by Neil Gaiman
Caius Pompeius said, “Inside the hill?”
Bod thought. “Yes. Good call. Scarlett, do you remember the place where we found the Indigo Man?”
“Kind of. A dark place. I remember there wasn’t anything to be scared of.”
“I’m taking you up there.”
They hurried up the path. Scarlett could tell that Bod was talking to people as he went, but could only hear his side of the conversation. It was like hearing someone talk on a phone. Which reminded her…
“My mum’s going to go spare,” she said. “I’m dead.”
“No,” said Bod. “You’re not. Not yet. Not for a long time.” Then, to someone else, “Two of them, now. Together? Okay.”
They reached the Frobisher mausoleum. “The entrance is behind the bottom coffin on the left,” Bod said. “If you hear anyone coming and it’s not me, go straight down to the very bottom…do you have anything to make light?”
“Yeah. A little LED thing on my keyring.”
“Good.”
He pulled open the door to the mausoleum. “And be careful. Don’t trip or anything.”
“Where are you going?” asked Scarlett.
“This is my home,” said Bod. “I’m going to protect it.”
Scarlett squeezed the LED keyring, and went down on her hands and knees. The space behind the coffin was tight, but she went through the hole into the hill and pulled the coffin back as best she could. In the dim LED light she could see stone steps. She stood upright, and, hand on the wall, walked down three steps, then stopped and sat, hoping that Bod knew what he was doing, and she waited.
Bod said, “Where are they now?”
His father said, “One fellow’s up by the Egyptian Walk, looking for you. His friend’s waiting down by the alley wall. Three others are on their way over, climbing up the alley wall on all the big bins.”
“I wish Silas was here. He’d make short work of them. Or Miss Lupescu.”
“You don’t need them,” said Mr. Owens encouragingly.
“Where’s Mum?”
“Down by the alley wall.”
“Tell her I’ve hidden Scarlett in the back of the Frobisher’s place. Ask her to keep an eye on her if anything happens to me.”
Bod ran through the darkened graveyard. The only way into the northwest part of the graveyard was through the Egyptian Walk. And to get there he would have to go past the little man with the black silk rope. A man who was looking for him, and who wanted him dead…
He was Nobody Owens, he told himself. He was a part of the graveyard. He would be fine.
He nearly missed the little man—the Jack called Ketch—as he hurried into the Egyptian Walk. The man was almost part of the shadows.
Bod breathed in, Faded as deeply as he could Fade, and moved past the man like dust blown on an evening breeze.
He walked down the green-hung length of the Egyptian Walk, and then, with an effort of will, he became as obvious as he could, and kicked at a pebble.
He saw the shadow by the arch detach itself and come after him, almost as silent as the dead.
Bod pushed through the trailing ivy that blocked the Walk and into the northwest corner of the graveyard. He would have to time this just right, he knew. Too fast and the man would lose him, yet if he moved too slowly a black silk rope would wrap itself around his neck, taking his breath with it and all his tomorrows.
He pushed noisily through the tangle of ivy, disturbing one of the graveyard’s many foxes, which sprinted off into the undergrowth. It was a jungle here, of fallen headstones and headless statues, of trees and holly bushes, of slippery piles of half-rotted fallen leaves, but it was a jungle that Bod had explored since he had been old enough to walk and to wander.
Now he was hurrying carefully, stepping from root-tangle of ivy to stone to earth, confident that this was his graveyard. He could feel the graveyard itself trying to hide him, to protect him, to make him vanish, and he fought it, worked to be seen.
He saw Nehemiah Trot, and hesitated.
“Hola, young Bod!” called the poet. “I hear that excitement is the master of the hour, that you fling yourself through these dominions like a comet across the firmament. What’s the word, good Bod?”
“Stand there,” said Bod. “Just where you are. Look back the way I came. Tell me when he comes close.”
Bod skirted the ivy-covered Carstairs grave, and then he stood, panting as if out of breath, with his back to his pursuer.
And he waited. It was only for a few seconds, but it felt like a small forever.
(“He’s here, lad,” said Nehemiah Trot. “About twenty paces behind you.”)
The Jack called Ketch saw the boy in front of him. He pulled his black silk cord tight between his hands. It had been stretched around many necks, over the years, and had been the end of every one of the people it had embraced. It was very soft and very strong and invisible to X-rays.
Ketch’s mustache moved, but nothing else. He had his prey in his sight, and did not want to startle it. He began to advance, silent as a shadow.
The boy straightened up.
Jack Ketch darted forward, his polished black shoes almost soundless on the leaf-mold.
(“He comes, lad!” called Nehemiah Trot.)
The boy turned around, and Jack Ketch made a leap towards him—
And Mr. Ketch felt the world tumbling away beneath him. He grabbed at the world with one gloved hand, but tumbled down and down into the old grave, all of twenty feet, before crash-landing on Mr. Carstairs’s coffin, splintering the coffin-lid and his ankle at the same time.
“That’s one,” said Bod, calmly, although he felt anything but calm.
“Elegantly accomplished,” said Nehemiah Trot. “I shall compose an Ode. Would you like to stay and listen?”
“No time,” said Bod. “Where are the other men?”
Euphemia Horsfall said, “Three of them are on the southwestern path, heading up the hill.”
Tom Sands said, “And there’s another. Right now he’s just walking around the chapel. He’s the one who’s been all around the graveyard for the last month. But there’s something different about him.”
Bod said, “Keep an eye on the man in with Mr. Carstairs—and please apologize to Mr. Carstairs for me…”
He ducked under a pine-branch and loped around the hill, on the paths when it suited him, off the paths, jumping from monument to stone, when that was quicker.
He passed the old apple tree. “There’s four of them, still,” said a tart female voice. “Four of them, and all killers. And the rest of them won’t all of them fall into open graves to oblige you.”
“Hullo, Liza. I thought you were angry at me.”
“I might be and I mightn’t,” she said, nothing more than a voice. “But I’m not going to let them cut you up, nohow.”
“Then trip them for me, trip them and confuse them and slow them down. Can you do that?”
“While you runs away again? Nobody Owens, why don’t you just Fade, and hide in your mam’s nice tomb, where they’ll never find you, and soon enough Silas will be back to take care of them—”
“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” said Bod. “I’ll meet you by the lightning tree.”
“I am still not talking to you,” said Liza Hempstock’s voice, proud as a peacock and pert as a sparrow.
“Actually, you are. I mean, we’re talking right now.”
“Only during this emergency. After that, not a word.”
Bod made for the lightning tree, an oak that had been burned by lightning twenty years ago and now was nothing more than a blackened limb clutching at the sky.
He had an idea. It was not fully formed. It depended on whether he could remember Miss Lupescu’s lessons, remember everything he had seen and heard as a child.
It was harder to find the grave than he had expected, even looking for it, but he found it—an ugly grave tipped at an odd angle, its stone topped by a headless, waterstained angel that had th
e appearance of a gargantuan fungus. It was only when he touched it, and felt the chill, that he knew it for certain.
He sat down on the grave, forced himself to become entirely visible.
“You’ve not Faded,” said Liza’s voice. “Anyone could find you.”
“Good,” said Bod. “I want them to find me.”
“More know Jack Fool than Jack Fool knows,” said Liza.
The moon was rising. It was huge now and low in the sky. Bod wondered if it would be overdoing it if he began to whistle.
“I can see him!”
A man ran towards him, tripping and stumbling, two other men close behind.
Bod was aware of the dead clustered around them, watching the scene, but he forced himself to ignore them. He made himself more comfortable on the ugly grave. He felt like the bait in a trap, and it was not a good feeling.
The bull-like man was the first to reach the grave, followed closely by the man with the white hair who had done all the talking, and the tall blond man.
Bod stayed where he was.
The man with the white hair said, “Ah. The elusive Dorian boy, I presume. Astonishing. There’s our Jack Frost hunting the whole world over, and here you are, just where he left you, thirteen years ago.”
Bod said, “That man killed my family.”
“Indeed he did.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter? You’re never going to tell anyone.”
“Then it’s no skin off your nose to tell me, is it?”
The white-haired man barked a laugh. “Hah! Funny boy. What I want to know is, how have you lived in a graveyard for thirteen years without anyone catching wise?”
“I’ll answer your question if you answer mine.”
The bull-necked man said, “You don’t talk to Mr. Dandy like that, little snot! I split you, I will—”
The white-haired man took another step closer to the grave. “Hush, Jack Tar. All right. An answer for an answer. We—my friends and I—are members of a fraternal organization, known as the Jacks of All Trades, or the Knaves, or by other names. We go back an extremely long way. We know…we remember things that most people have forgotten. The Old Knowledge.”
Bod said, “Magic. You know a little magic.”
The man nodded agreeably. “If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.”
“You killed my family for—for what? For magic powers? That’s ridiculous.”
“No. We killed you for protection. Long time ago, one of our people—this was back in Egypt, in pyramid days—he foresaw that one day, there would be a child born who would walk the borderland between the living and the dead. That if this child grew to adulthood it would mean the end of our order and all we stand for. We had people casting nativities before London was a village, we had your family in our sights before New Amsterdam became New York. And we sent what we thought was the best and the sharpest and the most dangerous of all the Jacks to deal with you. To do it properly, so we could take all the bad Juju and make it work for us instead, and keep everything tickety-boo for another five thousand years. Only he didn’t.”
Bod looked at the three men.
“So where is he? Why isn’t he here?”
The blond man said, “We can take care of you. He’s got a good nose on him, has our Jack Frost. He’s on the trail of your little girlfriend. Can’t leave any witnesses. Not to something like this.”
Bod leaned forward, dug his hands into the wild weed-grass that grew on the unkempt grave.
“Come and get me,” was all that he said.
The blond man grinned, the bull-necked man lunged, and—yes—even Mr. Dandy took several steps forward.
Bod pushed his fingers as deeply as he could into the grass, and he pulled his lips back from his teeth, and he said three words in a language that was already ancient before the Indigo Man was born.
“Skagh! Thegh! Khavagah!”
He opened the ghoul-gate.
The grave swung up like a trapdoor. In the deep hole below the door Bod could see stars, a darkness filled with glimmering lights.
The bull-man, Mr. Tar, at the edge of the hole, could not stop, and stumbled, surprised, into the darkness.
Mr. Nimble jumped toward Bod, his arms extended, leaping over the hole. Bod watched as the man stopped in the air at the zenith of his spring, and hung there for a moment, before he was sucked through the ghoul-gate, down and down.
Mr. Dandy stood at the edge of the ghoul-gate, on a lip of stone and looked down into the darkness beneath. Then he raised his eyes to Bod, and thin-lipped, he smiled.
“I don’t know what you just did,” said Mr. Dandy. “But it didn’t work.” He pulled his gloved hand out of his pocket, holding a gun, pointed directly at Bod. “I should have just done this thirteen years ago,” said Mr. Dandy. “You can’t trust other people. If it’s important, you have to do it yourself.”
A desert wind came up from the open ghoul-gate, hot and dry, with grit in it. Bod said, “There’s a desert down there. If you look for water, you should find some. There’s things to eat if you look hard, but don’t antagonize the night-gaunts. Avoid Ghûlheim. The ghouls might wipe your memories and make you into one of them, or they might wait until you’ve rotted down, and then eat you. Either way, you can do better.”
The gun barrel did not waver. Mr. Dandy said, “Why are you telling me this?”
Bod pointed across the graveyard. “Because of them,” he said, and as he said it, as Mr. Dandy glanced away, only for a moment, Bod Faded. Mr. Dandy’s eyes flickered away and back, but Bod was no longer by the broken statue. From deep in the hole something called, like the lonely wail of a night bird.
Mr. Dandy looked around, his forehead a slash, his body a mass of indecision and rage. “Where are you?” he growled. “The Deuce take you! Where are you?”
He thought he heard a voice say, “Ghoul-gates are made to be opened and then closed again. You can’t leave them open. They want to close.”
The lip of the hole shuddered and shook. Mr. Dandy had been in an earthquake once, years before, in Bangladesh. It felt like that: the earth juddered, and Mr. Dandy fell, would have fallen into the darkness, but he caught hold of the fallen headstone, threw his arms about it and locked on. He did not know what was beneath him, only that he had no wish to find out.
The earth shook, and he felt the headstone begin to shift, beneath his weight.
He looked up. The boy was there, looking down at him curiously.
“I’m going to let the gate close now,” he said. “I think if you keep holding onto that thing, it might close on you, and crush you, or it might just absorb you and make you into part of the gate. Don’t know. But I’m giving you a chance, more than you ever gave my family.”
A ragged judder. Mr. Dandy looked up into the boy’s grey eyes, and he swore. Then he said, “You can’t ever escape us. We’re the Jacks of All Trades. We’re everywhere. It’s not over.”
“It is for you,” said Bod. “The end of your people and all you stand for. Like your man in Egypt predicted. You didn’t kill me. You were everywhere. Now it’s all over.” Then Bod smiled. “That’s what Silas is doing, isn’t it? That’s where he is.”
Mr. Dandy’s face confirmed everything that Bod had suspected.
And what Mr. Dandy might have said to that, Bod would never know, because the man let go of the headstone and tumbled slowly down into the open ghoul-gate.
Bod said, “Wegh Khârados.”
The ghoul-gate was a grave once again, nothing more.
Something was tugging at his sleeve. Fortinbras Bartleby looked up at him. “Bod! The man by the chapel. He’s going up the hill.”
The man Jack followed his nose. He had left the others, not least because the stink of Jack Dandy’s cologne made finding anything subtler impossible.
He could not find the boy by scent. Not here. T
he boy smelled like the graveyard. But the girl smelled like her mother’s house, like the dab of perfume she had touched to her neck before school that morning. She smelled like a victim too, like fear-sweat, thought Jack, like his quarry. And wherever she was, the boy would be too, sooner or later.
His hand closed around the handle of his knife and he walked up the hill. He was almost at the top of the hill when it occurred to him—a hunch he knew was a truth—that Jack Dandy and the rest of them were gone. Good, he thought. There’s always room at the top. The man Jack’s own rise through the Order had slowed and stopped after he had failed to kill all of the Dorian family. It was as if he had no longer been trusted.
Now, soon, everything would change.
At the top of the hill the man Jack lost the girl’s scent. He knew she was near.
He retraced his steps, almost casually, caught her perfume again about fifty feet away, beside a small mausoleum with a closed metal gateway. He pulled on the gate and it swung wide.
Her scent was strong now. He could smell that she was afraid. He pulled down the coffins, one by one, from their shelves, and let them clatter onto the ground, shattering the old wood, spilling their contents onto the mausoleum floor. No, she was not hiding in any of those…
Then where?
He examined the wall. Solid. He went down on his hands and knees, pulled the last coffin out and reached back. His hand found an opening…
“Scarlett,” he called, trying to remember how he would have called her name when he was Mr. Frost, but he could not even find that part of himself any longer: he was the man Jack now, and that was all he was. On his hands and knees he crawled through the hole in the wall.
When Scarlett heard the crashing noise from above she made her way, carefully, down the steps, her left hand touching the wall, her right hand holding the little LED keyring, which cast just enough light to allow her to see where she was placing her feet. She made it to the bottom of the stone steps and edged back in the open chamber, her heart thumping.
She was scared: scared of nice Mr. Frost and his scarier friends; scared of this room and its memories; even, if she were honest, a little afraid of Bod. He was no longer a quiet boy with a mystery, a link to her childhood. He was something different, something not quite human.