The Graveyard Book

“We can put the food here,” said Silas. “It’s cool, and the food will keep longer.” He reached into the box, pulled out a banana.

“And what would that be when it was at home?” asked Mrs. Owens, eyeing the yellow and brown object suspiciously.

“It’s a banana. A fruit, from the tropics. I believe you peel off the outer covering,” said Silas, “like so.”

The child—Nobody—wriggled in Mrs. Owens’s arms, and she let it down to the flagstones. It toddled rapidly to Silas, grasped his trouser-leg and held on.

Silas passed it the banana.

Mrs. Owens watched the boy eat. “Ba-na-na,” she said, dubiously. “Never heard of them. Never. What’s it taste like?”

“I’ve absolutely no idea,” said Silas, who consumed only one food, and it was not bananas. “You could make up a bed in here for the boy, you know.”

“I’ll do no such thing, with Owens and me having a lovely little tomb over by the daffodil patch. Plenty of room in there for a little one. Anyway,” she added, concerned that Silas might think she was rejecting his hospitality, “I wouldn’t want the lad disturbing you.”

“He wouldn’t.”

The boy was done with his banana. What he had not eaten was now smeared over himself. He beamed, messy and apple-cheeked.

“Narna,” he said, happily.

“What a clever little thing he is,” said Mrs. Owens. “And such a mess he’s made! Why, attend, you little wriggler…” and she picked the lumps of banana from his clothes and his hair. And then, “What do you think they’ll decide?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t give him up. Not after what I promised his mama.”

“Although I have been a great many things in my time,” said Silas, “I have never been a mother. And I do not plan to begin now. But I can leave this place…”

Mrs. Owens said simply, “I cannot. My bones are here. And so are Owens’s. I’m never leaving.”

“It must be good,” said Silas, “to have somewhere that you belong. Somewhere that’s home.” There was nothing wistful in the way he said this. His voice was drier than deserts, and he said it as if he were simply stating something unarguable. Mrs. Owens did not argue.

“Do you think we will have long to wait?”

“Not long,” said Silas, but he was wrong about that.

Up in the amphitheater on the side of the hill, the debate continued. That it was the Owenses who had got involved in this nonsense, rather than some flibbertigibbet johnny-come-latelies, counted for a lot, for the Owenses were respectable and respected. That Silas had volunteered to be the boy’s guardian had weight—Silas was regarded with a certain wary awe by the graveyard folk, existing as he did on the borderland between their world and the world they had left. But still, but still…

A graveyard is not normally a democracy, and yet death is the great democracy, and each of the dead had a voice, and an opinion as to whether the living child should be allowed to stay, and they were each determined to be heard, that night.

It was late autumn when the daybreak was long in coming. Although the sky was still dark, cars could now be heard starting up further down the hill, and as the living folk began to drive to work through the misty night-black morning, the graveyard folk talked about the child that had come to them, and what was to be done. Three hundred voices. Three hundred opinions. Nehemiah Trot, the poet, from the tumbled northwestern side of the graveyard, had begun to declaim his thoughts on the matter, although what they were no person listening could have said, when something happened; something to silence each opinionated mouth, something unprecedented in the history of that graveyard.

A huge white horse, of the kind that the people who know horses would call a “grey,” came ambling up the side of the hill. The pounding of its hooves could be heard before it was seen, along with the crashing it made as it pushed through the little bushes and thickets, through the brambles and the ivy and the gorse that had grown up on the side of the hill. The size of a Shire horse it was, a full nineteen hands or more. It was a horse that could have carried a knight in full armor into combat, but all it carried on its naked back was a woman, clothed from head to foot in grey. Her long skirt and her shawl might have been spun out of old cobwebs.

Her face was serene, and peaceful.

They knew her, the graveyard folk, for each of us encounters the Lady on the Grey at the end of our days, and there is no forgetting her.

The horse paused beside the obelisk. In the east the sky was lightening gently, a pearlish, pre-dawn luminescence that made the people of the graveyard uncomfortable and made them think about returning to their comfortable homes. Even so, not a one of them moved. They were watching the Lady on the Grey, each of them half-excited, half-scared. The dead are not superstitious, not as a rule, but they watched her as a Roman Augur might have watched the sacred crows circle, seeking wisdom, seeking a clue.

And she spoke to them.

In a voice like the

chiming of a hundred tiny silver bells she said only, “The dead should have charity.” And she smiled.

The horse, which had been contentedly ripping up and masticating a clump of thick grass, stopped then. The lady touched the horse’s neck, and it turned. It took several huge, clattering steps, then it was off the side of the hill and cantering across the sky. Its thunderous hooves became an early rumble of distant thunder, and in moments it was lost to sight.