Save yourselves!” Percy warned. “It is too late for us!”
Then he gasped and pointed to the spot where Frank was hiding. “Oh, no! Frank is turning into a crazy dolphin!”
Nothing happened.
“I said,” Percy repeated, “Frank is turning into a crazy dolphin!”
Frank stumbled out of nowhere, making a big show of grabbing his throat. “Oh, no,” he said, like he was reading from a teleprompter. “I am turning into a crazy dolphin.”
He began to change, his nose elongating into a snout, his skin becoming sleek and gray. He fell to the deck as a dolphin, his tail thumping against the boards.
The pirate crew disbanded in terror.

For there be divers sorts of death — some wherein the body remained; and in some it vanished quite away with the spirit.

Franz Kafka is dead.<p>He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. [...] They turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice.

But now more often the old stale hopeless weariness overcame him: the black sickness which almost no one else, certainly not his nearest dearest friends, could understand at all. The idea of giving up the world, which had given him for a time so much life-energy, appeared now as a sort of fake suicide, a ghastly play-image of his death. This fatal falseness-of-heart was what perhaps Father Damien, on further acquaintance, had now seen in him.

Swithin! And the fellow had gone and died, last November, at the age of seventy-nine, renewing the doubt whether Forsytes could live for ever, which had first arisen when Aunt Ann passed away.

For there be divers sorts of death—some wherein the body remaineth; and in some it vanisheth quite away with the spirit. This commonly occurreth only in solitude (such is God's will) and, none seeing the end, we say the man is lost, or gone on a long journey—which indeed he hath; but sometimes it hath happened in sight of many, as abundant testimony showeth. In one kind of death the spirit also dieth, and this it hath been known to do while yet the body was in vigor for many years. Sometimes, as is veritably attested, it dieth with the body, but after a season is raised up again in that place where the body did decay.

On Friday, April 27th, he took a walk in the afternoon. That night he fell violently ill. He remained conscious and when informed by the doctor that he could ‘live only a few days, he exclaimed ‘Good!’ Before losing consciousness he said to Mrs. Bevan (who was with him throughout the night) ‘Tell them I've had a wonderful life!’ By ‘them’ he undoubtedly meant his close friends. When I think of his profound pessimism, the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in which he drove his intellect, his need for love together with the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end he himself exclaimed that it had been ‘wonderful’! To me this seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance.

Il dort. Quoique le sort fût pour lui bien étrange,
Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n'eut plus son ange.
La chose simplement d'elle-même arriva,
Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le four s'en va.

Poorly (poor man) he lived; poorly (poor man) he died.

"When Dick was killed last week he looked like that, Flapping along the fire-step like a fish, After the blazing crump had knocked him flat…. "How many dead? As many as ever you wish. Don't count 'em; they're too many. Who'll buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?

"You mean he's dead too?" asked Suzy. "Yes," said Dusk. "This morning, in his cell. The guards outside were also slain, and only Sir Thursday's boots remained." "Sounds more like he escaped," Suzy said. "His feet were still in the boots," said Dusk.

"The man might have died in a fit; but then the jewels are missing," mused the Inspector, "Ha! I have a theory. These flashes come upon me at times... What do you think of this, Holmes? Sholto was, on his own confession, with his brother last night. The brother died in a fit, on which Sholto walked off the treasure! How's that?"
"On which the dead man very considerately got up and locked the door on the inside," said Holmes.

"Too bad. And Mozart, not long after writing The Magic Flute, had died — in his thirties — of kidney disease. And had been buried in an unmarked pauper's grave.

Thinking this, he wondered if Mozart had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal move along. This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name "Mozart" will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I will get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I'm part of the form-destroying process of entropy."

The old shepherd had died, or got drunk, or got rats, or got the sack, or a legacy, or got sane, or chucked it, or got lost, or found, or a wife, or had cut his throat, or hanged himself, or got into Parliament or the peerage—anyway, anything had happened to him that can happen to an old shepherd or any other man in the bush, and he wasn't there.