Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection Page 18

  The horse paused beside the obelisk. In the east the sky was lightening gently, a pearlish, pre-dawn luminescence that made the people of the graveyard uncomfortable and made them think about returning to their comfortable homes. Even so, not a one of them moved. They were watching the Lady on the Grey, each of them half-excited, half-scared. The dead are not superstitious, not as a rule, but they watched her as a Roman Augur might have watched the sacred crows circle, seeking wisdom, seeking a clue.

  And she spoke to them.

  In a voice like the chiming of a hundred tiny silver bells she said only, “The dead should have charity.” And she smiled.

  The horse, which had been contentedly ripping up and masticating a clump of thick grass, stopped then. The lady touched the horse’s neck, and it turned. It took several huge, clattering steps, then it was off the side of the hill and cantering across the sky. Its thunderous hooves became an early rumble of distant thunder, and in moments it was lost to sight.

  That, at least, was what the folk of the graveyard who had been on the hillside that night claimed had happened.

  The debate was over and ended, and, without so much as a show of hands, had been decided. The child called Nobody Owens would be given the Freedom of the Graveyard.

  Mother Slaughter and Josiah Worthington, Bart., accompanied Mr. Owens to the crypt of the old chapel, and they told Mrs. Owens the news.

  She seemed unsurprised by the miracle. “That’s right,” she said. “Some of them dun’t have a ha’porth of sense in their heads. But she does. Of course she does.”

  Before the sun rose on a thundering grey morning the child was fast asleep in the Owenses’ fine little tomb (for Master Owens had died the prosperous head of the local cabinetmaker’s guild, and the cabinetmakers had wanted to ensure that he was properly honored).

  Silas went out for one final journey before the sunrise. He found the tall house on the side of the hill, and he examined the three bodies he found there, and he studied the pattern of the knife-wounds. When he was satisfied he stepped out into the morning’s dark, his head churning with unpleasant possibilities, and he returned to the graveyard, to the chapel spire where he slept and waited out the days.

  In the little town at the bottom of the hill the man Jack was getting increasingly angry. The night had been one that he had been looking forward to for so long, the culmination of months—of years—of work. And the business of the evening had started so promisingly—three people down before any of them had even had a chance to cry out. And then…

  Then it had all gone so maddeningly wrong. Why on earth had he gone up the hill when the child had so obviously gone down the hill? By the time he had reached the bottom of the hill, the trail had gone cold. Someone must have found the child, taken it in, hidden it. There was no other explanation.

  A crack of thunder rang out, loud and sudden as a gunshot, and the rain began in earnest. The man Jack was methodical, and he began to plan his next move—the calls he would need to pay on certain of the townsfolk, people who would be his eyes and ears in the town.

  He did not need to tell the Convocation he had failed.

  Anyway, he told himself, edging under a shopfront as the morning rain came down like tears, he had not failed. Not yet. Not for years to come. There was plenty of time. Time to tie up this last piece of unfinished business. Time to cut the final thread.

  It was not until the police sirens sounded and first a police car, then an ambulance, then an unmarked police car with a siren blaring, sped past him on their way up the hill that, reluctantly, the man Jack turned up the collar of his coat, put his head down, and walked off into the morning. His knife was in his pocket, safe and dry inside its sheath, protected from the misery of the elements.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The New Friend

  BOD WAS A QUIET child with sober grey eyes and a mop of tousled, mouse-colored hair. He was, for the most part, obedient. He learned how to talk, and, once he had learned, he would pester the graveyard folk with questions. “Why amn’t I allowed out of the graveyard?” he would ask, or “How do I do what he just did?” or “Who lives in here?” The adults would do their best to answer his questions, but their answers were often vague, or confusing, or contradictory, and then Bod would walk down to the old chapel and talk to Silas.

  He would be there waiting at sunset, just before Silas awakened.

  His guardian could always be counted upon to explain matters clearly and lucidly and as simply as Bod needed in order to understand.

  “You aren’t allowed out of the graveyard—it’s aren’t, by the way, not amn’t, not these days—because it’s only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found. Outside would not be safe for you. Not yet.”

  “You go outside. You go outside every night.”

  “I am infinitely older than you, lad. And I am safe wherever I am.”

  “I’m safe there too.”

  “I wish that that were true. But as long as you stay here, you are safe.”

  Or,

  “How could you do that? Some skills can be attained by education, and some by practice, and some by time. Those skills will come if you study. Soon enough you will master Fading and Sliding and Dreamwalking. But some skills cannot be mastered by the living, and for those you must wait a little longer. Still, I do not doubt that you will acquire even those, in time.

  “You were given the Freedom of the Graveyard, after all,” Silas would tell him. “So the Graveyard is taking care of you. While you are here, you can see in the darkness. You can walk some of the ways that the living should not travel. The eyes of the living will slip from you. I too was given the Freedom of the Graveyard, although in my case it comes with nothing but the right of abode.”

  “I want to be like you,” said Bod, pushing out his lower lip.

  “No,” said Silas, firmly. “You do not.”

  Or,

  “Who lies there? You know, Bod, in many cases it is written on the stone. Can you read yet? Do you know your alphabet?”

  “My what?”

  Silas shook his head, but said nothing. Mr. and Mrs. Owens had never been much for reading when they were alive, and there were no alphabet books in the graveyard.

  The next night, Silas appeared at the front of the Owenses’ cozy tomb carrying three large books—two of them brightly colored alphabet books (A is for Apple, B is for Ball) and a copy of The Cat in the Hat. He also had paper and a packet of wax crayons. Then he walked Bod around the graveyard, placing the boy’s small fingers on the newest and clearest of the headstones and the plaques, and taught Bod how to find the letters of the alphabet when they appeared, beginning with the sharp steeple of the capital A.

  Silas gave Bod a quest—to find each of the twenty-six letters in the graveyard—and Bod finished it, proudly, with the discovery of Ezekiel Ulmsley’s stone, built into the side of the wall in the old chapel. His guardian was pleased with him.

  Every day Bod would take his paper and crayons into the graveyard and he would copy names and words and numbers as best he could, and each night, before Silas would go off into the world, Bod would make Silas explain to him what he had written, and make him translate the snatches of Latin which had, for the most part, baffled the Owenses.

  A sunny day: bumblebees explored the wildflowers that grew in the corner of the graveyard, dangling from the gorse and the bluebells, droning their deep lazy buzz, while Bod lay in the spring sunlight watching a bronze-colored beetle wandering across the stone of Geo. Reeder, his wife, Dorcas, and their son Sebastian (Fidelis ad Mortem). Bod had copied down their inscription and now he was only thinking about the beetle when somebody said,

  “Boy? What’re you doing?”

  Bod looked up. There was someone on the other side of the gorse bush, watching him.

  “Nuffing,” said Bod. He stuck out his tongue.

  The face on the other side of the gorse bush crumpled into a gargoy
le, tongue sticking out, eyes popping, then returned to girl.

  “That was good,” said Bod, impressed.

  “I can make really good faces,” said the girl. “Look at this one.” She pushed her nose up with one finger, creased her mouth into a huge, satisfied smile, squinted her eyes, puffed out her cheeks. “Do you know what that was?”

  “No.”

  “It was a pig, silly.”

  “Oh.” Bod thought. “You mean, like P is for Pig?”

  “Of course like that. Hang on.”

  She came around the gorse bush and stood next to Bod, who got to his feet. She was a little older than he was, a little taller, and was dressed in bright colors, yellow and pink and orange. Bod, in his grey winding sheet, felt dowdy and drab.

  “How old are you?” said the girl. “What are you doing here? Do you live here? What’s your name?”

  “I don’t know,” said Bod.

  “You don’t know your name?” said the girl. “’Course you do. Everybody knows their own name. Fibber.”

  “I know my name,” said Bod. “And I know what I’m doing here. But I don’t know the other thing you said.”

  “How old you are?”

  Bod nodded.

  “Well,” said the girl, “what was you when you was last birthday?”

  “I didn’t,” said Bod. “I never was.”

  “Everybody gets birthdays. You mean you never had cake or candles or stuff?”

  Bod shook his head. The girl looked sympathetic. “Poor thing. I’m five. I bet you’re five too.”

  Bod nodded enthusiastically. He was not going to argue with his new friend. She made him happy.

  Her name was Scarlett Amber Perkins, she told him, and she lived in a flat with no garden. Her mother was sitting on a bench by the chapel at the bottom of the hill, reading a magazine, and she had told Scarlett to be back in half an hour, and to get some exercise, and not to get into trouble or talk to strangers.

  “I’m a stranger,” pointed out Bod.

  “You’re not,” she said, definitely. “You’re a little boy.” And then she said, “And you’re my friend. So you can’t be a stranger.”

  Bod smiled rarely, but he smiled then, hugely and with delight. “I’m your friend,” he said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bod. It’s short for Nobody.”

  She laughed then. “Funny sort of a name,” she said. “What are you doing now?”

  “ABCs,” said Bod. “From the stones. I have to write them down.”

  “Can I do it with you?”

  For a moment Bod felt protective—the gravestones were his, weren’t they?—and then he realized how foolish he was being, and he thought that there were things that might be more fun done in the sunlight with a friend. He said, “Yes.”

  They copied down names from tombstones, Scarlett helping Bod pronounce unfamiliar names and words, Bod telling Scarlett what the Latin meant, if he already knew, and it seemed much too soon when they heard a voice further down the hill shouting, “Scarlett!”

  The girl thrust the crayons and paper back at Bod. “I got to go,” she said.

  “I’ll see you next time,” said Bod. “Won’t I?”

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “Here,” he said. And he stood and watched her as she ran down the hill.

  On the way home Scarlett told her mother about the boy called Nobody who lived in the graveyard and had played with her, and that night Scarlett’s mother mentioned it to Scarlett’s father, who said that he believed that imaginary friends were a common phenomenon at that age, and nothing at all to be concerned about, and that they were fortunate to have a nature reserve so near.

  After that initial meeting, Scarlett never saw Bod first. On days when it was not raining one of her parents would bring her to the graveyard. The parent would sit on the bench and read while Scarlett would wander off the path, a splash of fluorescent green or orange or pink, and explore. Then, always sooner rather than later, she would see a small, grave face and grey eyes staring up at her from beneath a mop of mouse-colored hair, and then Bod and she would play—hide-and-seek, sometimes, or climbing things, or being quiet and watching the rabbits behind the old chapel.

  Bod would introduce Scarlett to some of his other friends. That she could not see them did not seem to matter. She had already been told firmly by her parents that Bod was imaginary and that there was nothing at all wrong with that—her mother had, for a few days, even insisted on laying an extra place at the dinner table for Bod—so it came as no surprise to her that Bod also had imaginary friends. He would pass on their comments to her.

  “Bartleby says that thou dost have a face like unto a squishèd plum,” he would tell her.

  “So does he. And why does he talk so funny? Doesn’t he mean squashed tomato?”

  “I don’t think that they had tomatoes when he comes from,” said Bod. “And that’s just how they talk then.”

  Scarlett was happy. She was a bright, lonely child, whose mother worked for a distant university teaching people she never met face-to-face, grading English papers sent to her over the computer, and sending messages of advice or encouragement back. Her father taught particle physics, but there were, Scarlett told Bod, too many people who wanted to teach particle physics and not enough people who wanted to learn it, so Scarlett’s family had to keep moving to different university towns, and in each town her father would hope for a permanent teaching position that never came.

  “What’s particle physics?” asked Bod.

  Scarlett shrugged. “Well,” she said. “There’s atoms, which is things that is too small to see, that’s what we’re all made of. And there’s things that’s smaller than atoms, and that’s particle physics.”

  Bod nodded and decided that Scarlett’s father was probably interested in imaginary things.

  Bod and Scarlett wandered the graveyard together every weekday afternoon, tracing names with their fingers, writing them down. Bod would tell Scarlett whatever he knew of the inhabitants of the grave or mausoleum or tomb, and she would tell him stories that she had been read or learned, and sometimes she would tell him about the world outside, about cars and buses and television and aeroplanes (Bod had seen them flying high overhead, had thought them loud silver birds, but had never been curious about them until now). He in his turn would tell her about the days when the people in the graves had been alive—how Sebastian Reeder had been to London Town and had seen the Queen, who had been a fat woman in a fur cap who had glared at everyone and spoke no English. Sebastian Reeder could not remember which queen she had been, but he did not think she had been queen for very long.

  “When was this?” Scarlett asked.

  “He died in 1583, it says on his tombstone, so before then.”

  “Who is the oldest person here. In the whole graveyard?” asked Scarlett.

  Bod frowned. “Probably Caius Pompeius. He came here a hundred years after the Romans first got here. He told me about it. He liked the roads.”

  “So he’s the oldest?”

  “I think so.”

  “Can we make a little house in one of those stone houses?”

  “You can’t get in. It’s locked. They all are.”

  “Can you get in?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why can’t I?”

  “The graveyard,” he explained. “I got the Freedom of the Graveyard. It lets me go places.”

  “I want to go in the stone house and make little houses.”

  “You can’t.”

  “You’re just mean.”

  “Not.”

  “Meany.”

  “Not.”

  Scarlett put her hands into the pocket of her anorak and walked down the hill without saying good-bye, convinced that Bod was holding out on her, and at the same time suspecting that she was being unfair, which made her angrier.

  That night, over dinner, she asked her mother and father if there was anyone in the country befo
re the Romans came.

  “Where did you hear about the Romans?” asked her father.

  “Everybody knows,” said Scarlett, with withering scorn. “Was there?”

  “There were Celts,” said her mother. “They were here first. They go back before the Romans. They were the people that the Romans conquered.”

  On the bench beside the old chapel, Bod was having a similar conversation.

  “The oldest?” said Silas. “Honestly, Bod, I don’t know. The oldest in the graveyard that I’ve encountered is Caius Pompeius. But there were people here before the Romans came. Lots of them, going back a long time. How are your letters coming along?”

  “Good, I think. When do I learn joined-up letters?”

  Silas paused. “I have no doubt,” he said, after a moment’s reflection, “that there are, among the many talented individuals interred here, at least a smattering of teachers. I shall make inquiries.”

  Bod was thrilled. He imagined a future in which he could read everything, in which all stories could be opened and discovered.

  When Silas had left the graveyard to go about his own affairs, Bod walked to the willow tree beside the old chapel, and called Caius Pompeius.

  The old Roman came out of his grave with a yawn. “Ah. Yes. The living boy,” he said. “How are you, living boy?”

  Bod said, “I do very well, sir.”

  “Good. I am pleased to hear it.” The old Roman’s hair was pale in the moonlight, and he wore the toga in which he had been buried, with, beneath it, a thick woolen vest and leggings because this was a cold country at the edge of the world, and the only place colder was Caledonia to the North, where the men were more animal than human and covered in orange fur, and were too savage even to be conquered by the Romans, so would soon be walled off in their perpetual winter.

  “Are you the oldest?” asked Bod.

  “The oldest in the graveyard? I am.”

  “So you were the first to be buried here?”

  A hesitation. “Almost the first,” said Caius Pompeius. “Before the Celts there were other people on this island. One of them was buried here.”