The first rider's mount was a pale horse—white, but still pale, in a Procol Harum sort of way, an otherworldly white, a paler than Earthly white. Which made sense. The horseman was shrouded (that made sense too) in a jet-black hooded robe, actually even blacker than jet, nightmare black one might say. The scythe gripped in his bony hand curved like a sickle moon, or the Cheshire Cat's grin, if the Cheshire Cat suffered from terminal depression. All of it, horse, rider, and reaping implement, look somewhat transparent to me and you. To inhabitants of the Earth, as of this particular moment, they are completely invisible.
As he surveyed the straining fault lines in Gravity Falls, where Reality ran up against Impossibility and subducted into the depths of Madness, Death clucked his tongue. Purely metaphorically, of course since he lacked the wherewithal, but he produced a tongue-clucking sound. "Very sloppy," he muttered.
He heard hoof beats behind him and saw—without looking, because he is like that—another rider, mounted on a furiously galloping red horse, coming up from behind. Death sat unmoving in the saddle until the newcomer suddenly reined in beside him and shouted, "Let's get it ONNNNNN!" in tones that made Death wince and small birds fall from trees.
"Good afternoon, War," said Death.
"My Apocalypse Alarm went off!" War shouted, brandishing a double-headed battle axe in one hand and an AK47 in the other. "BOOYAHHHH!" he added, spraying spittle that smoked as it flew. He clanked as he rocked in the saddle, his World War II-era helmet clattering on his late-medieval Italian gorget (worn over a Kevlar vest). The bandoliers of hollow-point cartridges added their festive jangling, too. "I wanna see some BLOOOOD! I'm ready to RUMMMMBLE!"
"Yes, well, hold that thought," Death said in his odd voice, dry as the whisper of sand through an hourglass.
"Here comes Famine," War said, turning in the saddle to look behind.
These hoof beats were nothing like War's steed's had been: Slow, uncertain, as though the beast were stumbling along. This horse was black and so lean that a mummy would look fat by comparison. If you'd had a mallet, you could easily have played "Heart and Soul" on the xylophone of the animal's ribs. The rider, by contrast, was rotund, not to say orbicular. His rags had been designed for a much thinner person, and his thighs strained the material the way a German sausage strains its casing. "I was having a snack," he complained as he came up between War and Death.
"Put on some weight, haven't you?" War asked, frowning at the newcomer.
"You don't get proper anthropomorphic abstractions these days," Death muttered. "You know, if you were a human being, you'd have been mine by heart attack at least five years ago."
"Can't help it," Famine whined. "I'm always so hungry, and every drive-thru these days super-sizes everything for just a few pennies more. It's a curse, that's what it is."
"We ready?" War asked, spurring his horse's flanks.
"No," Death said. "Where's Pestilence?"
"Oh," Famine said. "Sorry, forgot. She called in sick."
Death put a bony palm to his bony forehead. "Well, really. How are we to have a proper Apocalypse at all?"
"We'll get through it," War said. "Famine's big enough for two."
"That's weightist!" whined Famine.
"Where's the action?" bellowed War.
"Do you see that floating pyramid?" Death asked, pointing up to a spot high above what had until recently been a small Oregon town. "Right in there."
"Let's end it all!" Death said, firing the AK47. Bullets sizzled through both Famine and Death, though they, being insubstantial, did not feel or react to them. However, one slug did knock off a gnome's hat.
"HOLD!" roared Death, and they held, looking at him in surprise. He was usually a soft-spoken apparition. His clients did the screamy bits.
When he had their attention, Death said, "The Apocalypse is, as it were, balanced between probabilities. If Bill Cipher—"
The other two hissed at the name. "I hate that little masonry son of a brick," War growled.
"IF," Death repeated, overriding the observations of the other, "IF, I say, Bill Cipher discovers the key formula that will unlock the weirdness-containment dome, then the death of the Earth and indeed of this particular reality is upon us. If he fails, then this is only a drill."
"Let's go into the pyramid and see what happens," Famine said. "Then maybe Denny's?"
"We are already there."
Without physically moving—the horses are really just for tradition and show, though it must be said that Death treated his own mount with loving care and the horse in return adored him and was so utterly loyal to him that the others sometimes privately remarked it was as though he were riding a bleached, oversized Golden Retriever. But actually the horses were surplus to requirements, for when the Four Horsemen wanted to be in a place, there they were.
The horses stood on air, which did not seem to alarm them unduly. Below them, a man offered his hand to the pyramidal creature that, in this dimension, was the projection of Bill Cipher. They shook hands, Bill leaped out of his body and into the man's—the man fell on the floor—
"It's done!" shouted War.
"No," Death said coldly. "That is not Stanford Pines. It's his brother Stanley."
"Hey," protested Famine. "Spoiler alert!"
"How do you know?" War asked. "They're identical."
"Trust me to know my clients." Death waved bony fingers in dismissal. "You gentlemen may return home. There will be no Apocalypse this day."
"How about you?" asked War.
"I still have business here."
"Well," grumbled War, "I was halfway through a mission in Call of Duty."
"It's time for the Early Bird Special at Salty's in Portland," Famine added.
Then Death alone watched the events unfolding. When Stanford—the real one—began to erase his brother's mind, Death understood, and he grinned.
Of course, he always grinned, but this time he meant it. And then he was elsewhere, too. . ..
"Oh, man!" moaned a voice of nearly indefinite gender, certainly male but with undertones of a seductive yet deadly queen bee's buzz. "I'm wiped out!" The figure, a yellow triangle with one slit-pupiled eye, reached to pick up a battered, crooked stovepipe hat and with a pipe-cleaner arm straightened its only other item of clothing, a black bowtie. His stony body showed gaps and cracks and he grated when he moved. "What happened? Where am I?" He tried to float in the air, but for some reason remained earthbound. Well, ground bound, anyway. He shuffled around in a circle. Behind him reared a sheer stone monolith, soaring up into a black sky in which no star winked. Before him stretched a desert of ebony sand.
"You," said a voice, "it appears, are between a rock and a hard place."
Bill spun and for the first time noticed the hooded figure, no longer mounted, but standing right beside him. "Whoa," he said. "Black robe, white bones—I like your fashion statement! Who's your tailor?"
Ignoring that, Death said, "Bill Cipher, I have come for you."
"You the Über driver? I'm ready to get the heck out of Dodge! Hey, there's an extra twenty in it for you if you drop me off near my old buddy Ford."
"Guess again."
"Ummm—not a clue. My name's Bill Cipher. Put 'er there." When Death ignored his outstretched hand, the voice became a little uncertain: "Don't leave me . . . hangin'?"
"You should not have meddled in the continuum where I have dominion over final things. I am Death," said Death.
Bill backed away, holding up both hands. "Hey, baby, there's some mistake." He laughed, sounding a bit hysterical. "You nailed it: I'm not even from this continuum, pal! I can't die!"
"An interesting hypothesis. Let us test it."
Now Bill conjured up anger from some depth within him. "Listen, buddy, I know my rights! I know my lefts! Put 'em up!"
When his left jab went right through Death to no apparent effect, Bill whined, "No fair being insubstantial!" He took off his shabby hat and seemed to try to look apologetic, making his eye big and round, like that of a Cyclopean puppy. "Gimme a break, friend. I can't die, I tell you—the most you can do is send me back to my own dimension, and then eventually I'll find my way back anyhow, so let me just return to Earth and finish what I started."
"Part of that is true," Death agreed. "I can only return you to your own place. However, nothing says I have to send you back in one piece."
The scythe swung with a hiss as soft as a spider spinning a web, cut through Bill Cipher—and a stream of something halfway between steam and yellow dust poured out of the wound, spiraling away into the blackness above. "What are you doing?" shrieked Bill, his voice thinning by the nanosecond. "You're reducing me to molecules!"
"Which will be spread over a great many parsecs of your own dimension," Death agreed. "I estimate you can gather them all together again, if you work at it patiently for, oh, a trillion years."
"I'll be back! I'll be back!"
Death began to hum a tune: "I'll Be Seeing You."
The last sound the last of Bill made was a high scream of outrage and despair, fury and woe. It died without an echo.
For a moment Death stood in that place of endless night, Then, because he reflected that he still had business of a kind, he was in another place.
Inside the Mystery Shack, a baffled Stanley Pines sat in a chair as his grand-niece Mabel desperately thumbed through a scrapbook, saying, "Don't you remember?"
Of course he doesn't, Death thought. It would take a miracle.
And miracles were not in his job description.
Yet—the thought of this man's sacrifice for these grief-stricken people—the man who was his brother, the children to whom he was a grand-uncle—made Death pause. Sometimes Death can be kind. And always Death has an ability that is not necessarily a part of his job, but which he always threw in as an extra service to his clients. So now—
He pointed.
Stanley Pines's whole life began to flash before his eyes.
He said something to a pig, and the girl yelled, "It's working!"
Well, let her take the credit. Death suddenly was standing outside the building. He put two phalanges between his teeth and whistled. It should have required lips, but somehow he whistled.
His pale horse appeared and Death climbed into the saddle. Death reflected. He had clients to visit. Miles to go. Promises to keep. "Let's go," he said to his horse, and silence fell in the empty clearing near the Shack. Muted human laughter suddenly rang from within it, startling a woodpecker that flew away. A gnome scuttling through the undergrowth seized and ate a hapless field mouse, and so life and death resumed their eternal waltz to the music of time.