Summary: Silas and his relations with the living and the dead.
A/N: Just a doodle from this past August, more or less inspired by moving into an actual city, after having claimed to have lived in one most of my life. The title comes, once again, from Greg Rappleye's poem "A Path Between Houses."
Disclaimer: I don't own "A Path Between Houses" or The Graveyard Book. Thanks to glitterlavalamp for beta-reading, with apologies for spamming you with TGB fic at inconvenient moments.
CEMETERY FIRES
There was color, too, in the graveyard nights. The variable remnants of sunset, now scarlet, now purple, now blue. The vague azure of gaslit city streets that turned slowly to sodium-orange, neon-purple, fluorescent white. And there was color in the silence. The pale blue of solace. The grey cast of solitude. Silas had never seen them, or noticed them, before he came to the graveyard on the hill; but soon enough, he knew them all.
Invariably there was music. The dead made no sound, it was true; but the voices of the living took their places, men and women, young and old, laughing and grieving and singing as only the living can sing, with purpose, with hope. Silas learned to listen for them, he searched them out in their sleep and their half-sleep and their fitful waking dreams. He did not have to search far. They were all around him, the preludes and the operas, the waltzes and the requiems, a grand and fragile symphony in the night.
The graveyard folk asked him, sometimes, how the world had changed. "Very much," he replied; and it had. It had changed as irrevocably for those who had died yesterday as for the dead of a century gone. It changed second to second, heartbeat to heartbeat, a kaleidoscope of sounds and colors and souls. "It has changed very much," Silas said, and declined to elaborate. Like all who belonged to the inconstant earth, he too envied the dead.