The Graveyard Book
“I,” she said sternly, “am Miss Lupescu.”
“And what’s Silas?”
She hesitated. Then she said, “He is a solitary type.”
Bod endured the lesson. When Silas taught him things it was interesting. Much of the time Bod didn’t realize he had been taught anything at all. Miss Lupescu taught in lists, and Bod could not see the point to it. He sat in the crypt, aching to be out in the summer’s twilight, under the ghost moon.
When the lesson was done, in the foulest of moods, he fled. He looked for playmates, but found no one and saw nothing but a large grey dog, which prowled the gravestones, always keeping its distance from him, slipping between gravestones and through shadows.
The
week got worse.
Miss Lupescu continued to bring Bod things she had cooked for him: dumplings swimming in lard; thick reddish-purple soup with a lump of sour cream in it; small, cold boiled potatoes; cold garlic-heavy sausages; hardboiled eggs in a grey unappetizing liquid. He ate as little as he could get away with. The lessons continued: for two days she taught him nothing but ways to call for help in every language in the world, and she would rap his knuckles with her pen if he slipped up, or forgot. By the third day she was firing them at him,
“French?”
“Au secours.”
“Morse Code?”
“S-O-S. Three short dots, three long ones, three short ones again.”
“Night-Gaunt?”
“This is stupid. I don’t remember what a night-gaunt is.”
“They have hairless wings, and they fly low and fast. They do not visit this world, but they fly the red skies above the road to Ghûlheim.”
“I’m never going to need to know this.”
Her mouth pinched in tighter. All she said was, “Night-Gaunt?”
Bod made the noise in the back of his throat that she had taught him—a guttural cry, like an eagle’s call. She sniffed. “Adequate,” she said.
Bod could not wait until the day that Silas returned.
He said, “There’s a big grey dog in the graveyard sometimes. It came when you did. Is it your dog?”
Miss Lupescu straightened her tie. “No,” she said.
“Are we done?”
“For today. You will read the list I give you tonight and remember it for tomorrow.”
Miss Lupescu’s lists were printed in pale purple ink on white paper, and they smelled odd. Bod took the new list up onto the side of the hill and tried to read the words, but his attention kept sliding off it. Eventually he folded it up and placed it beneath a stone.
No one would play with him that night. No one wanted to play or to talk, to run and climb beneath the huge summer moon.
He went down to the Owenses’ tomb to complain to his parents, but Mrs. Owens would not hear a word said against Miss Lupescu, on, as far as Bod was concerned, the unfair grounds that Silas had chosen her, while Mr. Owens simply shrugged and started telling Bod about his days as a young apprentice cabinetmaker, and how much he would have loved to have learned about all the useful things that Bod was learning, which was, as far as Bod was concerned, even worse.
“Aren’t you meant to be studying, anyway?” asked Mrs. Owens, and Bod squeezed his fists together and said nothing.
He stomped off into the graveyard, feeling unloved and underappreciated.
Bod brooded on the injustice of it all, and wandered through the graveyard kicking at stones. He spotted the dark grey dog, and called to it to see if it would come over and play with him, but it kept its distance, and Bod, frustrated, threw a clump of mud towards it, which broke on a nearby gravestone, and scattered earth everywhere. The big dog gazed at Bod reproachfully, then stepped away into the shadows, and was gone.
The boy walked back down the southwest side of the hill, avoiding the old chapel: he did not want to see the place that Silas wasn’t. Bod stopped beside a grave that looked the way he felt: it was beneath an oak that had once been struck by lightning, and now was just a black trunk, like a sharp talon coming out of the hill; the grave itself was waterstained and cracked, and above it was a memorial stone on which a headless angel hung, its robes looking like a huge and ugly tree-fungus.