Reaper Man

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."

CALL ME BILL.

"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.

AH.

"New to these parts, then?" said the barman.

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

NOT PRECISELY.

"Been here before, have you?"

JUST 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 parlour of hers."

"She's 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 apologised.

"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 analysed the sentence for meaning within context.

YES? he ventured.

"I've brought you a hot milk drink."

YES?

"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.

THANK YOU, he said.

Miss Flitworth looked around.

"You've really made yourself at home here," she said brightly.

YES.

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.