Scarlett said, “Boy? What’re you doing?”
He looked around, seemed to have trouble focusing. “Who said that?” and then, “Oh, I can see you, sort of. Are you Dreamwalking?”
“I think I’m dreaming,” she agreed.
“Not quite what I meant,” said the boy. “Hullo. I’m Bod.”
“I’m Scarlett,” she said.
He looked at her again, as if he were seeing her for the first time. “Of course, you are! I knew you looked familiar. You were in the graveyard today with that man, the one with the paper.”
“Mr. Frost,” she said. “He’s really nice. He gave me a lift home.” Then she said, “Did you see us?”
“Yeah. I keep an eye on most things that happen in the graveyard.”
“What kind of a name is Bod?” she asked.
“It’s short for Nobody.”
“Of course!” said Scarlett. “That’s what this dream is about. You’re my imaginary friend, from when I was little, all grown up.”
He nodded.
He was taller than she was. He wore grey, although she could not have described his clothes. His hair was too long, and she thought it had been some time since he had received a haircut.
He said, “You were really brave. We went deep into the hill and we saw the Indigo Man. And we met the Sleer.”
Something happened, then, in her head. A rushing and a tumbling, a whirl of darkness and a crash of images…
“I remember,” said Scarlett. But she said it to the empty darkness of her bedroom, and heard nothing in reply but the low trundle of a distant lorry, making its way through the night.
Bod had stores of food, the kind that lasted, cached in the crypt, and more in some of the chillier tombs and vaults and mausoleums. Silas had made sure of that. He had enough food to keep him going for a couple of months. Unless Silas or Miss Lupescu was there, he simply would not leave the graveyard.
He missed the world beyond the graveyard gates, but he knew it was not safe out there. Not yet. The graveyard, though, was his world and his domain, and he was proud of it and loved it as only a fourteen-year-old boy can love anything.
And yet…
In the graveyard, no one ever changed. The little children Bod had played with when he was small were still little children; Fortinbras Bartleby, who had once been his best friend, was now four or five years younger than Bod was, and they had less to talk about each time they saw each other; Thackeray Porringer was Bod’s height and age, and seemed to be in much better temper with him; he would walk with Bod in the evenings, and tell stories of unfortunate things that had happened to his friends. Normally the stories would end in the friends being hanged until they were dead for no offense of theirs and by mistake, although sometimes they were simply transported to the American Colonies and they didn’t have to be hanged unless they came back.
Liza Hempstock, who had been Bod’s friend for the last six years, was different in another way; she was less likely to be there for him when Bod went down to the nettle-patch to see her, and on the rare occasions when she was, she would be short-tempered, argumentative, and often downright rude.
Bod talked to Mr. Owens about this, and, after a few moments’ reflection, his father said, “It’s just women, I reckon. She liked you as a boy, probably isn’t sure who you are now you’re a young man. I used to play with one little girl down by the duck-pond every day until she turned about your age, and then she threw an apple at my head and did not say another word to me until I was seventeen.”
Mrs. Owens sniffed. “It was a pear I threw,” she said, tartly, “and I was talking to you again soon enough, for we danced a measure at your cousin Ned’s wedding, and that was but two days after your sixteenth birthday.”
Mr. Owens said, “Of course you are right, my dear.” He winked at Bod, to tell him that it was none of it serious. And then he mouthed “Seventeen,” to show that, really, it was.
Bod had allowed himself no friends among the living. That way, he had realized back during his short-lived schooldays, lay only trouble. Still, he had remembered Scarlett, had missed her for years after she went away, had long ago faced the fact he would never see her again. And now she had been here in his graveyard, and he had not known her…
He was wandering deeper into the tangle of ivy and trees that made the graveyard’s northwest quadrant so dangerous. Signs advised visitors to keep out, but the signs were not needed. It was uninviting and creepy once you were past the ivy-tangle that marked the end of the Egyptian Walk and the black doors in the mock-Egyptian walls that led to people’s final resting places. In the northwest, nature had been reclaiming the graveyard for almost a hundred years, and the stones were tipped over, graves were forgotten or simply lost beneath the green ivy and the leaf-fall of fifty years. Paths were lost and impassable.