He looked down at his own body, which was wearing a long white nightshirt. His clothes had been neatly folded on a chair by the bed; the chair, he couldn’t help noticing, was delicately carved with a skull-and-bones motif.
Mort sat down on the edge of the bed and began to dress, his mind racing.
He eased open the heavy oak door, and felt oddly disappointed when it failed to creak ominously.
There was a bare wooden corridor outside, with big yellow candles set in holders on the far wall. Mort crept out and sidled along the boards until he reached a staircase. He negotiated that successfully without anything ghastly happening, arriving in what looked like an entrance hall full of doors. There were a lot of funereal drapes here, and a grandfather clock with a tick like the heartbeat of a mountain. There was an umbrella stand beside it.
It had a scythe in it.
Mort looked around at the doors. They looked important. Their arches were carved in the now-familiar bones motif. He went to try the nearest one, and a voice behind him said:
“You mustn’t go in there, boy.”
It took him a moment to realise that this wasn’t a voice in his head, but real human words that had been formed by a mouth and transferred to his ears by a convenient system of air compression, as nature intended. Nature had gone to a lot of trouble for six words with a slightly petulant tone to them.
He turned around. There was a girl there, about his own height and perhaps a few years older than him. She had silver hair, and eyes with a pearly sheen to them, and the kind of interesting but impractical long dress that tends to be worn by tragic heroines who clasp single roses to their bosom while gazing soulfully at the moon. Mort had never heard the phrase ‘Pre-Raphaelite’, which was a pity because it would have been almost the right description. However, such girls tend to be on the translucent, consumptive side, whereas this one had a slight suggestion of too many chocolates.
She stared at him with her head on one side, and one foot tapping irritably on the floor. Then she reached out quickly and pinched him sharply on the arm.
“Ow!”
“Hmm. So you’re really real,” she said. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Mortimer. They call me Mort,” he said, rubbing his elbow. “What did you do that for?”
“I shall call you Boy,”{4} she said. “And I don’t really have to explain myself, you understand, but if you must know I thought you were dead. You look dead.”
Mort said nothing.
“Lost your tongue?”
Mort was, in fact, counting to ten.
“I’m not dead,” he said eventually. “At least, I don’t think so. It’s a little hard to tell. Who are you?”
“You may call me Miss Ysabell,” she said haughtily. “Father told me you must have something to eat. Follow me.”
She swept away towards one of the other doors. Mort trailed behind her at just the right distance to have it swing back and hit his other elbow.
There was a kitchen on the other side of the door—long, low and warm, with copper pans hanging from the ceiling and a vast black iron stove occupying the whole of one long wall. An old man was standing in front of it, frying eggs and bacon and whistling between his teeth.
The smell attracted Mort’s taste buds from across the room, hinting that if they got together they could really enjoy themselves. He found himself moving forward without even consulting his legs.
“Albert,” snapped Ysabell, “another one for breakfast.”
The man turned his head slowly, and nodded at her without saying a word. She turned back to Mort.
“I must say,” she said, “that with the whole Disc to choose from, I should think Father could have done rather better than you. I suppose you’ll just have to do.”
She swept out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
“Have to do what?” said Mort, to no-one in particular.
The room was silent, except for the sizzle of the frying pan and the crumbling of coals in the molten heart of the stove. Mort saw that it had the words ‘The Little Moloch (Ptntd)’ embossed on its oven door.{5}
The cook didn’t seem to notice him, so Mort pulled up a chair and sat down at the white scrubbed table.
“Mushrooms?” said the old man, without looking around.
“Hmm? What?”
“I said, do you want mushrooms?”
“Oh. Sorry. No, thank you,” said Mort.
“Right you are, young sir.”
He turned around and set out for the table.
Even after he got used to it, Mort always held his breath when he watched Albert walking. Death’s manservant was one of those stick-thin, raw-nosed old men who always look as though they are wearing gloves with the fingers cut out—even when they’re not—and his walking involved a complicated sequence of movements. Albert leaned forward and his left arm started to swing, slowly at first but soon evolving into a wild jerking movement that finally and suddenly, at about the time when a watcher would have expected the arm to fly off at the elbow, transferred itself down the length of his body to his legs and propelled him forward like a high-speed stilt walker. The frying pan followed a series of intricate curves in the air and was brought to a halt just over Mort’s plate.
Albert did indeed have exactly the right type of half-moon spectacles to peer over the top of.
“There could be some porridge to follow,” he said, and winked, apparently to include Mort in the world porridge conspiracy.
“Excuse me”, said Mort, “but where am I, exactly?”
“Don’t you know? This is the house of Death, lad. He brought you here last night.”
“I—sort of remember. Only…
“Hmm?”
“Well. The bacon and eggs,” said Mort, vaguely. “It doesn’t seem, well, appropriate.”
“I’ve got some black pudding somewhere,” said Albert.
“No, I mean…” Mort hesitated. “It’s just that I can’t see him sitting down to a couple of rashers and a fried slice.”
Albert grinned. “Oh, he doesn’t, lad. Not as a regular thing, no. Very easy to cater for, the master. I just cook for me and—” he paused—“the young lady, of course.”
Mort nodded. “Your daughter,” he said.
“Mine? Ha,” said Albert. “You’re wrong there. She’s his.”
Mort stared down at his fried eggs. They stared back from their lake of fat. Albert had heard of nutritional values, and didn’t hold with them.
“Are we talking about the same person?” he said at last. “Tall, wears black, he’s a bit… skinny…”
“Adopted,” said Albert, kindly. “It’s rather a long story—”
A bell jangled by his head.
“—which will have to wait. He wants to see you in his study. I should run along if I were you. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Understandable, really. Up the steps and first on the left. You can’t miss it—”
“It’s got skulls and bones around the door?” said Mort, pushing back his chair.
“They all have, most of them,” sighed Albert. “It’s only his fancy. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
Leaving his breakfast to congeal, Mort hurried up the steps, along the corridor and paused in front of the first door. He raised his hand to knock.
ENTER.
The handle turned of its own accord. The door swung inward.
Death was seated behind a desk, peering intently into a vast leather book almost bigger than the desk itself. He looked up as Mort came in, keeping one calcareous finger marking his place, and grinned. There wasn’t much of an alternative.
AH, he said, and then paused. Then he scratched his chin, with a noise like a fingernail being pulled across a comb.