The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Author:Neil Gaiman [Gaiman, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780062255655
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

X.

I had strange dreams in that house, that night. I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly that I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.

I missed my father and I missed my mother, and I missed my bed in my house, only a mile or so away. I missed yesterday, before Ursula Monkton, before my father’s anger, before the bathtub. I wanted that yesterday back again, and I wanted it so badly.

I tried to pull the dream that had upset me so to the front of my mind, but it would not come. There had been betrayal in it, I knew, and loss, and time. The dream had left me scared to go back to sleep: the fireplace was almost dark now, with only the deep red glow of embers in the hearth to mark that it had once been burning, once had given light.

I climbed down from the four-poster bed, and felt beneath it until I found the heavy china chamber pot. I hitched up my nightgown and I used it. Then I walked to the window and looked out. The moon was still full, but now it was low in the sky, and a dark orange: what my mother called a harvest moon. But things were harvested in autumn, I knew, not in spring.

In the orange moonlight I could see an old woman—I was almost certain it was Old Mrs. Hempstock, although it was hard to see her face properly—walking up and down. She had a big long stick she was leaning on as she walked, like a staff. She reminded me of the soldiers I had seen on a trip to London, outside Buckingham Palace, as they marched backwards and forwards on parade.

I watched her, and I was comforted.

I climbed back into my bed in the dark, lay my head on the empty pillow, and thought, I’ll never go back to sleep, not now, and then I opened my eyes and saw that it was morning.

There were clothes I had never seen before on a chair by the bed. There were two china jugs of water—one steaming hot, one cold—beside a white china bowl that I realized was a handbasin, set into a small wooden table. The fluffy black kitten had returned to the foot of the bed. It opened its eyes as I got up: they were a vivid blue-green, unnatural and odd, like the sea in summer, and it mewed a high-pitched questioning noise. I stroked it, then I got out of bed.

I mixed the hot water and the cold in the basin, and I washed my face and my hands. I cleaned my teeth with the cold water. There was no toothpaste, but there was a small

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