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Authors: Neil Gaiman
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place. The phone book was downstairs, but I knew the number to call Directory Enquiries, and I only had to ask for anybody named Hempstock living at Hempstock Farm. There was a phone in my parents’ bedroom.
I got off the bed, went to the doorway, looked out. The upstairs hallway was empty. As quickly, as quietly as I could, I walked into the bedroom next to mine. The walls were pale pink, my parents’ bed covered with a bedspread covered in its turn with huge printed roses. There were French windows to the balcony that ran along that side of the house. There was a cream-coloured telephone on the cream-and-gilt nightstand beside the bed. I picked it up, heard the dull whirring noise of the dial tone, and dialled Directory Enquiries, my finger pulling the holes in the dial down, a one, a nine, a two. I waited for the operator to come on the line, and tell me the number of the Hempstocks’ farm. I had a pencil with me, and I was ready to write the telephone number down in the back of a blue cloth-bound book called
Pansy Saves the School
.
The operator did not come on. The dialling tone continued, and over it, Ursula Monkton’s voice saying, ‘Properly brought-up young people would not even think about sneaking off to use the telephone, would they?’
I did not say anything, although I have no doubt she could hear me breathing. I put the handset down on the cradle, and went back into the bedroom I shared with my sister.
I sat on my bed, and stared out of the window.
My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the window open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open the window and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown on to my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat.
But now it was not raining, and it was not night. All I could see through the window were trees, and clouds, and the distant purple of the horizon.
I had emergency chocolate supplies hidden beneath the large plastic Batman figurine I had acquired on my birthday, and I ate them, and as I ate them I thought of letting go of Lettie Hempstock’s hand to grab the ball of rotting cloth, remembered the stabbing pain in my foot that had followed.
I brought her here
, I thought, and I knew that it was true.
Ursula Monkton wasn’t real. She was a cardboard mask for the thing that had travelled inside me as a worm, that had flapped and gusted in the open country under that orange sky.
I went back to reading
Pansy Saves the School
. The secret plans to the airbase next door to the school were being smuggled out to the enemy by spies who were teachers working on the school vegetable allotment: the plans were concealed inside hollowed-out vegetable marrows.
‘Great heavens!’ said Inspector Davidson of Scotland Yard’s renowned Smugglers and Secret Spies Division (the SSSD). ‘That is literally the last place we would have looked!’
‘We owe you an apology, Pansy,’ said the stern headmistress, with an uncharacteristically warm smile, and a twinkle in her eyes that made Pansy think perhaps she had misjudged the woman all this term. ‘You have saved the reputation of the school! Now, before you get too full of yourself – aren’t there some French verbs you ought to be conjugating for Madame?’
I could be happy with Pansy, in some part of my head, even while the rest of my head was filled with fear. I waited for my parents to come home. I would tell them what was happening. I would tell them. They would believe me.
At that time my father worked in an office an hour’s drive away. I was not certain what he did. He had a very nice, pretty secretary, with a toy poodle, and whenever she knew we children would be coming
I got off the bed, went to the doorway, looked out. The upstairs hallway was empty. As quickly, as quietly as I could, I walked into the bedroom next to mine. The walls were pale pink, my parents’ bed covered with a bedspread covered in its turn with huge printed roses. There were French windows to the balcony that ran along that side of the house. There was a cream-coloured telephone on the cream-and-gilt nightstand beside the bed. I picked it up, heard the dull whirring noise of the dial tone, and dialled Directory Enquiries, my finger pulling the holes in the dial down, a one, a nine, a two. I waited for the operator to come on the line, and tell me the number of the Hempstocks’ farm. I had a pencil with me, and I was ready to write the telephone number down in the back of a blue cloth-bound book called
Pansy Saves the School
.
The operator did not come on. The dialling tone continued, and over it, Ursula Monkton’s voice saying, ‘Properly brought-up young people would not even think about sneaking off to use the telephone, would they?’
I did not say anything, although I have no doubt she could hear me breathing. I put the handset down on the cradle, and went back into the bedroom I shared with my sister.
I sat on my bed, and stared out of the window.
My bed was pushed up hard against the wall just below the window. I loved to sleep with the window open. Rainy nights were the best of all: I would open the window and put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak. There would be raindrops blown on to my face, too, if I was lucky, and I would imagine that I was in my boat on the ocean and that it was swaying with the swell of the sea. I did not imagine that I was a pirate, or that I was going anywhere. I was just on my boat.
But now it was not raining, and it was not night. All I could see through the window were trees, and clouds, and the distant purple of the horizon.
I had emergency chocolate supplies hidden beneath the large plastic Batman figurine I had acquired on my birthday, and I ate them, and as I ate them I thought of letting go of Lettie Hempstock’s hand to grab the ball of rotting cloth, remembered the stabbing pain in my foot that had followed.
I brought her here
, I thought, and I knew that it was true.
Ursula Monkton wasn’t real. She was a cardboard mask for the thing that had travelled inside me as a worm, that had flapped and gusted in the open country under that orange sky.
I went back to reading
Pansy Saves the School
. The secret plans to the airbase next door to the school were being smuggled out to the enemy by spies who were teachers working on the school vegetable allotment: the plans were concealed inside hollowed-out vegetable marrows.
‘Great heavens!’ said Inspector Davidson of Scotland Yard’s renowned Smugglers and Secret Spies Division (the SSSD). ‘That is literally the last place we would have looked!’
‘We owe you an apology, Pansy,’ said the stern headmistress, with an uncharacteristically warm smile, and a twinkle in her eyes that made Pansy think perhaps she had misjudged the woman all this term. ‘You have saved the reputation of the school! Now, before you get too full of yourself – aren’t there some French verbs you ought to be conjugating for Madame?’
I could be happy with Pansy, in some part of my head, even while the rest of my head was filled with fear. I waited for my parents to come home. I would tell them what was happening. I would tell them. They would believe me.
At that time my father worked in an office an hour’s drive away. I was not certain what he did. He had a very nice, pretty secretary, with a toy poodle, and whenever she knew we children would be coming
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