Neil Gaiman: M Is For Magic

“You can’t leave it here with them,” said Liza. “They were going to use it to hurt you.”

“I don’t want it,” said Bod. “It’s bad. Burn it.”

“No!” Liza gasped. “Don’t do that. You mustn’t do that.”

“Then I’ll give it to Silas,” said Bod. And he put the little card into an envelope, so he had to touch it as little as possible, and put the envelope into the inside pocket of his old gardening jacket beside his heart.

Two hundred miles away, the man Jack woke from his sleep, and sniffed the air. He walked downstairs.

“What is it?” asked his grandmother, stirring the contents of a big iron pot on the stove. “What’s got into you now?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something’s happening. Something…interesting.” And then he licked his lips. “Smells tasty,” he said. “Very tasty.”

Lightning illuminated the cobbled street.

Bod hurried through the rain through the Old Town, always heading up the hill toward the graveyard. The gray day had become an early night while he was inside the storeroom, and it came as no surprise to him when a familiar shadow swirled beneath the streetlamps. Bod hesitated, and a flutter of night-black velvet resolved itself into man-shape.

Silas stood in front of him, arms folded. He strode forward impatiently.

“Well?” he said.

Bod said, “I’m sorry, Silas.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Bod,” Silas said, and he shook his head. “I’ve been looking for you since I woke. You have the smell of trouble all around you. And you know you’re not allowed to go out here, into the living world.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” There was rain on the boy’s face, running down like tears.

“First of all, we need to get you back to safety.” Silas reached down and enfolded the living child inside his cloak, and Bod felt the ground fall away beneath him.

“Silas,” he said.

Silas did not answer.

“I was a bit scared,” he said. “But I knew you’d come and get me if it got too bad. And Liza was there. She helped a lot.”

“Liza?” Silas’s voice was sharp.

“The witch. From the potter’s field.”

“And you say she helped you?”

“Yes. She especially helped me with my Fading. I think I can do it now.”

Silas grunted. “You can tell me all about it when we’re home.” And Bod was quiet until they landed beside the church. They went inside, into the empty hall, as the rain redoubled, splashing up from the puddles that covered the ground.

Bod produced the envelope containing the black-edged card. “Um,” he said. “I thought you should have this. Well, Liza did, really.”

Silas looked at it. Then he opened it, removed the card, stared at it, turned it over, and read Abanazer Bolger’s penciled note to himself, in tiny handwriting, explaining the precise manner of use of the card.

“Tell me everything,” he said.

Bod told him everything he could remember about the day. And at the end, Silas shook his head slowly, thoughtfully.

“Am I in trouble?” asked Bod.

“Nobody Owens,” said Silas. “You are indeed in trouble. However, I believe I shall leave it to your foster parents to administer whatever discipline and reproach they believe to be needed. In the meantime, I need to deal with this.”

The black-edged card vanished inside the velvet cloak, and then, in the manner of his kind, Silas was gone.

Bod pulled the jacket up over his head, and clambered up the slippery paths to the top of the hill, to the Frobisher vault, and then he went down, and down, and still farther down.

He dropped the brooch beside the goblet and the knife.

“Here you go,” he said. “All polished up. Looking pretty.”

IT COMES BACK, whispered the Sleer, with satisfaction in its smoke-tendril voice. IT ALWAYS COMES BACK.

The night had been long, but it was almost dawn.

Bod was walking, sleepily and a little gingerly, past the small tomb of the wonderfully named Miss Liberty Roach ( What she spent is lost, what she gave away remains with her always. Reader, be charitable ), past the final resting place of Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives, Marion and Joan, to the potter’s field. Mr. and Mrs. Owens had died several hundred years before it had been decided that beating children was wrong, and Mr. Owens had, regretfully, that night, done what he saw as his duty, and Bod’s bottom stung like anything. Still, the look of worry on Mrs. Owens’s face had hurt Bod worse than any beating could have done.

He reached the iron railings that bounded the potter’s field, and slipped between them.

“Hullo?” he called. There was no answer. Not even an extra shadow in the hawthorn bush. “I hope I didn’t get you into trouble too,” he said.

Nothing.

He had replaced the jeans in the gardener’s hut—he was more comfortable in just his gray winding sheet—but he had kept the jacket. He liked having the pockets.

When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he had attacked the nettle patch in the potter’s field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.

From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colors, along with the paintpot, and the paintbrush.

He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters

E H

and beneath them he wrote

We don’t forget

It was almost daylight. Bedtime, soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.

He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and, pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, he went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.

“Not bad,” said a pert voice from the potter’s field behind him. “Not bad at all.”

But when he turned to look, there was nobody there.