Bod said, “You’re missing the point, I’m afraid. You two need to stop this. Stop behaving like other people don’t matter. Stop hurting people.”
Mo grinned a sharp grin. “For heaven’s sake,” she said to Nick. “Hit him.”
“I gave you a chance,” said Bod. Nick swung a vicious fist at Bod, who was no longer there, and Nick’s fist slammed into the side of the gravestone.
“Where did he go?” said Mo. Nick was swearing and shaking his hand. She looked around the shadowy cemetery, puzzled. “He was here. You know he was.”
Nick had little imagination, and he was not about to start thinking now. “Maybe he ran away,” he said.
“He didn’t run,” said Mo. “He just wasn’t there anymore.” Mo had an imagination. The ideas were hers. It was twilight in a spooky churchyard, and the hairs on the back of her neck were prickling. “Something is really, really wrong,” said Mo. Then she said, in a higher-pitched panicky voice, “We have to get out of here.”
“I’m going to find that kid,” said Nick F
arthing. “I’m going to beat the stuffing out of him.” Mo felt something unsettled in the pit of her stomach. The shadows seemed to move around them.
“Nick,” said Mo, “I’m scared.”
Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they’re scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too.
Nick didn’t say anything. He just ran, and Mo ran close on his heels. The streetlights were coming on as they ran back towards the world, turning the twilight into night, making the shadows into dark places in which anything could be happening.
They ran until they reached Nick’s house, and they went inside and turned on all the lights, and Mo called her mother and demanded, half crying, to be picked up and driven the short distance to her own house, because she wasn’t walking home that night.
Bod had watched them run with satisfaction.
“That was good, dear,” said someone behind him, a tall woman in white. “A nice Fade, first. Then the Fear.”
“Thank you,” said Bod. “I hadn’t even tried the Fear out on living people. I mean, I knew the theory, but. Well.”
“It worked a treat,” she said, cheerfully. “I’m Amabella Persson.”
“Bod. Nobody Owens.”
“The live boy? From the big graveyard on the hill? Really?”
“Um.” Bod hadn’t realized that anyone knew who he was beyond his own graveyard. Amabella was knocking on the side of the tomb. “Roddy? Portunia? Come and see who’s here!”
There were three of them there, then, and Amabella was introducing Bod and he was shaking hands and saying, “Charmed, I am sure,” because he could greet people politely over nine hundred years of changing manners.
“Master Owens here was frightening some children who doubtless deserved it,” Amabella was explaining.
“Good show,” said Roderick Persson. “Bounders guilty of reprehensible behavior, eh?”
“They were bullies,” said Bod. “Making kids hand over their pocket money. Stuff like that.”
“A Frightening is certainly a good beginning,” said Portunia Persson, who was a stout woman, much older than Amabella. “And what have you planned if it does not work?”
“I hadn’t really thought—” Bod began, but Amabella interrupted.
“I should suggest that Dreamwalking might be the most efficient remedy. You can Dreamwalk, can you not?”
“I’m not sure,” said Bod. “Mister Pennyworth showed me how, but I haven’t really—well, there’s things I only really know in theory, and—”
Portunia Persson said, “Dreamwalking is all very well, but might I suggest a good Visitation? That’s the only language that these people understand.”
“Oh,” said Amabella. “A Visitation? Portunia my dear, I don’t really think so–-”
“No, you don’t. Luckily, one of us thinks.”