The Graveyard Book

“Nobody Owens,” said Silas. “You are indeed in trouble. However, I believe I shall leave it to your parents to administer whatever discipline and reproach they believe to be needed. In the meantime, I need to dispose of this.”

The black-edged card vanished inside the velvet cloak, and then, in the manner of his kind, Silas was gone.

Bod pulled the jacket up over his head, and clambered up the slippery paths to the top of the hill, to the Frobisher mausoleum. He pulled aside Ephraim Pettyfer’s coffin, and he went down, and down, and still further down.

He replaced the brooch beside the goblet and the knife.

“Here you go,” he said. “All polished up. Looking pretty.” IT COMES BACK, said the Sleer, with satisfaction in its smoke-tendril voice. IT ALWAYS COMES BACK.

It had been a long night.

Bod was walking, sleepily and a little gingerly, past the small tomb of the wonderfully named Miss Liberty Roach (What she spent is lost, what she gave remains with her always. Reader be Charitable), past the final resting place of Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives, Marion and Joan, to the Potter’s Field. Mr. and Mrs. Owens had died several hundred years before it had been decided that beating children was wrong and Mr. Owens had, regretfully, that night, done what he saw as his duty, and Bod’s bottom stung like anything. Still, the look of worry on Mrs. Owens’s face had hurt Bod worse than any beating could have done.

He reached the iron railings that bounded the Potter’s Field, and slipped between them.

“Hullo?” he called. There was no answer. Not even an extra shadow in the hawthorn tree. “I hope I didn’t get you into trouble, too,” he said.

Nothing.

He had replaced the jeans in the gardener’s hut—he was more comfortable in just his grey winding sheet—but he had kept the jacket. He liked having the pockets.

When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand-scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he attacked the nettle-patch in the Potter’s Field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.

From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colors, along with the paint pot, and the paintbrush.

He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters…

E.H

and beneath them he wrote…

we don’t forget

Bedtime, soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.

He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle-patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, he went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.

“Not bad,” said a pert voice from the Potter’s Field, behind him. “Not bad at all.”

But when he turned to look, there was no one there.

CHAPTER FIVE Danse Macabre

SOMETHING WAS GOING ON, Bod was certain of it. It was there in the crisp winter air, in the stars, in the wind, in the darkness. It was there in the rhythms of the long nights and the fleeting days.

Mistress Owens pushed him out of the Owenses’ little tomb. “Get along with you,” she said. “I’ve got business to attend to.”

Bod looked at his mother. “But it’s cold out there,” he said.

“I should hope so,” she said, “it being winter. That’s as it should be. Now,” she said, more to herself than to Bod, “shoes. And look at this dress—it needs hemming. And cobwebs—there are cobwebs all over, for heaven’s sakes. You get along,” this to Bod once more. “I’ve plenty to be getting on with, and I don’t need you underfoot.”

And then she sang to herself, a little couplet Bod had never heard before.

“Rich man, poor man, come away.

Come to dance the Macabray.”

“What’s that?” asked Bod, but it was the wrong thing to have said, for Mistress Owens looked dark as a thunder-cloud, and Bod hurried out of the tomb before she could express her displeasure more forcefully.

It was cold in the graveyard, cold and dark, and the stars were already out. Bod passed Mother Slaughter in the ivy-covered Egyptian Walk, squinting at the greenery.

“Your eyes are younger than mine, young man,” she said. “Can you see blossom?”

“Blossom? In winter?”

“Don’t you look at me with that face on, young man,” she said. “Things blossom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.” She huddled deeper into her cloak and bonnet and she said,

“Time to work and time to play,

Time to dance the Macabray. Eh, boy?”

“I don’t know,” said Bod. “What’s the Macabray?”

But Mother Slaughter had pushed into the ivy and was gone from sight.

“How odd,” said Bod, aloud. He sought warmth and company in the bustling Bartleby mausoleum, but the Bartleby family—seven generations of them—had no time for him that night. They were cleaning and tidying, all of them, from the oldest (d. 1831) to the youngest (d. 1690).