Reaper Man

The centre of the heap of trolleys was no longer visible. Something was going on. A pale blue glow hung over the huge pyramid of twisted metal, and there were occasional flashes of lightning deep within the pile. Trolleys slammed into it like asteroids accreting around the core of a new planet, but a few arrivals did something else. They headed for tunnels that had opened within the structure, and disappeared into the glittering core.

Then there was a movement at the tip of the mountain and something thrust its way up through the broken metal. It was a glistening spike, supporting a globe about two metres across. It did nothing very much for a minute or two and then, as the breeze dried it out, it split and crumbled.

White objects cascaded out, were caught by the wind, and fountained over Ankh-Morpork and the watching crowds.

One of them zig-zagged gently down across the rooftops and landed at the feet of Windle Poons as he lurched outside the Library.

It was still damp, and there was writing on it. At least, an attempt at writing. It looked like the strange organic inscription of the snowflake balls - words created by something that was not at all at home with words:

So\le S~l~ I I solre!~~

d b,

S~Q~--%S to/70rro~*-,

Windle reached the University gateway. People were streaming past.

Windle knew his fellow citizens. They'd go to look at anything. They were suckers for anything written down with more than one exclamation mark after it.

He felt someone looking at him, and turned. A trolley was watching from an alleyway; it backed up and whizzed away.

"What's happening, Mr. Poons?" said Ludmilla.

There was something unreal about the expression of the passers-by. They wore an expression of unbudgeable anticipation.

You didn't have to be a wizard to know that something was wrong. And Windle's senses were whining like a dynamo.

Lupine leapt at a drifting sheet of paper and brought it to him.

~\M,..i\09 recloctio~s ir)~l

J ~ooo,

Windle shook his head sadly. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

And then he heard the music.

Lupine sat back on his haunches and howled.

In the cellar under Mrs. Cake's house, Schleppel the bogeyman paused halfway through his third rat and listened.

Then he finished his meal and reached for his door.

Count Arthur Winkings Notfaroutoe was working on the crypt.

Personally, he could have lived, or re-lived, or un-lived, or whatever it was he was supposed to be doing, without a crypt. But you had to have a crypt. Doreen had been very definite about the crypt. It gave the place ton, she said. You had to have a crypt anal a vault, otherwise the rest of vampire society would look down their teeth at you.

They never told you about that sort of thing when you started vampiring. They never told you to build your own crypt out of some cheap two-by-four from Challry the Troll's Wholesale Building Supplies. It wasn't something that happened to most vampires, Arthur reflected. Not your proper vampires. Your actual Count Jugular, for example. No, a toff like him'd have someone for it. When the villagers came to burn the place down, you wouldn't catch the Count his own self whipping down to the gate to drop the draw-bridge. Oh, no. He'd just say, "Igor' - as it might be - ‘Igor, just svort it out, chop chop'.

Huh. Well, they'd had an advert in Mr. Keeble's job shop for months now. Bed, three meals a day, and hump provided if necessary. Not so much as an enquiry. And people said there was all this unemployment around. It made you livid.

He picked up another piece of wood and measured it, grimacing as he unfolded the ruler.

Arthur's back ached from digging the moat. And that was another thing your posh vampire didn't have to worry about. The moat came with the job, style of thing. And it went all the way round, because other vampires didn't have the street out in front of them and old Mrs. Pivey complaining on one side and a family of trolls Doreen wasn't speaking to on the other and therefore they didn't end up with a moat that just went across the back yard. Arthur kept falling in it.

And then there was the biting the necks of young women. Or rather, there wasn't. Arthur was always prepared to see the other person's point of view, but he felt certain that young women came into the vampiring somewhere, whatever Doreen said. In diaphanous pegnoyers. Arthur wasn't quite certain what a diaphanous pegnoyer was, but he'd read about them and he definitely felt that he'd like to see one before he died... or whatever...

And other vampires didn't suddenly find their wives talking with Vs instead of Ws. The reason being, your natural vampire talked like that anyway.

Arthur sighed.

It was no life, or half-life or after-life or whatever it was, being a lower-middle-class wholesale fruit and vegetable merchant with an upper-class condition.

And then the music filtered in through the hole in the wall that he'd knocked out to put in the barred window.

"Ow," he said, and clutched at his jaw. ‘Doreen?"