“What is it?” asked his grandmother, stirring the contents of a big iron pot on the stove. “What’s got into you now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something’s happening. Something…interesting.” And then he licked his lips. “Smells tasty,” he said. “Very tasty.”
Lightning illuminated the cobbled street.
Bod hurried through the rain through the Old Town, always heading up the hill toward the graveyard. The grey day had become an early night while he was inside the storeroom, and it came as no surprise to him when a familiar shadow swirled beneath the street lamps. Bod hesitated, and a flutter of night-black velvet resolved itself into a man-shape.
Silas stood in front of him, arms folded. He strode forward, impatiently.
“Well?” he said.
Bod said, “I’m sorry, Silas.”
“I’m disappointed in you, Bod,” Silas said, and he shook his head. “I’ve been looking for you since I woke. You have the smell of trouble all around you. And you know you’re not allowed to go out here, into the living world.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” There was rain on the boy’s face, running down like tears.
“First of all, we need to get you back to safety.” Silas reached down, and enfolded the living child inside his cloak, and Bod felt the ground fall away beneath him.
“Silas,” he said.
Silas did not answer.
“I was a bit scared,” he said. “But I knew you’d come and get me if it got too bad. And Liza was there. She helped a lot.”
“Liza?” Silas’s voice was sharp.
“The witch. From the Potter’s Field.”
“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 clambered 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.
CHAPTER FIVE
Danse Macabre
SOMETHING WAS GOING ON, Bod was certain of it. It was there in the crisp winter air, in the stars, in the wind, in the darkness. It was there in the rhythms of the long nights and the fleeting days.
Mistress Owens pushed him out of the Owenses’ little tomb. “Get along with you,” she said. “I’ve got business to attend to.”
Bod looked at his mother. “But it’s cold out there,” he said.
“I should hope so,” she said, “it being winter. That’s as it should be. Now,” she said, more to herself than to Bod, “shoes. And look at this dress—it needs hemming. And cobwebs—there are cobwebs all over, for heaven’s sakes. You get along,” this to Bod once more. “I’ve plenty to be getting on with, and I don’t need you underfoot.”
And then she sang to herself, a little couplet Bod had never heard before.
“Rich man, poor man, come away.
Come to dance the Macabray.”
“What’s that?” asked Bod, but it was the wrong thing to have said, for Mistress Owens looked dark as a thunder-cloud, and Bod hurried out of the tomb before she could express her displeasure more forcefully.
It was cold in the graveyard, cold and dark, and the stars were already out. Bod passed Mother Slaughter in the ivy-covered Egyptian Walk, squinting at the greenery.
“Your eyes are younger than mine, young man,” she said. “Can you see blossom?”
“Blossom? In winter?”
“Don’t you look at me with that face on, young man,” she said. “Things blossom in their time. They bud and bloom, blossom and fade. Everything in its time.” She huddled deeper into her cloak and bonnet and she said,
“Time to work and time to play,
Time to dance the Macabray. Eh, boy?”
“I don’t know,” said Bod. “What’s the Macabray?”
But Mother Slaughter had pushed into the ivy and was gone from sight.
“How odd,” said Bod, aloud. He sought warmth and company in the bustling Bartleby mausoleum, but the Bartleby family—seven generations of them—had no time for him that night. They were cleaning and tidying, all of them, from the oldest (d. 1831) to the youngest (d. 1690).
Fortinbras Bartleby, ten years old when he had died (of consumption, he had told Bod, who had mistakenly believed for several years that Fortinbras had been eaten by lions or bears, and was extremely disappointed to learn it was merely a disease), now apologized to Bod.
“We cannot stop to play, Master Bod. For soon enough, tomorrow night comes. And how often can a man say that?”
“Every night,” said Bod. “Tomorrow night always comes.”
“Not this one,” said Fortinbras. “Not once in a blue moon, or a month of Sundays.”
“It’s not Guy Fawkes Night,” said Bod, “or Hallowe’en. It’s not Christmas or New Year’s Day.”
Fortinbras smiled, a huge smile that filled his pie-shaped, freckly face with joy.
“None of them,” he said. “This one’s special.”
“What’s it called?” asked Bod. “What happens tomorrow?”
“It’s the best day,” said Fortinbras, and Bod was certain he would have continued but his grandmother, Louisa Bartleby (who was only twenty) called him over to her, and said something sharply in his ear.
“Nothing,” said Fortinbras. Then to Bod, “Sorry. I have to work now.” And he took a rag and began to buff the side of his dusty coffin with it. “La, la, la, oomp,” he sang. “La la la, oomp.” And with each “oomp,” he would do a wild, whole-body flourish with his rag.
“Aren’t you going to sing that song?”
“What song?”
“The one everybody’s singing?”
“No time for that,” said Fortinbras. “It’s tomorrow, tomorrow, after all.”
“No time,” said Louisa, who had died in childbirth, giving birth to twins. “Be about your business.”
And in her sweet, clear voice, she sang,
“One and all will hear and stay
Come and dance the Macabray.”
Bod walked down to the crumbling little church. He slipped between the stones, and into the crypt, where he sat and waited for Silas to return. He was cold, true, but the cold did not bother Bod, not really: the graveyard embraced him, and the dead do not mind the cold.
His guardian returned in the small hours of the morning; he had a large plastic bag with him.
“What’s in there?”
“Clothes. For you. Try them on.” Silas produced a grey sweater the color of Bod’s winding sheet, a pair of jeans, underwear, and shoes—pale green sneakers.
“What are they for?”
“You mean, apart from wearing? Well, firstly, I think you’re old enough—what are you, ten years old now?—and normal, living people clothes are wise. You’ll have to wear them one day, so why not pick up the habit right now? And they could also be camouflage.”
“What’s camouflage?”
“When something looks enough like something else that people watching don’t know what it is they’re looking at.”
“Oh. I see. I think.” Bod put the clothes on. The shoelaces gave him a little trouble and Silas had to teach him how to tie them. It seemed remarkably complicated to Bod, and he had to tie and re-tie his laces several times before he had done it to Silas’s satisfaction. Only then did Bod dare to ask his question.