But a voice inside her said, 'You want to, though, don't you ... ?'

     Ten seconds later, there was only the snow.

     The raven turned to the Death of Rats.

     'Any idea where I can get some string?'

SQUEAK.

     She was watched.

     One said, Who is she?

     One said, Do we remember that Death adopted a daughter? The young woman is her daughter.

     One said, She is human?

     One said, Mostly.

     One said, Can she be killed?

     One said, Oh, yes.

     One said, Well, that's all right, then.

     One said, Er ... we don't  think we're going to get  into  trouble over this, do we? All this is not exactly ... authorized. We don't want questions asked.

     One said, We have a duty to rid the universe of sloppy thinking.

     One said, Everyone will be grateful when they find out.

     Binky touched down lightly on Death's lawn.

     Susan didn't bother with the front door but went round the  back, which was never locked.

     There had been changes. One significant change, at least.

     There was a cat-flap in the door.

     She stared at it.

     After a second or  two a ginger  cat came through the flap, gave her an I'm-not-hungryand-you're-notinteresting  look,  and padded off  into the gardens.

     Susan pushed open the door into the kitchen.

     Cats of every size and colour covered every surface.  Hundreds of  eyes swivelled to watch her.

     It  was  Mrs  Gammage all over  again, she thought. The old woman was a regular in Biers for the company and was quite gaga, and one of the symptoms of those going  completely yoyo was  that  they  broke out  in chronic cats. Usually  cats  who'd  mastered every  detail  of feline existence except the whereabouts of the dirt box.

     Several of them had their noses in a bowl of cream.

     Susan had never  been able  to  see the  attraction  in cats. They were owned by the kind of people  who liked puddings. There were actual people in the world whose idea of heaven would be a chocolate cat.

     'Push off, the lot of you,' she said. 'I've never known him have pets.'

     The  cats gave  her a look to  indicate that they were intending  to go somewhere else in any case and strolled off, licking their chops.

     The bowl slowly filled up again.

     They were obviously living cats. Only life  had colour here. Everything else was created by Death. Colour, along with plumbing and music, were  arts that escaped the grasp of his genius.

     She left them in the kitchen and wandered along to the study.

     There were changes here, too.  By the look  of  it, he'd been trying to learn to  play the violin  again. He'd never been able to understand  why he couldn't play music.

     The desk  was a mess. Books  lay open, piled  on one another. They were the ones Susan had never learned to  read.  Some  of  the characters hovered above the pages or  moved  in complicated  little patterns as they read  you while you read them.

     Intricate  devices  had  been  scattered  across the top.  They  looked vaguely navigational, but on what oceans and under which stars?

     Several  pages  of  parchment  had  been filled  up  with  Death's  own handwriting. It was immediately recognizable. No one else Susan had ever met had handwriting with serifs.

     It looked as though he'd been trying to work something out.

NOT KLATCH. NOT HOWOWONDALAND. NOT THE EMPIRE. LET US SAY 20 MILLION CHILDREN AT 2LB OF TOYS PER CHILD.

EQUALS 17,857 TONS. 1,785 TONS PER HOUR.

MEMO: DON'T FORGET THE SOOTY FOOTPRINTS. MORE PRACTICE ON THE HO HO HO.

CUSHION.

     She put the paper back carefully.

     Sooner or later  it'd get to  you. Death was fascinated by  humans, and study was never a one-way thing.  A man might spend his life peering at  the private life of elementary particles and then find he either knew who he was or where he was, but not both. Death had picked  up ... humanity. Not the real thing, but something  that might pass for it until you examined it closely.

     The house even imitated human houses.  Death had  created a bedroom for himself, despite the fact that he never slept. If he really picked things up from humans, had he tried insanity? It was very popular, after all.

     Perhaps, after all these millennia, he wanted to be nice.

     She let herself into  the Room of Lifetimers. She'd liked the sound  of it,  when she was a little girl.  But now the hiss of sand from  millions of hourglasses,  and  the little pings and pops as  full  ones vanished and new empty ones appeared, was not  so enjoyable. Now she knew what  was going on. Of course,  everyone  died  sooner or  later.  It  just wasn't right  to  be listening to it happening.

     She  was about to leave when she noticed the open door in a place where she had never seen a door before.

     It  was disguised.  A  whole  section  of  shelving, complete with  its whispering glasses, had swung out.

     Susan pushed it back and forth  with a finger. When it was  shut, you'd have to look hard to see the crack.

     There was a much smaller room on the other side. It was merely the size of,  say,  a  cathedral.  And  it  was  lined  floor  to ceiling  with  more hourglasses that Susan could just see dimly in the      light from the big room. She stepped inside and snapped her fingers.

     'Light,' she commanded. A couple of candles sprang into life.

     The hourglasses were ... wrong.

     The ones  in  the main room, however  metaphorical they might  be, were solid-looking things of wood and brass and glass. But these looked as though they were made of highlights and shadows with no real substance at all.

     She peered at a large one.

     The name in it was: OFFLER.

     'The crocodile god?' she thought.

     Well, gods had a life, presumably. But they never actually died, as far as  she knew. They just dwindled away  to a voice on the wind and a footnote in some textbook on religion.

     There were other gods lined up. She recognized a few of them.

     But there were smaller lifetimers on the shelf. When she saw the labels she nearly burst out laughing.

     'The Tooth Fairy? The Sandman? John Barleycorn? The Soul Cake Duck? The God of what?'

     She stepped back, and something crunched under her feet.

     There were shards of glass on the floor. She reached down and picked up the biggest. Only a few letters remained of the name etched into the glass HOGFA...

     'Oh, no ... it's true. Granddad, what have you done?'

     When she left, the candles winked out. Darkness sprang back.

     And in the darkness, among, the spilled sand, a faint sizzle and a tiny spark of light...

     Mustrum Ridcully adjusted the towel around his waist.

     'How're we doing, Mr Modo?'

     The University gardener saluted.

     'The tanks  are full, Mr  Archchancellor sir!' he said  brightly.  'And I've been stoking the hotwater boilers an day!'

     The other senior wizards clustered in the doorway.

     'Really,  Mustrum,  I really  think  this  is  most  unwise,' said  the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'It was surely sealed up for a purpose.'

     'Remember what it said on the door,' said the Dean.

     'Oh,  they  just wrote that on  it to keep people out,'  said Ridcully, opening a fresh bar of soap.

     'Wen, yes,' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. 'That's right. That's what people do.'

     'It's  a bathroom,' said Ridcully. 'You are all acting  as if it's some kind of a torture chamber.'