Neil Gaiman: M Is For Magic

She said, “There’s rules for those in graveyards, but not for those as was buried in unhallowed ground. Nobody tells me what to do or where to go.” She glared at the door. “I don’t like that man,” she said. “I’m going to see what he’s doing.”

A flicker, and Bod was alone in the room once more. He heard a rumble of distant thunder.

In the cluttered darkness of Bolger’s Antiquities, Abanazer Bolger looked up suspiciously, certain that someone was watching him, then realized he was being foolish. “The boy’s locked in the room,” he told himself. “The front door’s locked.” He was polishing the metal clasp surrounding the snakestone, as gently and as carefully as an archaeologist on a dig, taking off the black and revealing the glittering silver beneath it.

He was beginning to regret calling Tom Hustings over, although Hustings was big and good for scaring people. He was also beginning to regret that he was going to have to sell the brooch when he was done. It was special. The more it glittered, under the tiny light on his counter, the more he wanted it to be his, and only his.

There was more where this came from, though. The boy would tell him. The boy would lead him to it.

The boy…

And then an idea struck him. He put down the brooch reluctantly, and opened a drawer behind the counter, taking out a metal biscuit tin filled with envelopes and cards and slips of paper.

He reached in, and took out a card only slightly larger than a business card. It was black edged. There was no name or address printed on it, though. Only one word, handwritten in the center in an ink that had faded to brown: Jack.

On the back of the card, in pencil, Abanazer Bolger had written instructions to himself, in his tiny, precise handwriting, as a reminder, although he would not have been likely to forget the use of the card, how to use it to summon the man Jack. No, not summon. Invite. You did not summon people like him.

A knocking on the outer door of the shop.

Bolger tossed the card down onto the counter, and walked over to the door, peering out into the wet afternoon.

“Hurry up,” called Tom Hustings. “It’s miserable out here. Dismal. I’m getting soaked.”

Bolger unlocked the door and Tom Hustings pushed his way in, his raincoat and hair dripping. “What’s so important that you can’t talk about it over the phone, then?”

“Our fortune,” said Abanazer Bolger, with his sour face. “That’s what.”

Hustings took off his raincoat and hung it on the back of the shop door. “What is it? Something good fell off the back of a lorry?”

“Treasure,” said Abanazer Bolger. “Two kinds.” He took his friend over to the counter, showed him the brooch, under the little light.

“It’s old, isn’t it?”

“From pagan times,” said Abanazer. “Before. From Druid times. Before the Romans came. It’s called a snakestone. Seen ’em in museums. I’ve never seen metalwork like that, or one so fine. Must have belonged to a king. The lad who found it says it come from a grave—think of a barrow filled with stuff like this.”

“Might be worth doing it legit,” said Hustings thoughtfully. “Declare it as treasure trove. They have to pay us market value for it, and we could make them name it for us. The Hustings-Bolger Bequest.”

“Bolger-Hustings,” said Abanazer automatically. Then he said, “There’s a few people I know of, people with real money, would pay more than market value, if they could hold it as you are—” for Tom Hustings was fingering the brooch gently, like a man stroking a kitten—“and there’d be no questions asked.” He reached out his hand and, reluctantly, Tom Hustings passed him the brooch.

“You said two kinds of treasure,” said Hustings. “What’s t’other?”

Abanazer Bolger picked up the black-edged card, held it out for his friend’s inspection. “Do you know what this is?”

His friend shook his head.

Abanazer put the card down on the counter. “There’s a party is looking for another party.”

“So?”

“The way I heard it,” said Abanazer Bolger, “the other party is a boy.”

“There’s boys everywhere,” said Tom Hustings. “Running all around. Getting into trouble. I can’t abide them. So, there’s a party looking for a particular boy?”

“This lad looks to be the right sort of age. He’s dressed—well, you’ll see how he’s dressed. And he found this. It could be him.”

“And if it is him?”

Abanazer Bolger picked up the card again, by the edge, and waved it back and forth slowly, as if running the edge along an imaginary flame. “Here comes a candle to light you to bed…” he began.

“…and here comes a chopper to chop off your head,” concluded Tom Hustings thoughtfully. “But look you. If you call the man Jack, you lose the boy. And if you lose the boy, you lose the treasure.”

And the two men went back and forth on it, weighing the merits and disadvantages of reporting the boy or of collecting the treasure, which had grown in their minds to a huge underground cavern filled with precious things, and as they debated Abanazer pulled a bottle of sloe gin from beneath the counter and poured them both a generous tot, “to assist the cerebrations.”

Liza was soon bored with their discussions, which went around and around like a whirligig, getting nowhere, and so she went back into the storeroom, to find Bod standing in the middle of the room with his eyes tightly closed and his fists clenched and his face all screwed up as if he had a toothache, almost purple from holding his breath.

“What you a-doin’ of now?” she asked, unimpressed.

He opened his eyes and relaxed. “Trying to Fade,” he said.

Liza sniffed. “Try again,” she said.

He did, holding his breath even longer this time.

“Stop that,” she told him, “or you’ll pop.”

Bod took a deep breath and then sighed. “It doesn’t work,” he said. “Maybe I could hit him with a rock and just run for it.” There wasn’t a rock, so he picked up a colored-glass paperweight, hefted it in his hand, wondering if he could throw it hard enough to stop Abanazer Bolger in his tracks.

“There’s two of them out there now,” said Liza. “And if the one don’t get you, t’other one will. They say they want to get you to show them where you got the brooch, and then dig up the grave and take the treasure.” She did not tell him about the other discussions they were having, nor about the black-edged card. She shook her head. “Why did you do something as stupid as this anyway? You know the rules about leaving the graveyard. Just asking for trouble, it was.”

Bod felt very insignificant, and very foolish. “I wanted to get you a headstone,” he admitted in a small voice. “And I thought it would cost more money. So I was going to sell him the brooch, to buy you your headstone.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Are you angry?”

She shook her head. “It’s the first nice thing anyone’s done for me in five hundred years,” she said with a hint of a goblin smile. “Why would I be angry?” Then she said, “What do you do, when you try to Fade?”

“What Mr. Pennyworth told me. ‘I am an empty doorway, I am a vacant alley, I am nothing. Eyes will not see me, glances slip over me.’ But it never works.”

“It’s because you’re alive,” said Liza with a sniff. “There’s stuff as works for us, the dead, who have to fight to be noticed at the best of times, that won’t never work for you people.”

She hugged herself tightly, moving her body back and forth, as if she was debating something. Then she said, “It’s because of me you got into this…. Come here, Nobody Owens.”