The Graveyard Book: A Novel - Softcover

Gaiman, Neil; McKean, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062081551 ISBN 13: 9780062081551

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2011

Synopsis

“Wistful, witty, and wise—and creepy. . . . Closer in tone to American Gods than to Coraline, but permeated with Bod’s innocence, this needs to be read by anyone who is or has ever been a child.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

By turns macabre, uplifting, sinister, and heartwarming, Neil Gaiman’s #1 national bestseller is an ingenious reimagining of Rudyard Kipling’s classic adventure The Jungle Book. Called a “novel of wonder . . . a tale of unforgettable enchantment” by the New York Times Book Review, The Graveyard Book will captivate readers of all ages with its timeless meditation on love, loss, survival, and sacrifice . . . and what it means to truly be alive.

About this title

About the Authors

Neil Gaiman is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of books for children and adults whose award-winning titles include Norse Mythology, American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), Coraline, and The Sandman graphic novels. Neil Gaiman is a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR and Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

Dave McKean is best known for his work on Neil Gaiman's Sandman series of graphic novels and for his CD covers for musicians from Tori Amos to Alice Cooper. He also illustrated Neil Gaiman's picture books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, The Wolves in the Walls, and Crazy Hair. He is a cult figure in the comic book world, and is also a photographer.

From the Back Cover

In this ingenious and captivating reimagining of Rudyard Kipling's classic adventure The Jungle Book, Neil Gaiman tells the unforgettable story of Nobody Owens, a living, breathing boy whose home is a graveyard, raised by a guardian who belongs neither to the mortal world nor the realm of the dead. Among the mausoleums and headstones of his home, Bod experiences things most mortals can barely imagine. But real, flesh-and-blood danger waits just outside the cemetery walls: the man who murdered the infant Bod's family will not rest until he finds Nobody Owens and finishes the job he began many years ago.

A #1 New York Times bestseller and winner of many international awards, including the Hugo Award for best novel and the Locus Award, The Graveyard Book is a glorious meditation on love, loss, survival, and sacrifice . . . and what it means to truly be alive.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Graveyard Book

A NovelBy Neil Gaimen, Dave McLean

William Morrow Paperbacks

Copyright © 2011 Neil Gaimen, Dave McLean
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780062081551

Chapter One

How Nobody Came to the Graveyard

There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade
finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might
not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to
that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.
The street door was still open, just a little, where the
knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of
nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through
the open door.
The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand
he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his
black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved
right hand which had been holding it;
then he put the handkerchief away. The
hunt was almost over. He had left the
woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom
floor, the older child in her brightly
colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and
half-finished models. That only left the little
one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care
of. One more and his task would be done.
He flexed his fingers. The man Jack was, above all things,
a professional, or so he told himself, and he would not allow
himself to smile until the job was completed.
His hair was dark and his eyes were dark and he
wore black leather gloves of the thinnest
lambskin.
The toddler?s room was at the very
top of the house. The man Jack walked
up the stairs, his feet silent on the carpeting.
Then he pushed open the attic
door, and he walked in. His shoes were
black leather, and they were polished to such a shine that they
looked like dark mirrors: you could see the moon reflected in
them, tiny and half full.
The real moon shone through the casement window. Its
light was not bright, and it was diffused by the mist, but the
man Jack would not need much light. The moonlight was
enough. It would do.
He could make out the shape of the child in the crib, head
and limbs and torso.
The crib had high, slatted sides to prevent the child from
getting out. Jack leaned over, raised his right hand, the one
holding the knife, and he aimed for the chest...
and then he lowered his hand. The shape in the crib
was a teddy bear. There was no child.
The man Jack?s eyes were accustomed to the dim moonlight,
so he had no desire to turn on an electric light. And light
was not that important, after all. He had other skills.
The man Jack sniffed the air. He ignored the scents that
had come into the room with him, dismissed the scents that
he could safely ignore, honed in on the smell of the thing he
had come to find. He could smell the child: a milky smell,
like chocolate chip cookies, and the sour tang of a wet, disposable,
nighttime diaper. He could smell the baby shampoo in
its hair, and something small and rubbery?a toy, he thought,
and then, no, something to suck?that the child had been
carrying.
The child had been here. It was here no longer. The man
Jack followed his nose down the stairs through the middle of
the tall, thin house. He inspected the bathroom, the kitchen,
the airing cupboard, and, finally, the downstairs hall, in
which there was nothing to be seen but the family?s bicycles,
a pile of empty shopping bags, a fallen diaper, and the stray
tendrils of fog that had insinuated themselves into the hall
from the open door to the street.
The man Jack made a small noise then, a grunt that
contained in it both frustration and also satisfaction. He slipped
the knife into its sheath in the inside pocket of his long coat,
and he stepped out into the street. There was moonlight,
and there were streetlights, but the fog stifled everything,
muted light and muffled sound and made the night shadowy
and treacherous. He looked down the hill towards the light
of the closed shops, then up the street, where the last high
houses wound up the hill on their way to the darkness of the
old graveyard.
The man Jack sniffed the air. Then, without hurrying, he
began to walk up the hill.
Ever since the child had learned to walk he had been his
mother?s and father?s despair and delight, for there never
was such a boy for wandering, for climbing up things, for
getting into and out of things. That night, he had been woken by
the sound of something on the floor beneath him falling with
a crash. Awake, he soon became bored, and had begun looking
for a way out of his crib. It had high sides, like the walls
of his playpen downstairs, but he was convinced that he could
scale it. All he needed was a step...
He pulled his large, golden teddy bear into the corner of
the crib, then, holding the railing in his tiny hands, he put his
foot onto the bear?s lap, the other foot up on the bear?s head,
and he pulled himself up into a standing position, and then he
half-climbed, half-toppled over the railing and out of the crib.
He landed with a muffled thump on a small mound of
furry, fuzzy toys, some of them presents from relations from
his first birthday, not six months gone, some of them inherited
from his older sister. He was surprised when he hit the
floor, but he did not cry out: if you cried they came and put
you back in your crib.
He crawled out of the room.
Stairs that went up were tricky things, and he had not yet
entirely mastered them. Stairs that went down however, he
had discovered, were fairly simple. He did them sitting down,
bumping from step to step on his well-padded bottom.
He sucked on his nummer, the rubber pacifier his mother
had just begun to tell him that he was getting too old for.
His diaper had worked itself loose on his journey on his
bottom down the stairs, and when he reached the last step,
when he reached the little hall and stood up, the diaper
fell off. He stepped out of it. He was only wearing a child?s
nightshirt. The stairs that led back up to his room and his
family were steep, but the door to the street was open and
inviting....
The child stepped out of the house a little hesitantly. The
fog wreathed around him like a long-lost friend. And then,
uncertainly at first, then with increasing speed and confidence,
the boy tottered up the hill.
The fog was thinner as you approached the top of the hill.
The half-moon shone, not as bright as day, not by any
means, but enough to see the graveyard, enough for that.
Look.
You could see the abandoned funeral chapel, iron doors
padlocked, ivy on the sides of the spire, a small tree growing
out of the guttering at roof level.
You could see stones and tombs and vaults and memorial
plaques. You could see the occasional dash or scuttle of a rabbit
or a vole or a weasel as it slipped out of the undergrowth
and across the path.
You would have seen these things, in the moonlight, if you
had been there that night.
You might not have seen a pale, plump woman, who
walked the path near the front gates, and if you had seen her,
with a second, more careful glance you would have realized
that she was only moonlight, mist, and shadow. The plump,
pale woman was there, though. She walked the path that led
through a clutch of half-fallen tombstones towards the front
gates.
The gates were locked. They were always locked at four in
the afternoon in winter, at eight at night in summer. Spike
topped iron railings ran around part of the cemetery, a high
brick wall around the rest of it. The bars of the gates were
closely spaced: they would have stopped a grown man from
getting through, even stopped a ten-year-old child...
?Owens!? called the pale woman, in a voice that might
have been the rustle of the wind through the long grass.
?Owens! Come and look at this!?
She crouched down and peered at something on the
ground, as a patch of shadow moved into the moonlight,
revealing itself to be a grizzled man in his mid-forties. He
looked down at his wife, and then looked at what she was
looking at, and he scratched his head.
?Mistress Owens?? he said, for he came from a more formal
age than our own. ?Is that what I think it is??
And at that moment the thing he was inspecting seemed
to catch sight of Mrs. Owens, for it opened its mouth, letting
the rubber nipple it was sucking fall to the ground, and it
reached out a small, chubby fist, as if it were trying for all the
world to hold on to Mrs. Owens?s pale finger.
?Strike me silly,? said Mr. Owens, ?if that isn?t a baby.?
?Of course it?s a baby,? said his wife. ?And the question is,
what is to be done with it??
?I daresay that is a question, Mistress Owens,? said her
husband. ?And yet, it is not our question. For this here baby
is unquestionably alive, and as such is nothing to do with us,
and is no part of our world.?
?Look at him smile!? said Mrs. Owens. ?He has the sweetest
of smiles,? and with one insubstantial hand she stroked the
child?s sparse blond hair. The little boy giggled with delight.
A chilly breeze blew across the graveyard, scattering the
fog in the lower slopes of the place (for the graveyard covered
the whole of the top of the hill, and its paths wound up the
hill and down and back upon themselves). A rattling: someone
at the main gate of the graveyard was pulling and shaking
it, rattling the old gates and the heavy padlock and chain that
held them.
?There now,? said Owens, ?it?s the babe?s family, come to
bring him back to the loving bosom. Leave the little man be,?
he added, because Mrs. Owens was putting her insubstantial
arms around the toddler, smoothing, stroking.
Mrs. Owens said, ?He dun?t look like nobody?s family, that
one.? The man in the dark coat had given up on rattling the main
gates and was now examining the smaller side gate. It, too, was
well-locked. There had been some vandalism in the graveyard
the previous year, and the council had Taken Steps.
?Come on, Mistress Owens. Leave it be. There?s a dear,?
said Mr. Owens, when he saw a ghost, and his mouth dropped
open, and he found himself unable to think of anything to say.
You might think?and if you did, you would be right?
that Mr. Owens should not have taken on so at seeing a ghost,
given that Mr. and Mrs. Owens were themselves dead and had
been for a few hundred years now, and given that the entirety
of their social life, or very nearly, was spent with those who
were also dead. But there was a difference between the folk
of the graveyard and this: a raw, flickering, startling shape
the gray color of television static, all panic and naked emotion
which flooded the Owenses as if it was their own. Three
figures, two large, one smaller, but only one of them was in
focus, was more than an outline or a shimmer. And the figure
said, My baby! He is trying to harm my baby!
A clattering. The man outside was hauling a heavy metal
garbage can across the alley to the high brick wall that ran
around that part of the graveyard.
?Protect my son!? said the ghost, and Mrs. Owens thought
it was a woman. Of course, the babe?s mother.
?What did he do to you?? asked Mrs. Owens, but she was
not certain that the ghost could hear her. Recently dead, poor
love, she thought. It?s always easier to die gently, to wake in due
time in the place you were buried, to come to terms with your
death and to get acquainted with the other inhabitants. This
creature was nothing but alarm and fear for her child, and her
panic, which felt to the Owenses like a low-pitched screaming,
was now attracting attention, for other pale figures were
coming from all over the graveyard.
?Who are you?? Caius Pompeius asked the figure. His
headstone was now only a weathered lump of rock, but two
thousand years earlier he had asked to be laid to rest on the
mound beside the marble shrine, rather than to have his body
sent back to Rome, and he was one of the most senior citizens
of the graveyard. He took his responsibilities extremely
seriously. ?Are you buried here??
?Of course she?s not! Freshly dead by the look of her.? Mrs.
Owens put an arm around the woman-shape and spoke to it
privately, in a low voice, calm and sensible.
There was a thump and a crash from the high wall beside
the alley. The garbage can had fallen. A man clambered up
onto the top of the wall, a dark outline against the mist-
smudged streetlights. He paused for a moment, then climbed
down the other side, holding on to the top of the wall, legs
dangling, then let himself fall the last few feet, down into the
graveyard.
?But my dear,? Mrs. Owens said to the shape, now all that
was left of the three shapes that had appeared in the grave-
yard. ?He?s living. We?re not. Can you imagine ...?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Graveyard Bookby Neil Gaimen, Dave McLean Copyright © 2011 by Neil Gaimen, Dave McLean. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow Paperbacks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062081551
• ISBN 13: 9780062081551
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 293