The Graveyard Book

He landed with a muffled thump on a small mound of furry, fuzzy toys, some of them presents from relations from his first birthday, not six months gone, some of them inherited from his older sister. He was surprised when he hit the floor, but he did not cry out: if you cried they came and put you back in your cot.

He crawled out of the room.

Stairs that went up were tricky things, and he had not yet entirely mastered them. Stairs that went down however, he had discovered, were fairly simple. He did them sitting down, bumping from step to step on his well-padded bottom.

He sucked on his dummy, which his mother had just begun to tell him that he was getting too old for.

His nappy had worked itself loose on his journey on his bottom down the stairs, and when he reached the last step, when he reached the little hall and stood up, the nappy fell off. He stepped out of it. He was only wearing a child’s nightshirt. The stairs that led back up to his room and his family were steep and forbidding, but the door to the street was open and inviting . . .

The child stepped out of the house a little hesitantly. The fog wreathed around him like a long-lost friend. And, uncertainly at first, then with increasing speed and confidence, the boy tottered up the hill.

The fog was thinner as you approached the top of the hill. The half-moon shone, not as bright as day, not by any means, but enough to see the graveyard, enough for that.

Look.

You could see the abandoned funeral chapel, iron doors padlocked, ivy on the sides of the spire, a small tree growing out of the guttering at roof level.

You could see stones and tombs and vaults and memorial plaques. You could see the occasional dash or scuttle of a rabbit or a vole or a weasel as it slipped out of the undergrowth and across the path.

You would have seen these things, in the moonlight, if you had been there that night.

You might not have seen a pale, plump woman, who walked the path near the front gates, and if you had seen her, with a second, more careful glance you would have realised that she was only moonlight, mist and shadow. The plump, pale woman was there, though. She walked the path that led through a clutch of half-fallen tombstones towards the front gates.

The gates were locked. They were always locked at four in the afternoon in winter, at eight at night in summer. A spike-topped iron railing ran around part of the cemetery, a high brick wall around the rest of it. The bars of the gates were closely spaced: they would have stopped a grown man from getting through, even stopped a ten-year-old child . . .

‘Owens!’ called the pale woman, in a voice that might have been the rustle of the wind through the long grass. ‘Owens! Come and look at this!’

She crouched down and peered at something on the ground, as a patch of shadow moved into the moonlight, revealing itself to be a grizzled man in his mid-forties. He looked down at his wife, and then looked at what she was looking at, and he scratched his head.

‘Mistress Owens?’ he said, for he came from a more formal age than our own. ‘Is that what I think it is?’

And at that moment the thing he was inspecting seemed to catch sight of Mrs Owens, for it opened its mouth, letting the rubber nipple it was sucking fall to the ground, and it reached out a small, chubby fist, as if it were trying for all the world to hold on to Mrs Owens’ pale finger.

‘Strike me silly,’ said Mr Owens, ‘if that isn’t a baby.’

‘Of course it’s a baby,’ said his wife. ‘And the question is, what is to be done with it?’

‘I dare say that is a question, Mistress Owens,’ said her husband. ‘And yet, it is not our question. For this here baby is unquestionably alive, and as such is nothing to do with us, and is no part of our world.’

‘Look at him smile!’ said Mrs Owens. ‘He has the sweetest of smiles,’ and with one insubstantial hand she stroked the child’s sparse blond hair. The little boy giggled with delight.

A chilly breeze blew across the graveyard, scattering the fog in the lower slopes of the place (for the graveyard covered the whole of the top of the hill, and its paths wound up the hill and down and back upon themselves). A rattling: someone at the main gate of the graveyard was pulling and shaking it, rattling the old gates and the heavy padlock and chain that held them.

‘There now,’ said Owens, ‘it’s the babe’s family, come to bring him back to the loving bosom. Leave the little man be,’ he added, because Mrs Owens was putting her insubstantial arms around the toddler, smoothing, stroking.

Mrs Owens said, ‘He dun’t look like nobody’s family, that one.’ The man in the dark coat had given up on rattling the main gates and was now examining the smaller side gate. It, too, was well locked. There had been some vandalism in the graveyard the previous year, and the council had Taken Steps.

‘Come on, Mistress Owens. Leave it be. There’s a dear,’ said Mr Owens, when he saw a ghost, and his mouth dropped open, and he found himself unable to think of anything to say.

You might think – and if you did, you would be right – that Mr Owens should not have taken on so at seeing a ghost, given that Mr and Mrs Owens were themselves dead and had been for a few hundred years now, and given that the entirety of their social life, or very nearly, was spent with those who were also dead. But there was a difference between the folk of the graveyard and this: a raw, flickering, startling shape the grey colour of television static, all panic and naked emotion which flooded the Owenses as if it were their own. Three figures, two large, one smaller, but only one of them was in focus, was more than an outline or a shimmer. And the figure said, My baby! He is trying to harm my baby!

A clattering. The man outside was hauling a heavy metal rubbish bin across the alley to the high brick wall that ran around that part of the graveyard.

‘Protect my son!’ said the ghost, and Mrs Owens thought it was a woman. Of course, the babe’s mother.

‘What did he do to you?’ asked Mrs Owens, but she was not certain that the ghost could hear her. Recently dead, poor love, she thought. It’s always easier to die gently, to wake in due time in the place you were buried, to come to terms with your death and to get acquainted with the other inhabitants. This creature was nothing but alarm and fear for her child, and her panic, which felt to the Owenses like a low-pitched screaming, was now attracting attention, for other pale figures were coming from all over the graveyard.

‘Who are you?’ Caius Pompeius asked the figure. His headstone was now only a weathered lump of rock, but two thousand years earlier he had asked to be laid to rest on the mound beside the marble shrine, rather than to have his body sent back to Rome, and he was one of the most senior citizens of the graveyard. He took his responsibilities extremely seriously. ‘Are you buried here?’

‘Of course she’s not! Freshly dead by the look of her.’ Mrs Owens put an arm around the woman-shape and spoke to it privately, in a low voice, calm and sensible.

There was a thump and a crash from the high wall beside the alley. The rubbish bin had fallen. A man clambered up on to the top of the wall, a dark outline against the mist-smudged street lights. He paused for a moment, then climbed down the other side, holding on to the top of the wall, legs dangling, then let himself fall the last few feet, down into the graveyard.

‘But my dear,’ Mrs Owens said to the shape, now all that was left of the three shapes that had appeared in the graveyard. ‘He’s living. We’re not. Can you imagine . . .’

The child was looking up at them, puzzled. It reached for one of them, then the other, finding nothing but air. The woman-shape was fading fast.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Owens, in response to something that no one else had heard. ‘If we can, then we will.’ Then she turned to the man beside her. ‘And you, Owens? Will you be a father to this little lad?’

‘Will I what?’ said Owens, his brow crinkling.

‘We never had a child,’ said his wife. ‘And his mother wants us to protect him. Will you say yes?’

The man in the black coat had tripped in the tangle of ivy and half-broken headstones. Now he got to his feet and walked forward more carefully, startling an owl, which rose on silent wings. He could see the baby and there was triumph in his eyes.

Owens knew what his wife was thinking when she used that tone of voice. They had not, in life and in death, been married for over two hundred and fifty years for nothing. ‘Are you certain?’ he asked. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Sure as I ever have been of anything,’ said Mrs Owens.

‘Then yes. If you’ll be its mother, I’ll be its father.’

‘Did you hear that?’ Mrs Owens asked the flickering shape in the graveyard, now little more than an outline, like distant summer lightning in the shape of a woman. It said something to her that no one else could hear, and then it was gone.

‘She’ll not come here again,’ said Mr Owens. ‘Next time she wakes it’ll be in her own graveyard, or wherever it is she’s going.’

Mrs Owens bent down to the baby and extended her arms. ‘Come now,’ she said, warmly. ‘Come to mama.’

To the man Jack, walking through the graveyard towards them on a path, his knife already in his hand, it seemed as if a swirl of mist had curled around the child, in the moonlight, and that the boy was no longer there: just damp mist and moonlight and swaying grass.

He blinked and sniffed the air. Something had happened, but he had no idea what it was. He growled in the back of his throat, like a beast of prey, angry and frustrated.

‘Hullo?’ called the man Jack, wondering if perhaps the child had stepped behind something. His voice was dark and rough, and there was an odd edge to it, as if of surprise or puzzlement at hearing himself speak.

The graveyard kept its secrets.

‘Hello?’ he called again. He hoped to hear a baby cry or utter a half-word, or to hear it move. He did not expect what he actually heard, a voice, silky smooth, saying:

‘Can I help you?’

The man Jack was tall. This man was taller. The man Jack wore dark clothes. This man’s clothes were darker. People who noticed the man Jack when he went about his business – and he did not like to be noticed – were troubled, or made uncomfortable, or found themselves unaccountably scared. The man Jack looked up at the stranger, and it was the man Jack who was troubled.

‘I was looking for someone,’ said the man Jack, slipping his right hand back into his coat pocket, so the knife was hidden, but there if he needed it.

‘In a locked graveyard, at night?’ said the stranger drily.

‘It was just a baby,’ said the man Jack. ‘I was just passing, when I heard a baby cry, and I looked through the gates and I saw him. Well, what would anyone do?’

‘I applaud your public-spiritedness,’ said the stranger. ‘Yet if you managed to find this child, how were you planning to get out of here with it? You can’t climb back over the wall holding a baby.’

‘I would have called until someone let me out,’ said the man Jack.

A heavy jingling of keys. ‘Well, that would have been me, then,’ said the stranger. ‘I would have had to let you out.’ He selected one large key from the key ring, and said, ‘Follow me.’

The man Jack walked behind the stranger. He took his knife from his pocket. ‘Are you the caretaker, then?’

‘Am I? Certainly, in a manner of speaking,’ said the stranger. They were walking towards the gates and, the man Jack was certain, away from the baby. But the caretaker had the keys. A knife in the dark, that was all it would take, and then he could search for the child all through the night, if he needed to.

He raised the knife.

‘If there was a baby,’ said the stranger, without looking back, ‘it wouldn’t have been here in the graveyard. Perhaps you were mistaken. It’s unlikely that a child would have come in here, after all. Much more likely that you heard a nightbird, and saw a cat, perhaps, or a fox. They declared this place an official nature reserve, you know, thirty years ago, around the time of the last funeral. Now think carefully, and tell me you are certain that it was a child that you saw.’

The man Jack thought.

The stranger unlocked the side gate. ‘A fox,’ he said. ‘They make the most uncommon noises, not unlike a person crying. No, your visit to this graveyard was a misstep, sir. Somewhere the child you seek awaits you, but he is not here.’ And he let the thought sit there, in the man Jack’s head for a moment before he opened the gate with a flourish. ‘Delighted to have made your acquaintance,’ he said. ‘And I trust that you will find everything you need out there.’

The man Jack stood outside the gates to the graveyard. The stranger stood inside the gate, and he locked it again, and put the key away.

‘Where are you going?’ asked the man Jack.

‘There are other gates than this,’ said the stranger. ‘My car is on the other side of the hill. Don’t mind me. You don’t even have to remember this conversation.’

‘No,’ said the man Jack, agreeably. ‘I don’t.’ He remembered wandering up the hill, that what he had thought to be a child had turned out to be a fox, that a helpful caretaker had escorted him back out to the street. He slipped his knife into its sheath. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’

‘A goodnight to you,’ said the stranger, whom Jack had taken for a caretaker.

The man Jack set off down the hill, in pursuit of the infant.

From the shadows, the stranger watched Jack until he was out of sight. Then he moved through the night, up and up, to the flat place below the brow of the hill, a place dominated by an obelisk and a flat stone set into the ground dedicated to the memory of Josiah Worthington, local brewer, politician and later baronet, who had, almost three hundred years before, bought the old cemetery and the land around it, and given it to the city in perpetuity. He had reserved himself the best location on the hill – a natural amphitheatre, with a view of the whole city and beyond – and had ensured that the graveyard endured as a graveyard, for which the inhabitants of the graveyard were grateful, although never quite as grateful as Josiah Worthington, Bart, felt they should have been.

There were, all told, some ten thousand souls in the graveyard, but most of them slept deep, or took no interest in the night-to-night affairs of the place, and there were less than three hundred of them up there, in the amphitheatre, in the moonlight.

The stranger reached them as silently as the fog itself, and he watched the proceedings unfold, from the shadows, and he said nothing.

Josiah Worthington was speaking. He said, ‘My dear madam. Your obduracy is quite, is . . . well, can’t you see how ridiculous this is?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Owens. ‘I can’t.’

She was sitting, cross-legged, on the ground, and the living child was sleeping in her lap. She cradled its head with her pale hands.

‘What Mistress Owens is trying to say, sir, begging Your Honour’s pardon,’ said Mr Owens, standing beside her, ‘is that she dun’t see it that way. She sees it as doing her duty.’

Mr Owens had seen Josiah Worthington in the flesh back when they were both alive, had in fact made several pieces of fine furniture for the Worthingtons’ manor house, out near Inglesham, and was still in awe of him.

‘Her duty?’ Josiah Worthington, Bart, shook his head, as if to dislodge a strand of cobweb. ‘Your duty, ma’am, is to the graveyard, and to the commonality of those who form this population of discarnate spirits, revenants and suchlike wights, and your duty thus is to return the creature as soon as possible to its natural home – which is not here.’

‘His mama gave the boy to me,’ said Mrs Owens, as if that was all that needed to be said.

‘My dear woman . . .’

‘I am not your dear woman,’ said Mrs Owens, getting to her feet. ‘Truth to tell, I don’t even see why I am even here, talking to you fiddle-pated old dunderheads, when this lad is going to wake up hungry soon enough – and where am I going to find food for him in this graveyard, I should like to know?’

‘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.’

‘And what of food, and the rest of it?’

‘I can leave the graveyard and return. I can bring him food,’ said Silas.

‘That’s all very well you saying that,’ said Mother Slaughter. ‘But you comes and you goes and nobody keeps track of you. If you went off for a week, the boy could die.’

‘You are a wise woman,’ said Silas. ‘I see why they speak so highly of you.’ He couldn’t push the minds of the dead as he could the living, but he could use all the tools of flattery and persuasion he possessed, for the dead are not immune to either. Then he came to a decision. ‘Very well. If Mr and Mrs Owens will be his parents, I shall be his guardian. I shall remain here, and if I need to leave I shall ensure that someone takes my place, bringing the child food and looking after him. We can use the crypt of the chapel,’ he added.

‘But,’ expostulated Josiah Worthington. ‘But . . . A human child. A living child. I mean. I mean, I mean. This is a graveyard, not a nursery, blast it.’

‘Exactly,’ said Silas, nodding. ‘A very good point, Sir Josiah. I couldn’t have put it better myself. And for that reason, if for no other, it is vital that the child be raised with as little disruption as possible to the, if you’ll forgive the expression, the life of the graveyard.’ With that he strolled over to Mrs Owens, and he looked down at the infant asleep in her arms. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Does he have a name, Mrs Owens?’

‘Not that his mother told me,’ she said.

‘Well, then,’ said Silas. ‘His old name won’t be of much use to him now, anyway. There are those out there who mean him harm. Suppose we pick a name for him, eh?’

Caius Pompeius stepped over and eyed the child. ‘He looks a little like my proconsul, Marcus. We could call him Marcus.’

Josiah Worthington said, ‘He looks more like my head gardener, Stebbins. Not that I’m suggesting Stebbins as a name. The man drank like a fish.’

‘He looks like my nephew, Harry,’ said Mother Slaughter, and it seemed then as if the whole graveyard were about to join in, each inhabitant offering his or her own comparisons between the infant and someone long forgotten, when Mrs Owens broke in.

‘He looks like nobody but himself,’ said Mrs Owens, firmly. ‘He looks like nobody.’

‘Then Nobody it is,’ said Silas. ‘Nobody Owens.’

It was then that, as if responding to the name, the child opened its eyes wide in wakefulness. It stared around it, taking in the faces of the dead, and the mist, and the moon. Then it looked at Silas. Its gaze did not flinch. It looked grave.

‘And what kind of a name is Nobody?’ asked Mother Slaughter, scandalised.

‘His name. And a good name,’ Silas told her. ‘It will help to keep him safe.’

‘I don’t want trouble,’ said Josiah Worthington. The infant looked up at him and then, hungry or tired or simply missing his home, his family, his world, he screwed up his tiny face and began to cry.

‘Leave us,’ said Caius Pompeius to Mrs Owens. ‘We will discuss this further without you.’

Mrs Owens waited outside the chapel. It had been decreed over forty years before that the building, in appearance a small church with a spire, was a listed building of historical interest. The town council had decided that it would cost too much to renovate it, a little chapel in an overgrown graveyard that had already become unfashionable, so they had padlocked it, and waited for it to fall down. Ivy covered it, but it was solidly built, and it would not fall down this century.

The child had fallen asleep in Mrs Owens’ arms. She rocked it gently, sang to it an old song, one her mother had sung to her when she was a baby herself, back in the days when men had first started to wear powdered wigs. The song went:

Sleep my little babby-oh

Sleep until you waken

When you’re grown you’ll see the world

If I’m not mistaken.

Kiss a lover,

Dance a measure,

Find your name

and buried treasure . .

And Mrs Owens sang all that before she discovered that she had forgotten how the song ended. She had a feeling that the final line was something in the way of ‘and some hairy bacon’, but that might have been another song altogether, so she stopped and instead she sang him the one about the Man in the Moon who came down too soon, and after that she sang, in her warm country voice, a more recent song about a lad who put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and she had just started a long ballad about a young country gentleman whose girlfriend had, for no particular reason, poisoned him with a dish of spotted eels, when Silas came around the side of the chapel, carrying a cardboard box.

‘Here we go, Mistress Owens,’ he said. ‘Lots of good things for a growing boy. We can keep it in the crypt, eh?’