Mort

He couldn't have met Death. He couldn't have eaten a meal with a skeleton with glowing blue eyes. It had to be a weird dream. He couldn't have ridden pillion on a great white horse that had cantered up into the sky and then went . . .

. . . where?

The answer flowed into his mind with all the inevitability of a tax demand.

HERE.

His searching hands reached up to his cropped hair, and down to sheets of some smooth slippery material. It was much finer than the wool he was used to at home, which was coarse and always smelled of sheep; it felt like warm, dry ice.

He swung out of the bed hastily and stared around the room.

First of all it was large, larger than the entire house back home, and dry, dry as old tombs under ancient deserts. The air tasted as though it had been cooked for hours and then allowed to cool. The carpet under his feet was deep enough to hide a tribe of pygmies and crackled electrically as he padded through it. And everything had been designed in shades of purple and black.

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 realize 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,' 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.