“Last dance!” someone called, and the music skirled up into something stately and slow and final.
Each of the dancers took a partner, the living with the dead, each to each. Bod reached out his hand and found himself touching fingers with, and gazing into the grey eyes of, the lady in the cobweb dress.
She smiled at him.
“Hello, Bod,” she said.
“Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name.”
“Names aren’t really important,” she said.
“I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big.”
“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.”
“Can I ride him?” asked Bod.
“One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
And with that, the dance was done. Bod bowed low to his dancing partner, and then, and only then, did he feel exhausted, feel as if he had been dancing for hour after hour. He could fe
el all his muscles aching and protesting. He was out of breath.
A clock somewhere began to strike the hour, and Bod counted along with it. Twelve chimes. He wondered if they had been dancing for twelve hours or twenty-four or for no time at all.
He straightened up, and looked around him. The dead had gone, and the Lady on the Grey. Only the living remained, and they were beginning to make their way home—leaving the town square sleepily, stiffly, like people who had awakened from a deep sleep, walking without truly waking.
The town square was covered with tiny white flowers. It looked as if there had been a wedding.
Bod woke the next afternoon in the Owenses’ tomb feeling like he knew a huge secret, that he had done something important, and was burning to talk about it.
When Mistress Owens got up, Bod said, “That was amazing last night!”
Mistress Owens said, “Oh yes?”
“We danced,” said Bod. “All of us. Down in the Old Town.”
“Did we indeed?” said Mistress Owens, with a snort. “Dancing is it? And you know you aren’t allowed down into the town.”
Bod knew better than even to try to talk to his mother when she was in this kind of mood. He slipped out of the tomb into the gathering dusk.
He walked up the hill, to the black obelisk, and Josiah Worthington’s stone, where there was a natural amphitheater, and he could look out at the Old Town and at the lights of the city around it.
Josiah Worthington was standing beside him.
Bod said, “You began the dance. With the Mayor. You danced with her.”
Josiah Worthington looked at him and said nothing.
“You did,” said Bod.
Josiah Worthington said, “The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not to speak of it to the living.”
“But I’m one of you.”