Bod shook his head, and he gestured around him. “I’m not actually,” he said. “They are.”
“Who are?” said Mo.
“The people in this place,” said Bod. “Look. I brought you here to give you a choice—”
“You didn’t bring us here,” said Nick.
“You’re here,” said Bod. “I wanted you here. I came here. You followed me. Same thing.”
Mo looked around nervously. “You’ve got friends here?” she asked.
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 Farthing. “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.”
“I have to be getting home,” said Bod, hastily. “They’ll be worrying about me.”
“Of course,” said the Persson family, and “Lovely to meet you,” and “A very good evening to you, young man.” Amabella Persson and Portunia Persson glared at each other. Roderick Persson said, “If you’ll forgive me asking, but your guardian. He is well?”
“Silas? Yes, he’s fine.”
“Give him our regards. I’m afraid a small churchyard like this, well, we’re never going to meet an actual member of the Honour Guard. Still. It’s good to know that they’re there.”
“Good night,” said Bod, who had no idea what the man was talking about, but filed it away for later. “I’ll tell him.”
He picked up his bag of schoolbooks, and he walked home, taking comfort in the shadows.
Going to school with the living did not excuse Bod from his lessons with the dead. The nights were long, and sometimes Bod would apologize and crawl to bed exhausted before midnight. Mostly, he just kept going.
Mr. Pennyworth had little to complain of these days. Bod studied hard, and asked questions. Tonight Bod asked about Hauntings, getting more and more specific, which exasperated Mr. Pennyworth, who had never gone in for that sort of thing himself.
“How exactly do I make a cold spot in the air?” he asked, and “I think I’ve got Fear down, but how do I take it up all the way to Terror?” and Mr. Pennyworth sighed and hurrumphed and did his best to explain, and it was gone four in the morning before they were done.
Bod was tired at school the next day. The first class was History—a subject Bod mostly enjoyed, although he often had to resist the urge to say that it hadn’t happened like that, not according to people who had been there anyway—but this morning Bod was fighting to stay awake.
He was doing all he could do to concentrate on the lesson, so he was not paying attention to much else going on around him. He was thinking about King Charles the First, and about his parents, of Mr. and Mrs. Owens and of the other family, the one he could not remember, when there was a knock on the door. The class and Mr. Kirby all looked to see who was there (it was a year seven, who had been sent to borrow a textbook). And as they turned, Bod felt something stab in the back of his hand. He did not cry out. He just looked up.
Nick Farthing grinned down at him, a sharpened pencil in his fist. “I’m not afraid of you,” whispered Nick Farthing. Bod looked at the back of his hand. A small drop of blood welled up where the point of the pencil had punctured it.
Mo Quilling passed Bod in the corridor that afternoon, her eyes so wide he could see the whites all around them.
“You’re weird,” she said. “You don’t have any friends.”
“I didn’t come here for friends,” said Bod truthfully. “I came here to learn.”
Mo’s nose twitched. “Do you know how weird that is?” She asked. “Nobody comes to school to learn. I mean, you come because you have to.”
Bod shrugged.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said. “Whatever trick you did yesterday. You didn’t scare me.”
“Okay,” said Bod, and he walked on down the corridor.
He wondered if he had made a mistake, getting involved. He had made a mis-step in judgment, that was for certain. Mo and Nick had begun to talk about him, probably the year sevens had as well. Other kids were looking at him, pointing him out to each other. He was becoming a presence, rather than an absence, and that made him uncomfortable. Silas had warned him to keep a low profile, told him to go through school partly Faded, but everything was changing.
He talked to his guardian that evening, told him the whole story. He was not expecting Silas’s reaction.
“I cannot believe,” said Silas, “that you could have been so…so stupid. Everything I told you about remaining just this side of invisibility. And now you’ve become the talk of the school?”
“Well, what did you want me to do?”
“Not this,” said Silas. “It’s not like the olden times. They can keep track of you, Bod. They can find you.” Silas’s unmoving exterior was like the hard crust of rock over molten lava. Bod knew how angry Silas was only because he knew Silas. He seemed to be fighting his anger, controlling it.
Bod swallowed.
“What should I do?” he said, simply.
“Don’t go back,” said Silas. “This school business was an experiment. Let us simply acknowledge that it was not a successful one.”
Bod said nothing. Then he said, “It’s not just the learning stuff. It’s the other stuff. Do you know how nice it is to be in a room filled with people and for all of them to be breathing?”
“It’s not something in which I’ve ever taken pleasure,” said Silas. “So. You don’t go back to school tomorrow.”
“I’m not running away. Not from Mo or Nick or school. I’d leave here first.”
“You will do as you are told, boy,” said Silas, a knot of velvet anger in the darkness.
“Or what?” said Bod, his cheeks burning. “What would you do to keep me here? Kill me?” And he turned on his heel and began to walk down the path that led to the gates and out of the graveyard.
Silas began to call the boy back, then he stopped, and stood there in the night alone.
At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined. Silas wrapped the shadows around him like a blanket, and stared after the way the boy had gone, and did not move to follow.
Nick Farthing was in his bed, asleep and dreaming of pirates on the sunny blue sea, when it all went wrong. One moment he was the captain of his own pirate ship—a happy place, crewed by obedient eleven-year-olds, except for the girls, who were all a year or two older than Nick and who looked especially pretty in their pirate costumes—and the next he was alone on the deck, and a huge, dark ship the size of an oil tanker, with ragged black sails and a skull for a figurehead, was crashing through the storm towards him.
And then, in the way of dreams, he was standing on the black deck of the new ship, and someone was looking down at him.
“You’re not afraid of me,” said the man standing over him.
Nick looked up. He was scared, in his dream, scared of this dead-faced man in pirate costume, his hand on the hilt of a cutlass.
“Do you think you’re a pirate, Nick?” asked his captor, and suddenly something about him seemed familiar to Nick.