The Graveyard Book

Mrs. Owens said, “He means only the best for you. You know that.”

“Thanks,” said Bod, unimpressed. “So where is he?”

Mrs. Owens made no reply.

Bod said, “You saw the man who killed my family, didn’t you? On the day you adopted me.”

Mrs. Owens nodded.

“What was he like?”

“Mostly, I had eyes for you. Let me see…he had dark hair, very dark. And I was frightened of him. He had a sharp face. Hungry and angry all at once, he was. Silas saw him off.”

“Why didn’t Silas just kill him?” said Bod, fiercely. “He should have just killed him then.”

Mrs. Owens touched the back of Bod’s hand with her cold fingers. She said, “He’s not a monster, Bod.”

“If Silas had killed him back then, I would be safe now. I could go anywhere.”

“Silas knows more than you do about all this, more than any of us do. And Silas knows about life and death,” said Mrs. Owens. “It’s not that easy.”

Bod said, “What was his name? The man who killed them.”

“He didn’t say it. Not then.”

Bod put his head on one side, and stared at her with eyes as grey as thunderclouds. “But you know it, don’t you?”

Mrs. Owens said, “There’s nothing you can do, Bod.”

“There is. I can learn. I can learn everything I need to know, all I can. I learned about ghoul-gates. I learned to Dreamwalk. Miss Lupescu taught me how to watch the stars. Silas taught me silence. I can Haunt. I can Fade. I know every inch of this graveyard.”

Mrs. Owens reached out a hand, touched her son’s shoulder. “One day,” she said…and then she hesitated. One day, she would not be able to touch him. One day, he would leave them. One day. And then she said, “Silas told me the man who killed your family was called Jack.”

Bod said nothing. Then he nodded. “Mother?”

“What is it, son?”

“When will Silas come back?”

The midnight wind was cold and it came from the north.

Mrs. Owens was no longer angry. She feared for her son. She said only, “I wish I knew, my darling boy, I wish I knew.”

Scarlett Amber Perkins was fifteen, and, at that moment, sitting on the upper deck of the elderly bus, she was a mass of angry hate. She hated her parents for splitting up. She hated her mother for moving away from Scotland, hated her father because he didn’t seem to care that she had gone. She hated this town for being so different—nothing like Glasgow, where she had grown up—and she hated it because every now and again she would turn a corner and see something and the world would all become achingly, horribly familiar.

She had lost it with her mother that morning. “At least in Glasgow I had friends!” Scarlett had said, and she wasn’t quite shouting and she wasn’t quite sobbing. “I’ll never see them again!” All her mother had said in reply was, “At least you’re somewhere you’ve been before. I mean, we lived here when you were little.”

“I don’t remember,” said Scarlett. “And it’s not like I still know anyone. Do you want me to find my old friends from when I was five? Is that what you want?”

And her mother said, “Well, I’m not stopping you.”

Scarlett had gone through the whole of the school day angry, and she was angry now. She hated her school and she hated the world, and right now she particularly hated the town bus service.

Every day, when school was over, the 97 bus to the City Center would take her from her school gates all the way to the end of the street where her mother had rented a small flat. She had waited at the bus-stop on that gusty April day for almost half an hour and no 97 buses had appeared, so when she saw a 121 bus with City Center as its destination she had climbed aboard. But where her bus always turned right, this one turned left, into the Old Town, past the municipal gardens in the Old Town square, past the statue of Josiah Worthington, Bart., and then crept up a winding hill lined with high houses, as Scarlett’s heart sank and her anger was replaced with misery.

She walked downstairs, edged forward, eyed the sign telling her not to speak to the driver when the vehicle was in motion, and said, “Excuse me. I wanted to go to Acacia Avenue.”

The driver, a large woman, her skin even darker than Scarlett’s said, “You should have got the 97, then.”

“But this goes to the City Center.”

“Eventually. But even when you get there, you’ll still need to get back.” The woman sighed. “Best thing you can do, get off here, walk back down the hill, there’s a bus-stop in front of the town hall. From there, you can catch the number 4 or the 58, both of them will take you most of the way to Acacia Avenue. You could get off by the sports center and walk up from there. You got all that?”

“The 4 or the 58.”

“I’ll let you off here.” It was a request stop on the side of the hill, just past a large pair of open iron gates, and it looked uninviting and dismal. Scarlett stood in the open doorway of the bus until the bus driver said, “Go on. Hop it.” She stepped down onto the pavement and the bus belched black smoke and roared away.

The wind rattled the trees on the other side of the wall.