The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Page A

the tap. I did not know if it was dead, but I did
not think you came back from the drain.
    I put the tweezers back where I had got them from,
behind the bathroom mirror, then I closed the mirror and stared at myself.
    I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that
age, who I was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the
face I was looking at wasn’t me, and I knew it wasn’t, because I would still be
me whatever happened to my face, then what was me? And what was watching?
    I went back to the bedroom. It was my night to have
the door to the hallway open, and I waited until my sister was asleep, and
wouldn’t tell on me, and then, in the dim light from the hall, I read a Secret
Seven mystery until I fell asleep.

VI.
    A n
admission about myself: as a very small boy, perhaps three or four years old, I
could be a monster. “You were a little momzer, ” several aunts told me, on
different occasions, once I had safely reached adulthood and my dreadful infant
deeds could be recalled with wry amusement. But I do not actually remember being
a monster. I just remember wanting my own way.
    Small children believe themselves to be gods, or
some of them do, and they can only be satisfied when the rest of the world goes
along with their way of seeing things.
    But I was no longer a small boy. I was seven. I had
been fearless, but now I was such a frightened child.
    The incident of the worm in my foot did not scare
me. I did not talk about it. I wondered, though, the next day, whether people
often got foot-worms, or whether it was something that had only ever happened to
me, in the orange-sky place on the edge of the Hempstocks’ farm.
    I peeled off the plaster on the sole of my foot
when I awoke, and was relieved to see that the hole had begun to close up. There
was a pink place where it had been, like a blood blister, but nothing more.
    I went down to breakfast. My mother looked happy.
She said, “Good news, darling. I’ve got a job. They need an optometrist at
Dicksons Opticians, and they want me to start this afternoon. I’ll be working
four days a week.”
    I did not mind. I would be fine on my own.
    â€œAnd I’ve got more good news. We have someone
coming to look after you children while I’m away. Her name is Ursula. She’ll be
sleeping in your old bedroom, at the top of the stairs. She’ll be a sort of
housekeeper. She’ll make sure you children are fed, and she’ll clean the
house—Mrs. Wollery is having trouble with her hip, and she says it will be a few
weeks before she can come back. It will be such a load off my mind to have
someone here, if Daddy and I are both working.”
    â€œYou don’t have the money,” I said. “You said you
didn’t have any money.”
    â€œThat’s why I’m taking the optometrist job,” she
said. “And Ursula’s looking after you for room and board. She needs to live
locally for a few months. She phoned this morning. Her references are
excellent.”
    I hoped that she would be nice. The previous
housekeeper, Gertruda, six months earlier, had not been nice: she had enjoyed
playing practical jokes on my sister and me. She would short-sheet the beds, for
example, which left us baffled. Eventually we had marched outside the house with
placards saying “We hate Gertruda” and “We do not like Gertruda’s cooking,” and
put tiny frogs in her bed, and she had gone back to Sweden.
    I took a book and went out into the garden.
    It was a warm spring day, and sunny, and I climbed
up a rope ladder to the lowest branch of the big beech tree, sat on it, and read
my book. I was not scared of anything, when I read my book: I was far away, in
ancient Egypt, learning about Hathor, and how she had stalked Egypt in the form
of a lioness, and she had killed so many people that the sands of Egypt turned
red, and how they had only defeated her by mixing beer and honey and