“Nick,” said Mo, “I’m scared.”
Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they’re scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too.
Nick didn’t say anything. He just ran, and Mo ran close on his heels. The streetlights were coming on as they ran back towards the world, turning the twilight into night, making the shadows into dark places in which anything could be happening.
They ran until they reached Nick’s house, and they went inside and turned on all the lights, and Mo called her mother and demanded, half crying, to be picked up and driven the short distance to her own house, because she wasn’t walking home that night.
Bod had watched them run with satisfaction.
“That was good, dear,” said someone behind him, a tall woman in white. “A nice Fade, first. Then the Fear.”
“Thank you,” said Bod. “I hadn’t even tried the Fear out on living people. I mean, I knew the theory, but. Well.”
“It worked a treat,” she said, cheerfully. “I’m Amabella Persson.”
“Bod. Nobody Owens.”
“The live boy? From the big graveyard on the hill? Really?”
“Um.” Bod hadn’t realized that anyone knew who he was beyond his own graveyard. Amabella was knocking on the side of the tomb. “Roddy? Portunia? Come and see who’s here!”
There were three of them there, then, and Amabella was introducing Bod and he was shaking hands and saying, “Charmed, I am sure,” because he could greet people politely over nine hundred years of changing manners.
“Master Owens here was frightening some children who doubtless deserved it,” Amabella was explaining.
“Good show,” said Roderick Persson. “Bounders guilty of reprehensible behavior, eh?”
“They were bullies,” said Bod. “Making kids hand over their pocket money. Stuff like that.”
“A Frightening is certainly a good beginning,” said Portunia Persson, who was a stout woman, much older than Amabella. “And what have you planned if it does not work?”
“I hadn’t really thought—” Bod began, but Amabella interrupted.
“I should suggest that Dreamwalking might be the most efficient remedy. You can Dreamwalk, can you not?”
“I’m not sure,” said Bod. “Mister Pennyworth showed me how, but I haven’t really—well, there’s things I only really know in theory, and—”
Portunia Persson said, “Dreamwalking is all very well, but might I suggest a good Visitation? That’s the only language that these people understand.”
“Oh,” said Amabella. “A Visitation? Portunia my dear, I don’t really think so–-”
“No, you don’t. Luckily, one of us thinks.”
“I have to be getting home,” said Bod, hastily. “They’ll be worrying about me.”
“Of course,” said the Persson family, and “Lovely to meet you,” and “A very good evening to you, young man.” Amabella Persson and Portunia Persson glared at each other. Roderick Persson said, “If you’ll forgive me asking, but your guardian. He is well?”
“Silas? Yes, he’s fine.”
“Give him our regards. I’m afraid a small churchyard like this, well, we’re never going to meet an actual member of the Honour Guard. Still. It’s good to know that they’re there.”
“Good night,” said Bod, who had no idea what the man was talking about, but filed it away for later. “I’ll tell him.”
He picked up his bag of schoolbooks, and he walked home, taking comfort in the shadows.
Going to school with the living did not excuse Bod from his lessons with the dead. The nights were long, and sometimes Bod would apologize and crawl to bed exhausted before midnight. Mostly, he just kept going.
Mr. Pennyworth had little to complain of these days. Bod studied hard, and asked questions. Tonight Bod asked about Hauntings, getting more and more specific, which exasperated Mr. Pennyworth, who had never gone in for that sort of thing himself.
“How exactly do I make a cold spot in the air?” he asked, and “I think I’ve got Fear down, but how do I take it up all the way to Terror?” and Mr. Pennyworth sighed and hurrumphed and did his best to explain, and it was gone four in the morning before they were done.
Bod was tired at school the next day. The first class was History—a subject Bod mostly enjoyed, although he often had to resist the urge to say that it hadn’t happened like that, not according to people who had been there anyway—but this morning Bod was fighting to stay awake.