The Graveyard Book

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.”

“Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime.”

And Bod realized why he had danced as one of the living, and not as one of the crew that had walked down the hill, and he said only, “I see…I think.”

He went down the hill at a run, a ten-year-old boy in a hurry, going so fast he almost tripped over Digby Poole (1785–1860, As I Am So Shall You Be), righting himself by effort of will, and charged down to the old chapel, scared he would miss Silas, that his guardian would already be gone by the time Bod got there.

Bod sat down on the bench.

There was a movement beside him, although he heard nothing move, and his guardian said, “Good evening, Bod.”

“You were there last night,” said Bod. “Don’t try and say you weren’t there or something because I know you were.”

“Yes,” said Silas.

“I danced with her. With the lady on the white horse.”

“Did you?”

“You saw it! You watched us! The living and the dead! We were dancing. Why won’t anyone talk about it?”

“Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember.”

“But you’re speaking about it right now. We’re talking about the Macabray.”

“I have not danced it,” said Silas.

“You saw it, though.”

Silas said only, “I don’t know what I saw.”

“I danced with the lady, Silas!” exclaimed Bod. His guardian looked almost heartbroken then, and Bod found himself scared, like a child who has woken a sleeping panther.

But all Silas said was, “This conversation is at an end.”

Bod might have said something—there were a hundred things he wanted to say, unwise though it might have been to say them—when something distracted his attention: a rustling noise, soft and gentle, and a cold feather-touch as something brushed his face.

All thoughts of dancing were forgotten then, and his fear was replaced with delight and with awe.

It was the third time in his life that he had seen it.

“Look, Silas, it’s snowing!” he said, joy filling his chest and his head, leaving no room for anything else. “It’s really snow!”

INTERLUDE

A SMALL SIGN IN THE hotel lobby a

There were about a hundred of them, all in sober black suits, but the suits were all they had in common. They had white hair or dark hair or fair hair or red hair or no hair at all. They had friendly faces or unfriendly, helpful or sullen, open or secretive, brutish or sensitive. The majority of them were pink-ski

The men in black suits sat around their tables while up on a platform one of their number, a wide, cheery man dressed in a morning suit, as if he had just come from a wedding, was a

The man Jack sat at the front center table, beside a dapper man with silver-white hair. They were waiting for coffee.

“Time’s a-ticking,” said the silver-haired man, “and we’re none of us getting any younger.”

The man Jack said, “I’ve been thinking. That business in San Francisco four years ago—”

“Was unfortunate, but like the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, absolutely nothing to do with the case. You failed, Jack. You were meant to take care of them all. That included the baby. Especially the baby. Nearly only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.”

A waiter in a white jacket poured coffee for each of the men at the table: a small man with a pencil-thin black mustache, a tall blond man good-looking enough to be a film star or a model, and a dark-ski

“Ten years,” he said. “Time and tide wait for no man. The babe will soon be grown. And then what?”

“I still have time, Mister Dandy,” the man Jack began, but the silver-haired man cut him off, stabbing a large pink finger in his direction.

“You had time. Now, you just have a deadline. Now, you’ve got to get smart. We can’t cut you any slack, not any more. Sick of waiting, we are, every man Jack of us.”

The man Jack nodded, curtly. “I have leads to follow,” he said.

The silver-haired man slurped his black coffee. “Really?”

“Really. And I repeat, I think it’s co

“You’ve discussed this with the secretary?” Mr. Dandy indicated the man at the podium, who was, at that moment, telling them about hospital equipment bought in the previous year from their generosity. (“Not one, not two, but three kidney machines,” he was saying. The men in the room applauded themselves and their generosity politely.)

The man Jack nodded. “I’ve mentioned it.”

“And?”

“He’s not interested. He just wants results. He wants me to finish the business I started.”

“We all do, sunshine,” said the silver-haired man. “The boy’s still alive. And time is no longer our friend.”