Read Online The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman - Free Book Online

about her—but what could I say?
That the new housekeeper-nanny wore gray and pink? That she looked at me
oddly?
    I wished I had never let go of Lettie’s hand.
Ursula Monkton was my fault, I was certain of it, and I would not be able to get
rid of her by flushing her down a plug hole, or putting frogs in her bed.
    I should have left then, should have run away, fled
down the lane the mile or so to the Hempstocks’ farm, but I didn’t, and then a
taxi took my mother away to Dicksons Opticians, where she would show people
letters through lenses, and help them see more clearly, and I was left there
with Ursula Monkton.
    She came out into the garden with a plate of
sandwiches.
    â€œI’ve spoken to your mother,” she said, a sweet
smile beneath the pale lipstick, “and while I’m here, you children need to limit
your travels. You can be anywhere in the house or in the garden, or I will walk
with you to your friends’, but you may not leave the property and simply go
wandering.”
    â€œOf course,” said my sister.
    I did not say anything.
    My sister ate a peanut butter sandwich.
    I was starving. I wondered whether the sandwiches
were dangerous or not. I did not know. I was scared that I would eat one and it
would turn into worms in my stomach, and that they would wriggle through me,
colonizing my body, until they pushed out of my skin.
    I went back into the house. I pushed the kitchen
door open. Ursula Monkton was not there. I stuffed my pockets with fruit, with
apples and oranges and hard brown pears. I took three bananas and stuffed them
down my jumper, and fled to my laboratory.
    My laboratory—that was what I called it—was a
green-painted shed as far away from the house as you could get, built up against
the side of the house’s huge old garage. A fig tree grew beside the shed,
although we had never tasted ripe fruit from the tree, only seen the huge leaves
and the green fruits. I called the shed my laboratory because I kept my
chemistry set in there: the chemistry set, a perennial birthday present, had
been banished from the house by my father, after I had made something in a test
tube. I had randomly mixed things together, and then heated them, until they had
erupted and turned black, with an ammoniac stench that refused to fade. My
father had said that he did not mind my doing experiments (although neither of
us knew what I could possibly have been experimenting on, but that did not
matter; my mother had been given chemistry sets for her birthday, and see how
well that had turned out?) but he did not want them within smelling range of the
house.
    I ate a banana and a pear, then hid the rest of the
fruit beneath the wooden table.
    Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are
content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never
occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find
the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen
different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would
not involve walking down our drive. I decided that I would creep out of the
laboratory shed, along the wall to the edge of the lawn and then into the
azaleas and bay laurels that bordered the garden there. From the laurels, I
would slip down the hill and over the rusting metal fence that ran along the
side of the lane.
    Nobody was looking. I ran and I crept and got
through the laurels, and I went down the hill, pushing through the brambles and
the nettle patches that had sprung up since the last time I went that way.
    Ursula Monkton was waiting for me at the bottom of
the hill, just in front of the rusting metal fence. There was no way she could
have got there without my seeing her, but she was there. She folded her arms and
looked at me, and her gray and pink dress flapped in a gust of wind.
    â€œI believe I said that you were not to leave the
property.”
    â€œI’m