Mort

the door shut and locking it with a heavy iron key which she hung on a nail by the door.

The frost had tightened its grip on the forest, squeezing it until the roots creaked. The moon was setting, but the sky was full of hard white stars that made the winter seem colder still. Goodie Hamstring shivered.

'There's an old log over there,' she said conversationally. 'There's quite a good view across the valley. In the summertime, of course. I should like to sit down.'

Mort helped her through the drifts and brushed as much snow as possible off the wood. They sat down with the hourglass between them. Whatever the view might have been in the summer, it now consisted of black rocks against a sky from which little flakes of snow were now tumbling.

'I can't believe all this,' said Mort. 'I mean you sound as if you want to die.'

'There's some things I shall miss,' she said. 'But it gets thin, you know. Life, I'm referring to. You can't trust your own body any more, and it's time to move on. I reckon it's about time I tried something else. Did he tell you magical folk can see him all the time?'

'No,' said Mort, inaccurately.

'Well, we can.'

'He doesn't like wizards and witches much,' Mort volunteered.

'Nobody likes a smartass,' she said with some satisfaction. 'We give him trouble, you see. Priests don't, so he likes priests.'

'He's never said,' said Mort.

'Ah. They're always telling folk how much better it's going to be when they're dead. We tell them it could be pretty good right here if only they'd put their minds to it.'

Mort hesitated. He wanted to say: you're wrong, he's not like that at all, he doesn't care if people are good or bad so long as they're punctual. And kind to cats, he added.

But he thought better of it. It occurred to him that people needed to believe things.

The wolf howled again, so near that Mort looked around apprehensively. Another one across the valley answered it. The chorus was picked up by a couple of others in the depths of the forest. Mort had never heard anything so mournful.

He glanced sideways at the still figure of Goodie Hamstring and then, with mounting panic, at the hourglass. He sprang to his feet, snatched up the scythe, and brought it around in a two-handed swing.

The witch stood up, leaving her body behind.

'Well done,' she said. 'I thought you'd missed it, for a minute, there.'

Mort leaned against a tree, panting heavily, and watched Goodie walk around the log to look at herself.

'Hmm,' she said critically. 'Time has got a lot to answer for.' She raised her hand and laughed to see the stars through it.

Then she changed. Mort had seen this happen before, when the soul realized it was no longer bound by the body's morphic field, but never under such control. Her hair unwound itself from its tight bun, changing colour and lengthening. Her body straightened up. Wrinkles dwindled and vanished. Her grey woollen dress moved like the surface of the sea and ended up tracing entirely different and disturbing contours.

She looked down, giggled, and changed the dress into something leaf-green and clingy.

'What do you think, Mort?' she said. Her voice had sounded cracked and quavery before. Now it suggested musk and maple syrup and other things that set Mort's adam's apple bobbing like a rubber ball on an elastic band.

'. . .' he managed, and gripped the scythe until his knuckles went white.

She walked towards him like a snake in a four-wheel drift.

'I didn't hear you,' she purred.