Soul Music

Susan, unable to prevent herself.
    “No one argues,” he snapped. And Susan thought that was probably true. There was some kind of wiry strength in Albert, as if his whole body was a knuckle.
    “He can make just about anything,” she said, half to herself, “but some things he just doesn’t understand, and one of them’s plumbing.”
    “Right. We had to get a plumber from Ankh-Morpork, hah, he said he’d might be able to make it a week next Thursday, and you don’t say that kind of thing to the Master,” said Albert. “I’ve never seen a bugger work so fast. Then the Master just made him forget. He can make everyone forget, except—” Albert stopped, and frowned.
    “Seems I’ve got to put up with it,” he said. “Seems you’ve a right . I expect you’re tired. You can stay here. There’s plenty of rooms.”
    “No, I’ve got to get back! There’ll be terrible trouble if I’m not at school in the morning.”
    “There’s no Time here except what people brings with ’em. Things just happen one after the other. Binky’ll take you right back to the time you left, if you like. But you ought to stop here a while.”
    “You said there’s a hole and I’m being sucked in. I don’t know what that means.”
    “You’ll feel better after a sleep,” said Albert.

There was no real day or night here. That had given Albert trouble at first. There was just the bright landscape and, above, a black sky with stars. Death had never got the hang of day and night. When the house had human inhabitants it tended to keep a twenty-six-hour day. Humans, left to themselves, adopt a longer diurnal rhythm than the twenty-four-hour day, so they can be reset like a lot of little clocks at sunset. Humans have to put up with Time, but days are a sort of personal option.
    Albert went to bed whenever he remembered.
    Now he sat up, with one candle alight, staring into space.
    “She remembered about the bathroom,” he muttered. “And she knows about things she couldn’t have seen. She couldn’t have been tole. She’s got his memory. She inherited .”
    SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats. He liked to sit by the fire at night.
    “Last time he went off people stopped dyin’,” said Albert. “But they ain’t stopped dyin’ this time. And the horse went to her. She’s fillin’ the hole.”
    Albert glared at the darkness. When he was agitated it showed by a sort of relentless chewing and sucking activity, as if he was trying to extract some forgotten morsel of teatime from the recesses of a tooth. Now he was making a noise like a hairdresser’s U-bend.
    He couldn’t remember ever having been young. It must have happened thousands of years ago. He was seventy-nine, but Time in Death’s house was a reusable resource.
    He was vaguely aware that childhood was a tricky business, especially toward the end. There was all the business with pimples and bits of your body having a mind of their own.
    Running the executive arm of mortality was certainly an extra problem.
    But the point was, the horrible, inescapable point was, that someone had to do it.
    For, as has been said before, Death operated in general rather than particular terms, just like a monarchy.
    If you are a subject in a monarchy, you are ruled by the monarch. All the time. Waking or sleeping. Whatever you—or they—happen to be doing.
    It’s part of the general conditions of the situation. The queen doesn’t actually have to come around to your actual house, hog the chair and the TV remote control, and issue actual commands about how one is parched and would enjoy a cup of tea. It all takes place automatically, like gravity. Except that, unlike gravity, it needs someone at the top. They don’t necessarily have to do a great deal. They just have to be there. They just have to be .
    “Her?” said Albert.
    SQUEAK.
    “She’ll crack soon enough,” said Albert. “Oh, yes. You can’t be an immortal and a mortal at the same time, it’ll tear you in half. I almost feels sorry for her.”
    SQUEAK, agreed the Death of Rats.
    “And that ain’t the worst bit,” said Albert. “You wait till her memory really starts working…”
    SQUEAK.
    You listen to me,” said Albert. “You’d better start looking for him right away .”

    Susan awoke, and had no idea what time it was.
    There was a clock by the bedside, because Death knew there should be things like bedside clocks. It had skulls and bones and the omega sign on it, and it didn’t work. There were no