“What can you do to me in a dream?” asked Nick. He smiled. “I’m not afraid of you. You’ve still got my pencil in the back of your hand.” He pointed to the back of Bod’s hand, at the black mark the graphite point had made.
“I was hoping it wouldn’t have to be like this,” said the other boy. He tipped his head on one side as if he was listening to something. “They’re hungry,” he said.
“What are?” asked Nick.
“The things in the cellar. Or belowdecks. Depends whether this is a school or a ship, doesn’t it?”
Nick felt himself beginning to panic. “It isn’t…spiders…is it?” he said.
“It might be,” said the other boy. “You’ll find out, won’t you?”
Nick shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Please no.”
“Well,” said the other boy. “It’s all up to you, isn’t it? Change your ways or visit the cellar.”
The noise got louder—a scuttling sort of a scuffling noise, and while Nick Farthing had no idea what it was, he was utterly, completely certain that whatever it would turn out to be would be the most scary terrible thing he had ever—would ever—encounter…
He woke up screaming.
Bod heard the scream, a shout of terror, and felt the satisfaction of a job well done.
He was standing on the pavement outside Nick Farthing’s house, his face damp from the thick night mist. He was exhilarated and exhausted: he had felt barely in control of the Dreamwalk, had been all too aware that there was nothing else in the dream but Nick and himself, and that all Nick had been scared of was a noise.
But Bod was satisfied. The other boy would hesitate before tormenting smaller kids.
And now?
Bod put his hands in his pockets and began to walk, not certain where he was going. He would leave the school, he thought, just as he had left the graveyard. He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing. He wondered if there were still deserted islands in the world, like the one on which Robinson Crusoe had been shipwrecked. He could go and live on one of those.
Bod did not look up. If he had, he would have seen a pair of watery blue eyes watching him intently from a bedroom window.
He stepped into an alley, feeling more comfortable out of the light.
“Are you running away, then?” said a girl’s voice.
Bod said nothing.
“That’s the difference between the living and the dead, ennit?” said the voice. It was Liza Hempstock talking, Bod knew, although the witch-girl was nowhere to be seen. “The dead dun’t disappoint you. They’ve had their life, done what they’ve done. We dun’t change. The living, they always disappoint you, dun’t they? You meet a boy who’s all brave and noble, and he grows up to run away.”
“That’s not fair!” said Bod.
“The Nobody Owens I knew wouldn’t’ve run off from the graveyard without saying so much as a fare-thee-well to those who cared for him. You’ll break Mistress Owens’s heart.”
Bod had not thought of that. He said, “I had a fight with Silas.”
“So?”
“He wants me to come back to the graveyard. To stop school. He thinks it’s too dangerous.”
“Why? Between your talents and my bespellment, they’ll barely notice you.”
“I was getting involved. There were these kids bullying other kids. I wanted them to stop. I drew attention to myself…”
Liza could be seen now, a misty shape in the alleyway keeping pace with Bod.
“He’s out here, somewhere, and he wants you dead,” she said. “Him as killed your family. Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us. Come home, Bod.”
“I think…I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.”
“If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,” was all she said.
The fallen autumn leaves were slick beneath Bod’s feet, and the mists blurred the edges of the world. Nothing was as clean-cut as he had thought it, a few minutes before.
“I did a Dreamwalk,” he said.
“How did it go?”
“Good,” he said. “Well, all right.”
“You should tell Mr. Pennyworth. He’ll be pleased.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I should.”
He reached the end of the alley, and instead of turning right, as he had planned, and off into the world, he turned left, onto the High Street, the road that would take him back to Dunstan Road and the graveyard on the hill.
“What?” said Liza Hempstock. “What you doin’?”
“Going home,” said Bod. “Like you said.”
There were shop-lights now. Bod could smell the hot grease from the chip shop on the corner. The paving stones glistened.
“That’s good,” said Liza Hempstock, now only a voice once more. Then the voice said, “Run! Or Fade! Something’s wrong!”
Bod was about to tell her that there was nothing wrong, that she was being foolish, when a large car with a light flashing on the top came veering across the road and pulled up in front of him.
Two men got out from it. “Excuse me, young man,” said one of the men. “Police. Might I ask what you’re doing out so late?”