The Graveyard Book

He was Nobody Owens, he told himself. He was a part of the graveyard. He would be fine.

He nearly missed the little man—the Jack called Ketch—as he hurried into the Egyptian Walk. The man was almost part of the shadows.

Bod breathed in, Faded as deeply as he could Fade, and moved past the man like dust blown on an evening breeze.

He walked down the green-hung length of the Egyptian Walk, and then, with an effort of will, he became as obvious as he could, and kicked at a pebble.

He saw the shadow by the arch detach itself and come after him, almost as silent as the dead.

Bod pushed through the trailing ivy that blocked the Walk and into the northwest corner of the graveyard. He would have to time this just right, he knew. Too fast and the man would lose him, yet if he moved too slowly a black silk rope would wrap itself around his neck, taking his breath with it and all his tomorrows.

He pushed noisily through the tangle of ivy, disturbing one of the graveyard’s many foxes, which sprinted off into the undergrowth. It was a jungle here, of fallen headstones and headless statues, of trees and holly bushes, of slippery piles of half-rotted fallen leaves, but it was a jungle that Bod had explored since he had been old enough to walk and to wander.

Now he was hurrying carefully, stepping from root-tangle of ivy to stone to earth, confident that this was his graveyard. He could feel the graveyard itself trying to hide him, to protect him, to make him vanish, and he fought it, worked to be seen.

He saw Nehemiah Trot, and hesitated.

“Hola, young Bod!” called the poet. “I hear that excitement is the master of the hour, that you fling yourself through these dominions like a comet across the firmament. What’s the word, good Bod?”

“Stand there,” said Bod. “Just where you are. Look back the way I came. Tell me when he comes close.”

Bod skirted the ivy-covered Carstairs grave, and then he stood, panting as if out of breath, with his back to his pursuer.

And he waited. It was only for a few seconds, but it felt like a small forever.

(“He’s here, lad,” said Nehemiah Trot. “About twenty paces behind you.”)

The Jack called Ketch saw the boy in front of him. He pulled his black silk cord tight between his hands. It had been stretched around many necks, over the years, and had been the end of every one of the people it had embraced. It was very soft and very strong and invisible to X-rays.

Ketch’s mustache moved, but nothing else. He had his prey in his sight, and did not want to startle it. He began to advance, silent as a shadow.

The boy straightened up.

Jack Ketch darted forward, his polished black shoes almost soundless on the leaf-mold.

(“He comes, lad!” called Nehemiah Trot.)

The boy turned around, and Jack Ketch made a leap towards him—

And Mr. Ketch felt the world tumbling away beneath him. He grabbed at the world with one gloved hand, but tumbled down and down into the old grave, all of twenty feet, before crash-landing on Mr. Carstairs’s coffin, splintering the coffin-lid and his ankle at the same time.

“That’s one,” said Bod, calmly, although he felt anything but calm.

“Elegantly accomplished,” said Nehemiah Trot. “I shall compose an Ode. Would you like to stay and listen?”

“No time,” said Bod. “Where are the other men?”

Euphemia Horsfall said, “Three of them are on the southwestern path, heading up the hill.”

Tom Sands said, “And there’s another. Right now he’s just walking around the chapel. He’s the one who’s been all around the graveyard for the last month. But there’s something different about him.”

Bod said, “Keep an eye on the man in with Mr. Carstairs—and please apologize to Mr. Carstairs for me…”

He ducked under a pine-branch and loped around the hill, on the paths when it suited him, off the paths, jumping from monument to stone, when that was quicker.

He passed the old apple tree. “There’s four of them, still,” said a tart female voice. “Four of them, and all killers. And the rest of them won’t all of them fall into open graves to oblige you.”

“Hullo, Liza. I thought you were angry at me.”

“I might be and I mightn’t,” she said, nothing more than a voice. “But I’m not going to let them cut you up, nohow.”

“Then trip them for me, trip them and confuse them and slow them down. Can you do that?”

“While you runs away again? Nobody Owens, why don’t you just Fade, and hide in your mam’s nice tomb, where they’ll never find you, and soon enough Silas will be back to take care of them—”

“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t,” said Bod. “I’ll meet you by the lightning tree.”

“I am still not talking to you,” said Liza Hempstock’s voice, proud as a peacock and pert as a sparrow.

“Actually, you are. I mean, we’re talking right now.”

“Only during this emergency. After that, not a word.”

Bod made for the lightning tree, an oak that had been burned by lightning twenty years ago and now was nothing more than a blackened limb clutching at the sky.

He had an idea. It was not fully formed. It depended on whether he could remember Miss Lupescu’s lessons, remember everything he had seen and heard as a child.

It was harder to find the grave than he had expected, even looking for it, but he found it—an ugly grave tipped at an odd angle, its stone topped by a headless, waterstained angel that had the appearance of a gargantuan fungus. It was only when he touched it, and felt the chill, that he knew it for certain.

He sat down on the grave, forced himself to become entirely visible.

“You’ve not Faded,” said Liza’s voice. “Anyone could find you.”

“Good,” said Bod. “I want them to find me.”

“More know Jack Fool than Jack Fool knows,” said Liza.

The moon was rising. It was huge now and low in the sky. Bod wondered if it would be overdoing it if he began to whistle.

“I can see him!”

A man ran towards him, tripping and stumbling, two other men close behind.

Bod was aware of the dead clustered around them, watching the scene, but he forced himself to ignore them. He made himself more comfortable on the ugly grave. He felt like the bait in a trap, and it was not a good feeling.

The bull-like man was the first to reach the grave, followed closely by the man with the white hair who had done all the talking, and the tall blond man.

Bod stayed where he was.

The man with the white hair said, “Ah. The elusive Dorian boy, I presume. Astonishing. There’s our Jack Frost hunting the whole world over, and here you are, just where he left you, thirteen years ago.”

Bod said, “That man killed my family.”

“Indeed he did.”

“Why?”

“Does it matter? You’re never going to tell anyone.”

“Then it’s no skin off your nose to tell me, is it?”

The white-haired man barked a laugh. “Hah! Fu

“I’ll answer your question if you answer mine.”

The bull-necked man said, “You don’t talk to Mr. Dandy like that, little snot! I split you, I will—”

The white-haired man took another step closer to the grave. “Hush, Jack Tar. All right. An answer for an answer. We—my friends and I—are members of a fraternal organization, known as the Jacks of All Trades, or the Knaves, or by other names. We go back an extremely long way. We know…we remember things that most people have forgotten. The Old Knowledge.”

Bod said, “Magic. You know a little magic.”

The man nodded agreeably. “If you want to call it that. But it is a very specific sort of magic. There’s a magic you take from death. Something leaves the world, something else comes into it.”

“You killed my family for—for what? For magic powers? That’s ridiculous.”

“No. We killed you for protection. Long time ago, one of our people—this was back in Egypt, in pyramid days—he foresaw that one day, there would be a child born who would walk the borderland between the living and the dead. That if this child grew to adulthood it would mean the end of our order and all we stand for. We had people casting nativities before London was a village, we had your family in our sights before New Amsterdam became New York. And we sent what we thought was the best and the sharpest and the most dangerous of all the Jacks to deal with you. To do it properly, so we could take all the bad Juju and make it work for us instead, and keep everything tickety-boo for another five thousand years. Only he didn’t.”