The Graveyard Book: Chapters 4-6

In the twilight of the graveyard there was a silent implosion, a flutter of velvet darkness, and Silas was gone.

Miss Borrows smiled the guileless smile of the dead.

He took a step backward, walking toward the stone steps, avoiding the desiccated remains of people and animals on the floor.

“Good morrow, young lummox,” said Liza’s voice.

The shop, in the warren of streets in the Old Town—a little bit antiques shop, a little bit junk shop, a little bit pawnbroker’s (and not even Abanazer himself was entirely certain which bit was which) brought odd types and strange people, some of them wanting to buy, some of them needing to sell.

Abanazer Bolger, paying little attention to the boy’s prattle, led him behind the counter, and opened the door to the storeroom, a windowless little space, every inch of which was crammed high with teetering cardboard boxes, each filled with junk.

The autumn day had turned from sunny to grey, and a light patter of rain ran down the grubby shop window.

On the floor beside the men was a brooch of glittering silver; a crimson-orange-banded stone, held in place with claws and with snake-heads, and the expression on the snake-heads was one of triumph and avarice and satisfaction.

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.

Josiah Worthington said, "The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not to speak of it to the living.”

The man Jack sat at the front center table, beside a dapper man with silver-white hair.

“Damm’ee, sir, and blast your eyes! When I catch you—and find you I shall—I shall make you rue the day you were born!”

Thackeray had spent five hours being sent all over the town one slushy January morning, being laughed at in each establishment he visited and then sent on to the next; when he realized he had been made a fool of, he had taken an angry case of apoplexy, which carried him off within the week...

He ran on, pell-mell, through the rain and down the winding path into the lower slopes of the graveyard, running until he reached the old chapel.

“Bounders guilty of reprehensible behavior, eh?”