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.

A toddler escapes a knife murderer by climbing out of his crib and walking up the hill into a graveyard where the ghosts decide to take him in and look after his well-being until he grows up. Neil Gaiman tells his story in eight chapters, each of them set two years apart and a short story in its own right. Wonderful writing, won numerous awards in the young adult categories and beyond, inspired by The Jungle Book, in a perfect mood for bed-time stories or Tim Burton movies (even though the equally qualified Neil Jordan is apparently working on it now).