Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection

by Neil Gaiman

  A clock somewhere began to strike the hour, and Bod counted along with it. Twelve chimes. He wondered if they had been dancing for twelve hours or twenty-four or for no time at all.

  He straightened up, and looked around him. The dead had gone, and the Lady on the Grey. Only the living remained, and they were beginning to make their way home—leaving the town square sleepily, stiffly, like people who had awakened from a deep sleep, walking without truly waking.

  The town square was covered with tiny white flowers. It looked as if there had been a wedding.

  Bod woke the next afternoon in the Owenses’ tomb feeling like he knew a huge secret, that he had done something important, and was burning to talk about it.

  When Mistress Owens got up, Bod said, “That was amazing last night!”

  Mistress Owens said, “Oh yes?”

  “We danced,” said Bod. “All of us. Down in the Old Town.”

  “Did we indeed?” said Mistress Owens, with a snort. “Dancing is it? And you know you aren’t allowed down into the town.”

  Bod knew better than even to try to talk to his mother when she was in this kind of mood. He slipped out of the tomb into the gathering dusk.

  He walked up the hill, to the black obelisk, and Josiah Worthington’s stone, where there was a natural amphitheater, and he could look out at the Old Town and at the lights of the city around it.

  Josiah Worthington was standing beside him.

  Bod said, “You began the dance. With the Mayor. You danced with her.”

  Josiah Worthington looked at him and said nothing.

  “You did,” said Bod.

  Josiah Worthington said, “The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not to speak of it to the living.”

  “But I’m one of you.”

  “Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime.”

  And Bod realized why he had danced as one of the living, and not as one of the crew that had walked down the hill, and he said only, “I see…I think.”

  He went down the hill at a run, a ten-year-old boy in a hurry, going so fast he almost tripped over Digby Poole (1785–1860, As I Am So Shall You Be), righting himself by effort of will, and charged down to the old chapel, scared he would miss Silas, that his guardian would already be gone by the time Bod got there.

  Bod sat down on the bench.

  There was a movement beside him, although he heard nothing move, and his guardian said, “Good evening, Bod.”

  “You were there last night,” said Bod. “Don’t try and say you weren’t there or something because I know you were.”

  “Yes,” said Silas.

  “I danced with her. With the lady on the white horse.”

  “Did you?”

  “You saw it! You watched us! The living and the dead! We were dancing. Why won’t anyone talk about it?”

  “Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember.”

  “But you’re speaking about it right now. We’re talking about the Macabray.”

  “I have not danced it,” said Silas.

  “You saw it, though.”

  Silas said only, “I don’t know what I saw.”

  “I danced with the lady, Silas!” exclaimed Bod. His guardian looked almost heartbroken then, and Bod found himself scared, like a child who has woken a sleeping panther.

  But all Silas said was, “This conversation is at an end.”

  Bod might have said something—there were a hundred things he wanted to say, unwise though it might have been to say them—when something distracted his attention: a rustling noise, soft and gentle, and a cold feather-touch as something brushed his face.

  All thoughts of dancing were forgotten then, and his fear was replaced with delight and with awe.

  It was the third time in his life that he had seen it.

  “Look, Silas, it’s snowing!” he said, joy filling his chest and his head, leaving no room for anything else. “It’s really snow!”

  INTERLUDE

  The Convocation

  A SMALL SIGN IN THE hotel lobby announced that the Washington Room was taken that night by a private function, although there was no information as to what kind of function this might be. Truthfully, if you were to look at the inhabitants of the Washington Room that night, you would have no clearer idea of what was happening, although a rapid glance would tell you that there were no women in there. They were all men, that much was clear, and they sat at round dinner tables, and they were finishing their dessert.

  There were about a hundred of them, all in sober black suits, but the suits were all they had in common. They had white hair or dark hair or fair hair or red hair or no hair at all. They had friendly faces or unfriendly, helpful or sullen, open or secretive, brutish or sensitive. The majority of them were pink-skinned, but there were black-skinned men and brown-skinned. They were European, African, Indian, Chinese, South American, Filipino, American. They all spoke English when they talked to each other, or to the waiters, but the accents were as diverse as the gentlemen. They came from all across Europe and from all over the world.

  The men in black suits sat around their tables while up on a platform one of their number, a wide, cheery man dressed in a morning suit, as if he had just come from a wedding, was announcing Good Deeds Done. Children from poor places had been taken on exotic holidays. A bus had been bought to take people who needed it on excursions.

  The man Jack sat at the front center table, beside a dapper man with silver-white hair. They were waiting for coffee.

  “Time’s a-ticking,” said the silver-haired man, “and we’re none of us getting any younger.”

  The man Jack said, “I’ve been thinking. That business in San Francisco four years ago—”

  “Was unfortunate, but like the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, absolutely nothing to do with the case. You failed, Jack. You were meant to take care of them all. That included the baby. Especially the baby. Nearly only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.”

  A waiter in a white jacket poured coffee for each of the men at the table: a small man with a pencil-thin black mustache, a tall blond man good-looking enough to be a film star or a model, and a dark-skinned man with a huge head who glared out at the world like an angry bull. These men were making a point of not listening to Jack’s conversation, and instead were paying attention to the speaker, even clapping from time to time. The silver-haired man added several heaped spoonfuls of sugar to his coffee, stirred it briskly.

  “Ten years,” he said. “Time and tide wait for no man. The babe will soon be grown. And then what?”

  “I still have time, Mister Dandy,” the man Jack began, but the silver-haired man cut him off, stabbing a large pink finger in his direction.

  “You had time. Now, you just have a deadline. Now, you’ve got to get smart. We can’t cut you any slack, not any more. Sick of waiting, we are, every man Jack of us.”

  The man Jack nodded, curtly. “I have leads to follow,” he said.

  The silver-haired man slurped his black coffee. “Really?”

  “Really. And I repeat, I think it’s connected with the trouble we had in San Francisco.”

  “You’ve discussed this with the secretary?” Mr. Dandy indicated the man at the podium, who was, at that moment, telling them about hospital equipment bought in the previous year from their generosity. (“Not one, not two, but three kidney machines,” he was saying. The men in the room applauded themselves and their generosity politely.)

  The man Jack nodded. “I’ve mentioned it.”

  “And?”

  “He’s not interested. He just wants results. He wants me to finish the business I started.”

  “We all do, sunshine,” said the silver-haired man. “The boy’s still alive.
And time is no longer our friend.”

  The other men at the table, who had pretended not to be listening, grunted and nodded their agreement.

  “Like I say,” Mr. Dandy said, without emotion. “Time’s a-ticking.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Nobody Owens’ School Days

  RAIN IN THE GRAVEYARD, and the world puddled into blurred reflections. Bod sat, concealed from anyone, living or dead, who might come looking for him, under the arch that separated the Egyptian Walk and the northwestern wilderness beyond it from the rest of the graveyard, and he read his book.

  “Damm’ee!” came a shout from down the path. “Damm’ee, sir, and blast your eyes! When I catch you—and find you I shall—I shall make you rue the day you were born!”

  Bod sighed and he lowered the book, and leaned out enough to see Thackeray Porringer (1720–1734, son of the above) come stamping up the slippery path. Thackeray was a big boy—he had been fourteen when he died, following his initiation as an apprentice to a master house painter: he had been given eight copper pennies and told not to come back without a half-a-gallon of red and white striped paint for painting barber’s poles. Thackeray had spent five hours being sent all over the town one slushy January morning, being laughed at in each establishment he visited and then sent on to the next; when he realized he had been made a fool of, he had taken an angry case of apoplexy, which carried him off within the week, and he died glaring furiously at the other apprentices and even at Mr. Horrobin, the master painter, who had undergone so much worse back when he was a ’prentice that he could scarcely see what all the fuss was about.

  So Thackeray Porringer had died in a fury, clutching his copy of Robinson Crusoe which was, apart from a silver sixpence with the edges clipped and the clothes he had formerly been standing up in, all that he owned, and, at his mother’s request, he was buried with his book. Death had not improved Thackeray Porringer’s temper, and now he was shouting, “I know you’re here somewhere! Come out and take your punishment, you, you thief!”

  Bod closed the book. “I’m not a thief, Thackeray. I’m only borrowing it. I promise I’ll give the book back when I’ve finished it.”

  Thackeray looked up, saw Bod nestled behind the statue of Osiris. “I told you not to!”

  Bod sighed. “But there are so few books here. It’s just up to a good bit anyway. He’s found a footprint. It’s not his. That means someone else is on the island!”

  “It’s my book,” said Thackeray Porringer, obstinately. “Give it back.”

  Bod was ready to argue or simply to negotiate, but he saw the hurt look on Thackeray’s face, and he relented. Bod clambered down the side of the arch, jumped the last few feet. He held out the book. “Here.” Thackeray took it gracelessly, and glared.

  “I could read it to you,” offered Bod. “I could do that.”

  “You could go and boil your fat head,” said Thackeray, and he swung a punch at Bod’s ear. It connected, and it stung, although judging from the look on Thackeray Porringer’s face, Bod realized it must have hurt his fist as much as it hurt Bod.

  The bigger boy stomped off down the path, and Bod watched him go, ear hurting, eyes stinging. Then he walked though the rain back down the treacherous ivy-covered path. At one point he slipped and scraped his knee, tearing his jeans.

  There was a willow-grove beside the wall, and Bod almost ran into Miss Euphemia Horsfall and Tom Sands, who had been stepping out together for many years. Tom had been buried so long ago that his stone was just a weathered rock, and he had lived and died during the Hundred Years War with France, while Miss Euphemia (1861–1883, She Sleeps, Aye, Yet She Sleeps with Angels) had been buried in Victorian times, after the graveyard had been expanded and extended and became, for some fifty years, a successful commercial enterprise, and she had a whole tomb to herself behind a black door in the Willow Walk. But the couple seemed to have no troubles with the difference in their historical periods.

  “You should slow down, young Bod,” said Tom. “You’ll do yourself an injury.”

  “You already did,” said Miss Euphemia. “Oh dear, Bod. I have no doubt that your mother will have words with you about that. It’s not as if we can easily repair those pantaloons.”

  “Um. Sorry,” said Bod.

  “And your guardian was looking for you,” added Tom.

  Bod looked up at the grey sky. “But it’s still daylight,” he said.

  “He’s up betimes,” said Tom, a word which, Bod knew, meant early, “and said to tell you he wanted you. If we saw you.”

  Bod nodded.

  “There’s ripe hazel-nuts in the thicket just beyond the Littlejohns’ monument,” said Tom with a smile, as if softening a blow.

  “Thank you,” said Bod. He ran on, pell-mell, through the rain and down the winding path into the lower slopes of the graveyard, running until he reached the old chapel.

  The chapel door was open and Silas, who had love for neither the rain nor for the remnants of the daylight, was standing inside, in the shadows.

  “I heard you were looking for me,” said Bod.

  “Yes,” said Silas. Then, “It appears you’ve torn your trousers.”

  “I was running,” said Bod. “Um. I got into a bit of a fight with Thackeray Porringer. I wanted to read Robinson Crusoe. It’s a book about a man on a boat—that’s a thing that goes in the sea, which is water like an enormous puddle—and how the ship is wrecked on an island, which is a place on the sea where you can stand, and—”

  Silas said, “It has been eleven years, Bod. Eleven years that you have been with us.”

  “Right,” said Bod. “If you say so.”

  Silas looked down at his charge. The boy was lean, and his mouse-colored hair had darkened slightly with age.

  Inside the old chapel, it was all shadows.

  “I think,” said Silas, “it is time to talk about where you came from.”

  Bod breathed in deeply. He said, “It doesn’t have to be now. Not if you don’t want to.” He said it as easily as he could, but his heart was thudding in his chest.

  Silence. Only the patter of the rain and the wash of the water from the drainpipes. A silence that stretched until Bod thought that he would break.

  Silas said, “You know you’re different. That you are alive. That we took you in—they took you in here—and that I agreed to be your guardian.”

  Bod said nothing.

  Silas continued, in his voice like velvet, “You had parents. An older sister. They were killed. I believe that you were to have been killed as well, and that you were not was due to chance, and the intervention of the Owenses.”

  “And you,” said Bod, who had had that night described to him over the years by many people, some of whom had even been there. It had been a big night in the graveyard.

  Silas said, “Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you.”

  Bod shrugged. “So?” he said. “It’s only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead.”

  “Yes.” Silas hesitated. “They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You’re alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you’re dead, it’s gone. Over. You’ve made what you’ve made, dreamed your dream, written your name. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished.”

  Bod thought about this. It seemed almost true, although he could think of exceptions—his parents adopting him, for example. But the dead and the living were different, he knew that, even if his sympathies were with the dead.

  “What about you?” he asked Silas.

  “What about me?”

  “Well, you aren’t alive. And you go around and do things.”

  “I,” said Silas, “am precisely what I am, and nothing more. I am, as you say, not alive. But if I am ended, I shall simply cease to be. My kind a
re, or we are not. If you see what I mean.”

  “Not really.”

  Silas sighed. The rain was done and the cloudy gloaming had become true twilight. “Bod,” he said, “there are many reasons why it is important that we keep you safe.”

  Bod said, “The person who hurt my family. The one who wants to kill me. You are certain that he’s still out there?” It was something he had been thinking about for a while now, and he knew what he wanted.

  “Yes. He’s still out there.”

  “Then,” said Bod, and said the unsayable, “I want to go to school.”

  Silas was imperturbable. The world could have ended, and he would not have turned a hair. But now his mouth opened and his brow furrowed, and he said only,

  “What?”

  “I’ve learned a lot in this graveyard,” said Bod. “I can Fade and I can Haunt. I can open a ghoul-gate and I know the constellations. But there’s a world out there, with the sea in it, and islands, and shipwrecks and pigs. I mean, it’s filled with things I don’t know. And the teachers here have taught me lots of things, but I need more. If I’m going to survive out there, one day.”

  Silas seemed unimpressed. “Out of the question. Here we can keep you safe. How could we keep you safe, out there? Outside, anything could happen.”

  “Yes,” agreed Bod. “That’s the potential thing you were talking about.” He fell silent. Then, “Someone killed my mother and my father and my sister.”

  “Yes. Someone did.”

  “A man?”

  “A man.”

  “Which means,” said Bod, “you’re asking the wrong question.”

  Silas raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

  “Well,” said Bod. “If I go outside in the world, the question isn’t ‘who will keep me safe from him?’”

  “No?”

  “No. It’s ‘who will keep him safe from me?’”

  Twigs scratched against the high windows, as if they needed to be let in. Silas flicked an imaginary speck of dust from his sleeve with a fingernail as sharp as a blade. He said, “We will need to find you a school.”