss Flitworth.
    There was a giggle from somewhere in the scented darkness beyond the firelight.
    “And the young people” Miss Flitworth added, evenly. “We used to have a saying about this time of year. Let’s see…something like ‘Corn be ripe, nuts be brown, petticoats up…’ something.” She sighed. “Don’t time fly, eh?”
    Y ES .
    “You know, Bill Door, maybe you were right about the power of positive thinking. I feel a lot better tonight.”
    Y ES ?
    Miss Flitworth looked speculatively at the dance floor. “I used to be a great dancer when I was a gel. I could dance anyone off their feet. I could dance down the moon. I could dance the sun up.”
    She reached up and removed the bands that held her hair in its tight bun, and shook it out in a waterfall of white.
    “I take it you do dance, Mr. Bill Door?”
    F AMED FOR IT , M ISS F LITWORTH .
    Under the band’s awning, the lead fiddler nodded to his fellow musicians, stuck his fiddle under his chin, and pounded on the boards with his foot—
    “Hwun! Htwo! Hwun htwo three four…”

    Picture a landscape, with the orange light of a crescent moon drifting across it. And, down below, a circle of firelight in the night.
    There were the old favorites—the square dances, the reels, the whirling, intricate measures which, if the dancers had carried lights, would have traced out topological complexities beyond the reach of ordinary physics, and the sort of dances that lead perfectly sane people to shout out things like “Do-si-do!” and “Och-aye!” without feeling massively ashamed for quite a long time.
    When the casualties were cleared away the survivors went on to polka, mazurka, fox-trot, turkey-trot and trot a variety of other birds and beasts, and then to those dances where people form an arch and other people dance down it, which are incidentally generally based on folk memories of executions, and other dances where people form a circle, which are generally based on folk memories of plagues.
    Through it all two figures whirled as though there was no tomorrow.
    The lead fiddler was dimly aware that, when he paused for breath, a spinning figure tap-danced a storm out of the mêlée and a voice by his ear said:
    Y OU WILL CONTINUE , I PROMISE YOU .
    When he flagged a second time a diamond as big as his fist landed on the boards in front of him. A smaller figure sashayed out of the dancers and said:
    “If you boys don’t go on playing, William Spigot, I will personally make sure your life becomes absolutely foul.”
    And it returned to the press of bodies.
    The fiddler looked down at the diamond. It could have ransomed any five kings the world would care to name. He kicked it hurriedly behind him.
    “More power to your elbow, eh?” said the drummer, grinning.
    “Shut up and play!”
    He was aware that tunes were turning up at the ends of his fingers that his brain had never known. The drummer and the piper felt it too. Music was pouring in from somewhere. They weren’t playing it. It was playing them.
    I T IS TIME FOR A NEW DANCE TO BEGIN . “Duurrr ump -da-dum-dum,” hummed the fiddler, the sweat running off his chin as he was caught up in a different tune.
    The dancers milled around uncertainly, unsure about the steps. But one pair moved purposefully through them at a predatory crouch, arms clasped ahead of them like the bowsprit of a killer galleon. At the end of the floor they turned in a flurry of limbs that appeared to defy normal anatomy and began the angular advance back through the crowd.
    “What’s this one called?”
    T ANGO .
    “Can you get put in