Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection Page 20
“Who says?”
“Silas. My family. Everybody.”
She was silent.
Her father called, “Scarlett! Come on, love. Time to go. You’ve had your last trip to the graveyard. Now let’s go home.”
Scarlett said to Bod, “You’re brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don’t care if you are imaginary.” Then she fled down the path back the way they had come, to her parents and the world.
CHAPTER THREE
The Hounds of God
ONE GRAVE IN EVERY graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it—waterstained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like a fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.
There was one in Bod’s graveyard.
There is one in every graveyard.
Silas was leaving.
Bod had been upset by this when he had first learned about it. He was no longer upset. He was furious.
“But why?” said Bod.
“I told you. I need to obtain some information. In order to do that, I have to travel. To travel, I must leave here. We have already been over all this.”
“What’s so important that you have to go away?” Bod’s six-year-old mind tried to imagine something that could make Silas want to leave him, and failed. “It’s not fair.”
His guardian was unperturbed. “It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is.”
Bod was not impressed. “You’re meant to look after me. You said.”
“As your guardian I have responsibility for you, yes. Fortunately, I am not the only individual in the world willing to take on this responsibility.”
“Where are you going anyway?”
“Out. Away. There are things I need to uncover that I cannot uncover here.”
Bod snorted and walked off, kicking at imaginary stones. On the northwestern side of the graveyard things had become very overgrown and tangled, far beyond the ability of the groundskeeper or the Friends of the Graveyard to tame, and he ambled over there, and woke a family of Victorian children who had all died before their tenth birthdays, and they played at hide-and-go-seek in the moonlight in the ivy-twined jungle. Bod tried to pretend that Silas was not leaving, that nothing was going to change, but when the game was done and he ran back to the old chapel, he saw two things that changed his mind.
The first thing he saw was a bag. It was, Bod knew the moment he laid eyes on it, Silas’s bag. It was at least a hundred and fifty years old, a thing of beauty, black leather with brass fittings and a black handle, the kind of bag a Victorian doctor or undertaker might have carried, containing every implement that might have been needed. Bod had never seen Silas’s bag before, he had not even known that Silas had a bag, but it was the sort of bag that could only have belonged to Silas. Bod tried to peek inside it, but it was closed with a large brass padlock. It was too heavy for him to lift.
That was the first thing.
The second thing was sitting on the bench by the chapel.
“Bod,” said Silas. “This is Miss Lupescu.”
Miss Lupescu was not pretty. Her face was pinched and her expression was disapproving. Her hair was grey, although her face seemed too young for grey hair. Her front teeth were slightly crooked. She wore a bulky mackintosh and a man’s tie around her neck.
“How do you do, Miss Lupescu?” said Bod.
Miss Lupescu said nothing. She sniffed. Then she looked at Silas and said, “So. This is the boy.” She got up from her seat and walked all around Bod, nostrils flared, as if she were sniffing him. When she had made a complete circuit, she said, “You will report to me on waking, and before you go to sleep. I have rented a room in a house over there.” She pointed to a roof just visible from where they stood. “However, I shall spend my time in this graveyard. I am here as a historian, researching the history of old graves. You understand, boy? Da?”
“Bod,” said Bod. “It’s Bod. Not boy.”
“Short for Nobody,” she said. “A foolish name. Also, Bod is a pet name. A nickname. I do not approve. I will call you ‘boy.’ You will call me ‘Miss Lupescu.’”
Bod looked up at Silas, pleadingly, but there was no sympathy on Silas’s face. He picked up his bag and said, “You will be in good hands with Miss Lupescu, Bod. I am sure that the two of you will get on.”
“We won’t!” said Bod. “She’s horrible!”
“That,” said Silas, “was a very rude thing to say. I think you should apologize, don’t you?”
Bod didn’t, but Silas was looking at him and Silas was carrying his black bag, and about to leave for no one knew how long, so he said, “I’m sorry, Miss Lupescu.”
At first she said nothing in reply. She merely sniffed. Then she said, “I have come a long way to look after you, boy. I hope you are worth it.”
Bod could not imagine hugging Silas, so he held out his hand and Silas bent over and gently shook it, engulfing Bod’s small, grubby hand with his huge, pale one. Then, lifting his black leather bag as if it were weightless, he walked down the path and out of the graveyard.
Bod told his parents about it.
“Silas has gone,” he said.
“He’ll be back,” said Mr. Owens, cheerfully. “Don’t you worry your head about that, Bod. Like a bad penny, as they say.”
Mrs. Owens said, “Back when you were born he promised us that if he had to leave, he would find someone else to bring you food and keep an eye on you, and he has. He’s so reliable.”
Silas had brought Bod food, true, and left it in the crypt each night for him to eat, but this was, as far as Bod was concerned, the least of the things that Silas did for him. He gave advice, cool, sensible, and unfailingly correct; he knew more than the graveyard folk did, for his nightly excursions into the world outside meant that he was able to describe a world that was current, not hundreds of years out of date; he was unflappable and dependable, had been there every night of Bod’s life, so the idea of the little chapel without its only inhabitant was one that Bod found difficult to conceive of; most of all, he made Bod feel safe.
Miss Lupescu also saw her job as more than bringing Bod food. She did that too, though.
“What is that?” asked Bod, horrified.
“Good food,” said Miss Lupescu. They were in the crypt. She had put two plastic containers on the tabletop, and opened the lids. She pointed to the first: “Is beetroot-barley-stew-soup.” She pointed to the second. “Is salad. Now, you eat both. I make them for you.”
Bod stared up at her to see if this was a joke. Food from Silas mostly came in packets, purchased from the kind of places that sold food late at night and asked no questions. No one had ever brought him food in a plastic container with a lid before. “It smells horrible,” he said.
“If you do not eat the stew-soup soon,” she said, “it will be more horrible. It will be cold. Now eat.”
Bod was hungry. He took a plastic spoon, dipped it into the purple-red stew, and he ate. The food was slimy and unfamiliar, but he kept it down.
“Now the salad!” said Miss Lupescu, and she unpopped the top of the second container. It consisted of large lumps of raw onion, beetroot, and tomato, all in a thick vinegary dressing. Bod put a lump of beetroot into his mouth and started to chew. He could feel the saliva gathering, and realized that if he swallowed it, he would throw it back up. He said, “I can’t eat this.”
“Is good for you.”
“I’ll be sick.”
They stared at each other, the small boy with tousled, mousy hair, the pinched pale woman with not a silver hair out of p
lace. Miss Lupescu said, “You eat one more piece.”
“I can’t.”
“You eat one more piece now, or you stay here until you have eaten it all.”
Bod picked out a piece of vinegary tomato, chewed it, and choked it down. Miss Lupescu put the tops back on the containers and replaced them in the plastic shopping bag. She said, “Now, lessons.”
It was high summer. It would not get fully dark until almost midnight. There were no lessons in high summer—the time that Bod spent awake he spent in an endless warm twilight in which he would play or explore or climb.
“Lessons?” he said.
“Your guardian felt it would be good for me to teach you things.”
“I have teachers. Letitia Borrows teaches me writing and words, and Mr. Pennyworth teaches me his Compleat Educational System for Younger Gentlemen with Additional Material for Those Post Mortem. I do geography and everything. I don’t need more lessons.”
“You know everything, then, boy? Six years old, and already you know everything.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Miss Lupescu folded her arms. “Tell me about ghouls,” she said.
Bod tried to remember what Silas had told him about ghouls over the years. “Keep away from them,” he said.
“And that is all you know? Da? Why do you keep away from them? Where do they come from? Where do they go? Why do you not stand near a ghoul-gate? Eh, boy?”
Bod shrugged and shook his head.
“Name the different kinds of people,” said Miss Lupescu. “Now.”
Bod thought for a moment. “The living,” he said. “Er. The dead.” He stopped. Then, “…Cats?” he offered, uncertainly.
“You are ignorant, boy,” said Miss Lupescu. “This is bad. And you are content to be ignorant, which is worse. Repeat after me, there are the living and the dead, there are day-folk and night-folk, there are ghouls and mist-walkers, there are the high hunters and the Hounds of God. Also, there are solitary types.”
“What are you?” asked Bod.
“I,” she said sternly, “am Miss Lupescu.”
“And what’s Silas?”
She hesitated. Then she said, “He is a solitary type.”
Bod endured the lesson. When Silas taught him things it was interesting. Much of the time Bod didn’t realize he had been taught anything at all. Miss Lupescu taught in lists, and Bod could not see the point to it. He sat in the crypt, aching to be out in the summer’s twilight, under the ghost moon.
When the lesson was done, in the foulest of moods, he fled. He looked for playmates, but found no one and saw nothing but a large grey dog, which prowled the gravestones, always keeping its distance from him, slipping between gravestones and through shadows.
The week got worse.
Miss Lupescu continued to bring Bod things she had cooked for him: dumplings swimming in lard; thick reddish-purple soup with a lump of sour cream in it; small, cold boiled potatoes; cold garlic-heavy sausages; hardboiled eggs in a grey unappetizing liquid. He ate as little as he could get away with. The lessons continued: for two days she taught him nothing but ways to call for help in every language in the world, and she would rap his knuckles with her pen if he slipped up, or forgot. By the third day she was firing them at him,
“French?”
“Au secours.”
“Morse Code?”
“S-O-S. Three short dots, three long ones, three short ones again.”
“Night-Gaunt?”
“This is stupid. I don’t remember what a night-gaunt is.”
“They have hairless wings, and they fly low and fast. They do not visit this world, but they fly the red skies above the road to Ghûlheim.”
“I’m never going to need to know this.”
Her mouth pinched in tighter. All she said was, “Night-Gaunt?”
Bod made the noise in the back of his throat that she had taught him—a guttural cry, like an eagle’s call. She sniffed. “Adequate,” she said.
Bod could not wait until the day that Silas returned.
He said, “There’s a big grey dog in the graveyard sometimes. It came when you did. Is it your dog?”
Miss Lupescu straightened her tie. “No,” she said.
“Are we done?”
“For today. You will read the list I give you tonight and remember it for tomorrow.”
Miss Lupescu’s lists were printed in pale purple ink on white paper, and they smelled odd. Bod took the new list up onto the side of the hill and tried to read the words, but his attention kept sliding off it. Eventually he folded it up and placed it beneath a stone.
No one would play with him that night. No one wanted to play or to talk, to run and climb beneath the huge summer moon.
He went down to the Owenses’ tomb to complain to his parents, but Mrs. Owens would not hear a word said against Miss Lupescu, on, as far as Bod was concerned, the unfair grounds that Silas had chosen her, while Mr. Owens simply shrugged and started telling Bod about his days as a young apprentice cabinetmaker, and how much he would have loved to have learned about all the useful things that Bod was learning, which was, as far as Bod was concerned, even worse.
“Aren’t you meant to be studying, anyway?” asked Mrs. Owens, and Bod squeezed his fists together and said nothing.
He stomped off into the graveyard, feeling unloved and underappreciated.
Bod brooded on the injustice of it all, and wandered through the graveyard kicking at stones. He spotted the dark grey dog, and called to it to see if it would come over and play with him, but it kept its distance, and Bod, frustrated, threw a clump of mud towards it, which broke on a nearby gravestone, and scattered earth everywhere. The big dog gazed at Bod reproachfully, then stepped away into the shadows, and was gone.
The boy walked back down the southwest side of the hill, avoiding the old chapel: he did not want to see the place that Silas wasn’t. Bod stopped beside a grave that looked the way he felt: it was beneath an oak that had once been struck by lightning, and now was just a black trunk, like a sharp talon coming out of the hill; the grave itself was waterstained and cracked, and above it was a memorial stone on which a headless angel hung, its robes looking like a huge and ugly tree-fungus.
Bod sat down on a clump of grass, and felt sorry for himself, and hated everybody. He even hated Silas, for going away and leaving him. Then he closed his eyes, and curled into a ball on the grass, and drifted into a dreamless sleep.
Down the street and up the hill came the Duke of Westminster, the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh, and the Bishop of Bath and Wells, slipping and bounding from shadow to shadow, lean and leathery, all sinews and cartilage, wearing raggedy clothes all a-tatter, and they bounded and loped and skulked, leapfrogging over dustbins, keeping to the dark side of hedges.
They were small, like full-size people who had shrunk in the sun; they spoke to each other in undertones, saying things like, “If Your Grace has any more blooming idea of where we is than us do, I’d be grateful if he’d say so. Otherwise, he should keep his big offal-hole shut,” and “All I’m saying, Your Worship, is that I knows there’s a graveyard near to here, I can smell it,” and “If you could smell it then I should be able to smell it, ’cos I’ve got a better nose than you have, Your Grace.”
All this as they dodged and wove their way through suburban gardens. They avoided one garden (“Psst!” hissed the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh. “Dogs!”) and ran along the top of the garden wall, scampering over it like rats the size of children. Down into the high street, and up the road to the top of the hill. And then they were at the graveyard wall, and they went up it like squirrels up a tree, and they sniffed the air.
“’Ware dog,” said the Duke of Westminster.
“Where? I dunno. Somewhere around here. Doesn’t smell like a proper dog anyway,” said the Bishop of Bath and Wells.
“Somebody couldn’t smell this graveyard neither,” said the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh. “Remember? It’s just a dog.”
And beside the gate, in the moonlight, they paused.
“What’s this when it’s at home, then?” asked the Bishop of Bath and Wells.
“Lumme,” said the Duke of Westminster.
Bod woke then.
The three faces staring into his could have been those of mummified humans, fleshless and dried, but their features were mobile and interested—mouths that grinned to reveal sharp, stained teeth; bright beady eyes; clawed fingers that moved and tapped.
“Who are you?” Bod asked.
“We,” said one of the creatures—they were, Bod realized, only a little bigger than he was—“is most important folk, we is. This here is the Duke of Westminster.”
The biggest of the creatures gave a bow, saying, “Charmed, I’m sure.”
“…and this is the Bishop of Bath and Wells—”
The creature, which grinned sharp teeth and let a pointed tongue of improbable length waggle between them, did not look like Bod’s idea of a bishop: its skin was piebald and it had a large spot across one eye, making it look almost piratical. “…and I ’ave the honor to be ther ’onorable Harchibald Fitzhugh. Hat your service.”
The three creatures bowed as one. The Bishop of Bath and Wells said, “Now me lad, what’s your story, eh? And don’t tell any porkies, remember as how you’re talkin’ to a bishop.”
“You tell him, Your Worship,” said the other two.
So Bod told them. He told them how no one liked him or wanted to play with him, how no one appreciated him or cared, and how even his guardian had abandoned him.
“Blow me down,” said the Duke of Westminster, scratching his nose (a little dried-up thing that was mostly nostrils). “What you need is to go somewhere the people would appreciate you.”
“There isn’t anywhere,” said Bod. “And I’m not allowed out of the graveyard.”
“You needs an ’ole world of friends and playfellows,” said the Bishop of Bath and Wells, wiggling his long tongue. “A city of delights, of fun and magic, where you would be appreciated, not ignored.”