The Graveyard Book

“Good food,” said Miss Lupescu. They were in the crypt. She had put two plastic containers on the tabletop, and opened the lids. She pointed to the first: “Is beetroot-barley-stew-soup.” She pointed to the second. “Is salad. Now, you eat both. I make them for you.”

Bod stared up at her to see if this was a joke. Food from Silas mostly came in packets, purchased from the kind of places that sold food late at night and asked no questions. No one had ever brought him food in a plastic container with a lid before. “It smells horrible,” he said.

“If you do not eat the stew-soup soon,” she said, “it will be more horrible. It will be cold. Now eat.”

Bod was hungry. He took a plastic spoon, dipped it into the purple-red stew, and he ate. The food was slimy and unfamiliar, but he kept it down.

“Now the salad!” said Miss Lupescu, and she unpopped the top of the second container. It consisted of large lumps of raw onion, beetroot, and tomato, all in a thick vinegary dressing. Bod put a lump of beetroot into his mouth and started to chew. He could feel the saliva gathering, and realized that if he swallowed it, he would throw it back up. He said, “I can’t eat this.”

“Is good for you.”

“I’ll be sick.”

They stared at each other, the small boy with tousled, mousy hair, the pinched pale woman with not a silver hair out of place. Miss Lupescu said, “You eat one more piece.”

“I can’t.”

“You eat one more piece now, or you stay here until you have eaten it all.”

Bod picked out a piece of vinegary tomato, chewed it, and choked it down. Miss Lupescu put the tops back on the containers and replaced them in the plastic shopping bag. She said, “Now, lessons.”

It was high summer. It would not get fully dark until almost midnight. There were no lessons in high summer—the time that Bod spent awake he spent in an endless warm twilight in which he would play or explore or climb.

“Lessons?” he said.

“Your guardian felt it would be good for me to teach you things.”

“I have teachers. Letitia Borrows teaches me writing and words, and Mr. Pennyworth teaches me his Compleat Educational System for Younger Gentlemen with Additional Material for Those Post Mortem. I do geography and everything. I don’t need more lessons.”

“You know everything, then, boy? Six years old, and already you know everything.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Miss Lupescu folded her arms. “Tell me about ghouls,” she said.

Bod tried to remember what Silas had told him about ghouls over the years. “Keep away from them,” he said.

“And that is all you know? Da? Why do you keep away from them? Where do they come from? Where do they go? Why do you not stand near a ghoul-gate? Eh, boy?”

Bod shrugged and shook his head.

“Name the different kinds of people,” said Miss Lupescu. “Now.”

Bod thought for a moment. “The living,” he said. “Er. The dead.” He stopped. Then, “…Cats?” he offered, uncertainly.

“You are ignorant, boy,” said Miss Lupescu. “This is bad. And you are content to be ignorant, which is worse. Repeat after me, there are the living and the dead, there are day-folk and night-folk, there are ghouls and mist-walkers, there are the high hunters and the Hounds of God. Also, there are solitary types.”

“What are you?” asked Bod.

“I,” she said sternly, “am Miss Lupescu.”

“And what’s Silas?”

She hesitated. Then she said, “He is a solitary type.”

Bod endured the lesson. When Silas taught him things it was interesting. Much of the time Bod didn’t realize he had been taught anything at all. Miss Lupescu taught in lists, and Bod could not see the point to it. He sat in the crypt, aching to be out in the summer’s twilight, under the ghost moon.

When the lesson was done, in the foulest of moods, he fled. He looked for playmates, but found no one and saw nothing but a large grey dog, which prowled the gravestones, always keeping its distance from him, slipping between gravestones and through shadows.

The week got worse.

Miss Lupescu continued to bring Bod things she had cooked for him: dumplings swimming in lard; thick reddish-purple soup with a lump of sour cream in it; small, cold boiled potatoes; cold garlic-heavy sausages; hardboiled eggs in a grey unappetizing liquid. He ate as little as he could get away with. The lessons continued: for two days she taught him nothing but ways to call for help in every language in the world, and she would rap his knuckles with her pen if he slipped up, or forgot. By the third day she was firing them at him,

“French?”

“Au secours.”

“Morse Code?”

“S-O-S. Three short dots, three long ones, three short ones again.”

“Night-Gaunt?”

“This is stupid. I don’t remember what a night-gaunt is.”

“They have hairless wings, and they fly low and fast. They do not visit this world, but they fly the red skies above the road to Ghûlheim.”

“I’m never going to need to know this.”

Her mouth pinched in tighter. All she said was, “Night-Gaunt?”

Bod made the noise in the back of his throat that she had taught him—a guttural cry, like an eagle’s call. She sniffed. “Adequate,” she said.