It stopped. A dark shape was approaching through the snow.
It's
They faded hurriedly — not simply vanishing, but spreading out and thinning until they were just lost in the background.
The dark figure stopped by the dead carter and reached down.
COULD I GIVE YOU A HAND?
Ernie looked up gratefully.
‘Cor, yeah,’ he said. He got to his feet, swaying a little. ‘Here, your fingers're cold, mister!’
SORRY.
‘What'd he go and do that for? I
Ernie felt inside his overcoat and pulled out a small and, at this point, strangely transparent silver flask.
‘I always keep a nip on me these cold nights,’ he said. ‘Keeps me spirits up.’
YES INDEED. Death looked around briefly and sniffed the air.
‘How'm I going to explain all this, then, eh?’ said Ernie, taking a pull.
SORRY? THAT WAS VERY RUDE OF ME. I WASN'T PAYING ATTENTION.
‘I said what'm I going to tell people? Letting some blokes ride off with my cart neat as you like… That's gonna be the sack for sure, I'm gonna be in big trouble…’
All. WELL. THERE AT LEAST I HAVE SOME GOOD NEWS, ERNEST. AND, THEN AGAIN, I HAVE SOME BAD NEWS.
Ernie listened. Once or twice he looked at the corpse at his feet. He looked smaller from the outside. He was bright enough not to argue. Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them.
‘So I'm dead, then,’ he concluded.
CORRECT.
‘Er… The priest said that… you know… after you're dead… it's like going through a door and on one side of it there's… He… well, a terrible place …?’
Death looked at his worried, fading face.
THROUGH A DOOR…
‘That's what he said…’
I EXPECT IT DEPENDS ON THE DIRECTION YOU'RE WALKING IN.
When the street was empty again, except for the fleshy abode of the late Ernie, the grey shapes came back into focus.
Honestly, he gets worse and worse, said one.
He was looking for us, said another. Did you notice? He suspects something. He gets so…
Yes… but the beauty of this plan, said a third, is that he
He can go
No, said another. Not quite everywhere.
And, with ineffable smugness, they faded into the foreground.
It started to snow quite heavily.
It was the night before Hogswatch. All through the house…
…one creature stirred. It was a mouse.
And someone, in the face of all appropriateness, had baited a trap. Although, because it was the festive season, they'd used a piece of pork crackling. The smell of it had been driving the mouse mad all day but now, with no one about, it was prepared to risk it.
The mouse didn't know it was a trap. Mice aren't good at passing on information. Young mice aren't taken up to famous trap sites and told, ‘This is where your Uncle Arthur passed away.’ All it knew was that, what the hey, here was something to eat. On a wooden board with some wire round it.
A brief scurry later and its jaw had closed on the rind.
Or, rather, passed through it.
The mouse looked around at what was now lying under the big spring, and thought, ‘Oops…’
Then its gaze went up to the black-clad figure that had faded into view by the wainscoting.
‘Squeak?’ it asked.
SQUEAK, said the Death of Rats.
And that was
Afterwards, the Death of Rats looked around with interest. In the nature of things his very important job tended to take him to brickyards and dark cellars and the inside of cats and all the little dank holes where rats and mice finally found out if there was a Promised Cheese. This place was different.
It was brightly decorated, for one thing. Ivy and mistletoe hung in bunches from the bookshelves. Brightly coloured streamers festooned the walls, a feature seldom found in most holes or even quite civilized cats.
The Death of Rats took a leap onto a chair and from there on to the table and in fact right into a glass of amber liquid, which tipped over and broke. A puddle spread around four turnips and began to soak into a note which had been written rather awkwardly on pink writing paper.
It read:
The Death of Rats nibbled a bit of the pork pie because when you are the personification of the death of small rodents you have to behave in certain ways. He also piddled on one of the turnips for the same reason, although only metaphorically, because when you are a small skeleton in a black robe there are also some things you technically cannot do.
Then he leapt down from the table and left sherry-flavoured footprints all the way to the tree that stood in a pot in the corner. It was really only a bare branch of oak, but so much shiny holly and mistletoe had been wired onto it that it gleamed in the fight of the candles.
There was tinsel on it, and glittering ornaments, and small bags of chocolate money.
The Death of Rats peered at his hugely distorted reflection in a glass ball, and then looked up at the mantelpiece.
He reached it in one jump, and ambled curiously through the cards that had been ranged along it. His grey whiskers twitched at messages like
The Death of Rats sniffed at a couple of long stockings that had been hung from the mantelpiece, over the fireplace in which a fire had died down to a few sullen ashes.
He was aware of a subtle tension in the air, a feeling that here was a scene that was also a stage, a round hole, as it were, waiting for a round peg.
There was a scraping noise. A few lumps of soot thumped into the ashes.
The Grim Squeaker nodded to himself.
The scraping became louder, and was followed by a moment of silence and then a clang as something landed in the ashes and knocked over a set of ornamental fire irons.
The rat watched carefully as a red-robed figure pulled itself upright and staggered across the hearthrug, rubbing its shin where it had been caught by the toasting fork.