And now?
Bod put his hands in his pockets and began to walk, not certain where he was going. He would leave the school, he thought, just as he had left the graveyard. He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing. He wondered if there were still deserted islands in the world, like the one on which Robinson Crusoe had been shipwrecked. He could go and live on one of those.
Bod did not look up. If he had, he would have seen a pair of watery blue eyes watching him intently from a bedroom window.
He stepped into an alley, feeling more comfortable out of the light.
“Are you running away, then?” said a girl’s voice.
Bod said nothing.
“That’s the difference between the living and the dead, ennit?” said the voice. It was Liza Hempstock talking, Bod knew, although the witch-girl was nowhere to be seen. “The dead dun’t disappoint you. They’ve had their life, done what they’ve done. We dun’t change. The living, they always disappoint you, dun’t they? You meet a boy who’s all brave and noble, and he grows up to run away.”
“That’s not fair!” said Bod.
“The Nobody Owens I knew wouldn’t’ve run off from the graveyard without saying so much as a fare-thee-well to those who cared for him. You’ll break Mistress Owens’s heart.”
Bod had not thought of that. He said, “I had a fight with Silas.”
“So?”
“He wants me to come back to the graveyard. To stop school. He thinks it’s too dangerous.”
“Why? Between your talents and my bespellment, they’ll barely notice you.”
“I was getting involved. There were these kids bullying other kids. I wanted them to stop. I drew attention to myself…”
Liza could be seen now, a misty shape in the alleyway keeping pace with Bod.
“He’s out here, somewhere, and he wants you dead,” she said. “Him as killed your family. Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us. Come home, Bod.”
“I think…I said things to Silas. He’ll be angry.”
“If he didn’t care about you, you couldn’t upset him,” was all she said.
The fallen autumn leaves were slick beneath Bod’s feet, and the mists blurred the edges of the world. Nothing was as clean-cut as he had thought it, a few minutes before.
“I did a Dreamwalk,” he said.
“How did it go?”
“Good,” he said. “Well, all right.”
“You should tell Mr. Pennyworth. He’ll be pleased.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I should.”
He reached the end of the alley, and instead of turning right, as he had planned, and off into the world, he turned left, onto the High Street, the road that would take him back to Dunstan Road and the graveyard on the hill.
“What?” said Liza Hempstock. “What you doin’?”
“Going home,” said Bod. “Like you said.”
There were shop-lights now. Bod could smell the hot grease from the chip shop on the corner. The paving stones glistened.
“That’s good,” said Liza Hempstock, now only a voice once more. Then the voice said, “Run! Or Fade! Something’s wrong!”
Bod was about to tell her that there was nothing wrong, that she was being foolish, when a large car with a light flashing on the top came veering across the road and pulled up in front of him.