Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection

by Neil Gaiman

Scarlett hesitated. Rain was beginning to plaster her hair down. It was cold.

  The man reached over and handed her his mobile phone. Scarlett looked at it. She realized she was more afraid of calling her mother than she was of getting into the car. Then she said, “I could call the police too, couldn’t I?”

  “You certainly can, yes. Or you can walk home. Or you can just call your mother and ask her to come and pick you up.”

  Scarlett got into the passenger seat and closed the door. She kept hold of the man’s phone.

  “Where do you live?” the man asked.

  “You really don’t have to. I mean, you could just take me to the bus stop…”

  “I’ll take you home. Address?”

  “102a Acacia Avenue. It’s off the main road, a wee bit past the big sports center…”

  “You are out of your way, aren’t you? Right. Let’s get you home.” He took off the handbrake, swung the car around, and drove down the hill.

  “Been living here long?” he said.

  “Not really. We moved here just after Christmas. We lived here when I was five, though.”

  “Is that a brogue I detect in your accent?”

  “We’ve been living in Scotland for ten years. There, I sounded like everyone else, and then I came down here, and now I stick out like a sore thumb.” She had wanted it to sound like a joke, but it was true, and she could hear it as she said it. Not funny, just bitter.

  The man drove to Acacia Avenue, parked in front of the house, then insisted on coming up to the front door with her. When the door was opened he said, “Frightfully sorry. I took the liberty of bringing your daughter back to you. Obviously, you taught her well, shouldn’t accept rides from strangers. But, well, it was raining, she took the wrong bus, wound up on the other side of town. Bit of a mess all around really. Say you can find it in your heart to forgive. Forgive her. And, um, me.”

  Scarlett expected her mother to shout at both of them, and was surprised and relieved when her mother only said, Well, you couldn’t be too careful these days, and was Mr. Um a teacher, and would he like a cup of tea?

  Mr. Um said his name was Frost, but she should call him Jay, and Mrs. Perkins smiled and said he should call her Noona, and she’d put the kettle on.

  Over tea, Scarlett told her mother the story of her wrong bus adventure, and how she had found herself at the graveyard, and how she met Mr. Frost by the little church…

  Mrs. Perkins dropped her teacup.

  They were sitting around the table in the kitchen, so the cup didn’t fall very far, and it didn’t break, just spilled tea. Mrs. Perkins apologized awkwardly, and went and got a cloth from the sink to mop it up.

  Then she said, “The graveyard on the hill, in the Old Town? That one?”

  “I live over that way,” said Mr. Frost. “Been doing a lot of grave-rubbings. And you know it’s technically a nature reserve?”

  Mrs. Perkins said, “I know,” thin-lipped. Then she said, “Thank you so much for giving Scarlett a ride home, Mr. Frost.” Each word might have been an ice cube. Then, “I think you should leave now.”

  “I say, that’s a bit much,” said Frost, amiably. “Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Was it something I said? The rubbings, they’re for a local history project, it’s not as if I’m, you know, digging up bones or anything.”

  For a heartbeat, Scarlett thought that her mother was going to strike Mr. Frost, who just looked worried. But Mrs. Perkins shook her head and said, “Sorry, family history. Not your fault.” As if she was making a conscious effort, she said, brightly, “You know, Scarlett actually used to play in that graveyard when she was little. This is, oh, ten years ago. She had an imaginary friend, too. A little boy called Nobody.”

  A smile twitched at the corner of Mr. Frost’s lips. “A ghostie?”

  “No, I don’t think so. He just lived there. She even pointed out the tomb he lived in. So I suppose he was a ghost. Do you remember, love?”

  Scarlett shook her head. “I must have been a funny kid,” she said.

  “I’m sure that you were nothing of the, um,” said Mr. Frost. “You are raising a fine girl here, Noona. Well, lovely cup of tea. Always a joy to make new friends. I’ll be toddling off now. Got to make myself a little dinner, then I’ve got a meeting of the Local History Society.”

  “You’re making your own dinner?” said Mrs. Perkins.

  “Yes, making it. Well, defrosting it really. I’m also a master of the boil-in-the-bag. Eating for one. Living on my own. Bit of a crusty old bachelor. Actually, in the papers, that always means gay, doesn’t it? Not gay, just never met the right woman.” And for a moment, he looked rather sad.

  Mrs. Perkins, who hated to cook, announced that she always cooked too much food at the weekend, and as she ushered Mr. Frost out into the hall, Scarlett heard him agree that he would love to come round for dinner on Saturday night.

  When Mrs. Perkins came back from the front hall, all she said to Scarlett was, “I hope you’ve done your homework.”

  Scarlett was thinking about the afternoon’s events as she lay in bed that night listening to the sound of the cars grinding their way along the main road. She had been there, in that graveyard, when she was little. That was why everything had seemed so familiar.

  In her mind she imagined and she remembered, and somewhere in there she fell asleep, but in sleep she still walked the paths of the graveyard. It was night, but she could see everything as clearly as if it were day. She was on the side of a hill. There was a boy of about her own age standing with his back to her, looking at the lights of the city.

  Scarlett said, “Boy? What’re you doing?”

  He looked around, seemed to have trouble focusing. “Who said that?” and then, “Oh, I can see you, sort of. Are you Dreamwalking?”

  “I think I’m dreaming,” she agreed.

  “Not quite what I meant,” said the boy. “Hullo. I’m Bod.”

  “I’m Scarlett,” she said.

  He looked at her again, as if he were seeing her for the first time. “Of course, you are! I knew you looked familiar. You were in the graveyard today with that man, the one with the paper.”

  “Mr. Frost,” she said. “He’s really nice. He gave me a lift home.” Then she said, “Did you see us?”

  “Yeah. I keep an eye on most things that happen in the graveyard.”

  “What kind of a name is Bod?” she asked.

  “It’s short for Nobody.”

  “Of course!” said Scarlett. “That’s what this dream is about. You’re my imaginary friend, from when I was little, all grown up.”

  He nodded.

  He was taller than she was. He wore grey, although she could not have described his clothes. His hair was too long, and she thought it had been some time since he had received a haircut.

  He said, “You were really brave. We went deep into the hill and we saw the Indigo Man. And we met the Sleer.”

  Something happened, then, in her head. A rushing and a tumbling, a whirl of darkness and a crash of images…

  “I remember,” said Scarlett. But she said it to the empty darkness of her bedroom, and heard nothing in reply but the low trundle of a distant lorry, making its way through the night.

  Bod had stores of food, the kind that lasted, cached in the crypt, and more in some of the chillier tombs and vaults and mausoleums. Silas had made sure of that. He had enough food to keep him going for a couple of months. Unless Silas or Miss Lupescu was there, he simply would not leave the graveyard.

  He missed the world beyond the graveyard gates, but he knew it was not safe out there. Not yet. The graveyard, though, was his world and his domain, and he was proud of it and loved it as only a fourteen-year-old boy can love anything.

  And yet…

  In the graveyard, no one ever changed. The little children Bod had played with when he was small were still little children; Fortinbras Bartleby, who had once been his best friend, was now four or five years younger than Bod was, and they
had less to talk about each time they saw each other; Thackeray Porringer was Bod’s height and age, and seemed to be in much better temper with him; he would walk with Bod in the evenings, and tell stories of unfortunate things that had happened to his friends. Normally the stories would end in the friends being hanged until they were dead for no offense of theirs and by mistake, although sometimes they were simply transported to the American Colonies and they didn’t have to be hanged unless they came back.

  Liza Hempstock, who had been Bod’s friend for the last six years, was different in another way; she was less likely to be there for him when Bod went down to the nettle-patch to see her, and on the rare occasions when she was, she would be short-tempered, argumentative, and often downright rude.

  Bod talked to Mr. Owens about this, and, after a few moments’ reflection, his father said, “It’s just women, I reckon. She liked you as a boy, probably isn’t sure who you are now you’re a young man. I used to play with one little girl down by the duck-pond every day until she turned about your age, and then she threw an apple at my head and did not say another word to me until I was seventeen.”

  Mrs. Owens sniffed. “It was a pear I threw,” she said, tartly, “and I was talking to you again soon enough, for we danced a measure at your cousin Ned’s wedding, and that was but two days after your sixteenth birthday.”

  Mr. Owens said, “Of course you are right, my dear.” He winked at Bod, to tell him that it was none of it serious. And then he mouthed “Seventeen,” to show that, really, it was.

  Bod had allowed himself no friends among the living. That way, he had realized back during his short-lived schooldays, lay only trouble. Still, he had remembered Scarlett, had missed her for years after she went away, had long ago faced the fact he would never see her again. And now she had been here in his graveyard, and he had not known her…

  He was wandering deeper into the tangle of ivy and trees that made the graveyard’s northwest quadrant so dangerous. Signs advised visitors to keep out, but the signs were not needed. It was uninviting and creepy once you were past the ivy-tangle that marked the end of the Egyptian Walk and the black doors in the mock-Egyptian walls that led to people’s final resting places. In the northwest, nature had been reclaiming the graveyard for almost a hundred years, and the stones were tipped over, graves were forgotten or simply lost beneath the green ivy and the leaf-fall of fifty years. Paths were lost and impassable.

  Bod walked with care. He knew the area well, and he knew how dangerous it could be.

  When Bod was nine he had been exploring in just this part of the world when the soil had given way beneath him, tumbling him into a hole almost twenty feet down. The grave had been dug deep, to accommodate many coffins, but there was no headstone and only one coffin, down at the bottom, containing a rather excitable medical gentleman named Carstairs who seemed thrilled by Bod’s arrival and insisted on examining Bod’s wrist (which Bod had twisted in the tumble, grabbing onto a root) before he could be persuaded to go and fetch help.

  Bod was making his way through the northwest quadrant, a sludge of fallen leaves, a tangle of ivy, where the foxes made their homes and fallen angels stared up blindly, because he had an urge to talk to the Poet.

  Nehemiah Trot was the Poet’s name, and his gravestone, beneath the greenery, read:

  Here lies the mortal remains of

  NEHEMIAH TROT

  POET

  1741–1774

  SWANS SING BEFORE THEY DIE

  Bod said, “Master Trot? Might I ask you for advice?”

  Nehemiah Trot beamed, wanly. “Of course, brave boy. The advice of poets is the cordiality of kings! How may I smear unction on your, no, not unction, how may I give balm to your pain?”

  “I’m not actually in pain. I just—well, there’s a girl I used to know, and I wasn’t sure if I should find her and talk to her or if I should just forget about it.”

  Nehemiah Trot drew himself up to his full height, which was less than Bod’s, raised both hands to his chest excitedly, and said, “Oh! You must go to her and implore her. You must call her your Terpsichore, your Echo, your Clytemnestra. You must write poems for her, mighty odes—I shall help you write them—and thus—and only thus—shall you win your true love’s heart.”

  “I don’t actually need to win her heart. She’s not my true love,” said Bod. “Just someone I’d like to talk to.”

  “Of all the organs,” said Nehemiah Trot, “the tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste our sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue. Go to her! Talk to her!”

  “I shouldn’t.”

  “You should, sir! You must! I shall write about it, when the battle’s lost and won.”

  “But if I Unfade for one person, it makes it easier for other people to see me…”

  Nehemiah Trot said, “Ah, list to me, young Leander, young Hero, young Alexander. If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.”

  “Good point.” Bod was pleased with himself, and glad he had thought of asking the Poet for advice. Really, he thought, if you couldn’t trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust? Which reminded him…

  “Mister Trot?” said Bod. “Tell me about revenge.”

  “Dish best served cold,” said Nehemiah Trot. “Do not take revenge in the heat of the moment. Instead, wait until the hour is propitious. There was a Grub Street hack named O’Leary—an Irishman, I should add—who had the nerve, the confounded cheek to write of my first slim volume of poems, A Nosegay of Beauty Assembled for Gentlemen of Quality, that it was inferior doggerel of no worth whatsoever, and that the paper it was written on would have been better used as—no, I cannot say. Let us simply agree that it was a most vulgar statement.”

  “But you got your revenge on him?” asked Bod, curious.

  “On him and on his entire pestilent breed! Oh, I had my revenge, Master Owens, and it was a terrible one. I wrote, and had published, a letter, which I nailed to the doors of the public houses in London where such low scribbling folk were wont to frequent. And I explained that, given the fragility of the genius poetical, I would henceforth write not for them, but only for myself and posterity, and that I should, as long as I lived, publish no more poems—for them! Thus I left instructions that upon my death my poems were to be buried with me, unpublished, and that only when posterity realized my genius, realized that hundreds of my verses had been lost—lost!—only then was my coffin to be disinterred, only then could my poems be removed from my cold dead hand, to finally be published to the approbation and delight of all. It is a terrible thing to be ahead of your time.”

  “And after you died, they dug you up, and they printed the poems?”

  “Not yet, no. But there is still plenty of time. Posterity is vast.”

  “So…that was your revenge?”

  “Indeed. And a mightily powerful and cunning one at that!”

  “Ye-es,” said Bod, unconvinced.

  “Best. Served. Cold,” said Nehemiah Trot, proudly.

  Bod left the northwest of the graveyard, returned through the Egyptian Walk to the more orderly paths and untangled ways, and as the dusk fell, he wandered back towards the old chapel—not because he hoped Silas had returned from his travels, but because he had spent his life visiting the chapel at dusk, and it felt good to have a rhythm. And anyway, he was hungry.

  Bod slipped through the crypt door, down into the crypt. He moved a cardboard box filled with curled and damp parish papers and took out a carton of orange juice, an apple, a box of bread sticks, and a block of cheese, and he ate while pondering how and whether he would seek out Scarlett—he would Dreamwalk, perhaps, since that was how she had come to him…

  He headed outside, was on his way to sit on the grey wooden bench, when he saw something and he hesitated. There was someone already there, sitting on his bench. She was reading a magazine.

  Bod Faded even more, be
came a part of the graveyard, no more important than a shadow or a twig.

  But she looked up. She looked straight at him, and she said, “Bod? Is that you?”

  He said nothing. Then he said, “Why can you see me?”

  “I almost couldn’t. At first I thought you were a shadow or something. But you look like you did in my dream. You sort of came into focus.”

  He walked over to the bench. He said, “Can you actually read that? Isn’t it too dark for you?”

  Scarlett closed the magazine. She said, “It’s odd. You’d think it would be too dark, but I could read it fine, no problem.”

  “Are you…” He trailed off, uncertain of what he had wanted to ask her. “Are you here on your own?”

  She nodded. “I helped Mr. Frost do some grave-rubbings, after school. And then I told him I wanted to sit and think here, for a bit. When I’m done here, I promised to go and have a cup of tea with him and he’ll run me home. He didn’t even ask why. Just said he loves sitting in graveyards too, and that he thinks they can be the most peaceful places in the world.” Then she said, “Can I hug you?”

  “Do you want to?” said Bod.

  “Yes.”

  “Well then.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t mind if you do.”

  “My hands won’t go through you or anything? You’re really there?”

  “You won’t go through me,” he told her, and she threw her arms around him and squeezed him so tightly he could hardly breathe. He said, “That hurts.”

  Scarlett let go. “Sorry.”

  “No. It was nice. I mean. You just squeezed more than I was expecting.”

  “I just wanted to know if you were real. All these years I thought you were just something in my head. And then I sort of forgot about you. But I didn’t make you up, and you’re back, you’re in my head, and you’re in the world too.”

  Bod smiled. He said, “You used to wear a sort of a coat, it was orange, and whenever I saw that particular color orange, I’d think of you. I don’t suppose you still have the coat.”

  “No,” she said. “Not for a long time. It would be a wee bit too small for me now.”