The Graveyard Book

‘If I change my mind, can I come back here?’
And then he answered his own question. ‘If I come back, it will be a place, but it won’t be home any longer.’

If you dare nothing, then when the day is over, nothing is all you will have gained.’

‘Someone killed my mother and my father and my sister.’
‘Yes. Someone did.’
‘A man?’
‘A man.’
‘Which means,’ said Bod, ‘you’re asking the wrong question.’
Silas raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’
‘Well,’ said Bod. ‘If I go outside in the world, the question isn’t, “Who will keep me safe from him?” ’
‘No?’
‘No. It’s “Who will keep him safe from me?”

people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.’
‘They kill themselves, you mean?’ said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid.
‘Indeed.’
‘Does it work? Are they happier dead?’
‘Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the

moonbeam, not because his guardian was insubstantial, but because it would be wrong. There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

His guardian inspected Bod thoughtfully, a boy in his new clothes. ‘You’ll do,’ he said. ‘Now you look like you’ve lived outside the graveyard all your life.’

Bod smiled proudly. Then the smile stopped and he looked grave once again. He said, ‘But you’ll always be here, Silas, won’t you? And I won’t ever have to leave, if I don’t want to?’

‘Everything in its season,’ said Silas, and he said no more that night.

‘Silas. What’s a Macabray?’

Silas’s eyebrows raised and his head tipped to one side. ‘Where did you hear about that?’

‘Everyone in the graveyard is talking about it. I think it’s something that happens tomorrow night. What’s a Macabray?’

‘It’s a dance,’ said Silas.

‘All must dance the Macabray,’ said Bod, remembering. ‘Have you danced it? What kind of dance is it?’

His guardian looked at him with eyes like black pools and said, ‘I do not know. I know many things, Bod, for I have been walking this earth at night for a very long time, but I do not know what it is like to dance the Macabray. You must be alive or you must be dead to dance it – and I am neither.’

Bod shivered. He wanted to embrace his guardian, to hold him and tell him that he would never desert him, but the action was unthinkable. He could no more hug Silas than he could hold a

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

‘What’s in the far corner of the graveyard?’ asked Bod. ‘Past Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives Marion and Joan?’

‘Why do you ask?’ said his guardian, brushing the dust from his black suit with ivory fingers.

Bod shrugged. ‘Just wondered.’

‘It’s unconsecrated ground,’ said Silas. ‘Do you know what that means?’

‘Not really,’ said Bod.

Silas walked across the path without disturbing a fallen leaf, and sat down on the bench, beside Bod. ‘There are those,’ he said, in his silken voice, ‘who believe that all land is sacred. That it is sacred before we come to it, and sacred after. But here, in your land, they blessed the churches and the ground they set aside to bury people in, to make it holy. But they left land unconsecrated beside the sacred ground, potter’s fields to bury the criminals and the suicides or those who were not of the faith.’

‘So the people buried in the ground on the other side of the fence are bad people?’

Silas raised one perfect eyebrow. ‘Mm? Oh, not at all. Let’s see, it’s been a while since I’ve been down that way. But I don’t remember anyone particularly evil. Remember, in days gone by you could be hanged for stealing a shilling.

And there are always people who find their lives have become so unsupportable they believe the best thing they could do would be to hasten their transition to another plane of existence.’

‘They kill themselves, you mean?’ said Bod. He was about eight years old, wide-eyed and inquisitive, and he was not stupid.

‘Indeed.’

‘Does it work? Are they happier dead?’

‘Sometimes. Mostly, no. It’s like the people who believe they’ll be happy if they go and live somewhere else, but who learn it doesn’t work that way. Wherever you go, you take yourself with you. If you see what I mean.’

‘Sort of,’ said Bod.