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

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-colored telephone on the cream-and-gilt nightstand beside the bed. I
picked it up, heard the dull whirring noise of the dial tone, and dialed
Directory Enquiries, my finger pulling the holes in the dial down, a one, a
nine, a two, and 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 dialing tone
continued, and over it, I heard 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 windows open. Rainy nights were the
best of all: I would open my windows 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 onto 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 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 how I had let go of Lettie Hempstock’s hand to
grab the ball of rotting cloth, and I 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 traveled 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.
    â€œGreat 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!”
    â€œWe 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
in to see our father she would bring the poodle in from home, and we would play
with it. Sometimes we would pass buildings and my father would say, “That’s one
of ours.” But I did not care about buildings, so never asked how it was one of
ours, or even who we were.
    I lay on my