Reaper Man (11 page)

Bill Door. So now he had a name. Of course, he’d always had a name, but he’d been named for what he embodied, not for who he was. Bill Door. It had a good solid ring to it. Mr. Bill Door. William Door, Esq. Billy D—no. Not Billy.

Bill Door cased himself further into the hay. He reached into his robe and pulled out the golden timer. There was, quite perceptibly, less sand in the top bulb. He put it back.

And then there was this “sleep.” He knew what it was. People did it for quite a lot of the time. They lay down and sleep happened. Presumably it served some purpose. He was watching out for it with interest. He would have to subject it to analysis.

Night drifted across the world, coolly pursued by a new day.

There was a stirring in the henhouse across the yard.

“Cock-a-doo…er.”

Bill Door stared at the roof of the barn.

“Cock-a-doodle…er.”

Gray light was filtering in between the cracks.

Yet only moments ago there had been the red light of sunset!

Six hours had vanished.

Bill hauled out the timer. Yes. The level was definitely down. While he had been waiting to experience sleep, something had stolen part of his…of his
life
. He’d completely missed it, too—

“Cock…cock-a…er…”

He climbed down from the loft and stepped out into the thin mist of dawn.

The elderly chickens watched him cautiously as he peered into their house. An ancient and rather embarrassed-looking cockerel glared at him and shrugged.

There was a clanging noise from the direction of the house. An old iron barrel hoop was hanging by the door, and Miss Flitworth was hitting it vigorously with a ladle.

He stalked over to investigate.

W
HAT FOR ARE YOU MAKING THE NOISE
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
?

She spun around, ladle half-raised.

“Good grief, you must walk like a cat!” she said.

I
MUST
?

“I meant I didn’t hear you.” She stood back and looked him up and down.

“There’s still something about you I can’t put my finger on, Bill Door,” she said. “Wish I knew what it was.”

The seven-foot skeleton regarded her stoically. He felt there was nothing he could say.

“What do you want for breakfast?” said the old woman. “Not that it’ll make any difference, ’cos it’s porridge.”

Later she thought: he must have eaten it, because the bowl is empty. Why can’t I remember?

And then there was the matter of the scythe. He looked at it as if he’d never seen one before. She pointed out the grass nail and the handles. He looked at them politely.

H
OW DO YOU SHARPEN IT
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
?

“It’s sharp enough, for goodness sake.”

H
OW DO YOU SHARPEN IT MORE
?

“You can’t. Sharp’s sharp. You can’t get sharper than that.”

He’d swished it aimlessly, and made a disappointed hissing noise.

And there was the grass, too.

The hay meadow was high on the hill behind the farm, overlooking the cornfield. She watched him for a while.

It was the most interesting technique she had ever witnessed. She wouldn’t even have thought that it was technically possible.

Eventually she said: “It’s good. You’ve got the swing and everything.”

T
HANK YOU
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

“But why one blade of grass at a time?”

Bill Door regarded the neat row of stalks for some while.

T
HERE IS ANOTHER WAY
?

“You can do lots in one go, you know.”

N
O
. N
O
. O
NE BLADE AT A TIME
. O
NE TIME
,
ONE BLADE
.

“You won’t cut many
that
way,” said Miss Flitworth.

E
VERY LAST ONE
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

“Yes?”

T
RUST ME ON THIS
.

Miss Flitworth left him to it and went back to the farmhouse. She stood at the kitchen window and watched the distant dark figure for a while, as it moved over the hillside.

I wonder what he did? she thought. He’s got a Past. He’s one of them Men of Mystery, I expect. Perhaps he did a robbery and is Lying Low.

He’s cut a whole row already. One at a time, but somehow faster than a man cutting swathe by swathe…

Miss Flitworth’s only reading matter was the
Farmer’s Almanac and Seed Catalogue
, which could last a whole year in the privy if no one was ill. In addition to sober information about phases of the moon and seed sowings it took a certain grisly relish in recounting the various mass murders, vicious robberies and natural disasters that befell mankind, on the lines of “June 15, Year of the Impromptu Stoat: On this Day 150 yrs. since, a Man killed by Freak shower of Goulash in Quirm” or “14 die at hands of Chume, the Notorious Herring Thrower.”

The important thing about all these was that they happened a long way away, possibly by some kind of divine intervention. The only things that usually happened locally were the occasional theft of a chicken, and the occasional wandering troll. Of course, there were also robbers and bandits in the hills but they got on well with the actual residents and were essential to the local economy. Even so, she felt she’d certainly feel safer with someone else about the place.

The dark figure on the hillside was well into the second row. Behind it, the cut grass withered in the sun.

I
HAVE FINISHED
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

“Go and feed the pig, then. She’s called Nancy.”

N
ANCY
, said Bill, turning the word around in his mouth as though he was trying to see it from all sides.

“After my mother.”

I
WILL GO AND FEED THE PIG
N
ANCY
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

It seemed to Miss Flitworth that mere seconds went by.

I
HAVE FINISHED
, M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
.

She squinted at him. Then, slowly and deliberately, she wiped her hands on a cloth, stepped out into the yard and headed for the pigsty.

Nancy was eyeball-deep in the swill trough.

Miss Flitworth wondered exactly what comment she should make. Finally she said, “Very good. Very good. You, you, you certainly work…fast.”

M
ISS
F
LITWORTH
,
WHY DOES NOT THE COCKEREL CROW PROPERLY
?

“Oh, that’s just Cyril. He hasn’t got a very good memory. Ridiculous, isn’t it? I wish he’d get it right.”

Bill Door found a piece of chalk in the farm’s old smithy, located a piece of board among the debris, and wrote very carefully for some time. Then he wedged the board in front of the henhouse and pointed Cyril toward it.

T
HIS YOU WILL READ
, he said.

Cyril peered myopically at the “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo” in heavy gothic script. Somewhere in his tiny mad chicken mind a very distinct and chilly understanding formed that he’d better learn to read very, very quickly.

Bill Door sat back among the hay and thought about the day. It seemed to have been quite a full one. He’d cut hay and fed animals and mended a window. He’d found some old overalls hanging in the barn. They seemed far more appropriate for a Bill Door than a robe woven of absolute darkness, so he’d put them on. And Miss Flitworth had given him a broad-brimmed straw hat.

And he’d ventured the half-mile walk into the town. It wasn’t even a one horse town. If anyone had a horse, they’d have eaten it. The residents appeared to make a living by stealing one another’s washing.

There was a town square, which was ridiculous. It was really only an enlarged crossroads, with a clock tower. And there was a tavern. He’d gone inside.

After the initial pause while everyone’s mind had refocused to allow him room, they’d been cautiously hospitable; news travels even faster on a vine with few grapes.

“You’d be the new man up at Miss Flitworth’s,” said the barman. “A Mr. Door, I did hear.”

C
ALL ME
B
ILL
.

“Ah? Used to be a tidy old farm, once upon a time. We never thought the old girl’d stay on.”

“Ah,” agreed a couple of old men by the fireplace.

A
H
.

“New to these parts, then?” said the barman.

The sudden silence of the other men in the bar was like a black hole.

N
OT PRECISELY
.

“Been here before, have you?”

J
UST PASSING THROUGH
.

“They say old Miss Flitworth’s a loony,” said one of the figures on the benches around the smoke-blackened walls.

“But sharp as a knife, mind,” said another hunched drinker.

“Oh, yes. She’s sharp all right. But still a loony.”

“And they say she’s got boxes full of treasure in that old parlor of hers.”

“She’m tight with money, I know that.”

“That proves it. Rich folk are always tight with money.”

“All right. Sharp and
rich
. But still a loony.”

“You can’t be loony and rich. You’ve got to be eccentric if you’re rich.”

The silence returned and hovered. Bill Door sought desperately for something to say. He had never been very good at small talk. He’d never had much occasion to use it.

What did people say at times like this? Ah. Yes.

I
WILL BUY EVERYONE A DRINK
, he announced.

Later on they taught him a game that consisted of a table with holes and nets around the edge, and balls carved expertly out of wood, and apparently balls had to bounce off one another and into the holes. It was called Pond. He played it well. In fact, he played it perfectly. At the start, he didn’t know how not to. But after he heard them gasp a few times he corrected himself and started making mistakes with painstaking precision; by the time they taught him darts he was getting really good at them. The more mistakes he made, the more people liked him. So he propelled the little feathery darts with cold skill, never letting one drop within a foot of the targets they urged on him. He even sent one ricocheting off a nail head and a lamp so that it landed in someone’s beer, which made one of the older men laugh so much he had to be taken outside into the fresh air.

They’d called him Good Old Bill.

No one had ever called him that before.

What a strange evening.

There had been one bad moment, though. He’d heard a small voice say: “That man is a skelington,” and had turned to see a small child in a nightdress watching him over the top of the bar, without terror but with a sort of fascinated horror.

The landlord, who by now Bill Door knew to be called Lifton, had laughed nervously and apologized.

“That’s just her fancy,” he said. “The things children say, eh? Get on with you back to bed, Sal. And say you’re sorry to Mr. Door.”

“He’s a skelington with clothes on,” said the child. “Why doesn’t all the drink fall through?”

He’d almost panicked. His intrinsic powers were fading, then. People could not normally see him—he occupied a blind spot in their senses, which they filled in somewhere inside their heads with something they preferred to encounter. But the adults’ inability to see him clearly wasn’t proof against this sort of insistent declaration, and he could feel the puzzlement around him. Then, just in time, its mother had come in from the back room and had taken the child away. There’d been muffled complaints on the lines of “—a skelington, with all bones on—” disappearing around the bend in the stairs.

And all the time the ancient clock over the fireplace had been ticking, ticking, chopping seconds off his life. There’d seemed so many of them, not long ago…

There was a faint knocking at the barn door, below the hayloft. He heard it pushed open.

“Are you decent, Bill Door?” said Miss Flitworth’s voice in the darkness.

Bill Door analyzed the sentence for meaning within context.

Y
ES
? he ventured.

“I’ve brought you a hot milk drink.”

Y
ES
?

“Come on, quick now. Otherwise it’ll go cold.”

Bill Door cautiously climbed down the wooden ladder. Miss Flitworth was holding a lantern, and had a shawl around her shoulders.

“It’s got cinnamon on it. My Ralph always liked cinnamon.” She sighed.

Bill Door was aware of undertones and overtones in the same way that an astronaut is aware of weather patterns below him; they’re all visible, all there, all laid out for study and all totally divorced from actual experience.

T
HANK YOU
, he said.

Miss Flitworth looked around.

“You’ve really made yourself at home here,” she said brightly.

Y
ES
.

She pulled the shawl around her shoulders.

“I’ll be getting back to the house, then,” she said. “You can bring the mug back in the morning.”

She sped away into the night.

Bill Door took the drink up to the loft. He put it on a low beam and sat and watched it long after it grew cold and the candle had gone out.

After a while he was aware of an insistent hissing. He took out the golden timer and put it right at the other end of the loft, under a pile of hay.

It made no difference at all.

Windle Poons peered at the house numbers—a hundred Counting Pines had died for this street alone—and then realized he didn’t have to. He was being shortsighted out of habit. He improved his eyesight.

Number 668 took some while to find because it was in fact on the first floor above a tailor’s shop. Entrance was via an alleyway. There was a wooden door at the end of the alley. On its peeling paintwork someone had pinned a notice which read, in optimistic lettering.

“Come in! Come in!! The Fresh Start Club. Being Dead is only the Beginning!!!”

The door opened onto a flight of stairs that smelled of old paint and dead flies. They creaked even more than Windle’s knees.