The Graveyard Book

Mr. Owens said, “Of course you are right, my dear.” He winked at Bod, to tell him that it was none of it serious. And then he mouthed “Seventeen,” to show that, really, it was.

Bod had allowed himself no friends among the living. That way, he had realized back during his short-lived schooldays, lay only trouble. Still, he had remembered Scarlett, had missed her for years after she went away, had long ago faced the fact he would never see her again. And now she had been here in his graveyard, and he had not known her…

He was wandering deeper into the tangle of ivy and trees that made the graveyard’s northwest quadrant so dangerous. Signs advised visitors to keep out, but the signs were not needed. It was uninviting and creepy once you were past the ivy-tangle that marked the end of the Egyptian Walk and the black doors in the mock-Egyptian walls that led to people’s final resting places. In the northwest, nature had been reclaiming the graveyard for almost a hundred years, and the stones were tipped over, graves were forgotten or simply lost beneath the green ivy and the leaf-fall of fifty years. Paths were lost and impassable.

Bod walked with care. He knew the area well, and he knew how dangerous it could be.

When Bod was nine he had been exploring in just this part of the world when the soil had given way beneath him, tumbling him into a hole almost twenty feet down. The grave had been dug deep, to accommodate many coffins, but there was no headstone and only one coffin, down at the bottom, containing a rather excitable medical gentleman named Carstairs who seemed thrilled by Bod’s arrival and insisted on examining Bod’s wrist (which Bod had twisted in the tumble, grabbing onto a root) before he could be persuaded to go and fetch help.

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.