Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection

by Neil Gaiman

  That was good.

  He attacked the sacking with his brass screw again, jabbing and pushing until he’d made another hole in the fabric.

  “Come on, lads,” shouted the Bishop of Bath and Wells. “Up the steps and then we’re home, all safe in Ghûlheim!”

  “Hurrah, Your Worship!” called someone else, probably the Honorable Archibald Fitzhugh.

  Now the motion of his captors had changed. It was no longer a forward motion: now it was a sequence of movements, up and along, up and along.

  Bod pushed at the sacking with his hand to try and make an eye-hole. He looked out. Above, the drear red sky, below…

  …he could see the desert floor, but it was now hundreds of feet below him. There were steps stretching out behind them, but steps made for giants, and the ochre rock wall to his right. Ghûlheim, which Bod could not see from where he was, had to be above them. To his left was a sheer drop. He was going to have to fall straight down, he decided, onto the steps, and he would just hope that the ghouls wouldn’t notice that he was making his break for it in their desperation to be home and safe. He saw night-gaunts high in the red sky, hanging back, circling.

  He was pleased to see there were no other ghouls behind him: the famous writer Victor Hugo was bringing up the rear, and no one was behind him to alert the ghouls to the hole that was growing in the sack. Or to see Bod if he fell out.

  But there was something else….

  Bod was bounced onto his side, away from the hole. But he had seen something huge and grey, on the steps beneath, pursuing them. He could hear an angry growling noise.

  Mr. Owens had an expression for two things he found equally unpleasant: “I’m between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” he would say. Bod had wondered what this meant, having seen, in his life in the graveyard, neither the Devil nor the Deep Blue Sea.

  I’m between the ghouls and the monster, he thought.

  And as he thought it, sharp canine teeth caught at the sacking, pulled at it until the fabric tore along the rips Bod had made, and the boy tumbled down on the rock stairs, where a huge grey animal, like a dog but far larger, growled and drooled, and stood over him, an animal with flaming eyes and white fangs and huge paws. It panted and it stared at Bod.

  Ahead of him the ghouls had stopped. “Bloody Nora!” said the Duke of Westminster. “That hellhound’s got the blinking boy!”

  “Let it have him,” said the Emperor of China. “Run!”

  “Yikes!” said the 33rd President of the United States.

  The ghouls ran up the steps. Bod was now certain that the steps had been carved by giants, for each step was higher than he was. As they fled, the ghouls paused only to turn and make rude gestures at the beast and possibly also at Bod.

  The beast stayed where it was.

  It’s going to eat me, Bod thought bitterly. Smart, Bod. And he thought of his home in the graveyard, and now he could no longer remember why he had ever left. Monster dog or no monster dog, he had to get back home once more. There were people waiting for him.

  He pushed past the beast, jumped down to the next step four feet below, fell his height, landed on his ankle, which twisted underneath him, painfully, and he dropped, heavily, onto the rock.

  He could hear the beast running, jumping down towards him, and he tried to wriggle away, to pull himself up onto his feet, but his ankle was useless, now, numb and in pain, and before he could stop himself, he fell again. He fell off the step, away from the rock wall, out into space, off the cliff-side, where he dropped—a nightmarish tumble down distances that Bod could not even imagine….

  And as he fell, he was certain he heard a voice coming from the general direction of the grey beast. And it said, in Miss Lupescu’s voice, “Oh, Bod!”

  It was like every dream of falling he had ever had, a scared and frantic drop through space, as he headed towards the ground below. Bod felt as though his mind was only big enough for one huge thought, so, That big dog was actually Miss Lupescu, and, I’m going to hit the rock floor and splat, competed in his head for occupation.

  Something wrapped itself about him, falling at the same speed he was falling, and then there was the loud flapping of leathery wings and everything slowed. The ground no longer seemed to be heading towards him at the same speed.

  The wings flapped harder. They lifted slightly and now the only thought in Bod’s head was I’m flying! And he was. He turned his head. Above him was a dark brown head, perfectly bald, with deep eyes that looked as if they were polished slabs of black glass.

  Bod made the screeching noise that means “Help,” in Night-Gaunt, and the night-gaunt smiled and made a deep hooting noise in return. It seemed pleased.

  A swoop and a slow, and they touched down on the desert floor with a thump. Bod tried to stand up, and his ankle betrayed him once again, sent him stumbling down into the sand. The wind was high, and the sharp desert sand blew hard, stinging Bod’s skin.

  The night-gaunt crouched beside him, its leathery wings folded on its back. Bod had grown up in a graveyard and was used to images of winged people, but the angels on the headstones looked nothing like this.

  And now, bounding toward them across the desert floor in the shadow of Ghûlheim, a huge grey beast, like an enormous dog.

  The dog spoke, in Miss Lupescu’s voice.

  It said, “This is the third time the night-gaunts have saved your life, Bod. The first was when you called for help, and they heard. They got the message to me, telling me where you were. The second was around the fire last night, when you were asleep: they were circling in the darkness, and heard a couple of the ghouls saying that you were ill-luck for them and that they should beat your brains in with a rock and put you somewhere they could find you again, when you were properly rotted down, and then they would eat you. The night-gaunts dealt with the matter silently. And now this.”

  “Miss Lupescu?”

  The great dog-like head lowered towards him, and for one mad, fear-filled moment, he thought she was going to take a bite out of him, but her tongue licked the side of his face, affectionately. “You hurt your ankle?”

  “Yes. I can’t stand on it.”

  “Let’s get you onto my back,” said the huge grey beast that was Miss Lupescu.

  She said something in the night-gaunt’s screeching tongue and it came over, held Bod up while he put his arms around Miss Lupescu’s neck.

  “Hold my fur,” she said. “Hold tight. Now, before we go, say…” and she made a high screeching noise.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Thank you. Or good-bye. Both.”

  Bod screeched as best as he could, and the night-gaunt made an amused chuckle. Then it made a similar noise, and it spread its great leathery wings, and it ran into the desert wind, flapping hard, and the wind caught it and carried it aloft, like a kite that had begun to fly.

  “Now,” said the beast that was Miss Lupescu, “hold on tightly.” And she began to run.

  “Are we going to the wall of graves?”

  “To the ghoul-gates? No. Those are for ghouls. I am a Hound of God. I travel my own road, into Hell and out of it.” And it seemed to Bod as if she ran even faster then.

  The huge moon rose and the smaller mold-colored moon and they were joined by a ruby-red moon, and the grey wolf ran at a steady lope beneath them across the desert of bones. She stopped by a broken clay building like an enormous beehive, built beside a small rill of water that came bubbling out of the desert rock, splashed down into a tiny pool and was gone again. The grey wolf put her head down and drank, and Bod scooped water up in his hands, drinking the water in a dozen tiny gulps.

  “This is the boundary,” said the grey wolf that was Miss Lupescu, and Bod looked up. The three moons had gone. Now he could see the Milky Way, see it as he had never seen it before, a glimmering shroud across the arch of the sky. The sky was filled with stars.

  “They’re beautiful,” said Bod.

  “When we get you home,” said Miss Lupescu
, “I teach you the names of the stars and their constellations.”

  “I’d like that,” admitted Bod.

  Bod clambered onto her huge, grey back once more and he buried his face in her fur and held on tightly, and it seemed only moments later that he was being carried—awkwardly, as a grown woman carries a six-year-old boy—across the graveyard, to the Owenses’ tomb.

  “He’s hurt his ankle,” Miss Lupescu was saying.

  “Poor little soul,” said Mistress Owens, taking the boy from her, and cradling him in her capable, if insubstantial arms. “I can’t say I didn’t worry, for I did. But he’s back now, and that’s all that matters.”

  And then he was perfectly comfortable, beneath the earth, in a good place, with his head on his own pillow, and a gentle, exhausted darkness took him.

  Bod’s left ankle was swollen and purple. Doctor Trefusis (1870–1936, May He Wake to Glory) inspected it and pronounced it merely sprained. Miss Lupescu returned from a journey to the chemist’s with a tight ankle bandage, and Josiah Worthington, Bart., who had been buried with his ebony walking cane, insisted on lending it to Bod, who had too much fun leaning on the stick and pretending to be one hundred years old.

  Bod limped up the hill and retrieved a folded piece of paper from beneath a stone.

  The Hounds of God

  he read. It was printed in a purple ink, and was the first item on a list.

  Those that men call Werewolves or Lycanthropes call themselves the Hounds of God, as they claim their transformation is a gift from their creator, and they repay the gift with their tenacity, for they will pursue an evildoer to the very gates of Hell.

  Bod nodded.

  Not just evildoers, he thought.

  He read the rest of the list, committing it to memory as best he could, then went down to the chapel, where Miss Lupescu was waiting for him with a small meat pie and a huge bag of chips she had bought from the fish-and-chips shop at the bottom of the hill, and another pile of purple-inked duplicated lists.

  The two of them shared the chips, and once or twice, Miss Lupescu even smiled.

  Silas came back at the the end of the month. He carried his black bag in his left hand and he held his right arm stiffly. But he was Silas, and Bod was happy to see him, and even happier when Silas gave him a present, a little model of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

  It was almost midnight, and it was still not fully dark. The three of them sat at the top of the hill, with the lights of the city glimmering beneath them.

  “I trust that all went well in my absence,” said Silas.

  “I learned a lot,” said Bod, still holding his Bridge. He pointed up into the night sky. “That’s Orion the Hunter, up there, with his belt of three stars. That’s Taurus the Bull.”

  “Very good,” said Silas.

  “And you?” asked Bod. “Did you learn anything, while you were away?”

  “Oh yes,” said Silas, but he declined to elaborate.

  “I also,” said Miss Lupescu, primly. “I also learned things.”

  “Good,” said Silas. An owl hooted in the branches of an oak tree. “You know, I heard rumors, while I was away,” said Silas, “that some weeks ago you both went somewhat further afield than I would have been able to follow. Normally, I would advise caution, but, unlike some, the ghoul-folk have short memories.”

  Bod said, “It’s okay. Miss Lupescu looked after me. I was never in any danger.”

  Miss Lupescu looked at Bod, and her eyes shone, then she looked at Silas.

  “There are so many things to know,” she said. “Perhaps I come back next year, in high summer also, to teach the boy again.”

  Silas looked at Miss Lupescu, and he raised an eyebrow a fraction. Then he looked at Bod.

  “I’d like that,” said Bod.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Witch’s Headstone

  THERE WAS A WITCH buried at the edge of the graveyard, it was common knowledge. Bod had been told to keep away from that corner of the world by Mrs. Owens as far back as he could remember.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “T’aint healthy for a living body,” said Mrs. Owens. “There’s damp down that end of things. It’s practically a marsh. You’ll catch your death.”

  Mr. Owens himself was more evasive and less imaginative. “It’s not a good place,” was all he said.

  The graveyard proper ended at the bottom of the west side of the hill, beneath the old apple tree, with a fence of rust-brown iron railings, each topped with a small, rusting spearhead, but there was a wasteland beyond that, a mass of nettles and weeds, of brambles and autumnal rubbish, and Bod, who was, on the whole, obedient, did not push between the railings, but he went down there and looked through. He knew he wasn’t being told the whole story, and it irritated him.

  Bod went back up the hill, to the little chapel near the entrance to the graveyard, and he waited until it got dark. As twilight edged from grey to purple there was a noise in the spire, like a fluttering of heavy velvet, and Silas left his resting place in the belfry and clambered headfirst down the spire.

  “What’s in the far corner of the graveyard?” asked Bod. “Past Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives, Marion and Joan?”

  “Why do you ask?” said his guardian, brushing the dust from his black suit with ivory fingers.

  Bod shrugged. “Just wondered.”

  “It’s unconsecrated ground,” said Silas. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Not really,” said Bod.

  Silas walked across the path without disturbing a fallen leaf, and sat down on the bench beside Bod. “There are those,” he said, in his silken voice, “who believe that all land is sacred. That it is sacred before we come to it, and sacred after. But here, in your land, they blessed the churches and the ground they set aside to bury people in, to make it holy. But they left land unconsecrated beside the sacred ground, Potter’s Fields to bury the criminals and the suicides or those who were not of the faith.”

  “So the people buried in the ground on the other side of the fence are bad people?”

  Silas raised one perfect eyebrow. “Mm? Oh, not at all. Let’s see, it’s been a while since I’ve been down that way. But I don’t remember anyone particularly evil. Remember, in days gone by you could be hanged for stealing a shilling. And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.”

  “They kill themselves, you mean?” said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid.

  “Indeed.”

  “Does it work? Are they happier dead?”

  “Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.”

  “Sort of,” said Bod.

  Silas reached down and ruffled the boy’s hair.

  Bod said, “What about the witch?”

  “Yes. Exactly,” said Silas. “Suicides, criminals, and witches. Those who died unshriven.” He stood up, a midnight shadow in the twilight. “All this talking,” he said, “and I have not even had my breakfast. While you will be late for lessons.” In the twilight of the graveyard there was a silent implosion, a flutter of velvet darkness, and Silas was gone.

  The moon had begun to rise by the time Bod reached Mr. Pennyworth’s mausoleum, and Thomes Pennyworth (here he lyes in the certainty of the moft glorious refurrection) was already waiting, and was not in the best of moods.

  “You are late,” he said.

  “Sorry, Mr. Pennyworth.”

  Pennyworth tutted. The previous week Mr. Pennyworth had been teaching Bod about Elements and Humors, and Bod had kept forgetting which was which. He was expecting a test, but instead Mr. Pennyworth said, “I think it is time to spend a few days on practical matters. Time is p
assing, after all.”

  “Is it?” asked Bod.

  “I am afraid so, young Master Owens. Now, how is your Fading?”

  Bod had hoped he would not be asked that question.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I mean. You know.”

  “No, Master Owens. I do not know. Why do you not demonstrate for me?”

  Bod’s heart sank. He took a deep breath, and did his best, squinching up his eyes and trying to fade away.

  Mr. Pennyworth was not impressed.

  “Pah. That’s not the kind of thing. Not the kind of thing at all. Slipping and Fading, boy, the way of the dead. Slip through shadows. Fade from awareness. Try again.”

  Bod tried harder.

  “You’re as plain as the nose on your face,” said Mr. Pennyworth. “And your nose is remarkably obvious. As is the rest of your face, young man. As are you. For the sake of all that is holy, empty your mind. Now. You are an empty alleyway. You are a vacant doorway. You are nothing. Eyes will not see you. Minds will not hold you. Where you are is nothing and nobody.”

  Bod tried again. He closed his eyes and imagined himself fading into the stained stonework of the mausoleum wall, becoming a shadow on the night and nothing more. He sneezed.

  “Dreadful,” said Mr. Pennyworth, with a sigh. “Quite dreadful. I believe I shall have a word with your guardian about this.” He shook his head. “So. The humors. List them.”

  “Um. Sanguine. Choleric. Phlegmatic. And the other one. Um, Melancholic, I think.”

  And so it went, until it was time for Grammar and Composition with Miss Letitia Borrows, Spinster of this Parish (Who Did No Harm to No Man all the Dais of Her Life. Reader, Can You Say Lykewise?). Bod liked Miss Borrows, and the coziness of her little crypt, and that she could all-too-easily be led off the subject.

  “They say there’s a witch in uncons—unconsecrated ground,” he said.