She smiled at him.
“Hello, Bod,” she said.
“Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name.”
“Names aren’t really important,” she said.
“I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big.”
“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.”
“Can I ride him?” asked Bod.
“One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
And with that, the dance was done. Bod bowed low to his dancing partner, and then, and only then, did he feel exhausted, feel as if he had been dancing for hour after hour. He could feel all his muscles aching and protesting. He was out of breath.
A clock somewhere began to strike the hour, and Bod counted along with it. Twelve chimes. He wondered if they had been dancing for twelve hours or twenty-four or for no time at all.
He straightened up, and looked around him. The dead had gone, and the Lady on the Grey. Only the living remained, and they were beginning to make their way home—leaving the town square sleepily, stiffly, like people who had awakened from a deep sleep, walking without truly waking.
The town square was covered with tiny white flowers. It looked as if there had been a wedding.
Bod woke the next afternoon in the Owenses’ tomb feeling like he knew a huge secret, that he had done something important, and was burning to talk about it.
When Mistress Owens got up, Bod said, “That was amazing last night!”
Mistress Owens said, “Oh yes?”
“We danced,” said Bod. “All of us. Down in the Old Town.”
“Did we indeed?” said Mistress Owens, with a snort. “Dancing is it? And you know you aren’t allowed down into the town.”
Bod knew better than even to try to talk to his mother when she was in this kind of mood. He slipped out of the tomb into the gathering dusk.
He walked up the hill, to the black obelisk, and Josiah Worthington’s stone, where there was a natural amphitheater, and he could look out at the Old Town and at the lights of the city around it.
Josiah Worthington was standing beside him.
Bod said, “You began the dance. With the Mayor. You danced with her.”
Josiah Worthington looked at him and said nothing.
“You did,” said Bod.
Josiah Worthington said, “The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not to speak of it to the living.”
“But I’m one of you.”
“Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime.”
And Bod realized why he had danced as one of the living, and not as one of the crew that had walked down the hill, and he said only, “I see…I think.”
He went down the hill at a run, a ten-year-old boy in a hurry, going so fast he almost tripped over Digby Poole (1785–1860, As I Am So Shall You Be), righting himself by effort of will, and charged down to the old chapel, scared he would miss Silas, that his guardian would already be gone by the time Bod got there.
Bod sat down on the bench.
There was a movement beside him, although he heard nothing move, and his guardian said, “Good evening, Bod.”
“You were there last night,” said Bod. “Don’t try and say you weren’t there or something because I know you were.”
“Yes,” said Silas.
“I danced with her. With the lady on the white horse.”
“Did you?”
“You saw it! You watched us! The living and the dead! We were dancing. Why won’t anyone talk about it?”
“Because there are mysteries. Because there are things that people are forbidden to speak about. Because there are things they do not remember.”
“But you’re speaking about it right now. We’re talking about the Macabray.”
“I have not danced it,” said Silas.
“You saw it, though.”
Silas said only, “I don’t know what I saw.”
“I danced with the lady, Silas!” exclaimed Bod. His guardian looked almost heartbroken then, and Bod found himself scared, like a child who has woken a sleeping panther.
But all Silas said was, “This conversation is at an end.”
Bod might have said something—there were a hundred things he wanted to say, unwise though it might have been to say them—when something distracted his attention: a rustling noise, soft and gentle, and a cold feather-touch as something brushed his face.
All thoughts of dancing were forgotten then, and his fear was replaced with delight and with awe.
It was the third time in his life that he had seen it.
“Look, Silas, it’s snowing!” he said, joy filling his chest and his head, leaving no room for anything else. “It’s really snow!”
The Graveyard Book
INTERLUDE