'Who were you expecting, precisely?' he said.
'Death,' said the witch, simply. 'It's part of the arrangement, you see. One gets to know the time of one's death in advance, and one is guaranteed – personal attention.'
'I'm it,'said Mort.
'It?'
'The personal attention. He sent me. I work for him. No-one else would have me.' Mort paused. This was all wrong. He'd be sent home again in disgrace. His first bit of responsibility, and he'd ruined it. He could already hear people laughing at him.
The wail started in the depths of his embarrassment and blared out like a foghorn. 'Only this is my first real job and it's all gone wrong!'
The scythe fell to the floor with a clatter, slicing a piece off the table leg and cutting a flagstone in half.
Goodie watched him for some time, with her head on one side. Then she said, 'I see. What is your name, young man?'
'Mort,' sniffed Mort. 'Short for Mortimer.'
'Well, Mort, I expect you've got an hourglass somewhere about your person,'
Mort nodded vaguely. He reached down to his belt and produced the glass. The witch inspected it critically.
'Still a minute or so,' she said. 'We don't have much time to lose. Just give me a moment to lock p.'
'But you don't understand!' Mort wailed. 'I'll mess it all up! I've never done this before!'
She patted his hand. 'Neither have I,' she said. 'We can learn together. Now pick up the scythe and try to act your age, there's a good boy.'
Against his protestations she shooed him out into the snow and followed behind him, pulling 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.