On this occasion I happened to notice my father turn a page of the News of the World and give a sudden start. My mother asked if anything was the matter. “I’ll tell you later,” he said and left the kitchen, taking the paper with him.
When, later that morning, I found the News of the World abandoned in the sitting room, I noticed that the centre pages were missing. However, my father had failed to observe that among the exciting list of contents to be found on the front page were the words: HORROR AT THE VILLA MONTE ROSA.
I forget how I managed to get hold of another copy of that paper, but I did that day, and I made sure that my parents did not know about it. These little discretions and courtesies were part of the fabric of our life together.
Across the centre page spread was sprawled the familiar headline: HORROR AT THE VILLA MONTE ROSA.
Much of the space was occupied by a large but fuzzy photograph, probably taken with a long lens from a nearby vantage point, of three people being escorted down the drive of the villa by several Portuguese policemen. Two of them I could clearly make out. They were Mr and Mrs de Walter, their expressions stony and sullen. The third, a woman in an overall, had bowed her head and was covering her face with both hands. I guessed this to be their housekeeper, María, an assumption that was confirmed by the text.
The article itself was short on detail, but long on words such as “horror”, “gruesome”, “grisly” and “sinister”. The few clear facts that I could ascertain were as follows. Over the course of about eight or nine years a number of boys, all Portuguese, aged between ten and twelve had disappeared from the Monte Rosa district.
The last boy to vanish, from the village of Monte Rosa itself, had been seen on the day of his disappearance in the company of the de Walters’ housekeeper, María. A police search of the Villa Monte Rosa and its grounds resulted in the discovery not only of the boy’s corpse “hideously mutilated”, according to the article, but the remains of over a dozen other children. Most of these had been found “at the bottom of a disused well in the grounds”.
The de Walters, said the article, had “been unable to throw any light on these horrific discoveries”, but were still helping the authorities with their investigations.
Some weeks later I confessed to my mother that I had read the article. Her only comment was that I had had a lucky escape, but I am not sure if she was right. The de Walters would not have touched me, and Hal, whom I had met by the well, had not been one of the boys who were killed because they were all Portuguese. Hal, you see, had been English like me and not a Portugoose.
I am writing this now because I have been told to, by my wife and the others. Not that I have any complaint against her. We have been married for over twenty years. We have no children; that inestimable privilege had been denied us, and adoption would have been impossible. I could not have taken an alien being into my house. But we have plenty of occupation, my wife and I. We are great collectors; in fact, I am a dealer in antiques and am recognized as something of an expert on Lalique glass.
One afternoon, about three months ago – I think it was three months, it may have been two, or perhaps even less – we were in Bath. Naturally, we did our rounds of the antique shops. There is a little place in Circus Mews, not far from the Royal Crescent, which we often visit, rather shabbier than the rest; at least not tarted-up in some awful way. I won’t say we pick up bargains there because the owner knows his stuff, but he has a way of discovering rare and unusual items that I find enviable.
It was a bright summer day, and shafts of sunlight were penetrating the windows of his normally rather gloomy establishment. That is how I believe I had a sense of what was ahead of me even before we opened the door to the shop.
As soon as I was inside, I saw it.
It was one of Mrs de Walter’s glass cases of stuffed animals, the second one of the series I had called in my mind “The Rodent’s Rake’s Progress”, and it was exactly as I had remembered it. In fact, it surprised me that it did not seem smaller to me, now that I was myself older and larger.
The scene, as you remember, is set outside the inn with the sign of the Skull and Trumpet. There were the brawling mice and rats in the foreground, and – yes! – the Puritan moles in steeple hats are peering out of a diamond-leaded casement on the first floor to the right of the inn sign. There are windows to the left, but these are not open. And yet – this is something I cannot remember seeing before – there is something behind those windows, and it is not another rodent.
It is the pale head-and-shoulders of a boy in a white flannel shirt, a boy no more than six inches high. I cannot see him too clearly through the little leaded panes of glass, but I think I know him.
I swear that the head moved and turned its black eyes upon me.
They tell me of course this is rubbish, and I want to believe them.
NEIL GAIMAN
The Witch’s Headstone
NEIL GAIMAN WAS BORN in Portchester, England, and he now makes his home in America, in a big dark house of uncertain location where he grows exotic pumpkins and accumulates computers and cats.
He is one of the most acclaimed comics writers of his generation, most notably for his epic World Fantasy Award-winning Sandman series (collected into various volumes) and his numerous graphic novel collaborations with artist Dave McKean (Violent Cases, Black Orchid, Signal to Noise, Mr Punch, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls).
He is the author of such bestselling novels as Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, Odd and the Frost Giants, Interworld (with Michael Reaves) and The Graveyard Book.
Angels & Visitations: A Miscellany is a collection of his short fiction that won the International Horror Guild Award, despite not having any horror in it. Or hardly any. It was followed by Smoke and Mirrors, Adventures in the Dream Trade, Fragile Things and M is for Magic.
He created the BBC mini-series Neverwhere (with Lenny Henry) and scripted the English-language version of Princess Mononoke, an episode of Babylon 5 (“Day of the Dead”), Dave McKean’s MirrorMask and Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D epic Beowulf (with Roger Avary). Mathhew Vaughn’s movie Stardust and Henry Selick’s Coraline are adapted from his work.
Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden and Stephen R. Bissette was published in 2008.
“I owe this story’s existence to my daughter Maddy,” explains Gaiman. “We were on holiday. I don’t do holidays well, so I started to write a short story. I was about a page into it and decided it wasn’t working and to abandon it and do something else when Maddy sat down on the deck chair next to me and asked what I was doing.
“So I read her what I’d written, and she asked what happened next. I had no choice, and carried on writing. Which means I also owe her The Graveyard Book, of which this story turns out to be chapter four . . .”
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 edge of the hill, beneath the old apple tree, with a fence of rust-brown iron railings, each topped with a small, rusting spear-head, but there was a wasteland beyond that, a mass of nettles and weeds, of brambles and autumnal rubbish, and Bod, who was a good boy, on the whole, and 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 abandoned church in the middle of the graveyard, and he waited until it got dark. As twilight edged from grey to purple ther
e 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 stone 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 bless the churches and the ground they set aside to bury people in, to make it holy. But they leave land unconsecrated beside the sacred ground, Potters 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?”
Silas grinned so wide and sudden that he showed his fangs. “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 Humours, 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 passing, 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 humours. 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 cosiness 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.
“Yes, dear. But you don’t want to go over there.”
“Why not?”
Miss Borrows smiled the guileless smile of the dead. “They aren’t our sort of people,” she said.
“But it is the graveyard, isn’t it? I mean, I’m allowed to go there if I want to?”
“That,” said Miss Borrows, “would not be advisable.”
Bod was obedient, but curious, and so, when lessons were done for the night, he walked past Harrison Westwood, Baker, and family’s memorial, a broken-headed angel, but did not climb down the hill to the Potters Field. Instead he walked up the side of the hill to where a picnic some thirty years before had left its mark in the shape of a large apple tree.
There were some lessons that Bod had mastered. He had eaten a bellyful of unripe apples, sour and white-pipped, from the tree some years before, and had regretted it for days, his guts cramping and painful while Mrs Owens lectured him on what not to eat. Now he waited until the apples were ripe before eating them, and never ate more than two or three a night. He had finished the last of the apples the week before, but he liked the apple tree as a place to think.
He edged up the trunk, to his favourite place in the crook of two branches, and looked down at the Potters Field below him, a brambly patch of weeds and unmown grass in the moonlight. He wondered whether the witch would be old and iron-toothed and travel in a house on chicken legs, or whether she would be thin and sharp-nosed and carry a broomstick.
And then he was hungry. He wished he had not devoured all the apples on the tree. That he had left just one . . .
He glanced up, and thought he saw something. He looked once, looked twice to be certain. An apple, red and ripe
Bod prided himself on his tree-climbing skills. He swung himself up, branch by branch, and imagined he was Silas, swarming smoothly up a sheer brick wall. The apple, the red of it almost black in the moonlight, hung just out of reach. Bod moved slowly forward along the branch, until he was just below the apple. Then he stretched up, and the tips of his fingers touched the perfect apple.
He was never to taste it.
A snap, loud as a hunter’s gun, as the branch gave way beneath him.
A flash of pain woke him, sharp as ice, the colour of slow thunder, down in the weeds that summer’s night.
The ground beneath him seemed relatively soft, and oddly warm. He pushed a hand down and felt something like warm fur beneath him. He had landed on the grass-pile, where the graveyard’s gardener threw the cuttings from the mower, and it had broken his fall. Still, there was a pain in his chest, and his leg hurt as if he had landed on it first, and twisted it.
Bod moaned.
“Hush-a-you-hush-a-boy,” said a voice from behind him. “Where did you come from? Dropping like a thunderstone. What way is that to carry on?”
“I was in the apple tree,” said Bod.
“Ah. Let me see your leg. Broken like the tree’s limb, I’ll be bound.” Cool fingers prodded his left leg. “Not broken. Twisted, y
es, sprained perhaps. You have the Devil’s own luck, boy, falling into the compost. ’Tain’t the end of the world.”
“Oh, good,” said Bod. “Hurts, though.”
He turned his head, looked up and behind him. She was older than him, but not a grown-up, and she looked neither friendly nor unfriendly. Wary, mostly. She had a face that was intelligent and not even a little bit beautiful.
“I’m Bod,” he said.
“The live boy?” she asked.
Bod nodded.
“I thought you must be,” she said. “We’ve heard of you, even over here, in the Potter’s Field. What do they call you?”
“Owens,” he said. “Nobody Owens. Bod, for short.”
“How-de-do, young Master Bod.”
Bod looked her up and down. She wore a plain white shift. Her hair was mousy and long, and there was something of the goblin in her face – a sideways hint of a smile that seemed to linger, no matter what the rest of her face was doing.
“Were you a suicide?” he asked. “Did you steal a shilling?”
“Never stole nuffink,” she said, “Not even a handkerchief. Anyway,” she said, pertly, “the suicides is all over there, on the other side of that hawthorn, and the gallows-birds are in the blackberry-patch, both of them. One was a coiner, t’other a highwayman, or so he says, although if you ask me I doubt he was more than a common footpad and nightwalker.”
“Ah,” said Bod. Then, suspicion forming, tentatively, he said, “They say a witch is buried here.”
She nodded. “Drownded and burnded and buried here without as much as a stone to mark the spot.”
“You were drowned and burned?”
She settled down on the hill of grass-cuttings beside him, and held his throbbing leg with her chilly hands. “They come to my little cottage at dawn, before I’m proper awake, and drags me out onto the Green. ‘You’re a witch!’ they shouts, fat and fresh-scrubbed all pink in the morning, like so many pigwiggins scrubbed clean for market day. One by one they gets up beneath the sky and tells of milk gone sour and horses gone lame, and finally Mistress Jemima gets up, the fattest, pinkest, best-scrubbed of them all, and tells how as Solomon Porritt now cuts her dead and instead hangs around the washhouse like a wasp about a honeypot, and it’s all my magic, says she, that made him so and the poor young man must be bespelled. So they strap me to the cucking-stool and forces it under the water of the duck pond, saying if I’m a witch I’ll neither drown nor care, but if I am not a witch I’ll feel it. And Mistress Jemima’s father gives them each a silver groat to hold the stool down under the foul green water for a long time, to see if I’d choke on it.”
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