Reaper Man

by Terry Pratchett

  The Shades was a city within a city.

  The streets were thronged. Muffled figures slunk past on errands of their own. Strange music wound up from sunken stairwells. So did sharp and exciting smells.

  Poons passed goblin delicatessens and dwarf bars, from which came the sounds of singing and fighting, which dwarfs traditionally did at the same time. And there were trolls, moving through the crowds like…like big people moving among little people. They weren’t shambling, either.

  Windle had hitherto seen trolls only in the more select parts of the city,* where they moved with exaggerated caution in case they accidentally clubbed someone to death and ate them. In the Shades they strode, unafraid, heads held so high they very nearly rose above their shoulder-blades.

  Windle Poons wandered through the crowds like a random shot on a pinball table. Here a blast of smoky sound from a bar spun him back into the street, there a discreet doorway promising unusual and forbidden delights attracted him like a magnet. Windle Poons’ life hadn’t included even very many usual and approved delights. He wasn’t even certain what they were. Some sketches outside one pink-lit, inviting doorway left him even more mystified but incredibly anxious to learn.

  He turned around and around in pleased astonishment.

  This place! Only ten minutes’ walk or fifteen minutes’ lurch from the University! And he’d never known it was there! All these people! All this noise! All this life!

  Several people of various shapes and species jostled him. One or two started to say something, shut their mouths quickly, and hurried off.

  They were thinking…his eyes! Like gimlets!

  And then a voice from the shadows said: “Hallo, big boy. You want a nice time?”

  “Oh, yes!” said Windle Poons, lost in wonder. “Oh, yes! Yes!”

  He turned around.

  “Bloody hell!” There was the sound of someone hurrying away down an alley.

  Windle’s face fell.

  Life, obviously, was only for the living. Perhaps this back-to-your-body business had been a mistake after all. He’d been a fool to think otherwise.

  He turned and, hardly bothering to keep his own heart beating, went back to the University.

  Windle trudged across the quad to the Great Hall. The Archchancellor would know what to do—

  “There he is!”

  “It’s him!”

  “Get him!”

  Windle’s train of thought ran over a cliff. He looked around at five red, worried, and above all familiar faces.

  “Oh, hallo, Dean,” he said, unhappily. “And is that the Senior Wrangler? Oh, and the Archchancellor, this is—”

  “Grab his arm!”

  “Don’t look at his eyes!”

  “Grab his other arm!”

  “This is for your own good, Windle!”

  “It’s not Windle! It’s a creature of the Night!”

  “I assure you—”

  “Have you got his legs?”

  “Grab his leg!”

  “Grab his other leg!”

  “Have you grabbed everything?” roared the Archchancellor.

  The wizards nodded.

  Mustrum Ridcully reached into the massive recesses of his robe.

  “Right, fiend in human shape,” he growled, “what d’you think of this, then? Ah-ha!”

  Windle squinted at the small object that was thrust triumphantly under his nose.

  “Well, er…” he said diffidently, “I’d say…yes…hmm…yes, the smell is very distinctive, isn’t it…yes, quite definitely. Allium sativum. The common domestic garlic. Yes?”

  The wizards stared at him. They stared at the little white clove. They stared at Windle again.

  “I am right, aren’t I?” he said, and made an attempt at a smile.

  “Er,” said the Archchancellor. “Yes. Yes, that’s right.” Ridcully cast around for something to add. “Well done,” he said.

  “Thank you for trying,” said Windle. “I really appreciate it.” He stepped forward. The wizards might as well have tried to hold back a glacier.

  “And now I’m going to have a lie down,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”

  He lurched into the building and creaked along the corridors until he reached his room. Someone else seemed to have moved some of their stuff into it, but Windle dealt with that by simply picking it all up in one sweep of his arms and throwing it out into the corridor.

  Then he lay down on the bed.

  Sleep. Well, he was tired. That was a start. But sleeping meant letting go of control, and he wasn’t too certain that all the systems were fully functional yet.

  Anyway, when you got right down to it, did he have to sleep at all? After all, he was dead. That was supposed to be just like sleeping, only even more so. They said that dying was just like going to sleep, although of course if you weren’t careful bits of you could rot and drop off.

  What were you supposed to do when you slept, anyway? Dreaming…wasn’t that all to do with sorting out your memories, or something? How did you go about it?

  He stared at the ceiling.

  “I never thought being dead would be so much trouble,” he said aloud.

  After a while a faint but insistent squeaking noise made him turn his head.

  Over the fireplace was an ornamental candlestick, fixed to a bracket on the wall. It was such a familiar piece of furniture that Windle hadn’t really seen it for fifty years.

  It was coming unscrewed. It spun around slowly, squeaking once a turn. After half a dozen turns it fell off and clattered to the floor.

  Inexplicable phenomena were not in themselves unusual on the Discworld.* It was just that they normally had more point, or at least were a bit more interesting.

  Nothing else seemed to be about to move. Windle relaxed, and went back to organizing his memories. There was stuff in there he’d completely forgotten about.

  There was a brief whispering outside, and then the door burst open—

  “Get his legs! Get his legs!”

  “Hold his arms!”

  Windle tried to sit up. “Oh, hallo, everyone,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  The Archchancellor, standing at the foot of the bed, fumbled in a sack and produced a large, heavy object.

  He held it aloft.

  “Ah-ha!” he said.

  Windle peered at it.

  “Yes?” he said, helpfully.

  “Ah-ha,” said the Archchancellor again, but with slightly less conviction.

  “It’s a symbolic double-handled axe from the cult of Blind Io,” said Windle.

  The Archchancellor gave him a blank look.

  “Er, yes,” he said, “that’s right.” He threw it over his shoulder, almost removing the Dean’s left ear, and fished in the sack again.

  “Ah-ha!”

  “That’s a rather fine example of the Mystic Tooth of Offler the Crocodile God,” said Windle.

  “Ah-ha!”

  “And that’s a…let me see now…yes, that’s the matched set of sacred Flying Ducks of Ordpor the Tasteless. I say, this is fun!”

  “Ah-ha.”

  “That’s…don’t tell me, don’t tell me…that’s the holy linglong of the notorious Sootee cult, isn’t it?”

  “Ah-ha?”

  “I think that one’s the three-headed fish of the Howanda three-headed fish religion,” said Windle.

  “This is ridiculous,” said the Archchancellor, dropping the fish.

  The wizards sagged. Religious objects weren’t such a surefire undead cure after all.

  “I’m really sorry to be such a nuisance,” said Windle.

  The Dean suddenly brightened up.

  “Daylight!” he said excitedly. “That’ll do the trick!”

  “Get the curtain!”

  “Get the other curtain!”

  “One, two, three…now!”

  Windle blinked in the invasive sunlight.

  The wizards held their breath.

  “I’m sorry,”
he said. “It doesn’t seem to work.”

  They sagged again.

  “Don’t you feel anything?” said Ridcully.

  “No sensation of crumbling into dust and blowing away?” said the Senior Wrangler hopefully.

  “My nose tends to peel if I’m out in the sun too long,” said Windle. “I don’t know if that’s any help.” He tried to smile.

  The wizards looked at one another and shrugged.

  “Get out,” said the Archchancellor. They trooped out.

  Ridcully followed them. He paused at the door and waved a finger at Windle.

  “This uncooperative attitude, Windle, is not doing you any good,” he said, and slammed the door behind him.

  After a few seconds the four screws holding the door handle very slowly unscrewed themselves. They rose up and orbited near the ceiling for a while, and then fell.

  Windle thought about this for a while.

  Memories. He had lots of them. One hundred and thirty years of memories. When he was alive he hadn’t been able to remember one-hundredth of the things he knew but now he was dead, his mind uncluttered with everything except the single silver thread of his thoughts, he could feel them all there. Everything he’d ever read, everything he’d ever seen, everything he’d ever heard. All there, ranged in ranks. Nothing forgotten. Everything in its place.

  Three inexplicable phenomena in one day. Four, if you included the fact of his continued existence. That was really inexplicable.

  It needed explicating.

  Well, that was someone else’s problem. Everything was someone else’s problem now.

  The wizards crouched outside the door of Windle’s room.

  “Got everything?” said Ridcully.

  “Why can’t we get some of the servants to do it?” muttered the Senior Wrangler. “It’s undignified.”

  “Because I want it done properly and with dignity,” snapped the Archchancellor. “If anyone’s going to bury a wizard at a crossroads with a stake hammered through him, then wizards ought to do it. After all, we’re his friends.”

  “What is this thing, anyway?” said the Dean, inspecting the implement in his hands.

  “It’s called a shovel,” said the Senior Wrangler. “I’ve seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical.”

  Ridcully squinted through the keyhole.

  “He’s lying down again” he said. He got up, brushing the dust off his knees, and grasped the door handle. “Right,” he said. “Take your time from me. One…two…”

  Modo the gardener was trundling a barrow load of hedge trimmings to a bonfire behind the new High Energy Magic research building when about half a dozen wizards went past at, for wizards, high speed. Windle Poons was being borne aloft between them.

  Modo heard him say, “Really, Archchancellor, are you quite sure this one will work—?”

  “We’ve got your best interests at heart,” said Ridcully.

  “I’m sure, but—”

  “We’ll soon have you feeling your old self again,” said the Bursar.

  “No, we won’t,” hissed the Dean. “That’s the whole point!”

  “We’ll soon have you not feeling your old self again, that’s the whole point,” stuttered the Bursar, as they rounded the corner.

  Modo picked up the handles of the barrow again and pushed it thoughtfully toward the secluded area where he kept his bonfire, his compost heaps, his leaf-mold pile, and the little shed he sat in when it rained.

  He used to be assistant gardener at the palace, but this job was a lot more interesting. You really got to see life.

  Ankh-Morpork society is street society. There is always something interesting going on. At the moment, the driver of a two-horse fruit wagon was holding the Dean six inches in the air by the scruff of the Dean’s robe and was threatening to push the Dean’s face through the back of the Dean’s head.

  “It’s peaches, right?” he kept bellowing. “You know what happens to peaches what lies around too long? They get bruised. Lots of things around here are going to get bruised.”

  “I am a wizard, you know,” said the Dean, his pointy shoes dangling. “If it wasn’t for the fact that it would be against the rules for me to use magic in anything except a purely defensive manner, you would definitely be in a lot of trouble.”

  “What you doing, anyway?” said the driver, lowering the Dean so he could look suspiciously over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” said a man trying to control the team pulling a lumber wagon, “what’s going on? There’s people here being paid by the hour, you know!”

  “Move along at the front there!”

  The lumber driver turned in his seat and addressed the queue of carts behind him. “I’m trying to,” he said. “It’s not my fault, is it? There’s a load of wizards digging up the godsdamn street!”

  The Archchancellor’s muddy face peered over the edge of the hole.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dean,” he said, “I told you to sort things out!”

  “Yes, I was just asking this gentleman to back up and go another way,” said the Dean, who was afraid he was beginning to choke.

  The fruiterer turned him around so that he could see along the crowded streets. “Ever tried to back up sixty carts all at once?” he demanded. “It’s not easy. Especially when everyone can’t move because you guys have got it so’s the carts are backed up all around the block and no one can move because everyone’s in someone else’s way, right?”

  The Dean tried to nod. He had wondered himself about the wisdom of digging the hole at the junction of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork. It had seemed logical at the time. Even the most persistent undead ought to stay decently buried under that amount of traffic. The only problem was that no one had thought seriously about the difficulty of digging up a couple of main streets during the busy time of day.

  “All right, all right, what’s going on here?”

  The crowd of spectators opened to admit the bulky figure of Sergeant Colon of the Watch. He moved through the people unstoppably, his stomach leading the way. When he saw the wizards, waist deep in a hole in the middle of the road, his huge red face brightened up.

  “What’s this, then?” he said. “A gang of international crossroads thieves?”

  He was overjoyed. His long-term policing strategy was paying off!

  The Archchancellor tipped a shovelful of Ankh-Morpork loam over his boots.

  “Don’t be stupid, man,” he snapped. “This is vitally important.”

  “Oh, yes. That’s what they all say,” said Sergeant Colon, not a man to be easily steered from a particular course of thought once he’d got up to mental speed. “I bet there’s hundreds of villages in heathen places like Klatch that’d pay good money for a nice prestigious crossroads like this, eh?”

  Ridcully looked up at him with his mouth open.

  “What are you gabbling about, officer?” he said. He pointed irritably to his pointy hat. “Didn’t you hear me? We’re wizards. This is wizard business. So if you could just sort of direct the traffic around us, there’s a good chap—”

  “—these peaches bruise as soon as you even look at ’em—” said a voice behind Sergeant Colon.

  “The old idiots have been holding us up for half an hour,” said a cattle drover who had long ago lost control of forty steers now wandering aimlessly around the nearby streets. “I wants ’em arrested.”

  It dawned on the sergeant that he had inadvertently placed himself center stage in a drama involving hundreds of people, some of them wizards and all of them angry.

  “What are you doing, then?” he said weakly.

  “We’re burying our colleague. What does it look like?” said Ridcully.

  Colon’s eyes swiveled to an open coffin by the side of the road. Windle Poons gave him a little wave.

  “But…he’s not dead…is he?” he said, his forehead wrinkling as he tried to get ahead o
f the situation.

  “Appearances can be deceptive,” said the Archchancellor.

  “But he just waved to me,” said the sergeant, desperately. “So?”

  “Well, it’s not normal for—”

  “It’s all right, sergeant,” said Windle.

  Sergeant Colon sidled closer to the coffin.

  “Didn’t I see you throw yourself into the river last night?” he said, out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Yes. You were very helpful,” said Windle.

  “And then you threw yourself sort of out again,” said the sergeant.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But you were down there for ages.”

  “Well, it was very dark, you see. I couldn’t find the steps.”

  Sergeant Colon had to concede the logic of this.

  “Well, I suppose you must be dead, then,” he said. “No one could stay down there who wasn’t dead.”

  “This is it,” Windle agreed.

  “Only why are you waving and talking?” said Colon.

  The Senior Wrangler poked his head out of the hole.

  “It’s not unknown for a dead body to move and make noises after death, Sergeant,” he volunteered. “It’s all down to involuntary muscular spasms.”

  “Actually, Senior Wrangler is right,” said Windle Poons. “I read that somewhere.”

  “Oh.” Sergeant Colon looked around. “Right,” he said, uncertainly. “Well…fair enough, I suppose…”

  “Okay, we’re done,” said the Archchancellor, scrambling out of the hole, “it’s deep enough. Come on, Windle, down you go.”

  “I really am very touched, you know,” said Windle, lying back in the coffin. It was quite a good one, from the mortuary in Elm Street. The Archchancellor had let him choose it himself.

  Ridcully picked up a mallet.

  Windle sat up again.

  “Everyone’s going to so much trouble—”

  “Yes, right,” said Ridcully, looking around. “Now—who’s got the stake?”

  Everyone looked at the Bursar.

  The Bursar looked unhappy.

  He fumbled in a bag.

  “I couldn’t get any,” he said.