“Oh, yes. Hey, wow, there’s a lock and a handle and a brass finger plate and everything behind here—”
“What do you mean, a build up of life force?”
“—and the hinges, there’s a really good rising butts here, never had a door with—”
“Schleppel!”
“Just life force, Mr. Poons. You know. It’s a kind of force what you get in things that are alive? I thought you wizards knew about this sort of thing.”
Windle Poons opened his mouth to say something like “Of course we do,” before proceeding diplomatically to find out what the hell the bogeyman was talking about, and then remembered that he didn’t have to act like that now. That’s what he would have done if he was alive, but despite what Reg Shoe proclaimed, it was quite hard to be proud when you were dead. A bit stiff, perhaps, but not proud.
“Never heard of it,” he said. “What’s it building up for?”
“Don’t know. Very unseasonal. It ought to be dying down around now,” said Schleppel.
The floor shook again. Then the loose floorboard that had concealed Windle’s little fortune creaked, and started to put out shoots.
“What do you mean, unseasonal?” he said.
“You get a lot of it in the spring,” said the voice from behind the door. “Shoving the daffodils up out of the ground and that kind of stuff.”
“Never heard of it,” said Windle, fascinated.
“I thought you wizards knew everything about everything.”
Windle looked at his wizarding hat. Burial and tunnelling had not been kind to it, but after more than a century of wear it hadn’t been the height of haute couture to start with.
“There’s always something new to learn,” he said.
It was another dawn. Cyril the cockerel stirred on his perch.
The chalked words glowed in the half light.
He concentrated.
He took a deep breath.
“Dock-a-loodle-fod!”
Now that the memory problem was solved, there was only the dyslexia to worry about.
Up in the high fields the wind was strong and the sun was close and strong. Bill Door strode back and forth through the stricken grass of the hillside like a shuttle across a green weave.
He wondered if he’d ever felt wind and sunlight before. Yes, he’d felt them, he must have done. But he’d never experienced them like this; the way wind pushed at you, the way the sun made you hot. The way you could feel Time passing.
Carrying you with it.
There was a timid knocking at the barn door.
YES?
“Come on down here, Bill Door?”
He climbed down in the darkness and opened the door cautiously.
Miss Flitworth was shielding a candle with one hand.
“Um,” she said.