Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have.
Magrat’s hands shook slightly as they made the tea. Of course, it was all very gratifying, but it was a bit nerve-racking to start one’s working life as village witch between Granny and, on the other side of the forest, Nanny Ogg. It’d been her idea to form a local coven. She felt it was more, well, occult. To her amazement the other two had agreed or, at least, hadn’t disagreed much.
‘An oven?’ Nanny Ogg had said. ‘What’d we want to join an oven for?’
‘She means a coven, Gytha,’ Granny Weatherwax had explained. ‘You know, like in the old days. A meeting.’
‘A knees up?’ said Nanny Ogg hopefully.
‘No dancing,’ Granny had warned. ‘I don’t hold with dancing. Or singing or getting over-excited or all that messing about with ointments and similar.’
‘Does you good to get out,’ said Nanny happily.
Magrat had been disappointed about the dancing, and was relieved that she hadn’t ventured one or two other ideas that had been on her mind. She fumbled in the packet she had brought with her. It was her first sabbat, and she was determined to do it right.
‘Would anyone care for a scone?’ she said.
Granny looked hard at hers before she bit. Magrat had baked bat designs on it. They had little eyes made of currants.
The coachman, standing upright in the manner of a charioteer, pushed his hair out of his eyes and peered through the murk. No-one lived up here, in the lap of the Ramtops themselves, but there was a light ahead. By all that was merciful, there was a light there.
An arrow buried itself in the coach roof behind him.
And, like most people since the dawn of time, he was now dead.
He was in fact lying at the bottom of one of his own stairways in Lancre Castle, with a dagger in his back.
He sat up, and was surprised to find that while someone he was certainly inclined to think of as himself was sitting up, something very much like his body remained lying on the floor.
It was a pretty good body, incidentally, now he came to see it from outside for the first time. He had always been quite attached to it although, he had to admit, this did not now seem to be the case.
It was big and well-muscled. He’d looked after it. He’d allowed it a moustache and long-flowing locks. He’d seen it got plenty of healthy outdoor exercise and lots of red meat. Now, just when a body would have been useful, it had let him down. Or out.
On top of that, he had to come to terms with the tall, thin figure standing beside him. Most of it was hidden in a hooded black robe, but the one arm which extended from the folds to grip a large scythe was made of bone.
When one is dead, there are things one instinctively recognizes.
HALLO.
Verence drew himself up to his full height, or what would have been his full height if that part of him to which the word ‘height’ could have been applied was not lying stiff on the floor and facing a future in which only the word ‘depth’ could be appropriate.
‘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.