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 tunnelled 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 a steel-jawed trap. This was clearly unsuitable.
It cast around for fresh ideas and much to its surprise one arrived smoothly, as if travelling 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 practising 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 spiralled 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 swivelled round.
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.’
YOU ARE MISTAKEN, SMALL CHILD.
‘You are. People turn into skelingtons when they’re dead. They’re not supposed to walk around afterwards.’
HA. HA. HA. WILL 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, IF 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.
LOOK, 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.’
PERHAPS 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?’
YES.
‘It’s a dead skelington he’s got then, is it?’
YES.
‘What was inside someone?’
YES.
‘Ur. Yuk.’
The child stared distantly at the landscape for a while and then said, ‘I’ve got new socks.’
YES?
‘You can look, if you like.’
A grubby foot was extended for inspection.
WELL, WELL. FANCY THAT. NEW SOCKS.
‘My mum knitted them out of sheep.’
MY WORD.
The horizon was given another inspection.
‘D’you know,’ she said, ‘d’you know … it’s Friday.’
YES.
‘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?’
YES.
‘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.’
HAS SHE?
‘I’ve got tuppence.’
MY GOODNESS.
‘Sal!’
They both looked up as Mrs Lifton appeared on the doorstep.
‘Bedtime for you. Stop worrying Mr Door.’
OH, 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 grey 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: AND YOU ARE—?
The Death of Rats nodded.
SQUEAK.
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?{26}
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 littled 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.