2008م - 1444هـ
The Graveyard Book



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.