Chris Riddell

The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of night-time mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.

‘Which,’ said Caius Pompeius, stiffly, ‘is precisely the point. What will you feed him? How can you care for him?’

Mrs Owens’ eyes burned. ‘I can look after him,’ she said. ‘As well as his own mama. She already gave him to me. Look – I’m holding him, aren’t I? I’m touching him.’

‘Now, see reason, Betsy,’ said Mother Slaughter, a tiny old thing, in the huge bonnet and cape that she had worn in life and been buried wearing. ‘Where would he live?’

‘Here,’ said Mrs Owens. ‘We could give him the Freedom of the Graveyard.’

Mother Slaughter’s mouth became a tiny ‘O’. ‘But,’ she said. Then she said, ‘But I never.’

‘Well, why not? It en’t the first time we’d’ve given the Freedom of the Graveyard to an outsider.’

‘That is true,’ said Caius Pompeius. ‘But he wasn’t alive.’

And with that, the stranger realised that he was being drawn, like it or not, into the conversation and, reluctantly, he stepped out of the shadows, detaching from them like a patch of darkness. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I am not. But I take Mrs Owens’ point.’

Josiah Worthington said, ‘You do, Silas?’

‘I do. For good or for evil – and I firmly believe that it is for good – Mrs Owens and her husband have taken this child under their protection. It is going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will,’ said Silas, ‘take a graveyard.’

He would be there waiting at sunset, just before Silas awakened.

His guardian could always be counted upon to explain matters clearly and lucidly and as simply as Bod needed in order to understand.

‘You aren’t allowed out of the graveyard – it’s aren’t, by the way, not amn’t, not these days – because it’s only in the graveyard that we can keep you safe. This is where you live and this is where those who love you can be found. Outside would not be safe for you. Not yet.’

‘You go outside. You go outside every night.’

‘I am infinitely older than you, lad. And I am safe wherever I am.’

‘I’m safe there too.’

‘I wish that that were true. But as long as you stay here, you are safe.’

Or:

‘How could you do that? Some skills can be attained by education, and some by practice, and some by time. Those skills will come if you study. Soon enough you will master Fading and Sliding and Dreamwalking. But some skills cannot be mastered by the living, and for those you must wait a little longer. Still, I do not doubt that you will acquire even those, in time.

‘You were given the Freedom of the Graveyard, after all,’ Silas would tell him. ‘So the graveyard is taking care of you. While you are here, you can see in the darkness. You can walk some of the ways that the living should not travel. The eyes of the living will slip from you. I, too, was given the Freedom of the Graveyard, although in my case it comes with nothing but the right of abode.’

‘I want to be like you,’ said Bod, pushing out his lower lip.

‘No,’ said Silas firmly, ‘you do not.’

‘What’s Particle Physics?’ asked Bod.

Scarlett shrugged. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘There’s atoms, which is things that is too small to see, that’s what we’re all made of. And there’s things that’s smaller than atoms, and that’s Particle Physics.’

Bod nodded and decided that Scarlett’s father was probably interested in imaginary things.

‘Um. Oh. So, who is buried down there?’

Caius shook his head. ‘I do not know, young Owens. But I felt him, back when this place was empty. I could feel something waiting even then, deep in the hill.’

‘What was he waiting for?’

‘All I could feel,’ said Caius Pompeius, ‘was the waiting.’

trip to the graveyard. Now let’s go home.’

Scarlett said to Bod, ‘You’re brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don’t care if you are imaginary.’ Then she fled down the path back the way they had come, to her parents and the world

They told Bod how they had got their names and how he, in his turn, once he had become a nameless ghoul, would be named, as they had been, after the main course of his first dinner.

The Hounds of God

It was printed in a purple ink, and was the first item on a list.

Those that men call Werewolves or Lycanthropes call

themselves the Hounds of God, as they claim their

transformation is a gift from their creator, and they repay

the gift with their tenacity, for they will pursue an evil-doer

to the very gates of Hell.

In the twilight of the graveyard there was a silent implosion, a flutter of velvet darkness, and Silas was gone.