The Graveyard Book (22 page)

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, became 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.”

“Yes,” said Bod. “Of course.”

“I should go home,” said Scarlett. “I thought I could come up on the weekend, though.” And then, seeing the expression on Bod’s face, she said, “Today’s Wednesday.”

“I’d like that.”

She turned to go. Then she said, “How will I find you, next time?”

Bod said, “I’ll find you. Don’t worry. Just be on your own and I’ll find you.”

She nodded, and was gone.

Bod walked back into the graveyard and up the hill, until he reached the Frobisher mausoleum. He did not enter it. He climbed up the side of the building, using the thick ivy root as a foothold, and he pulled himself up onto the stone roof, where he sat and thought looking out at the world of moving things beyond the graveyard, and he remembered the way that Scarlett had held him and how safe he had felt, if only for a moment, and how fine it would be to walk safely in the lands beyond the graveyard, and how good it was to be master of his own small world.

Scarlett said that she didn’t want a cup of tea, thank you. Or a chocolate biscuit. Mr. Frost was concerned.

“Honestly,” he told her, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Well, a graveyard, not a bad place to see one, if you were going to, um, I had an aunt once who claimed her parrot was haunted. She was a scarlet macaw. The parrot. The aunt was an architect. Never knew the details.”

“I’m fine,” said Scarlett. “It was just a long day.”

“I’ll give you a lift home then. Any idea what this says? Been puzzling over it for half an hour.” He indicated a grave-rubbing on the little table, held flat by a jam jar in each corner. “Is that name Gladstone, do you think? Could be a relative of the prime minister. But I can’t make out anything else.”

“’Fraid not,” said Scarlett. “But I’ll take another look when I come out on Saturday.”

“Is your mother likely to put in an appearance?”

“She said she’d drop me off here in the morning. Then she has to go and get groceries for our dinner. She’s cooking a roast chicken.”

“Do you think,” asked Mr. Frost, hopefully, “there are likely to be roast potatoes?”

“I expect so, yes.”

Mr. Frost looked delighted. Then he said, “I wouldn’t want to put her out of her way, I mean.”

“She’s loving it,” said Scarlett, truthfully. “Thank you for giving me a lift home.”

“More than welcome,” said Mr. Frost. They walked together down the steps in Mr. Frost’s high narrow house, to the little entrance hall at the bottom of the stairs.

In Krakow, on Wawel Hill, there are caves called the Dragon’s Den, named after a long dead dragon. These are the caves that the tourists know about. There are caves beneath those caves that the tourists do not know and do not ever get to visit. They go down a long way, and they are inhabited.

Silas went first, followed by the grey hugeness of Miss Lupescu, padding quietly on four feet just behind him. Behind them was Kandar, a bandage-wrapped Assyrian mummy with powerful eagle-wings and eyes like rubies, who was carrying a small pig.

There had originally been four of them, but they had lost Haroun in a cave far above, when the Ifrit, as naturally overconfident as are all of its race, had stepped into a space bounded by three polished bronze mirrors and had been swallowed up in a blaze of bronze light. In moments the Ifrit could only be seen in the mirrors, and no longer in reality. In the mirrors his fiery eyes were wide open, and his mouth was moving as if he was shouting at them to leave and beware, and then he faded and was lost to them.

Silas, who had no problems with mirrors, had covered one of them with his coat, rendering the trap useless.

“So,” said Silas. “Now there are only three of us.”

“And a pig,” said Kandar.

“Why?” asked Miss Lupescu, with a wolf-tongue, through wolf teeth. “Why the pig?”

“It’s lucky,” said Kandar.

Miss Lupescu growled, unconvinced.

“Did Haroun have a pig?” asked Kandar, simply.

“Hush,” said Silas. “They are coming. From the sound of it, there are many of them.”

“Let them come,” whispered Kandar.

Miss Lupescu’s hackles were rising. She said nothing, but she was ready for them, and it was only by an effort of will that she did not throw back her head and howl.

“It’s beautiful up this way,” said Scarlett.

“Yes,” said Bod.

“So, your family were all killed?” said Scarlett. “Does anyone know who did it?”

“No. Not that I know. My guardian only says that the man who did it is still alive, and that he’ll tell me the rest of what he knows one day.”

“One day?”

“When I’m ready.”

“What’s he scared of? That you’d strap on your gun and ride out to wreak vengeance on the man who killed your family?”

Bod looked at her seriously. “Well, obviously,” he said. “Not a gun, though. But yes. Something like that.”

“You’re joking.”

Bod said nothing. His lips were tight-pressed together. He shook his head. Then he said, “I’m not joking.”

It was a bright and sunny Saturday morning. They were just past the entrance to the Egyptian Walk, out of the direct sunlight, under the pines and the sprawling monkey puzzle tree.

“Your guardian. Is he a dead person too?”

Bod said, “I don’t talk about him.”

Scarlett looked hurt. “Not even to me?”

“Not even to you.”

“Well,” she said. “Be like that.”

Bod said, “Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” just as Scarlett said, “I promised Mr. Frost I wouldn’t be too long. I’d better be getting back.”

“Right,” said Bod, worried he had offended her, unsure what he should say to make anything better.

He watched Scarlett head off on the winding path back to the chapel. A familiar female voice said, with derision, “Look at her! Miss high and mighty!” but there was no one to be seen.

Bod, feeling awkward, walked back to the Egyptian Walk. Miss Lillibet and Miss Violet had let him store a cardboard box filled with old paperback books in their vault, and he wanted to find something to read.

Scarlett helped Mr. Frost with his grave-rubbings until midday, when they stopped for lunch. He offered to buy her fish and chips as a thank-you, and they walked down to the fish and chip shop at the bottom of the road, and as they walked back up the hill they ate their steaming fish and chips, drenched in vinegar and glittering with salt, out of paper bags.

Scarlett said, “If you wanted to find out about a murder, where would you look? I already tried the Internet.”

“Um. Depends. What kind of murder are we talking about?”

“Something local, I think. About thirteen or fourteen years ago. A family was killed around here.”

“Crikey,” said Mr. Frost. “This really happened?”

“Oh yes. Are you all right?”

“Not really. Bit too, well, bit of a wimp, really. Things like that, I mean, local true crime, you don’t like to think about it. Things like that, happening here. Not something I’d expect a girl of your age to be interested in.”

“It’s not actually for me,” admitted Scarlett. “It’s for a friend.”