Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection

by Neil Gaiman

  “I did,” said Bolger, from behind him.

  “Well, I can’t see hide nor hair of him.”

  Bolger’s face appeared behind the ruddy man’s and he peered into the room. “Hiding,” he said, staring straight at where Bod was standing. “No use hiding,” he announced, loudly. “I can see you there. Come on out.”

  The two men walked into the little room, and Bod stood stock still between them and thought of Mr. Pennyworth’s lessons. He did not react, he did not move. He let the men’s glances slide from him without seeing him.

  “You’re going to wish you’d come out when I called,” said Bolger, and he shut the door. “Right,” he said to Tom Hustings. “You block the door, so he can’t get past.” And with that he walked around the room, peering behind things, and bending, awkwardly, to look beneath the desk. He walked straight past Bod and opened the cupboard. “Now I see you!” he shouted. “Come out!”

  Liza giggled.

  “What was that?” asked Tom Hustings, spinning round.

  “I didn’t hear nothing,” said Abanazer Bolger.

  Liza giggled again. Then she put her lips together and blew, making a noise that began as a whistling, and then sounded like a distant wind. The electric lights in the little room flickered and buzzed, then they went out.

  “Bloody fuses,” said Abanazer Bolger. “Come on. This is a waste of time.”

  The key clicked in the lock, and Liza and Bod were left alone in the room.

  “He’s got away,” said Abanazer Bolger. Bod could hear him now, through the door. “Room like that. There wasn’t anywhere he could have been hiding. We’d’ve seen him if he was.”

  “The man Jack won’t like that.”

  “Who’s going to tell him?”

  A pause.

  “Here. Tom Hustings. Where’s the brooch gone?”

  “Mm? That? Here. I was keeping it safe.”

  “Keeping it safe? In your pocket? Funny place to be keeping it safe, if you ask me. More like you were planning to make off with it—like you was planing to keep my brooch for your own.”

  “Your brooch, Abanazer? Your brooch? Our brooch, you mean.”

  “Ours, indeed. I don’t remember you being here, when I got it from that boy.”

  “That boy that you couldn’t even keep safe for the man Jack, you mean? Can you imagine what he’ll do, when he finds you had the boy he was looking for, and you let him go?”

  “Probably not the same boy. Lots of boys in the world, what’re the odds it was the one he was looking for? Out the back door as soon as my back was turned, I’ll bet.” And then Abanazer Bolger said, in a high, wheedling voice, “Don’t you worry about the man Jack, Tom Hustings. I’m sure that it was a different boy. My old mind playing tricks. And we’re almost out of sloe gin—how would you fancy a good Scotch? I’ve whisky in the back room. You just wait here a moment.”

  The storeroom door was unlocked, and Abanazer entered, holding a walking stick and a flashlight, looking even more sour of face than before.

  “If you’re still in here,” he said, in a sour mutter, “don’t even think of making a run for it. I’ve called the police on you, that’s what I’ve done.” A rummage in a drawer produced the half-filled bottle of whisky, and then a tiny black bottle. Abanazer poured several drops from the little bottle into the larger, then he pocketed the tiny bottle. “My brooch, and mine alone,” he muttered, and followed it with a barked, “Just coming, Tom!”

  He glared around the dark room, staring past Bod, then he left the storeroom, carrying the whisky in front of him. He locked the door behind him.

  “Here you go,” came Abanazer Bolger’s voice through the door. “Give us your glass then, Tom. Nice drop of Scotch, put hairs on your chest. Say when.”

  Silence. “Cheap muck. Aren’t you drinking?”

  “That sloe gin’s gone to my innards. Give it a minute for my stomach to settle…” Then, “Here—Tom! What have you done with my brooch?”

  “Your brooch is it now? Whoa—what did you…you put something in my drink, you little grub!”

  “What if I did? I could read on your face what you was planning, Tom Hustings. Thief.”

  And then there was shouting, and several crashes, and loud bangs, as if heavy items of furniture were being overturned…

  …then silence.

  Liza said, “Quickly now. Let’s get you out of here.”

  “But the door’s locked.” He looked at her. “Is there something you can do?”

  “Me? I don’t have any magics will get you out of a locked room, boy.”

  Bod crouched, and peered out through the keyhole. It was blocked; the key sat in the keyhole. Bod thought, then he smiled, momentarily, and it lit his face like the flash of a lightbulb. He pulled a crumpled sheet of newspaper from a packing case, flattened it out as best he could, then pushed it underneath the door, leaving only a corner on his side of the doorway.

  “What are you playing at?” asked Liza, impatiently.

  “I need something like a pencil. Only thinner…” he said. “Here we go.” And he took a thin paintbrush from the top of the desk, and pushed the brushless end into the lock, jiggled it and pushed some more.

  There was a muffled clunk as the key was pushed out, as it dropped from the lock onto the newspaper. Bod pulled the paper back under the door, now with the key sitting on it.

  Liza laughed, delighted. “That’s wit, young man,” she said. “That’s wisdom.”

  Bod put the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the storeroom door.

  There were two men on the floor, in the middle of the crowded antiques shop. Furniture had indeed fallen; the place was a chaos of wrecked clocks and chairs, and in the midst of it the bulk of Tom Hustings lay, fallen on the smaller figure of Abanazer Bolger. Neither of them was moving.

  “Are they dead?” asked Bod.

  “No such luck,” said Liza.

  On the floor beside the men was a brooch of glittering silver; a crimson-orange-banded stone, held in place with claws and with snake-heads, and the expression on the snake-heads was one of triumph and avarice and satisfaction.

  Bod dropped the brooch into his pocket, where it sat beside the heavy glass paperweight, the paintbrush, and the little pot of paint.

  “Take this too,” said Liza.

  Bod looked at the black-edged card with the word Jack handwritten on one side. It disturbed him. There was something familiar about it, something that stirred old memories, something dangerous. “I don’t want it.”

  “You can’t leave it here with them,” said Liza. “They were going to use it to hurt you.”

  “I don’t want it,” said Bod. “It’s bad. Burn it.”

  “No!” Liza gasped. “Don’t do that. You mustn’t do that.”

  “Then I’ll give it to Silas,” said Bod. And he put the little card into an envelope so he had to touch it as little as possible, and put the envelope into the inside pocket of his old gardening jacket, beside his heart.

  Two hundred miles away, the man Jack woke from his sleep, and sniffed the air. He walked downstairs.

  “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 o
ver 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.”