[MUSIC]
HarperAudio presents a full
cast presentation of
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman.
[MUSIC]
>> Rattle his bones over the stones,
it's only a pauper who nobody owns.
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, Jackm 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 moon light, so
he had no desire to turn
on an electric light.
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,
homed 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 and
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 was 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
wondering, for climbing up things,
for getting into and out of things.
That night he had been woken by
the sound on the floor beneath
him falling with a crash.
Awake, he soon became bored and
began 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 bears 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 on 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 number, 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 hole and
stood up, the diaper fell off.
He stepped out of it,
he was only wearing a child's nightshirt.
The stairs that lead 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 weaved 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 door's 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 the 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-40s.
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 it's 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 pale finger.
>> Strike me silly, if that isn't a baby.
>> Of course it's a baby, and the question
is, what is to be done with it?
>> I dare say that is a question Mistress
Owens, and yet it is not our question.
For this here baby is
unquestionably alive, and
as such has nothing to do with us and
is no part of our world.
>> Look at him smile.
He has the sweetest of smiles.
>> And with one insubstantial hand, she
stroked the child's sparse blonde hair.
The little boy giggled with delight.
>> [SOUND]
>> 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, 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.
>> He don'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 grey 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's 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?
>> But Mrs. Owens 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 2,000 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 street lights.
He paused for a moment,
then climbed down the other side,
holding onto 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 graveyard.
>> He's living, we're not,
can you imagine?
>> The child was looking up at them,
puzzled.
It reached for one of them,
then the other, finding nothing but air.
The woman shape was fading fast.
>> Yes.
>> Said Mrs Owens in response to
something that no one else had heard.
>> If we can, then we will.
>> Then she turned to the man beside her.
>> And you Owens,
will you be a father to this little lad?
>> Will I what?
>> We never had a child, and
his mother wants us to protect him.
Will you say yes?
>> The man in the black coat had
tripped in the tangle of ivy and
half broken headstones.
Now he got to his feet and
walked forward more carefully,
startling an owl,
which rose on silent wings.
He could see the baby and
there was triumph in his eyes.
Owens knew what his wife was thinking
when she used that tone of voice.
They had not, in life and in death, been
married for over 250 years for nothing.
>> Are you certain, are you sure?
>> Sure as I have ever been of anything.
>> Then yes, if you'll be its mother,
I'll be its father.
>> Did you hear that?
>> Mrs Owens asked the flickering shape
in the graveyard, now little more
than an outline, like distant summer
lightning in the shape of a woman.
It said something to her that no one
else could hear and then it was gone.
>> She'll not come here again.
Next time she wakes it'll be in her own
graveyard, or wherever it is she's going.
>> Mrs Owens bent down to the baby and
extended her arms.
>> Come now, come to mamma.
>> To the man, Jack walking through
the graveyard towards them on a path,
his knife already in his hand,
it seemed as if a swirl of mist had
curled around the child in the moonlight.
And that the boy was no longer there, just
damp mist and moonlight and swaying grass.
