He closed the watch again and looked around desperately. No one else seemed anxious to come too near Windle Poons. The Bursar felt it was up to him to make polite conversation. He surveyed possible topics. They all presented problems.
Windle Poons helped him out.
“I’m thinking of coming back as a woman,” he said conversationally.
The Bursar opened and shut his mouth a few times.
“I’m looking forward to it,” Poons went on. “I think it might, mm, be jolly good fun.”
The Bursar riffled desperately through his limited repertoire of small talk relating to women. He leaned down to Windle’s gnarled ear.
“Isn’t there rather a lot of,” he struck out aimlessly, “washing things? And making beds and cookery and all that sort of thing?”
“Not in the kind of, mm, life I have in mind,” said Windle firmly.
The Bursar shut his mouth. The Archchancellor banged on a table with a spoon.
“Brothers—” he began, when there was something approaching silence. This prompted a loud and ragged chorus of cheering.
“—As you all know we are here tonight to mark the, ah, retirement”—nervous laughter—“of our old friend and colleague Windle Poons. You know, seeing old Windle sitting here tonight puts me in mind, as luck would have it, of the story of the cow with three wooden legs. It appears that there was this cow, and—”
The Bursar let his mind wander. He knew the story. The Archchancellor always mucked up the punch line, and in any case he had other things on his mind.
He kept looking back at the little table.
The Bursar was a kindly if nervous soul, and quite enjoyed his job. Apart from anything else, no other wizard wanted it. Lots of wizards wanted to be Archchancellor, for example, or the head of one of the eight orders of magic, but practically no wizards wanted to spend lots of time in an office shuffling bits of paper and doing sums. All the paperwork of the University tended to accumulate in the Bursar’s office, which meant that he went to bed tired at nights but at least slept soundly and didn’t have to check very hard for unexpected scorpions in his nightshirt.
Killing off a wizard of a higher grade was a recognized way of getting advancement in the orders. However, the only person likely to want to kill the Bursar was someone else who derived a quiet pleasure from columns of numbers, all neatly arranged, and people like that don’t often go in for murder.*
He recalled his childhood, long ago, in the Ramtop Mountains. He and his sister used to leave a glass of wine and a cake out every Hogswatch-night for the Hogfather. Things had been different, then. He’d been a lot younger and hadn’t known much and had probably been a lot happier.
For example, he hadn’t known that he might one day be a wizard and join other wizards in leaving a glass of wine and a cake and a rather suspect chicken vol-au-vent and a paper party hat for…
…someone else.
There’d been Hogswatch parties, too, when he was a little boy. They’d always follow a certain pattern. Just when all the children were nearly sick with excitement, one of the grown-ups would say, archly, “I think we’re going to have a special visitor!” and, amazingly on cue, there’d be a suspicious ringing of hog bells outside the window and in would come…
…in would come…
The Bursar shook his head. Someone’s grandad in false whiskers, of course. Some jolly old boy with a sack of toys, stamping the snow off his boots. Someone who gave you something.
Whereas tonight…
Of course, old Windle probably felt different about it. After one hundred and thirty years, death probably had a certain attraction. You probably became quite interested in finding out what happened next.
The Archchancellor’s convoluted anecdote wound jerkily to its close. The assembled wizards laughed dutifully, and then tried to work out the joke.
The Bursar looked surreptitiously at his watch. It was now twenty minutes past nine.
Windle Poons made a speech. It was long and rambling and disjointed and went on about the good old days and he seemed to think that most of the people around him were people who had been, in fact, dead for about fifty years, but that didn’t matter because you got into the habit of not listening to old Windle.
The Bursar couldn’t tear his eyes away from his watch. From inside came the squeak of the treadle as the demon patiently pedalled his way toward infinity.
Twenty-five minutes past the hour.
The Bursar wondered how it was supposed to happen. Did you hear—I think we’re going to have a very special visitor—hoofbeats outside?
Did the door actually open or did He come through it? Silly question. He was renowned for His ability to get into sealed places—especially into sealed places, if you thought about it logically. Seal yourself in anywhere and it was only a matter of time.