‘I
Most people aren’t. They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is—anticipating the future, or holding on to the past. They’re usually so busy thinking about what happens next that the only time they ever find out what is happening now is when they come to look back on it. Most people are like this. They learn how to fear because they can actually tell, down at the subconscious level, what is going to happen next. It’s already happening to them.
But Verence had always lived only for the present. Until now, anyway.
Death sighed.
I SUPPOSE NO-ONE MENTIONED ANYTHING TO YOU? he hazarded.
‘Say again?’
NO PREMONITIONS? STRANGE DREAMS? MAD OLD SOOTHSAYERS SHOUTING THINGS AT YOU IN THE STREET?
‘About what? Dying?’
NO, I SUPPOSE NOT. IT WOULD BE TOO MUCH TO EXPECT, said Death sourly. THEY LEAVE IT ALL TO ME.
‘Who do?’ said Verence, mystified.
FATE. DESTINY. ALL THE REST OF THEM. Death laid a hand on the king’s shoulder. THE FACT IS, I’M AFRAID, YOU’RE DUE TO BECOME A GHOST.
‘Oh.’ He looked down at his … body, which seemed solid enough. Then someone walked through him.
DON’T LET IT UPSET YOU.
Verence watched his own stiff corpse being carried reverentially from the hall.
‘I’ll try,’ he said.
GOOD MAN.
‘I don’t think I will be up to all that business with the white sheets and the chains, though,’ he said. ‘Do I have to walk around moaning and screaming?’
Death shrugged. DO YOU WANT TO? he said.
‘No.’
THEN I SHOULDN’T BOTHER, IF I WERE YOU. Death pulled an hour-glass from the recesses of his dark robe and inspected it closely.
AND NOW I REALLY MUST BE GOING, he said. He turned on his heel, put his scythe over his shoulder and started to walk out of the hall through the wall.
‘I say? Just hold on there!’ shouted Verence, running after him.
Death didn’t look back. Verence followed him through the wall; it was like walking through fog.
‘Is that all?’ he demanded. ‘I mean, how long will I be a ghost?
Death shook his head gloomily, and stepped through the next wall. The king hurried after him with as much dignity as he could still muster, and found Death fiddling with the girths of a large white horse standing on the battlements. It was wearing a nosebag.
‘You can’t leave me like this!’ he repeated, in the face of the evidence.
Death turned to him.
I CAN, he said. YOU’RE UNDEAD, YOU SEE. GHOSTS INHABIT A WORLD BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE DEAD. IT’S NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY. He patted the king on the shoulder. DON’T WORRY, he said, IT WON’T BE FOR EVER.
‘Good.’
IT MAY
CAN’T HELP THERE. I’M SORRY.
‘Well, how can I find out?’
THESE THINGS GENERALLY BECOME APPARENT, I UNDERSTAND, said Death, and swung himself into the saddle.
‘And until then I have to haunt this place.’ King Verence stared around at the draughty battlements. ‘All alone, I suppose. Won’t anyone be able to see me?’
OH, THE PSYCHICALLY INCLINED. CLOSE RELATIVES. AND CATS, OF COURSE.
‘I hate cats.’
Death’s face became a little stiffer, if that were possible. The blue glow in his eye sockets flickered red for an instant.
I SEE, he said. The tone suggested that death was too good for cat-haters. YOU LIKE GREAT BIG DOGS, I IMAGINE.
‘As a matter of fact, I do.’ The king stared gloomily at the dawn. His dogs. He’d really miss his dogs. And it looked like such a good hunting day.
He wondered if ghosts hunted. Almost certainly not, he imagined. Or ate, or drank either for that matter, and that was really depressing. He liked a big noisy banquet and had quaffed many a pint of good ale. And bad ale, come to that. He’d never been able to tell the difference till the following morning, usually.
He kicked despondently at a stone, and noted gloomily that his foot went right through it. No hunting, drinking, carousing, no wassailing, no hawking … It was dawning on him that the pleasures of the flesh were pretty sparse without the flesh. Suddenly life wasn’t worth living. The fact that he wasn’t living it didn’t cheer him up at all.
SOME PEOPLE
BUSY, BUSY, he muttered, and spurred his horse into the sky.
Verence ran through the walls of his own castle. His feet barely touched the ground—in fact, the unevenness of the floor meant that at times they didn’t touch the ground at all.
As a king he was used to treating servants as if they were not there, and running through them as a ghost was almost the same. The only difference was that they didn’t stand aside.
Verence reached the nursery, saw the broken door, the trailed sheets …
Heard the hoofbeats. He reached the window, saw his own horse go full tilt through the open gateway in the shafts of the coach. A few seconds later three horsemen followed it. The sound of hooves echoed for a moment on the cobbles and died away.
The king thumped the sill, his fist going several inches into the stone.
Then he pushed his way out into the air, disdaining to notice the drop, and half flew, half ran down across the courtyard and into the stables.
It took him a mere twenty seconds to learn that, to the great many things a ghost cannot do, should be added the mounting of a horse. He did succeed in getting into the saddle, or at least in straddling the air just above it, but when the horse finally bolted, terrified beyond belief by the mysterious things happening behind its ears, Verence was left sitting astride five feet of fresh air.
He tried to run, and got about as far as the gateway before the air around him thickened to the consistency of tar.
‘You can’t,’ said a sad, old voice behind him. ‘You have to stay where you were killed. That’s what haunting means. Take it from me. I know.’
‘Something comes,’ she said.
‘Can you tell by the pricking of your thumbs?’ said Magrat earnestly. Magrat had learned a lot about witchcraft from books.
‘The pricking of my ears,’ said Granny. She raised her eyebrows at Nanny Ogg. Old Goodie Whemper had been an excellent witch in her way, but far too
Magrat peered around timidly. Here and there on the moor were huge standing stones, their origins lost in time, which were said to lead mobile and private lives of their own. She shivered.