Reaper Man (16 page)

D
O RATS NOT FEED THEMSELVES
?

“You bet they do. That’s why we’re going to give them a little extra something before the harvest. A few dollops of this around the holes and—no more rats.”

It took a little while for Bill Door to put two and two together, but when this took place it was like megaliths mating.

T
HIS IS POISON
?

“Essence of spikkle, mixed with oatmeal. Never fails.”

A
ND THEY DIE
?

“Instantly. Straight over and legs in the air. We’re having bread and cheese,” she added. “I ain’t doing big cooking twice in one day, and we’re having chicken tonight. Talking of chicken, in fact…come on…”

She took a cleaver off the rack and went out into the yard. Cyril the cockerel eyed her suspiciously from the top of the midden. His harem of fat and rather elderly hens, who had been scratching up the dust, bounded unsteadily toward Miss Flitworth in the broken-knicker-elastic runs of hens everywhere. She reached down quickly and picked one up.

It regarded Bill Door with bright, stupid eyes.

“Do you know how to pluck a chicken?” said Miss Flitworth.

Bill looked from her to the hen.

B
UT WE FEED THEM
, he said helplessly.

“That’s right. And then they feed us. This one’s been off lay for months. That’s how it goes in the chicken world. Mr. Flitworth used to wring their necks but I never got the knack of that; the cleaver’s messy and they run around a bit afterward, but they’re dead all right, and they know it.”

Bill Door considered his options. The chicken had focused one beady eye on him. Chickens are a lot more stupid than humans, and don’t have the sophisticated mental filters that prevent them seeing what is truly there. It knew where it was and who was looking at it.

He looked into its small and simple life and saw the last few seconds pouring away.

He’d never killed. He’d taken life, but only when it was finished with. There was a difference between theft and stealing by finding.

N
OT THE CLEAVER
, he said wearily. G
IVE ME THE CHICKEN
.

He turned his back for a moment, then handed the limp body to Miss Flitworth.

“Well done,” she said, and went back to the kitchen.

Bill Door felt Cyril’s accusing gaze on him.

He opened his hand. A tiny spot of light hovered over his palm.

He blew on it, gently, and it faded away.

After lunch they put down the rat poison. He felt like a murderer.

A lot of rats died.

Down in the runs under the barn—in the deepest one, one tunneled long ago by long-forgotten ancestral rodents—something appeared in the darkness.

It seemed to have difficulty deciding what shape it was going to be.

It began as a lump of highly-suspicious cheese. This didn’t seem to work.

Then it tried something that looked very much like a small, hungry terrier. This was also rejected.

For a moment it was steel-jawed trap. This was clearly unsuitable.

It cast around for fresh ideas and much to its surprise one arrived smoothly, as if traveling from no distance at all. Not so much a shape as a memory of a shape.

It tried it and found that, while totally wrong for the job, in some deeply satisfying way it was the only shape it could possibly be.

It went to work.

That evening the men were practicing archery on the green. Bill Door had carefully ensured a local reputation as the worst bowman in the entire history of toxophily; it had never occurred to anyone that putting arrows through the hats of bystanders behind him must logically take a lot more skill than merely sending them through a quite large target a mere fifty yards away.

It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.

So he was allowed to sit on a bench outside the inn, with the old men.

Next door, sparks poured from the chimney of the village smithy and spiraled up into the dusk. There was a ferocious hammering from behind its closed doors. Bill Door wondered why the smithy was always shut. Most smiths worked with their doors open, so that their forge became an unofficial village meeting room. This one was keen on his work—

“Hallo, skelington.”

He swiveled around.

The small child of the house was watching him with the most penetrating gaze he had ever seen.

“You are a skelington, aren’t you,” she said. “I can tell, because of the bones.”

Y
OU ARE MISTAKEN
,
SMALL CHILD
.

“You are. People turn into skelingtons when they’re dead. They’re not supposed to walk around afterward.”

H
A
. H
A
. H
A
. W
ILL YOU HARK AT THE CHILD
.

“Why are you walking around, then?”

Bill Door looked at the old men. They appeared engrossed in the sport.

I’
LL TELL YOU WHAT
, he said desperately, I
F YOU WILL GO AWAY
, I
WILL GIVE YOU A HALF-PENNY
.

“I’ve got a skelington mask for when we go trickle-treating on Soul Cake Night,” she said. “It’s made of paper. You get given sweets.”

Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason.

L
OOK
, he said,
IF
I
WAS REALLY A SKELETON
,
LITTLE GIRL
, I’
M SURE THESE OLD GENTLEMEN HERE WOULD HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT IT
.

She regarded the old men at the other end of the bench.

“They’re nearly skelingtons anyway,” she said. “I shouldn’t think they’d want to see another one.”

He gave in.

I
HAVE TO ADMIT THAT YOU ARE RIGHT ON THAT POINT
.

“Why don’t you fall to bits?”

I
DON’T KNOW
. I
NEVER HAVE
.

“I’ve seen skelingtons of birds and things and they all fall to bits.”

P
ERHAPS IT IS BECAUSE THEY ARE WHAT SOMETHING
WAS
,
WHEREAS THIS IS WHAT
I
AM
.

“The apothecary who does medicine over in Chambly’s got a skelington on a hook with all wire to hold the bones together,” said the child, with the air of one imparting information gained after diligent research.

I
DON’T HAVE WIRES
.

“There’s a difference between alive skelingtons and dead ones?”

Y
ES
.

“It’s a dead skelington he’s got then, is it?”

Y
ES
.

“What was inside someone?”

Y
ES
.

“Ur. Yuk.”

The child stared distantly at the landscape for a while and then said, “I’ve got new socks.”

Y
ES
?

“You can look, if you like.”

A grubby foot was extended for inspection.

W
ELL
,
WELL
. F
ANCY THAT
. N
EW SOCKS
.

“My mum knitted them out of sheep.”

M
Y WORD
.

The horizon was given another inspection.

“D’you know,” she said, “d’you know…it’s Friday.”

Y
ES
.

“I found a spoon.”

Bill Door found he was waiting expectantly. He was not familiar with people who had an attention span of less than three seconds.

“You work along of Miss Flitworth’s?”

Y
ES
.

“My dad says you’ve got your feet properly under the table there.”

Bill Door couldn’t think of an answer to this because he didn’t know what it meant. It was one of those many flat statements humans made that were really just a disguise for something more subtle, which was often conveyed merely by the tone of voice or a look in the eyes, neither of which was being done by the child.

“My dad says she said she’s got boxes of treasure.”

H
AS SHE
?

“I’ve got tuppence.”

M
Y GOODNESS
.

“Sal!”

They both looked up as Mrs. Lifton appeared on the doorstep.

“Bedtime for you. Stop worrying Mr. Door.”

O
H
, I
ASSURE YOU SHE IS NOT
—

“Say goodnight, now.”

“How do skelingtons go to sleep? They can’t close their eyes because—”

He heard their voices, muffled, inside the inn.

“You mustn’t call Mr. Door that just because…he’s…very…he’s very thin…”

“It’s all right. He’s not the dead sort.”

Mrs. Lifton’s voice had the familiar worried tones of someone who can’t bring themselves to believe the evidence of their own eyes. “Perhaps he’s just been very ill.”

“I should think he’s just about been as ill as he can be ever.”

Bill Door walked back home thoughtfully.

There was a light on in the farmhouse kitchen, but he went straight to the barn, climbed the ladder to the hayloft, and lay down.

He could put off dreaming, but he couldn’t escape remembering.

He stared at the darkness.

After a while he was aware of the pattering of feet. He turned.

A stream of pale rat-shaped ghosts skipped along the roof beam above his head, fading as they ran so that soon there was nothing but the sound of the scampering.

They were followed by a…shape.

It was about six inches high. It wore a black robe. It held a small scythe in one skeletal paw. A bone-white nose with brittle gray whiskers protruded from the shadowy hood.

Bill Door reached out and picked it up. It didn’t resist, but stood on the palm of his hand and eyed him as one professional to another.

Bill Door said: A
ND YOU ARE
—?

The Death of Rats nodded.

S
QUEAK
.

I
REMEMBER
, said Bill Door,
WHEN YOU WERE A PART OF ME
.

The Death of Rats squeaked again.

Bill Door fumbled in the pockets of his overall. He’d put some of his lunch in there. Ah, yes.

I
EXPECT
, he said,
THAT YOU COULD MURDER A PIECE OF CHEESE
?

The Death of Rats took it graciously.

Bill Door remembered visiting an old man once—only once—who had spent almost his entire life locked in a cell in a tower for some alleged crime or other, and had tamed little birds for company during his life sentence. They crapped on his bedding and ate his food, but he tolerated them and smiled at their flight in and out of the high barred windows. Death had wondered, at the time, why anyone would do something like that.

I
WON’T DELAY YOU
, he said. I
EXPECT YOU’VE GOT THINGS TO DO
,
RATS TO SEE
. I
KNOW HOW IT IS
.

And now he understood.

He put the figure back on the beam, and lay down in the hay.

D
ROP IN ANY TIME YOU’RE PASSING
.

Bill Door stared at the darkness again.

Sleep. He could feel her prowling around. Sleep, with a pocketful of dreams.

He lay in the darkness and fought back.

Miss Flitworth’s shouting jolted him upright and, to his momentary relief, still went on.

The barn door slammed open.

“Bill! Come down quick!”

He swung his legs onto the ladder.

W
HAT IS HAPPENING
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
?

“Something’s on fire!”

They ran across the yard and out onto the road. The sky over the village was red.

“Come on!”

B
UT IT IS NOT OUR FIRE
.

“It’s going to be everyone’s! It spreads like crazy on thatch!”

They reached the apology for a town square. The inn was already well alight, the thatch roaring star-ward in a million twisting sparks.

“Look at everyone standing around,” snarled Miss Flitworth. “There’s the pump, buckets are everywhere, why don’t people
think
?”

There was a scuffle a little way as a couple of his customers tried to stop Lifton from running into the building. He was screaming at them.

“The girl’s still in there,” said Miss Flitworth. “Is that what he said?”

Y
ES
.

Flames curtained every upper window.

“There’s got to be some way,” said Miss Flitworth. “Maybe we could find a ladder—”

W
E SHOULD NOT
.

“What? We’ve got to try. We can’t leave people in there!”

Y
OU DON’T UNDERSTAND
, said Bill Door. T
O TINKER WITH THE FATE OF ONE INDIVIDUAL COULD DESTROY THE WHOLE WORLD
.

Miss Flitworth looked at him as if he had gone mad.

“What kind of garbage is that?”

I
MEAN THAT THERE IS A TIME FOR EVERYONE TO DIE
.

She stared. Then she drew her hand back, and gave him a ringing slap across the face.

He was harder than she’d expected. She yelped and sucked at her knuckles.

“You leave my farm
tonight
, Mr. Bill Door,” she growled. “Understand?” Then she turned on her heel and ran toward the pump.

Some of the men had brought long hooks to drag the burning thatch off the roof. Miss Flitworth organized a team to get a ladder up to one of the bedroom windows but, by the time a man was persuaded to climb it behind the steaming protection of a damp blanket, the top of the ladder was already smouldering.

Bill Door watched the flames.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the golden timer. The firelight glowed redly on the glass. He put it away again.

Part of the roof fell in.

S
QUEAK
.

Bill Door looked down. A small robed figure marched between his legs and strutted into the flaming doorway.

Someone was yelling something about barrels of brandy.

Bill Door reached back into his pocket and took out the timer again. Its hissing drowned out the roar of the flames. The future flowed into the past, and there was a lot more past than there was future, but he was struck by the fact that what it flowed through all the time was
now
.