Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book

She scrambled up the hillside beside him.

“You’re telling the truth?”

He nodded, a pleased smile dancing at the corners of his lips. “Come on,” he said.

It was a perfect spring day, and the air was alive with birdsong and bee hum. The daffodils bustled in the breeze and here and there on the side of the hill a few early tulips nodded. A blue powdering of forget-me-nots and fine, fat yellow primroses punctuated the green of the slope as the two children walked up the hill toward the Frobishers’ little mausoleum.

It was old and simple in design, a small, forgotten stone house with a metal gate for a door. Bod unlocked the gate with his key, and they went in.

“It’s a hole,” said Bod. “Or a door. Behind one of the coffins.”

They found it behind a coffin on the bottom shelf—a simple crawl space. “Down there,” said Bod. “We go down there.”

Scarlett found herself suddenly enjoying the adventure rather less. She said, “We can’t see down there. It’s dark.”

“I don’t need light,” said Bod. “Not while I’m in the graveyard.”

“I do,” said Scarlett. “It’s dark.”

Bod thought about the reassuring things that he could say, like “there’s nothing bad down there,” but the tales of hair turning white and people never returning meant that he could not have said them with a clear conscience, so he said, “I’ll go down. You wait for me up here.”

Scarlett frowned. “You shouldn’t leave me,” she said.

“I’ll go down,” said Bod, “and I’ll see who’s there, and I’ll come back and tell you all about it.”

He turned to the opening, bent down, and clambered through on his hands and knees. He was in a space big enough to stand up in, and he could see steps cut into the stone. “I’m going down the steps now,” he said.

“Do they go down a long way?”

“I think so.”

“If you held my hand and told me where I was walking,” she said, “then I could come with you. If you make sure I’m okay.”

“Of course,” said Bod, and before he had finished speaking the girl was coming through the hole on her hands and her knees.

“You can stand up,” Bod told her. He took her hand. “The steps are just here. If you put a foot forward you can find it. There. Now I’ll go first.”

“Can you really see?” she asked.

“It’s dark,” said Bod. “But I can see.”

He began to lead Scarlett down the steps, deep into the hill, and to describe what he saw to her as they went. “It’s steps down,” he said. “Made of stone. And there’s stone all above us. Someone’s made a painting on the wall.”

“What kind of painting?”

“A big hairy C is for Cow, I think. With horns. Then something that’s more like a pattern, like a big knot. It’s sort of carved in the stone too, not just painted, see?” and he took her fingers and placed them onto the carved knot-work.

“I can feel it!” she said.

“Now the steps are getting bigger. We are coming out into some kind of big room, now, but the steps are still going. Don’t move. Okay, now I am between you and the room. Keep your left hand on the wall.”

They kept going down. “One more step and we are on the rock floor,” said Bod. “It’s a bit uneven.”

The room was small. There was a slab of stone on the ground, and a low ledge in one corner, with some small objects on it. There were bones on the ground, very old bones indeed, although below where the steps entered the room Bod could see a crumpled corpse, dressed in the remains of a long brown coat—the young man who had dreamed of riches, Bod decided. He must have slipped and fallen in the dark.

The noise began all about them, a rustling slither, like a snake twining through dry leaves. Scarlett’s grip on Bod’s hand was harder.

“What’s that? Do you see anything?”

“No.”

Scarlett made a noise that was half gasp and half wail, and Bod saw something, and he knew without asking that she could see it too.

There was a light at the end of the room, and in the light a man came walking, walking through the rock, and Bod heard Scarlett choking back a scream.

The man looked well-preserved, but still like something that had been dead for a long while. His skin was painted (Bod thought) or tattooed (Scarlett thought) with purple designs and patterns. Around his neck hung a necklace of sharp, long teeth.

“I am the master of this place!” said the figure, in words so ancient and gutteral that they were scarcely words at all. “I guard this place from all who would harm it!”

His eyes were huge in his head. Bod realized it was because he had circles drawn around them in purple, making his face look like an owl’s.

“Who are you?” asked Bod. He squeezed Scarlett’s hand as he said it.

The Indigo Man did not seem to have heard the question. He looked at them fiercely.

“Leave this place!” he said in words that Bod heard in his head, words that were also a gutteral growl.

“Is he going to hurt us?” asked Scarlett.

“I don’t think so,” said Bod. Then, to the Indigo Man, he said, as he had been taught, “I have the Freedom of the Graveyard and I may walk where I choose.”

There was no reaction to this by the Indigo Man, which puzzled Bod even more because even the most irritable inhabitants of the graveyard had been calmed by this statement. Bod said, “Scarlett, can you see him?”

“Of course I can see him. He’s a big scary tattooey man and he wants to kill us. Bod, make him go away!”

Bod looked at the remains of the gentleman in the brown coat. There was a lamp beside him, broken on the rocky floor. “He ran away,” said Bod aloud. “He ran because he was scared. And he slipped or he tripped on the stairs and he fell off.”

“Who did?”

“The man on the floor.”

Scarlett sounded irritated now, as well as puzzled and scared. “What man on the floor? It’s too dark. The only man I can see is the tattooey man.”

And then, as if to make quite sure that they knew that he was there, the Indigo Man threw back his head and let out a series of yodeling screams, a full-throated ululation that made Scarlett grip Bod’s hand so tightly that her fingernails pressed into his flesh.

Bod was no longer scared, though.

“I’m sorry I said they were imaginary,” said Scarlett. “I believe now. They’re real.”

The Indigo Man raised something over his head. It looked like a sharp stone blade. “All who invade this place will die!” he shouted, in his gutteral speech. Bod thought about the man whose hair had turned white after he had discovered the chamber, how he would never return to the graveyard or speak of what he had seen.

“No,” said Bod. “I think you’re right. I think this one is.”

“Is what?”

“Imaginary.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Scarlett. “I can see it.”

“Yes,” said Bod. “And you can’t see dead people.” He looked around the chamber. “You can stop now,” he said. “We know it’s not real.”

“I will feast on your liver!” screamed the Indigo Man.

“No, you won’t,” said Scarlett, with a huge sigh. “Bod’s right.” Then she said, “I think maybe it’s a scarecrow.”

“What’s a scarecrow?” asked Bod.

“It’s a thing farmers put in fields to scare crows.”

“Why would they do that?” Bod quite liked crows. He thought they were funny, and he liked the way they helped to keep the graveyard tidy.

“I don’t know exactly. I’ll ask Mummy. But I saw one from a train and I asked what it was. Crows think it’s a real person. It’s just a made-up thing, that looks like a person, but it’s not. It’s just to scare the crows away.”