Reaper Man

by Terry Pratchett

  “Hmm,” he said. “Lot of potential, too—”

  Then he heard the cry of the vampires.

  “Coo-ee, Mr. Poons!”

  He turned. The Notfaroutoes were bearing down on him.

  “We—I mean, Ve vould have been here sooner, only—”

  “—I couldn’t find the blasted collar stud,” muttered Arthur, looking hot and flustered. He was wearing a collapsible opera hat, which was fine on the collapsible part but regrettably lacking in hatness, so that Arthur appeared to be looking at the world from under a concertina.

  “Oh, hallo,” said Windle. There was something dreadfully fascinating about the Winkings’ dedication to accurate vampirism.

  “Unt who iss the yunk laty?” said Doreen, beaming at Ludmilla.

  “Pardon?” said Windle.

  “Vot?”

  “Doreen—I mean, the Countess asked who she is,” Arthur supplied, wearily.

  “I understood what I said,” snapped Doreen, in the more normal tones of one born and brought up in Ankh-Morpork rather than some transylvanian fastness. “Honestly, if I left it to you, we’d have no standards at all—”

  “My name’s Ludmilla,” said Ludmilla.

  “Charmed,” said the Countess Notfaroutoe graciously, extending a hand that would have been thin and pale if it had not been pink and stubby. “Alvays nice to meet fresh blood. If you ever fancy a dog biscuit when you’re out and about, our door iss alwace open.”

  Ludmilla turned to Windle Poons.

  “It’s not written on my forehead, is it?” she said.

  “These are a special kind of people,” said Windle gently.

  “I should think so,” said Ludmilla, levelly. “I hardly know anyone who wears an opera cloak the whole time.”

  “You’ve got to have the cloak,” said Count Arthur. “For the wings, you see. Like—”

  He spread the cloak dramatically. There was a brief, implosive noise, and a small fat bat hung in the air. It looked down, gave an angry squeak, and nose-dived onto the soil. Doreen picked it up by its feet and dusted it off.

  “It’s having to sleep with the window open all night that I object to,” she said vaguely. “I wish they’d stop that music! I’m getting a headache.”

  There was another whoomph. Arthur reappeared upside down and landed on his head.

  “It’s the drop, you see,” said Doreen. “It’s like a run-up, sort of thing. If he doesn’t get at least a one-story start he can’t get up a proper airspeed.”

  “I can’t get a proper airspeed,” said Arthur, struggling to his feet.

  “Excuse me,” said Windle, “The music doesn’t affect you?”

  “It puts my teeth on edge is what it does,” said Arthur. “Which is not a good thing for a vampire, I prob’ly don’t have to tell you.”

  “Mr. Poons thinks it does something to people,” said Ludmilla.

  “Sets everyone’s teeth on edge?” said Arthur.

  Windle looked at the crowd. No one was taking any notice of the Fresh Starters.

  “They look as though they’re waiting for something,” said Doreen. “Vaiting, I mean.”

  “It’s scary,” said Ludmilla.

  “Nothing wrong with scary,” said Doreen. “We’re scary.”

  “Mr. Poons wants to go inside the heap,” said Ludmilla.

  “Good idea. Get them to turn that damn music off,” said Arthur.

  “But you could get killed!” said Ludmilla.

  Windle clapped his hands together, and rubbed them thoughtfully.

  “Ah,” he said, “that’s where we’re ahead of the game.”

  He walked into the glow.

  He’d never seen such bright light. It seemed to emanate from everywhere, hunting down every last shadow and eradicating it ruthlessly. It was much brighter than daylight without being anything like it—there was a blue edge to it that cut vision like a knife.

  “You all right, Count?” he said.

  “Fine, fine,” said Arthur.

  Lupine growled.

  Ludmilla pulled at a tangle of metal.

  “There’s something under this, you know. It looks like…marble. Orange-colored marble.” She ran her hand over it. “But warm. Marble shouldn’t be warm, should it?”

  “It can’t be marble. There can’t be this much marble in the whole world…vorld,” said Doreen. “We tried to get marble for the vault,” she tasted the sound of the word and nodded to herself, “the vault, yes. Those dwarfs should be shot, the prices they charge. It’s a disgrace.”

  “I don’t think dwarfs built this,” said Windle. He knelt down awkwardly to examine the floor.

  “I shouldn’t think so, the lazy little buggers. They wanted nearly seventy dollars to do our vault. Didn’t they, Arthur?”

  “Nearly seventy dollars,” said Arthur.

  “I don’t think anyone built it,” said Windle quietly. Cracks. There should be cracks, he thought. Edges and things, where one slab joins another. It shouldn’t be all one piece. And slightly sticky.

  “So, Arthur did it himself.”

  “I did it myself.”

  Ah. Here was an edge. Well, not exactly an edge. The marble became clear, like a window, looking into another brightly lit space. There were things in there, indistinct and melted-looking, but no way in to them.

  The chatter of the Winkings flowed over him as he crept forward.

  “—more of a vaultette, really. But he got a dungeon in, even if you have to go out into the hall to shut the door properly—”

  Gentility meant all sorts of things, Windle thought. To some people it was not being a vampire. To others it was a matched set of flying plaster bats on the wall.

  He ran his fingers over the clear substance. The world here was all rectangles. There were corners, and the corridor was lined on both sides with the clear panels. And the non-music played all the time.

  It couldn’t be alive, could it? Life was…more rounded.

  “What do you think, Lupine?” he said.

  Lupine barked.

  “Hmm. Not a lot of help.”

  Ludmilla knelt down and put her hand on Windle’s shoulder.

  “What did you mean, no one built it?” she said.

  Windle scratched his head.

  “I’m not sure…but I think maybe it was…secreted.”

  “Secreted? From what? By what?”

  They looked up. A trolley whirred out of the mouth of a side corridor and skidded away down another on the opposite side of the passage.

  “Them?” said Ludmilla.

  “I shouldn’t think so. I think they’re more like servants. Like ants. Bees in a hive, maybe.”

  “What’s the honey?”

  “Not sure. But it’s not ripe yet. I don’t think things are quite finished. No one touch anything.”

  They walked onward. The passage opened up into a wide, bright, domed area. Stairways led up and down to different floors, and there was a fountain and a grove of potted plants that looked too healthy to be real.

  “Isn’t it nice?” said Doreen.

  “You keep thinking there should be people,” said Ludmilla. “Lots of people.”

  “There should at least be wizards,” muttered Windle Poons. “Half a dozen wizards don’t just disappear.”

  The five of them moved closer. Passages the size of the one they’d just walked down could have accommodated a couple of elephants walking abreast.

  “Do you think it might be a good idea to go back outside?” said Doreen.

  “What good would that do?” said Windle.

  “Well, it’d get us out of here.”

  Windle turned, counting. Five of the passages radiated equidistantly out of the domed area.

  “And presumably it’s the same above and below,” he said aloud.

  “It’s very clean here,” Doreen said nervously. “Isn’t it clean, Arthur?”

  “It’s very clean.”

  “What’s that noise?” said Ludmilla.

>   “What noise?”

  “That noise. Like something sucking something.”

  Arthur looked around with a certain amount of interest.

  “It’s not me.”

  “It’s the stairs,” said Windle.

  “Don’t be silly, Mr. Poons. Stairs don’t suck.”

  Windle looked down.

  “These do.”

  They were black, like a sloping river. As the dark substance flowed out from under the floor it humped itself into something resembling steps, which traveled up the slope until they disappeared under the floor again, somewhere above. When the steps emerged they made a slow, rhythmic shlupshlup noise, like someone investigating a particularly annoying dental cavity.

  “Do you know,” said Ludmilla, “that’s quite possibly the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever seen?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” said Windle. “But it’s pretty bad. Shall we go up or down?”

  “You want to stand on them?”

  “No. But the wizards aren’t on this floor and it’s that or slide down the handrail. Have you looked closely at the handrail?”

  They looked at the handrail.

  “I think,” said Doreen nervously, “that down is more us.”

  They went down in silence. Arthur fell over at the point where the traveling stairs were sucked into the floor again.

  “I had this horrible feeling it was going to drag me under,” he said apologetically, and then looked around him.

  “It’s big,” he concluded. “Roomy. I could do wonders down here with some stone-effect wallpaper.”

  Ludmilla wandered over to the nearest wall.

  “You know,” she said, “there’s more glass than I’ve seen before, but these clear bits look like shops. Does that make sense? A great big shop full of shops?”

  “And not ripe yet,” said Windle.

  “Sorry?”

  “Just thinking aloud. Can you see what the merchandise is?”

  Ludmilla shaded her eyes.

  “It just looks like a lot of color and glitter.”

  “Let me know if you see a wizard.”

  Someone screamed.

  “Or hear one, for example,” Windle added.

  Lupine bounded off down a passageway. Windle lurched swiftly after him.

  Someone was on their back, trying desperately to fight off a couple of the trolleys. They were bigger than the ones Windle had seen before, with a golden sheen to them.

  “Hey!” he yelled.

  They stopped trying to gore the prone figure and three-point-turned toward him.

  “Oh,” he said, as they got up speed.

  The first one dodged Lupine’s jaws and butted Windle full in the knees, knocking him over. As the second passed over him he reached up wildly, grabbed randomly at the metal, and pulled hard. A wheel spun off and the trolley cartwheeled into the wall.

  He scrambled up in time to see Arthur hanging grimly onto the handle of the other trolley as the two of them whirred around in a mad centrifugal waltz.

  “Let go! Let go!” Doreen screamed.

  “I can’t! I can’t!”

  “Well, do something!”

  There was a pop of inrushing air. The trolley was suddenly not straining against the weight of a middle-aged wholesale fruit and vegetable entrepreneur but only against a small terrified bat. It rocketed into a marble pillar, bounced off, hit a wall and landed on its back, wheels spinning.

  “The wheels!” shouted Ludmilla. “Pull the wheels off!”

  “I’ll do that,” said Windle. “You help Reg.”

  “Is that Reg down there?” said Doreen.

  Windle jerked his thumb toward the distant wall. The words “Better late than nev” ended in a desperate streak of paint.

  “Show him a wall and a paint pot and he doesn’t know what world he’s in,” said Doreen.

  “He’s only got a choice of two,” said Windle, throwing the trolley wheels across the floor. “Lupine, keep a look-out in case there’s anymore.”

  The wheels had been sharp, like ice skates. He was definitely feeling tattered around the legs. Now, how did healing go?

  Reg Shoe was helped into a sitting position.

  “What’s happening?” he said. “No one else was coming in, and I came down here to see where the music was coming from, and the next thing, there’s these wheels—”

  Count Arthur returned to his approximately human form, looked around proudly, realized that no one was paying him any attention, and sagged.

  “They looked a lot tougher than the others,” said Ludmilla. “Bigger and nastier and covered in sharp edges.”

  “Soldiers,” said Windle. “We’ve seen the workers. And now there’s soldiers. Just like ants.”

  “I had an ant farm when I was a lad,” said Arthur, who had hit the floor rather heavily and was having temporary trouble with the nature of reality.

  “Hang on,” said Ludmilla. “I know about ants. We have ants in the backyard. If you have workers and soldiers, then you must also have a—”

  “I know. I know,” said Windle.

  “—mind you, they called it a farm, I never saw them doing any farming—”

  Ludmilla leaned against the wall.

  “It’ll be somewhere close,” she said.

  “I think so,” said Windle.

  “What does it look like, do you think?”

  “—what you do is, you get two bits of glass and some ants—”

  “I don’t know. How should I know? But the wizards will be somewhere near it.”

  “I don’t see vy you’re bothering about them,” said Doreen. “They buried you alive just because you vere dead.”

  Windle looked up at the sound of wheels. Adozen warrior baskets turned the corner and pulled up in formation.

  “They thought they were doing it for the best,” said Windle. “People often do. It’s amazing, the things that seem a good idea at the time.”

  The new Death straightened up.

  Or?

  AH.

  ER.

  Bill Door stepped back, turned around, and ran for it.

  It was, as he was wonderfully well placed to know, merely putting off the inevitable. But wasn’t that what living was all about?

  No one had ever run away from him after they were dead. Many had tried it before they were dead, often with great ingenuity. But the normal reaction of a spirit, suddenly pitched from one world into the next, was to hang around hopefully. Why run, after all? It wasn’t as if you knew where you were running to.

  The ghost of Bill Door knew where he was running to.

  Ned Simnel’s smithy was locked up for the night, although this did not present a problem. Not alive and not dead, the spirit of Bill Door lived through the wall.

  The fire was a barely-visible glow, settling in the forge. The smithy was full of warm darkness.

  What it didn’t contain was the ghost of a scythe.

  Bill Door looked around desperately.

  SQUEAK?

  There was a small, dark-robed figure sitting on a beam above him. It gestured frantically toward the corner.

  He saw a dark handle sticking out from the load of timber. He tried to pull at it with fingers now as substantial as a shadow.

  HE SAID HE WOULD DESTROY IT FOR ME!

  The Death of Rats shrugged sympathetically.

  The new Death stepped through the wall, scythe held in both hands.

  It advanced on Bill Door.

  There was a rustling. The gray robes were pouring into the smithy.

  Bill Door grinned in terror.

  The new Death stopped, posing dramatically in the glow from the forge.

  It swung.

  It almost lost its balance.

  You’re not supposed to duck!

  Bill Door dived through the wall again and pounded across the square, skull down, spectral feet making no noise on the cobbles. He reached the little group by the clock.

  ON THE HORSE! GO!

  �
��What’s happening? What’s happening!”

  IT HASN’T WORKED!

  Miss Flitworth gave him a panicky look but put the unconscious child on Binky’s back and climbed up after her. Then Bill Door brought his hand down hard on the horse’s flank. There at least there was contact—Binky existed in all worlds.

  GO!

  He didn’t look around but darted on up the road toward the farm.

  A weapon!

  Something he could hold!

  The only weapon in the undead world was in the hands of the new Death.

  As Bill Door ran he was aware of a faint, higher-pitched clicking noise. He looked down. The Death of Rats was keeping pace with him.

  It gave him an encouraging squeak.

  He skidded through the farm gate and flung himself against the wall.

  There was the distant rumble of the storm. Apart from that, silence.

  He relaxed slightly, and crept cautiously along the wall toward the back of the farmhouse.

  He caught a glimpse of something metallic. Leaning against the wall there, where the men from the village had left it when they brought him back, was his scythe; not the one he’d carefully prepared, but the one he’d used for the harvest. What edge it had had been achieved only by the whetstone and the caress of the stalks, but it was a familiar shape and he made a tentative grab at it. His hand passed right through.

  The further you run, the closer you get.

  The new Death stepped unhurriedly out of the shadows.

  You should know that, it added.

  Bill Door straightened up.

  We will enjoy this.

  ENJOY?

  The new Death advanced. Bill Door backed away.

  Yes. The taking of one Death is the same as achieving the end of a billion lesser lives.

  LESSER LIVES? THIS IS NOT A GAME!

  The new Death hesitated. What is a game?

  Bill Door felt the tiny flicker of hope.

  I COULD SHOW YOU—

  The end of the scythe handle caught him under the chin and knocked him against the wall, where he slid to the ground.

  We detect a trick. We do not listen. The reaper does not listen to the harvest.

  Bill Door tried to get up.

  The scythe handle struck him again.

  We will not make the same mistakes.

  Bill Door looked up. The new Death was holding the golden timer; the top bulb was empty. Around both of them the landscape shifted, reddened, began to take on the unreal appearance of reality seen from the other side…