He read it again.
The match went out.
He lit another one, just to check that what he had read really did exist.
The message was still as strange, even third time around:
Dead? Depressed?
Feel like starting it all again?
Then why not come along to the
FRESH START CLUB
Thursdays, 12pm, 668 Elm Street
EVERY BODY WELCOME
The second match went out, taking the last of the oxygen with it.
Windle lay in the dark for a while, considering his next move and finishing off the celery.
Who’d have thought it?
And it suddenly dawned on the late Windle Poons that there was no such thing as somebody else’s problem, and that just when you thought the world had pushed you aside it turned out to be full of strangeness. He knew from experience that the living never found out half of what was really happening, because they were too busy being the living. The onlooker sees most of the game, he told himself.
It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane. But It was strange. It had things in it like screws that unscrewed themselves, and little written messages to the dead.
He resolved to find out what was going on. And then…if Death wasn’t going to come to him, he’d go to Death. He had his rights, after all. Yeah. He’d lead the biggest missing-person hunt of all time.
Windle grinned in the darkness.
Missing—believed Death.
Today was the first day of the rest of his life.
And Ankh-Morpork lay at his feet. Well, metaphorically. The only way was up.
He reached up, felt for the card in the dark, and pulled it free. He stuck it between his teeth.
Windle Poons braced his feet against the end of the box, pushed his hands past his head, and heaved.
The soggy loam of Ankh-Morpork moved slightly.
Windle paused out of habit to take a breath, and realized that there was no point. He pushed again. The end of the coffin splintered.
Windle pulled it toward him and tore the solid pine like paper. He was left with a piece of plank which would have been a totally useless spade for anyone with un-zombie-like strength.
Turning onto his stomach, tucking the earth around him with his impromptu spade and ramming it back with his feet, Windle Poons dug his way toward a fresh start.
Picture a landscape, a plain with rolling curves.
It’s late summer in the octarine grass country below the towering peaks of the high Ramtops, and the predominant colors are umber and gold. Heat sears the landscape. Grasshoppers sizzle, as in a frying pan. Even the air is too hot to move. It’s the hottest summer in living memory and, in these parts, that’s a long, long time.
Picture a figure on horseback, moving slowly along a road that’s an inch deep in dust between fields of corn that already promise an unusually rich harvest.
Picture a fence of baked, dead wood. There’s a notice pinned to it. The sun has faded the letters, but they are still readable.