There was a blotter on the oversize desk but it was part of it, fused to the surface. The drawers were just raised areas of wood, impossible to open. Whoever had made the desk had seen desks, but hadn’t understood deskishness.
There was even some sort of desk ornament. It was just a slab of lead, with a thread hanging down one side and a shiny round metal ball on the end of the thread. If you raised the ball it swung down and thumped into the lead, just once.
She didn’t try to sit in the chair. There was a deep pit in the leather. Someone had spent a lot of time sitting there.
She glanced at the spines of the books. They were in a language she couldn’t understand.
She trekked back to the distant door, went out into the hall, and tried the next door. A suspicion was beginning to form in her mind.
The door led to another huge room, but this one was full of shelves, floor to distant, cloud-hung ceiling. Every shelf was lined with hourglasses.
The sand pouring from the past to the future filled the room with a sound like surf, a noise made up of a billion small sounds.
Susan walked between the shelves. It was like being in a crowd.
Her eye was caught by a movement on a nearby shelf. In most of the hourglasses the falling sand was a solid silver line but in this one, just as she watched, the line vanished. The last grain of sand tumbled into the bottom bulb.
The hourglass vanished, with a small “pop.”
A moment later another one appeared in its place, with the faintest of “pings.” In front of her eyes, sand began to fall…
And she was aware that this process was going on all over the room. Old hourglasses vanished, new ones took their place.
She knew about this, too.
She reached out and picked up a glass, bit her lip thoughtfully, and started to turn the thing upside down…
SQUEAK!
She spun around. The Death of Rats was on the shelf behind her. It raised an admonitory finger.
“All right,” said Susan. She put the glass back in its place.
SQUEAK
“No. I haven’t finished looking.”
Susan set off for the door, with the rat skrittering across the floor after her.
The third room turned out to be…
…the bathroom.
Susan hesitated. You expected hourglasses in this place. You expected the skull-and-bones motif. But you didn’t expect the very large white porcelain tub, on its own raised podium like a throne, with giant brass taps and—in faded blue letters just over the thing that held the plug chain—the words: C. H. Lavatory & Son, Mollymog St, Ankh-Morpork.
You didn’t expect the rubber duck. It was yellow.
You didn’t expect the soap. It was suitably bone white, but looked as if it had never been used. Beside it was a bar of orange soap which certainly had been used—it was hardly more than a sliver. It smelled a lot like the vicious stuff used at school.
The bath, though big, was a human thing. There was brown-lined crazing around the plug hole and a stain where the tap had dripped. But almost everything else had been designed by the person who hadn’t understood deskishness, and now hadn’t understood ablutionology either.
They had created a towel rail an entire athletics team could have used for training. The black towels on it were fused onto it and were quite hard. Whoever actually used the bathroom probably dried themselves on one white-and-blue, very worn towel with the initials Y.M.R-C-I-G-B-S A, A-M. on it.
There was even a lavatory, another fine example of C. H. Lavatory’s porcelainic art, with an embossed frieze of green-and-blue flowers on the cistern. And again, like the bath and the soap, it suggested that this room had been built by someone…and then someone else had come along afterward to add small details. Someone with a better knowledge of plumbing, for a start. And someone else who understood, really understood, that towels should be soft and capable of drying people, and soap should be capable of bubbles.
You didn’t expect any of it until you saw it. And then it was like seeing it again.
The bald towel dropped off the rail and skipped across the floor, until it fell away to reveal the Death of Rats.
SQUEAK?
“Oh, all right,” said Susan. “Where do you want me to go now?”
The rat scurried to the open door and disappeared into the hall.
Susan followed it to yet another door. She turned yet another handle.
Another room within a room lay beyond. There was a tiny area of lit tiling in the darkness, containing the distant vision of a table, a few chairs, a kitchen dresser—
—and someone. A hunched figure was sitting at the table. As Susan cautiously approached she heard the rattle of cutlery on a plate.
An old man was eating his supper, very noisily. In between forkfuls, he was talking to himself with his mouth full. It was a kind of auto bad manners.
“’s not my fault! (spray) I was against it from the start but, oh no, he has to go and (recover piece of ballistic sausage from table) start gettin’ involved, I told him, i’s’not as if you’re not involved (stab unidentified fried object) oh no, that’s not his way (spray, jab fork at the air) once you get involved like that, I said, how’re you getting out, tell me that (make temporary egg and ketchup sandwich) but, oh no—”
Susan walked around the patch of carpet. The man took no notice.
The Death of Rats shinned up the table leg and landed on a slice of fried bread.
“Oh. It’s you.”
SQUEAK.
The old man looked around.
“Where? Where?”
Susan stepped onto the carpet. The man stood up so quickly that his chair fell over.
“Who the hells are you?”
“Could you stop pointing that sharp bacon at me?”
“I asked you a question, young woman!”
“I’m Susan.” This didn’t sound enough. “Duchess of Sto Helit,” she added.
The man’s wrinkled face wrinkled still further as he strove to comprehend this. Then he turned away and threw his hands up in the air.
“Oh, yes!” he bawled, to the room in general. “That just puts the entire tin lid on it, that does!”
He waved a finger at the Death of Rats, who leaned backward.
“You cheating little rodent! Oh, yes! I smell a rat here!”
SQUEAK?
The shaking finger stopped suddenly. The man spun around.
“How did you manage to walk through the wall?”
“I’m sorry?” said Susan, backing away. “I didn’t know there was one.”
“What d’you call this then, Klatchian mist?” The man slapped the air.
The hippo of memory wallowed…
“…Albert…” said Susan. “Right?”
Albert thumped his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“Worse and worse! What’ve you been telling her?”
“He didn’t tell me anything except SQUEAK and I don’t know what that means,” said Susan. “But…look, there’s no wall here, there’s just…”
Albert wrenched open a drawer.
“Observe,” he said sharply. “Hammer, right? Nail, right? Watch.”
He hammered the nail into the air about five feet up at the edge of the tiled area. It hung there.
“Wall,” said Albert.
Susan reached out gingerly and touched the nail. It had a sticky feel, a little like static electricity.
“Well, it doesn’t feel like a wall to me,” she managed.
SQUEAK.
Albert dropped the hammer on the table.
He wasn’t a small man, Susan realized. He was quite tall, but he walked with the kind of lopsided stoop normally associated with laboratory assistants of an Igor turn of mind.
“I give in,” he said, wagging his finger at Susan again. “I told him no good’d come of it. He started meddlin’, and next thing a mere chit of a girl—where’d you go?”
Susan walked over to the table while Albert w
aved his arms in the air, trying to find her.
There was a cheeseboard on the table, and a snuffbox. And a string of sausages. No fresh vegetables at all. Miss Butts advocated avoiding fried foods and eating plenty of vegetables for what she referred to as Daily Health. She put a lot of troubles down to an absence of Daily Health. Albert looked like the embodiment of them all as he scuttled around the kitchen, grabbing at the air.
She sat in the chair as he danced past.
Albert stopped moving, and put his hand over one eye. Then he turned, very carefully. The one visible eye was screwed up in a frantic effort of concentration.
He squinted at the chair, his eye watering with effort.
“That’s pretty good,” he said, quietly, “All right. You’re here. The rat and the horse brought you. Damn fool things. They think it’s the right thing to do.”
“What right thing to do?” said Susan. “And I’m not a…what you said.”
Albert stared at her.
“The Master could do that,” he said at last. “It’s part of the job. I ’spect you found you could do it a long time ago, eh? Not be noticed when you didn’t want to be?”
SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats.
“What?” said Albert.
SQUEAK.
“He says to tell you,” said Albert wearily, “that a chit of a girl means a small girl. He thinks you may have misheard me.”
Susan hunched up in the chair. Albert pulled up another one and sat down.
“How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Oh, my.” Albert rolled his eyes. “How long have you been sixteen?”
“Since I was fifteen, of course. Are you stupid?”
“My, my, how the time does pass,” said Albert. “Do you know why you’re here?”
“No…but,” Susan hesitated, “but it’s got something to do with…it’s something like…I’m seeing things that people don’t see, and I’ve met someone who’s just a story, and I know I’ve been here before…and all these skulls and bones on things…”
Albert’s rangy, vulturelike shape loomed over her.
“Would you like a cocoa?” he said.
It was a lot different from the cocoa at the school, which was like hot brown water. Albert’s cocoa had fat floating in it; if you turned the mug upside down, it would be a little while before anything fell out.
“Your mum and dad,” said Albert, when she had a chocolate mustache that was far too young for her, “did they ever…explain anything to you?”
“Miss Delcross did that in Biology,” said Susan. “She got it wrong,” she added.
“I mean about your grandfather,” said Albert.
“I remember things,” said Susan, “but I can’t remember them until I’ve seen them. Like the bathroom. Like you.”
“Your mum and dad thought it best if you forgot,” said Albert. “Hah! It’s in the bone! They was afraid it was going to happen and it has! You’ve inherited.”
“Oh, I know about that, too,” said Susan. “It’s all about mice and beans and things.”
Albert gave her a blank look.
“Look, I’ll try to put it tactful,” he said.
Susan gave him a polite look.
“Your grandfather is Death,” said Albert. “You know? The skeleton in the black robe? You rode in on his horse and this is his house. Only he’s…gone away. To think things over, or something. What I reckon’s happening is you’re being sucked in. It’s in the bone. You’re old enough now. There’s a hole and it thinks you’re the right shape. I don’t like it any more than you do.”
“Death,” said Susan, flatly. “Like the Hogfather and the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy?”
“Yes.”
SQUEAK.
“You expect me to believe that, do you?” said Susan, trying to summon up her most withering scorn.
Albert glared back like someone who’d done all his withering a long time ago.
“It’s no skin off my nose what you believe, madam,” he said.
“You really mean the tall figure with the scythe and everything?”
“Yes.”
“Look, Albert,” said Susan, in the voice ones uses to the simple-minded, “even if there was a ‘Death’ like that, and frankly it’s quite ridiculous to go anthropomorphizing a simple natural function, no-one can inherit anything from it. I know about heredity. It’s all about having red hair and things. You get it from other people. You don’t get it from…myths and legends. Um.”
The Death of Rats had gravitated to the cheeseboard, where he was using his scythe to hack off a lump. Albert sat back.
“I remember when you got brought here,” he said. “He’d kept on asking, you see. He was curious. He likes kids. Sees a lot of them really, but…not to get to know, if you see what I mean. Your mum and dad didn’t want to, but they gave in and brought you all here for tea one day just to keep him quiet. They didn’t like to do it because they thought you’d be scared and scream the place down. But you…you didn’t scream. You laughed. Frightened the life out of your dad, that did. They brought you a couple more times when he asked, but then they got scared about what might happen and your dad put his foot down and that was the end of it. He was about the only one who could argue with the Master, your dad. You’d have been about four then, I think.”
Susan raised her hand thoughtfully and touched the pale lines on her cheek.
“The Master said they were raising you according to,” Albert sneered, “modern methods. Logic. And thinking old stuff is silly. I dunno…I suppose they wanted to keep you away from…ideas like this…”
“I was given a ride on the horse,” said Susan, not listening to him. “I had a bath in the big bathroom.”
“Soap all over the place,” said Albert. His face contorted into something approaching a smile. “I could hear the Master laughing from here. And he made you a swing, too. Tried to, anyway. No magic or anything. With his actual hands.”
Susan sat while memories woke and yawned and unfolded in her head.
“I remember about that bathroom now,” she said. “It’s all coming back to me.”
“Nah, it never went away. It just got papered over.”
“He was no good at plumbing. What does Y.M.R-C-I-G-B-S A, A-M. mean?”
“Young Men’s Reformed-Cultists-of-the-Ichor-God-Bel-Shamharoth Association, Ankh-Morpork,” said Albert. “It’s where I stay if I have to go back down for anything. Soap and suchlike.”
“But you’re not…a young man,” said 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 da
y 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.
Discworld 16 - Soul Music Page 7