The Graveyard Book (14 page)

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

S
OMETHING 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 over 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.”

“Oh. I see. I think.” Bod put the clothes on. The shoelaces gave him a little trouble and Silas had to teach him how to tie them. It seemed remarkably complicated to Bod, and he had to tie and re-tie his laces several times before he had done it to Silas’s satisfaction. Only then did Bod dare to ask his question.

“Silas. What’s a Macabray?”

Silas’s eyebrows raised and his head tipped to one side. “Where did you hear about that?”

“Everyone in the graveyard is talking about it. I think it’s something that happens tomorrow night. What’s a Macabray?”

“It’s a dance, “said Silas.

“
All must dance the Macabray,
” said Bod, remembering. “Have you danced it? What kind of dance is it?”

His guardian looked at him with eyes like black pools and said, “I do not know. I know many things, Bod, for I have been walking this earth at night for a very long time, but I do not know what it is like to dance the Macabray. You must be alive or you must be dead to dance it—and I am neither.”

Bod shivered. He wanted to embrace his guardian, to hold him and tell him that he would never desert him, but the action was unthinkable. He could no more hug Silas than he could hold a moonbeam, not because his guardian was insubstantial, but because it would be wrong. There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

His guardian inspected Bod thoughtfully, a boy in his new clothes. “You’ll do,” he said. “Now you look like you’ve lived outside the graveyard all your life.”

Bod smiled proudly. Then the smile stopped and he looked grave once again. He said, “But you’ll always be here, Silas, won’t you? And I won’t ever have to leave, if I don’t want to?”

“Everything in its season,” said Silas, and he said no more that night.

Bod woke early the next day, when the sun was a silver coin high in the grey winter sky. It was too easy to sleep through the hours of daylight, to spend all his winter in one long night and never see the sun, and so each night before he slept he would promise himself that he would wake in daylight, and leave the Owenses’ cozy tomb.

There was a strange scent in the air, sharp and floral. Bod followed it up the hill to the Egyptian Walk, where the winter ivy hung in green tumbles, an evergreen tangle that hid the mock-Egyptian walls and statues and hieroglyphs.

The perfume was heaviest there, and for a moment Bod wondered if snow might have fallen, for there were white clusters on the greenery. Bod examined a cluster more closely. It was made of small five-petaled flowers, and he had just put his head in to sniff the perfume when he heard footsteps coming up the path.

Bod Faded into the ivy, and watched. Three men and a woman, all alive, came up the path and into the Egyptian Walk. The woman had an ornate chain around her neck.

“Is this it?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Caraway,” said one of the men—chubby and white-haired and short of breath. Like each of the men, he carried a large, empty wicker basket.

She seemed both vague and puzzled. “Well, if you say so,” she said. “But I cannot say that I understand it.” She looked up at the flowers. “What do I do now?”

The smallest of the men reached into his wicker basket and brought out a tarnished pair of silver scissors. “The scissors, Lady Mayoress, “he said.

She took the scissors from him and began to cut the clumps of blossom, and she and the three men started to fill the baskets with the flowers.

“This is,” said Mrs. Caraway, the Lady Mayoress, after a little while, “perfectly ridiculous.”

“It
is
,” said the fat man, “a
tradition
.”

“Perfectly ridiculous,” said Mrs. Caraway, but she continued to cut the white blossoms and drop them into the wicker baskets. When they had filled the first basket, she asked, “Isn’t that enough?”

“We need to fill all four baskets,” said the smaller man, “and then distribute a flower to everyone in the Old Town.”

“And what kind of tradition is that?” said Mrs. Caraway. “I asked the Lord Mayor before me, and he said he’d never heard of it.” Then she said, “Do you get a feeling someone’s watching us?”

“What?” said the third man, who had not spoken until now. He had a beard and a turban and two wicker baskets. “Ghosts, you mean? I do not believe in ghosts.”

“Not ghosts,” said Mrs. Caraway. “Just a feeling like someone’s looking.”

Bod fought the urge to push further back into the ivy.

“It’s not surprising that the previous Lord Mayor did not know about this tradition,” said the chubby man, whose basket was almost full. “It’s the first time the winter blossoms have bloomed in eighty years.”

The man with the beard and the turban, who did not believe in ghosts, was looking around him nervously.

“Everyone in the Old Town gets a flower,” said the small man. “Man, woman, and child.” Then he said, slowly, as if he were trying to remember something he had learned a very long time ago,
“One to leave and one to stay and all to dance the Macabray.”

Mrs. Caraway sniffed. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said, and kept on snipping the blossoms.

Dusk fell early in the afternoon, and it was night by half past four. Bod wandered the paths of the graveyard, looking for someone to talk to, but there was no one about. He walked down to the Potter’s Field to see if Liza Hempstock was about, but found no one there. He went back to the Owenses’ tomb, but found it also deserted: neither his father nor Mistress Owens was anywhere to be seen.

Panic started then, a low-level panic. It was the first time in his ten years that Bod could remember feeling abandoned in the place he had always thought of as his home: he ran down the hill to the old chapel, where he waited for Silas.

Silas did not come.

“Perhaps I missed him,” thought Bod, but he did not believe this. He walked up the hill to the very top, and looked out. The stars hung in the chilly sky, while the patterned lights of the city spread below him, streetlights and car headlights and things in motion. He walked slowly down from the hill until he reached the graveyard’s main gates, and he stopped there.

He could hear music.

Bod had listened to all kinds of music: the sweet chimes of the ice-cream van, the songs that played on workmen’s radios, the tunes that Claretty Jake played the dead on his dusty fiddle, but he had never heard anything like this before: a series of deep swells, like the music at the beginning of something, a prelude perhaps, or an overture.