The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Read Free Book Online Page A

began to talk to each other, Bod said, “Hello.”
    “Hi,” said Scarlett, very quietly.
    “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
    “I told them I wouldn’t go with them unless they brought me back here one last time.”
    “Go where?”
    “Scotland. There’s a university there. For Dad to teach particle physics.”
    They walked on the path together, a small girl in a bright orange anorak and a small boy in a grey winding sheet.
    “Is Scotland a long way away?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “Oh.”
    “I hoped you’d be here. To say good-bye.”
    “I’m always here.”
    “But you aren’t dead, are you, Nobody Owens?”
    “’Course not.”
    “Well, you can’t stay here all your life. Can you? One day you’ll grow up and then you will have to go and live in the world outside.”
    He shook his head. “It’s not safe for me out there.”
    “Who says?”
    “Silas. My family. Everybody.”
    She was silent.
    Her father called, “Scarlett! Come on, love. Time to go. You’ve had your last 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.
     

The Hounds of God

    O NE GRAVE IN EVERY graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it—waterstained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like a fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.
    There was one in Bod’s graveyard.
    There is one in every graveyard.

    Silas was leaving.
    Bod had been upset by this when he had first learned about it. He was no longer upset. He was furious.
    “But why ?” said Bod.
    “I told you. I need to obtain some information. In order to do that, I have to travel. To travel, I must leave here. We have already been over all this.”
    “What’s so important that you have to go away?” Bod’s six-year-old mind tried to imagine something that could make Silas want to leave him, and failed. “It’s not fair.”
    His guardian was unperturbed. “It is neither fair nor unfair, Nobody Owens. It simply is.”
    Bod was not impressed. “You’re meant to look after me. You said .”
    “As your guardian I have responsibility for you, yes. Fortunately, I am not the only individual in the world willing to take on this responsibility.”
    “Where are you going anyway?”
    “Out. Away. There are things I need to uncover that I cannot uncover here.”
    Bod snorted and walked off, kicking at imaginary stones. On the northwestern side of the graveyard things had become very overgrown and tangled, far beyond the ability of the groundskeeper or the Friends of the Graveyard to tame, and he ambled over there, and woke a family of Victorian children who had all died before their tenth birthdays, and they played at hide-and-go-seek in the moonlight in the ivy-twined jungle. Bod tried to pretend that Silas was not leaving, that nothing was going to change, but when the game was done and he ran back to the old chapel, he saw two things that changed his mind.
    The first thing he saw was a bag. It was, Bod knew the moment he laid eyes on it, Silas’s bag. It was at least a hundred and fifty years old, a thing of beauty, black leather with brass fittings and a black handle, the kind of bag a Victorian doctor or undertaker might have carried, containing every implement that might have been needed. Bod had never seen Silas’s bag before, he had not even known