Read Online Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online Page B

stranger stared at her for a moment, and then looked around wildly.
    “Come on,” said Miss Flitworth. “I ain’t employing no one without no name. Mr…?”
    The figure stared upward.
    M R . S KY ?
    “No one’s called Mr. Sky.”
    M R …. D OOR ?
    She nodded.
    “Could be. Could be Mr. Door. There was a chap called Doors I knew once. Yeah. Mr. Door. And yourfirst name? Don’t tell me you haven’t got one of those too. You’ve got to be a Bill or a Tom or a Bruce or one of those names.”
    Y ES .
    “What?”
    O NE OF THOSE .
    “Which one?”
    E R . T HE FIRST ONE ?
    “You’re a Bill?”
    Y ES ?
    Miss Flitworth rolled her eyes.
    “All right, Bill Sky…” she said.
    D OOR .
    “Yeah. Sorry. All right, Bill Door…”
    C ALL ME B ILL .
    “And you can call me Miss Flitworth. I expect you want some dinner?”
    I WOULD ? A H . Y ES . T HE MEAL OF THE EVENING . Y ES .
    “You look half starved, to tell the truth. More than half, really.” She squinted at the figure. Somehow it was very hard to be certain what Bill Door looked like, or even remember the exact sound of his voice. Clearly he was there, and clearly he had spoken—otherwise why did you remember anything at all?
    “There’s a lot of people in these parts as don’t use the name they were born with,” she said. “I always say there’s nothing to be gained by going around asking pers’nal questions. I suppose you can work, Mr. Bill Door? I’m still getting the hay in off the high meadows and there’ll be a lot of work come harvest. Can you use a scythe?”
    Bill Door seemed to meditate on the question forsome time. Then he said, I THINK THE ANSWER TO THAT IS A DEFINITE “ YES ,” M ISS F LITWORTH .

 
    Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler also never saw the sense in asking personal questions, at least insofar as they applied to him and were on the lines of “Are these things yours to sell?” But no one appeared to be coming forward to berate him for selling off their property, and that was good enough for him. He’d sold more than a thousand of the little globes this morning, and he’d had to employ a troll to keep up a flow from the mysterious source of supply in the cellar.
    People loved them.
    The principle of operation was laughably simple and easily graspable by the average Ankh-Morpork citizen after a few false starts.
    If you gave the globe a shake, a cloud of little white snowflakes swirled up in the liquid inside and settled, delicately, on a tiny model of a famous Ankh-Morpork landmark. In some globes it was the University, or the Tower of Art, or the Brass Bridge, or the Patrician’s Palace. The detail was amazing.
    And then there were no more left. Well, thought Throat, that’s a shame. Since they hadn’t technically belonged to him—although morally , of course, morally they were his—he couldn’t actually complain. Well, he could complain, of course, but only under his breath and not to anybody specific. Maybe it was all for the best, come to think of it. Stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap. Get ’em off your hands—it made it mucheasier to spread them in a gesture of injured innocence when you said “Who, me?”
    They were really pretty, though. Except, strangely enough, for the writing. It was on the bottom of each globe, in shaky, amateurish letters, as if done by someone who had never seen writing before and was trying to copy some down. On the bottom of every globe, below the intricate little snowflake-covered building, were the words:

    Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was a shameless autocondimentor. * He had his own special cruet put in front of him at every meal. It consisted of salt, three types of pepper, four types of mustard, four types of vinegar, fifteen different kinds of chutney and his special favorite: Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulfur and saltpetre for added