M Is for Magic

Bod stood up slowly, and limped down from the grass pile. He leaned against the iron railings. “So were you always a witch?” he asked. “I mean, before you cursed them all?”

“As if it would take witchcraft,” she said with a sniff, “to get Solomon Porritt mooning ’round my cottage.”

Which, Bod thought, but did not say, was not actually an answer to the question, not at all.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Got no headstone,” she said, turning down the corners of her mouth. “Might be anybody. Mightn’t I?”

“But you must have a name.”

“Liza Hempstock, if you please,” she said tartly. Then she said, “It’s not that much to ask, is it? Something to mark my grave. I’m just down there, see? With nothing but nettles to show where I rest.” And she looked so sad, just for a moment, that Bod wanted to hug her. And then it came to him, and as he squeezed between the railings of the fence. He would find Liza Hempstock a headstone, with her name upon it. He would make her smile.

He turned to wave good-bye as he began to clamber up the hill, but she was already gone.

There were broken lumps of other people’s stones and statues in the graveyard, but, Bod knew, that would have been entirely the wrong sort of thing to bring to the gray-eyed witch in the potter’s field. It was going to take more than that. He decided not to tell anyone what he was planning, on the not entirely unreasonable basis that they would have told him not to do it.

Over the next few days his mind filled with plans, each more complicated and extravagant than the last. Mr. Pennyworth despaired.

“I do believe,” he announced, scratching his dusty mustache, “that you are getting, if anything, worse. You are not Fading. You are obvious, boy. You are difficult to miss. If you came to me in company with a purple lion, a green elephant, and a scarlet unicorn astride which was the King of England in his royal robes, I do believe that it is you and you alone that people would stare at, dismissing the others as minor irrelevancies.”

Bod simply stared at him, and said nothing. He was wondering whether there were special shops in the places where the living people gathered that sold only headstones, and if so how he could go about finding one, and Fading was the least of his problems.

He took advantage of Miss Borrow’s willingness to be diverted from the subjects of grammar and composition to the subject of anything else at all to ask her about money—how exactly it worked, how one used it to get things one wanted. Bod had a number of coins he had found over the years (he had learned that the best place to find money was to go, afterward, to wherever courting couples had used the grass of the graveyard as a place to cuddle and snuggle and kiss and roll about. He would often find metal coins on the ground, in the place where they had been), and he thought perhaps he could finally get some use from them.

“How much would a headstone be?” he asked Miss Borrows.

“In my time,” she told him, “they were fifteen guineas. I do not know what they would be today. More, I imagine. Much, much more.”

Bod had fifty-three pence. It would, he was quite certain, not be enough.

It had been four years, almost half a lifetime, since Bod had visited the Indigo Man’s tomb. But he still remembered the way. He climbed to the top of the hill, until he was above the whole town, above even the top of the apple tree, above even the steeple of the ruined church, up where the Frobisher vault stood like a rotten tooth. He slipped down into it, and down and down and still farther down, down to the tiny stone steps cut into the center of the hill, and those he descended until he reached the stone chamber at the base of the hill. It was dark in that tomb, dark as a deep mine, but Bod saw as the dead see and the room gave up its secrets to him.

The Sleer was coiled around the wall of the barrow. It was as he remembered it, all smoky tendrils and hate and greed. This time, however, he was not afraid of it.

FEAR ME, whispered the Sleer. FOR I GUARD THINGS PRECIOUS AND NEVER-LOST.

“I don’t fear you,” said Bod. “Remember? And I need to take something away from here.”

NOTHING EVER LEAVES, came the reply from the coiled thing in the darkness. THE KNIFE, THE BROOCH, THE GOBLET. I GUARD THEM IN THE DARKNESS. I WAIT.

In the center of the room was a slab of rock, and on it they lay: a stone knife, a brooch, and a goblet.

“Pardon me for asking,” said Bod, “but was this your grave?”

MASTER SETS US HERE ON THE PLAIN TO GUARD, BURIES OUR SKULLS BENEATH THIS STONE, LEAVES US HERE KNOWING WHAT WE HAVE TO DO. WE GUARDS THE TREASURES UNTIL MASTER COMES BACK. “I expect that he’s forgotten all about you,” pointed out Bod. “I’m sure he’s been dead himself for ages.”

WE ARE THE SLEER. WE GUARD.