Soul Music - Time Travel

'I don't know how you do this,' Susan whispered, 'but you must be able to do it, and you know where I want to go.'

The horse appeared to nod. Albert had said that Binky was a genuine flesh-and-blood horse, but maybe you couldn't be ridden by Death for hundreds of years without learning something. He looked as though he'd been pretty bright to start with.


Binky began to trot, and then canter, and then gallop. And then the sky flickered, just once.

Susan had expected more than that. Flashing stars, some sort of explosion of rainbow colours . . . not just a flicker. It seemed a rather dismissive way of travelling nearly seventeen years.

The cornfields had gone, but the garden was pretty much the same. There was the strange topiary and the pond with the skeletal fish. There were, pushing jolly wheelbarrows and carrying tiny scythes, what might have been garden gnomes in a mortal garden but here were cheery little skeletons in black robes. Things tended not to change.

The stables were a little different, though. Binky was in them, for a start.

He whinnied quietly as Susan led him into an empty stall next to himself.

'I'm sure you two know each other,' she said. She'd never expected it to work, but it had to, didn't it? Time was something that happened to other people, wasn't it?

She slipped into the house.

NO. I CANNOT BE BIDDEN. I CANNOT BE FORCED. I WILL ONLY DO THAT WHICH I KNOW TO BE RIGHT . . .

Susan crept along behind the shelves of lifetimers. No-one noticed her. When you are watching Death fight, you don't notice shadows in the background.

They'd never told her about this. Parents never do. Your father could be Death's apprentice and your mother Death's adopted daughter, but that's just fine detail when they become Parents. Parents were never young. They were merely waiting to become Parents.

Susan reached the end of the shelves.

Death was standing over her father . . . she corrected herself, the boy who would be her father.

Three red marks burned on his cheek where Death had struck him. Susan raised a hand to the pale marks on her own face.

***

Soul Music - p97-98