The Graveyard Book

“And you say she helped you?”

“Yes. She especially helped me with my Fading. I think I can do it now.”

Silas grunted. “You can tell me all about it when we’re home.” And Bod was quiet until they landed beside the chapel. They went inside, into the empty hall, as the rain redoubled, splashing up from the puddles that covered the ground.

Bod produced the envelope containing the black-edged card. “Um,” he said. “I thought you should have this. Well, Liza did, really.”

Silas looked at it. Then he opened it, removed the card, stared at it, turned it over, and read Abanazer Bolger’s penciled note to himself, in tiny handwriting, explaining the precise manner of use of the card.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

Bod told him everything he could remember about the day. And at the end, Silas shook his head, slowly, thoughtfully.

“Am I in trouble?” asked Bod.

“Nobody Owens,” said Silas. “You are indeed in trouble. However, I believe I shall leave it to your parents to administer whatever discipline and reproach they believe to be needed. In the meantime, I need to dispose of this.”

The black-edged card vanished inside the velvet cloak, and then, in the manner of his kind, Silas was gone.

Bod pulled the jacket up over his head, and clam

bered up the slippery paths to the top of the hill, to the Frobisher mausoleum. He pulled aside Ephraim Pettyfer’s coffin, and he went down, and down, and still further down.

He replaced the brooch beside the goblet and the knife.

“Here you go,” he said. “All polished up. Looking pretty.” IT COMES BACK, said the Sleer, with satisfaction in its smoke-tendril voice. IT ALWAYS COMES BACK.

It had been a long night.

Bod was walking, sleepily and a little gingerly, past the small tomb of the wonderfully named Miss Liberty Roach (What she spent is lost, what she gave remains with her always. Reader be Charitable), past the final resting place of Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives, Marion and Joan, to the Potter’s Field. Mr. and Mrs. Owens had died several hundred years before it had been decided that beating children was wrong and Mr. Owens had, regretfully, that night, done what he saw as his duty, and Bod’s bottom stung like anything. Still, the look of worry on Mrs. Owens’s face had hurt Bod worse than any beating could have done.

He reached the iron railings that bounded the Potter’s Field, and slipped between them.

“Hullo?” he called. There was no answer. Not even an extra shadow in the hawthorn tree. “I hope I didn’t get you into trouble, too,” he said.

Nothing.

He had replaced the jeans in the gardener’s hut—he was more comfortable in just his grey winding sheet—but he had kept the jacket. He liked having the pockets.

When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand-scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he attacked the nettle-patch in the Potter’s Field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.

From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colors, along with the paint pot, and the paintbrush.

He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters…

E.H

and beneath them he wrote…

we don’t forget

Bedtime, soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.

He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle-patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, he went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.

“Not bad,” said a pert voice from the Potter’s Field, behind him. “Not bad at all.”

But when he turned to look, there was no one there.