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The Graveyard Book Page 17
Author: Neil Gaiman

“Silas. What’s a Macabray?”

Silas’s eyebrows raised and his head tipped to one side. “Where did you hear about that?”

“Everyone in the graveyard is talking about it. I think it’s something that happens tomorrow night. What’s a Macabray?”

“It’s a dance, “said Silas.

“All must dance the Macabray,” said Bod, remembering. “Have you danced it? What kind of dance is it?”

His guardian looked at him with eyes like black pools and said, “I do not know. I know many things, Bod, for I have been walking this earth at night for a very long time, but I do not know what it is like to dance the Macabray. You must be alive or you must be dead to dance it—and I am neither.”

Bod shivered. He wanted to embrace his guardian, to hold him and tell him that he would never desert him, but the action was unthinkable. He could no more hug Silas than he could hold a moonbeam, not because his guardian was insubstantial, but because it would be wrong. There were people you could hug, and then there was Silas.

His guardian inspected Bod thoughtfully, a boy in his new clothes. “You’ll do,” he said. “Now you look like you’ve lived outside the graveyard all your life.”

Bod smiled proudly. Then the smile stopped and he looked grave once again. He said, “But you’ll always be here, Silas, won’t you? And I won’t ever have to leave, if I don’t want to?”

“Everything in its season,” said Silas, and he said no more that night.

Bod woke early the next day, when the sun was a silver coin high in the grey winter sky. It was too easy to sleep through the hours of daylight, to spend all his winter in one long night and never see the sun, and so each night before he slept he would promise himself that he would wake in daylight, and leave the Owenses’ cozy tomb.

There was a strange scent in the air, sharp and floral. Bod followed it up the hill to the Egyptian Walk, where the winter ivy hung in green tumbles, an evergreen tangle that hid the mock-Egyptian walls and statues and hieroglyphs.

The perfume was heaviest there, and for a moment Bod wondered if snow might have fallen, for there were white clusters on the greenery. Bod examined a cluster more closely. It was made of small five-petaled flowers, and he had just put his head in to sniff the perfume when he heard footsteps coming up the path.

Bod Faded into the ivy, and watched. Three men and a woman, all alive, came up the path and into the Egyptian Walk. The woman had an ornate chain around her neck.

“Is this it?” she asked.

“Yes, Mrs. Caraway,” said one of the men—chubby and white-haired and short of breath. Like each of the men, he carried a large, empty wicker basket.

She seemed both vague and puzzled. “Well, if you say so,” she said. “But I cannot say that I understand it.” She looked up at the flowers. “What do I do now?”

The smallest of the men reached into his wicker basket and brought out a tarnished pair of silver scissors. “The scissors, Lady Mayoress, “he said.

She took the scissors from him and began to cut the clumps of blossom, and she and the three men started to fill the baskets with the flowers.

“This is,” said Mrs. Caraway, the Lady Mayoress, after a little while, “perfectly ridiculous.”

“It is,” said the fat man, “a tradition.”

“Perfectly ridiculous,” said Mrs. Caraway, but she continued to cut the white blossoms and drop them into the wicker baskets. When they had filled the first basket, she asked, “Isn’t that enough?”

“We need to fill all four baskets,” said the smaller man, “and then distribute a flower to everyone in the Old Town.”

“And what kind of tradition is that?” said Mrs. Caraway. “I asked the Lord Mayor before me, and he said he’d never heard of it.” Then she said, “Do you get a feeling someone’s watching us?”

“What?” said the third man, who had not spoken until now. He had a beard and a turban and two wicker baskets. “Ghosts, you mean? I do not believe in ghosts.”

“Not ghosts,” said Mrs. Caraway. “Just a feeling like someone’s looking.”

Bod fought the urge to push further back into the ivy.

“It’s not surprising that the previous Lord Mayor did not know about this tradition,” said the chubby man, whose basket was almost full. “It’s the first time the winter blossoms have bloomed in eighty years.”

The man with the beard and the turban, who did not believe in ghosts, was looking around him nervously.

“Everyone in the Old Town gets a flower,” said the small man. “Man, woman, and child.” Then he said, slowly, as if he were trying to remember something he had learned a very long time ago, “One to leave and one to stay and all to dance the Macabray.”

Mrs. Caraway sniffed. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said, and kept on snipping the blossoms.

Dusk fell early in the afternoon, and it was night by half past four. Bod wandered the paths of the graveyard, looking for someone to talk to, but there was no one about. He walked down to the Potter’s Field to see if Liza Hempstock was about, but found no one there. He went back to the Owenses’ tomb, but found it also deserted: neither his father nor Mistress Owens was anywhere to be seen.

Panic started then, a low-level panic. It was the first time in his ten years that Bod could remember feeling abandoned in the place he had always thought of as his home: he ran down the hill to the old chapel, where he waited for Silas.

Silas did not come.

“Perhaps I missed him,” thought Bod, but he did not believe this. He walked up the hill to the very top, and looked out. The stars hung in the chilly sky, while the patterned lights of the city spread below him, streetlights and car headlights and things in motion. He walked slowly down from the hill until he reached the graveyard’s main gates, and he stopped there.

He could hear music.

Bod had listened to all kinds of music: the sweet chimes of the ice-cream van, the songs that played on workmen’s radios, the tunes that Claretty Jake played the dead on his dusty fiddle, but he had never heard anything like this before: a series of deep swells, like the music at the beginning of something, a prelude perhaps, or an overture.

He slipped through the locked gates, walked down the hill, and into the Old Town.

He passed the Lady Mayoress, standing on a corner, and as he watched, she reached out and pinned a little white flower to the lapel of a passing businessman.

“I don’t make personal charitable donations,” said the man. “I leave that to the office.”

“It’s not for charity,” said Mrs. Caraway. “It’s a local tradition.”

“Ah,” he said, and he pushed his chest out, displaying the little white flower to the world, and walked off, proud as Punch.

A young woman pushing a baby buggy was the next to go past.

“Wossit for?” she asked suspiciously, as the Mayoress approached.

“One for you, one for the little one,” said the Mayoress.

She pinned the flower to the young woman’s winter coat. She stuck the flower for the baby to its coat with tape.

“But wossit for?” asked the young woman.

“It’s an Old Town thing,” said the Lady Mayoress, vaguely. “Some sort of tradition.”

Bod walked on. Everywhere he went he saw people wearing the white flowers. On the other street corners, he passed the men who had been with the Lady Mayoress, each man with a basket, handing out the white flowers. Not everyone took a flower, but most people did.

The music was still playing: somewhere, at the edge of perception, solemn and strange. Bod cocked his head to one side, trying to locate where it was coming from, without success. It was in the air and all around. It was playing in the flapping of flags and awnings, in the rumble of distant traffic, the click of heels on the dry paving stones…

And there was an oddness, thought Bod, as he watched the people heading home. They were walking in time to the music.

The man with the beard and the turban was almost out of flowers. Bod walked over to him.

“Excuse me,” said Bod.

The man started. “I did not see you,” he said, accusingly.

“Sorry,” said Bod. “Can I have a flower as well?”

The man with the turban looked at Bod with suspicion. “Do you live around here?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” said Bod.

The man passed Bod a white flower. Bod took it, then said, “Ow,” as something stabbed into the base of his thumb.

“You pin it to your coat,” said the man. “Watch out for the pin.”

A bead of crimson was coming up on Bod’s thumb. He sucked at it while the man pinned the flower to Bod’s sweater. “I’ve never seen you around here,” he told Bod.

“I live here, all right,” said Bod. “What are the flowers for?”

“It was a tradition in the Old Town,” said the man, “before the city grew up around it. When the winter flowers bloom in the graveyard on the hill they are cut and given out to everybody, man or woman, young or old, rich or poor.”

The music was louder now. Bod wondered if he could hear it better because he was wearing the flower—-he could make out a beat, like distant drums, and a skirling, hesitant melody that made him want to pick up his heels and march in time to the sound.

Bod had never walked anywhere as a sightseer before. He had forgotten the prohibitions on leaving the graveyard, forgotten that tonight in the graveyard on the hill the dead were no longer in their places; all that he thought of was the Old Town, and he trotted through it down to the municipal gardens in front of the Old Town Hall (which was now a museum and tourist information center, the town hall itself having moved into much more imposing, if newer and duller, offices halfway across the city).

There were already people around, wandering the municipal gardens—now in midwinter, little more than a large grassy field with, here and there, some steps, a shrub, a statue.

Bod listened to the music, entranced. There were people trickling into the square, in ones and twos, in families or alone. He had never seen so many living people at one time. There must have been hundreds of them, all of them breathing, each of them as alive as he was, each with a white flower.

Is this what living people do? thought Bod, but he knew that it was not: that this, whatever it was, was special.

The young woman he had seen earlier pushing a baby buggy stood beside him, holding her baby, swaying her head to the music.

“How long does the music go on for?” Bod asked her, but she said nothing, just swayed and smiled. Bod did not think she smiled much normally. And only when he was certain that she had not heard him, that he had Faded, or was simply not someone she cared enough about to listen to, she said, “Blimmen ’eck. It’s like Christmases.” She said it like a woman in a dream, as if she was seeing herself from the outside. In the same not-really-there tone of voice, she said, “Puts me in mind of me Gran’s sister, Aunt Clara. The night before Christmas we’d go to her, after me Gran passed away, and she’d play music on her old piano, and she’d sing, sometimes, and we’d eat chocolates and nuts and I can’t remember any of the songs she sung. But that music, it’s like all of them songs playing at once.”

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