And at that moment the cobblestones came up to meet him.
This is usually a poetic way of saying that someone fell flat on their face. In this case, the cobblestones really came up to meet him. They fountained up, circled silently in the air above the alley for a moment, and then dropped like stones.
Windle stared at them. So did Lupine.
“That’s something you don’t often see,” said the wereman, after a while. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen stones flying before.”
“Or dropping like stones,” said Windle. He nudged one with the toe of his boot. It seemed perfectly happy with the role gravity had chosen for it.
“You’re a wizard—”
“Were a wizard,” said Windle.
“You were a wizard. What caused all that?”
“I think it was probably an inexplicable phenomenon,” said Windle. “There’s a lot of them about, for some reason. I wish I knew why.”
He prodded a stone again. It showed no inclination to move.
“I’d better be getting along,” said Lupine.
“What’s it like, being a wereman?” said Windle.
Lupine shrugged. “Lonely,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“You don’t fit in, you see. When I’m a wolf I remember what it’s like to be a man, and vice versa. Like…I mean…sometimes…sometimes, right, when I’m wolf-shaped, I run up into the hills…in the winter, you know, when there’s a crescent moon in the sky and a crust on the snow and the hills go on forever…and the other wolves, well, they feel what it’s like, of course, but they don’t know like I do. To feel and know at the same time. No one else knows what that’s like. No one else in the whole world could know what that’s like. That’s the bad part. Knowing there’s no one else…”
Windle became aware of teetering on the edge of a pit of sorrows. He never knew what to say in moments like this.
Lupine brightened up. “Come to that…what’s it like, being a zombie?”
“It’s okay. It’s not too bad.”
Lupine nodded.
“See you around,” he said, and strode off.
The streets were beginning to fill up as the population of Ankh-Morpork began its informal shift change between the night people and the day people. All of them avoided Windle. People didn’t bump into a zombie if they could help it.
He reached the University gates, which were now open, and made his way to his bedroom.
He’d need money, if he was moving out. He’d saved quite a lot over the years. Had he made a will? He’d been fairly confused the past ten years or so. He might have made one. Had he been confused enough to leave all his money to himself? He hoped so. There’d been practically no known cases of anyone successfully challenging their own will—
He levered up the floorboard by the end of his bed, and lifted out a bag of coins. He remembered he’d been saving up for his old age.
There was his diary. It was a five-year diary, he recalled, so in a technical sense Windle had wasted about—he did a quick calculation—yes, about three-fifths of his money.
Or more, when you came to think about it. After all, there wasn’t much on the pages. Windle hadn’t done anything worth writing down for years, or at least anything he’d been able to remember by the evening. There were just phases of the moon, lists of religious festivals, and the occasional sweet stuck to a page.
There was something else down there under the floor, too. He fumbled around in the dusty space and found a couple of smooth spheres. He pulled them out and stared at them, mystified. He shook them, and watched the tiny snowfalls. He read the writing, noting how it wasn’t so much writing as a drawing of writing. He reached down and picked up the third object; it was a little bent metal wheel. Just one little metal wheel. And, beside it, a broken sphere.
Windle stared at them.
Of course, he had been a bit non-compos mentis in his last thirty years or so, and maybe he’d worn his underwear outside his clothes and dribbled a bit, but…he’d collected souvenirs? And little wheels?
There was a cough behind him.