Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett [31]
“That one’ll do. I never liked the pattern.”
Mrs. Cake took an orange vase with pink peonies on it from her daughter’s paws.
“Are you still there, One-Man-Bucket?” she said.
—I’ll make you regret the day you ever died, you whining—
“Catch.”
She dropped the vase onto the stove. It smashed.
A moment later, there was a sound from the Other Side. If a discorporate spirit had hit another discorporate spirit with the ghost of a vase, it would have sounded just like that.
right, said the voice of One-Man-Bucket, and there’s more where that came from, okay?
The Cakes, mother and hairy daughter, nodded at each other.
When One-Man-Bucket spoke again, his voice dripped with smug satisfaction.
just a bit of an altercation about seniority here, he said. just sorting out a bit of personal space. got a lot of problems here, Mrs. Cake. it’s like a waiting room—
There was a shrill clamor of other disembodied voices.
—could you get a message, please, to Mr.—
—tell her there’s a bag of coins on the ledge up the chimney—
—Agnes is not to have the silverware after what she said about our Molly—
—I didn’t have time to feed the cat, could someone go—
shutupshutup! That was One-Man-Bucket again. you’ve got no idea, have you? this is ghost talk, is it? feed the cat? whatever happened to “I am very happy here, and waiting for you to join me”?
—listen, if anyone else joins us, we’ll be standing on one another’s heads—
that’s not the point. that’s not the point, that’s all I’m saying. when you’re a spirit, there’s things you gotta say. Mrs. Cake?
“Yes?” you got to tell someone about this.
Mrs. Cake nodded.
“Now you all go away,” she said. “I’m getting one of my headaches.”
The crystal ball faded.
“Well!” said Ludmilla.
“I ain’t going to tell no priests,” said Mrs. Cake firmly.
It wasn’t that Mrs. Cake wasn’t a religious woman. She was, as has already been hinted, a very religious woman indeed. There wasn’t a temple, church, mosque or small group of standing stones anywhere in the city that she hadn’t attended at one time or another, as a result of which she was more feared than an Age of Enlightenment; the mere sight of Mrs. Cake’s small fat body on the threshold was enough to stop most priests dead in the middle of their invocation.
Dead. That was the point. All the religions had very strong views about talking to the dead. And so did Mrs. Cake. They held that it was sinful. Mrs. Cake held that it was only common courtesy.
This usually led to a fierce ecclesiastical debate which resulted in Mrs. Cake giving the chief priest what she called “a piece of her mind.” There were so many pieces of Mrs. Cake’s mind left around the city now that it was quite surprising that there was enough left to power Mrs. Cake but, strangely enough, the more pieces of her mind she gave away the more there seemed to be left.
There was also the question of Ludmilla. Ludmilla was a problem. The late Mr. Cake, gods-resthissoul, had never so much as even whistled at the full moon his whole life, and Mrs. Cake had dark suspicions that Ludmilla was a throwback to the family’s distant past in the mountains, or maybe had contracted genetics as a child. She was pretty certain her mother had once alluded circumspectly to the fact that Great-uncle Erasmus sometimes had to eat his meals under the table. Either way, Ludmilla was a decent upright young woman for three weeks in every four and a perfectly well-behaved hairy wolf thing for the rest of the time.
Priests often failed to see it that way. Since by the time Mrs. Cake fell out with whatever priests* were currently moderating between her and the gods, she had usually already taken over the flower arrangements, altar dusting, temple cleaning, sacrificial stone scrubbing, honorary vestigial virgining, has-sock repairing and every other vital religious support role by sheer force of personality, her departure resulted in total chaos.
Mrs. Cake buttoned up her coat.
“It won’t work,”