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

not,” I told her, with a cockiness I knew I
did not feel, not even a little. “I’m still on the property. I’m just
exploring.”
    â€œYou’re sneaking around,” she said.
    I said nothing.
    â€œI think you should be in your bedroom, where I can
keep an eye on you. It’s time for your nap.”
    I was too old for naps, but I knew that I was too
young to argue, or to win the argument if I did.
    â€œOkay,” I said.
    â€œDon’t say ‘okay,’ ” she said. “Say ‘Yes, Miss
Monkton.’ Or ‘Ma’am.’ Say ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ” She looked down at me with her
blue-gray eyes, which put me in mind of holes rotted in canvas, and which did
not look pretty at that moment.
    I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and hated myself for saying
it.
    We walked together up the hill.
    â€œYour parents can no longer afford this place,”
said Ursula Monkton. “And they can’t afford to keep it up. Soon enough they’ll
see that the way to solve their financial problems is to sell this house and its
gardens to property developers. Then all of this ”—and this was the tangle of
brambles, the unkempt world behind the lawn—“will become a dozen identical
houses and gardens. And if you are lucky, you’ll get to live in one. And if not,
you will just envy the people who do. Will you like that?”
    I loved the house, and the garden. I loved the
rambling shabbiness of it. I loved that place as if it was a part of me, and
perhaps, in some ways, it was.
    â€œWho are you?” I asked.
    â€œUrsula Monkton. I’m your housekeeper.”
    I said, “Who are you really? Why are you giving
people money?”
    â€œEverybody wants money,” she said, as if it were
self-evident. “It makes them happy. It will make you happy, if you let it.” We
had come out by the heap of grass clippings, behind the circle of green grass
that we called the fairy ring: sometimes, when the weather was wet, it filled
with vivid yellow toadstools.
    â€œNow,” she said. “Go to your room.”
    I ran from her—ran as fast as I could, across the
fairy ring, up the lawn, past the rosebushes, past the coal shed and into the
house.
    Ursula Monkton was standing just inside the back
door of the house to welcome me in, although she could not have got past me. I
would have seen. Her hair was perfect, and her lipstick seemed freshly
applied.
    â€œI’ve been inside you,” she said. “So a word to the
wise. If you tell anybody anything, they won’t believe you. And, because I’ve
been inside you, I’ll know. And I can make it so you never say anything I don’t
want you to say to anybody, not ever again.”
    I went upstairs to the bedroom, and I lay on my
bed. The place on the sole of my foot where the worm had been throbbed and
ached, and now my chest hurt too. I went away in my head, into a book. That was
where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible. I pulled down a
handful of my mother’s old books, from when she was a girl, and I read about
schoolgirls having adventures in the 1930s and 1940s. Mostly they were up
against smugglers or spies or fifth columnists, whatever they were, and the
girls were always brave and they always knew exactly what to do. I was not brave
and I had no idea what to do.
    I had never felt so alone.
    I wondered if the Hempstocks had a telephone. It
seemed unlikely, but not impossible—perhaps it had been Mrs. Hempstock who had
reported the abandoned Mini to the police in the first 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