“I expect so,” said Silas.
“Do you think I’ll ever see her again?”
“The girl? I very much doubt it.”
But Silas was wrong. Three weeks later, on a grey afternoon, Scarlett came to the graveyard, accompanied by both her parents.
They insisted that she remain in sight at all times, although they trailed a little behind her. Scarlett’s mother occasionally exclaimed about how morbid this all was and how fine and good it was that they would soon be leaving it behind forever.
When Scarlett’s parents began to talk to each other, Bod said, “Hello.”
“Hi,” said Scarlett, very quietly.
“I didn’t think I’d see you again.”
“I told them I wouldn’t go with them unless they brought me back here one last time.”
“Go where?”
“Scotland. There’s a university there. For Dad to teach particle physics.”
They walked on the path together, a small girl in a bright orange anorak and a small boy in a grey winding sheet.
“Is Scotland a long way away?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Oh.”
“I hoped you’d be here. To say good-bye.”
“I’m always here.”
“But you aren’t dead, are you, Nobody Owens?”
“’Course not.”
“Well, you can’t stay here all your life. Can you? One day you’ll grow up and then you will have to go and live in the world outside.”
He shook his head. “It’s not safe for me out there.”
“Who says?”
“Silas. My family. Everybody.”
She was silent.
Her father called, “Scarlett! Come on, love. Time to go. You’ve had your last trip to the graveyard. Now let’s go home.”
Scarlett said to
Bod, “You’re brave. You are the bravest person I know, and you are my friend. I don’t care if you are imaginary.” Then she fled down the path back the way they had come, to her parents and the world.
CHAPTER THREE
The Hounds of God
ONE GRAVE IN EVERY graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it—waterstained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like a fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.