Copyright © 2013 Neil Gaiman

The right of Neil Gaiman to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP in 2013

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 1 4722 0033 4

Cover design and illustration © Leo Nickolls

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About the Author

‘There’s no one quite like Neil Gaiman’

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

Neil Gaiman is a storyteller. He is the No.1 Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling writer of books, graphic novels, short stories, film and television for all ages, and is known for creating extraordinary worlds beyond imagination. He has been awarded numerous literary honours, including the National Book Award, the Writers for Writers Award, the Hugo, Locus and Bram Stoker awards, and is the first author to have won both the Carnegie and Newbery Medals for the same work. The Sandman sequence of graphic novels is, according to the BBC, one of the ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’.

Many of Neil’s books, including Stardust and Coraline, have been made into films; Neverwhere has been adapted for TV and radio; American Gods is a major, Emmy-nominated television series and the celebrated National Theatre production of The Ocean at the End of the Lane transferred to the West End in 2021. In recent years, Neil wrote and was the showrunner for a critically acclaimed television adaptation of Good Omens, the seminal novel he co-authored with the late Sir Terry Pratchett. He has also written two episodes of Doctor Who and appeared in The Simpsons as himself.

In 2017, Neil became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. He received a Doctor of Letters from the University of St Andrews, is a Professor in the Arts at Bard College and is a Royal Society of Literature fellow. Born in the UK, Neil now mostly lives in America, and travels all around the world every year appearing at festivals, events and conventions.

He wrote this book especially for you.

Twitter logo. @neilhimself

Facebook logo. /neilgaiman

Instagram logo. @neilhimself

www.neilgaiman.com

Praise for Neil Gaiman

‘To give him his full title: Neil Gaiman, Architect of Worlds, Svengali of Plot, Shaman of Character, Exploder of Cliché, Master Craftsman of Style, Dreamer Laureate of the Republic of Letters’
DAVID MITCHELL

‘It’s virtually impossible to read more than ten words by Neil Gaiman and not wish he would tell you the rest of the story’
OBSERVER

‘Beyond all the borders that divide us, there is a place of infinite possibilities and pure magic. I think of Neil Gaiman as a writer who wears the key to that land around his neck – the key to Storyland’
ELIF SHAFAK

‘One of the best fabulists of our age’
FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Neil’s stories leave you feeling that his is the world we’ve always lived in’
MARLON JAMES

‘While we might come to his writing for gods and monsters, actually all human life is here’
INDEPENDENT

‘Neil Gaiman’s entire body of work is a feat of elegant sorcery. He writes with such assurance and originality that the reader has no choice but to surrender to a waking dream’
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN

‘Gaiman describes the indescribable’
SUSANNA CLARKE

‘As pure and perfect as anything you’ll ever read’
NEW STATESMAN

‘Gaiman is god in the universe of story’
STEPHEN FRY

‘Gaiman is, simply put, a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to have him’
STEPHEN KING

‘His mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown’
NEW YORK TIMES

‘If this book came to you during a despairing night, by dawn, you would believe in ideas and hope and humans again’
CAITLIN MORAN

‘There’s no one quite like Neil Gaiman’
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

‘Much too clever to be caught in the net of a single interpretation’
PHILIP PULLMAN

‘A tonic for these turbulent times’
IRISH TIMES

‘Some books just swallow you up, heart and soul’
JOANNE HARRIS

‘Gaiman is a master of fear’
A. S. BYATT

‘A very fine and imaginative writer’
THE SUNDAY TIMES

‘Neil Gaiman is a writer worth following into any labyrinth’
ELIZABETH GILBERT

‘A glorious love letter to reading, to writing, to dreaming’
JUNOT DÍAZ

‘A power that defies explanation’
SUNDAY EXPRESS

‘Intimate, erudite and illuminating’
GUILLERMO DEL TORO

‘A very good writer indeed’
DAILY TELEGRAPH

By Neil Gaiman

Rummage through the attic of Neil Gaiman’s mind.
There’s much to discover . . .

NOVELS
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
The Graveyard Book
Anansi Boys
Coraline
American Gods
Stardust
Neverwhere
Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett)

COLLECTIONS
The Neil Gaiman Reader
The View from the Cheap Seats
Trigger Warning
Fragile Things
Smoke and Mirrors

ILLUSTRATED
Art Matters
(illustrated by Chris Riddell)
The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains
(illustrated by Eddie Campbell)
The Sleeper and the Spindle
(illustrated by Chris Riddell)

About the Book

‘My favourite response to this book is when people say, “My childhood was nothing like that – and it was as if I was reading about me”’
NEIL GAIMAN

This is what he remembers, as he sits by the ocean at the end of the lane:

A dead man on the back seat of the car, and warm milk at the farmhouse.
An ancient little girl, and an old woman who saw the moon being made.
A beautiful housekeeper with a monstrous smile.
And dark forces woken that were best left undisturbed.

They are memories hard to believe, waiting at the edges of things. The recollections of a man who thought he was lost but is now, perhaps, remembering a time when he was saved . . .

For Amanda,
who wanted to know

‘I remember my own childhood vividly . . . I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew. It would scare them.’

Maurice Sendak, in conversation with Art Spiegelman, The New Yorker, 27 September 1993

It was only a duckpond, out at the back of the farm. It wasn’t very big.

Lettie Hempstock said it was an ocean, but I knew that was silly. She said they’d come here across the ocean from the old country.

Her mother said that Lettie didn’t remember properly, and it was a long time ago, and anyway, the old country had sunk.

Old Mrs Hempstock, Lettie’s grandmother, said they were both wrong, and that the place that had sunk wasn’t the really old country. She said she could remember the really old country.

She said the really old country had blown up.

Prologue

I wore a black suit and a white shirt, a black tie and black shoes, all polished and shiny: clothes that normally would make me feel uncomfortable, as if I were in a stolen uniform, or pretending to be an adult. Today they gave me comfort, of a kind. I was wearing the right clothes for a hard day.

I had done my duty in the morning, spoken the words I was meant to speak, and I meant them as I spoke them, and then, when the service was done, I got in my car and I drove, randomly, without a plan, with an hour or so to kill before I met more people I had not seen for years and shook more hands and drank too many cups of tea from the best china. I drove along winding Sussex country roads I only half remembered, until I found myself headed towards the town centre, so I turned, randomly, down another road, and took a left, and a right. It was only then that I realised where I was going, where I had been going all along, and I grimaced at my own foolishness.

I had been driving towards a house that had not existed for decades.

I thought of turning around, then, as I drove down a wide street that had once been a flint lane beside a barley field, of turning back and leaving the past undisturbed. But I was curious.

The old house, the one I had lived in for seven years, from when I was five until I was twelve, that house had been knocked down and was lost for good. The new house, the one my parents had built at the bottom of the garden, between the azalea bushes and the green circle in the grass we called the fairy ring, that had been sold thirty years ago.

I slowed the car as I saw the new house. It would always be the new house in my head. I pulled up into the driveway, observing the way they had built out on the mid-seventies architecture. I had forgotten that the bricks of the house were chocolate brown. The new people had made my mother’s tiny balcony into a two-storey sunroom. I stared at the house, remembering less than I had expected about my teenage years: no good times, no bad times. I’d lived in that place, for a while, as a teenager. It didn’t seem to be any part of who I was now.

I backed the car out of their driveway.

It was time, I knew, to drive to my sister’s bustling, cheerful house, all tidied and stiff for the day. I would talk to people whose existence I had forgotten years before and they would ask me about my marriage (failed a decade ago, a relationship that had slowly frayed until eventually, as they always seem to, it broke) and whether I was seeing anyone (I wasn’t; I was not even sure that I could, not yet), and they would ask about my children (all grown up, they have their own lives, they wish they could be here today), and work (doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all). We would talk about the departed; we would remember the dead.

The little country lane of my childhood had become a black tarmac road that served as a buffer between two sprawling housing estates. I drove further down it, away from the town, which was not the way I should have been travelling, and it felt good.

The slick black road became narrower, windier, became the single-lane track I remembered from my childhood, became packed earth and knobbly, bone-like flints.

Soon I was driving slowly, bumpily, down a narrow lane with brambles and briar roses on each side, wherever the edge was not a stand of hazels or a wild hedgerow. It felt like I had driven back in time. That lane was how I remembered it, when nothing else was.

I drove past Caraway Farm. I remembered being just sixteen, and kissing red-cheeked, fair-haired Callie Anders, who lived there, and whose family would soon move to the Shetlands, and I would never kiss her or see her again. Then nothing but fields on either side of the road, for almost a mile: a tangle of meadows. Slowly the lane became a track. It was reaching its end.

I remembered it before I turned the corner and saw it, in all its dilapidated red-brick glory: the Hempstocks’ farmhouse.

It took me by surprise, although that was where the lane had always ended. I could have gone no further. I parked the car at the side of the farmyard. I had no plan. I wondered whether, after all these years, there was anyone still living there, or, more precisely, if the Hempstocks were still living there. It seemed unlikely, but then, from what little I remembered, they had been unlikely people.

The stench of cow muck struck me as I got out of the car, and I walked gingerly across the small yard to the front door. I looked for a doorbell, in vain, and then I knocked. The door had not been latched properly, and it swung gently open as I rapped it with my knuckles.

I had been here, hadn’t I, a long time ago? I was sure I had. Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good. I stood in the hallway and called, ‘Hello? Is there anybody here?’

I heard nothing. I smelled bread baking and wax furniture polish and old wood. My eyes were slow to adjust to the darkness: I peered into it, was getting ready to turn and leave when an elderly woman came out of the dim hallway holding a white duster. She wore her grey hair long.

I said, ‘Mrs Hempstock?’

She tipped her head to one side, looked at me. ‘Yes. I do know you, young man,’ she said. I am not a young man. Not any longer. ‘I know you, but things get messy when you get to my age. Who are you, exactly?’

‘I think I must have been about seven, maybe eight, the last time I was here.’

She smiled then. ‘You were Lettie’s friend? From the top of the lane?’

‘You gave me milk. It was warm, from the cows.’ And then I realised how many years had gone by, and I said, ‘No, you didn’t do that, that must have been your mother who gave me the milk. I’m sorry.’ As we age, we become our parents; live long enough and we see faces repeat in time. I remembered Mrs Hempstock, Lettie’s mother, as a stout woman. This woman was stick-thin, and she looked delicate. She looked like her mother, like the woman I had known as Old Mrs Hempstock.

Sometimes when I look in the mirror I see my father’s face, not my own, and I remember the way he would smile at himself, in mirrors, before he went out. ‘Looking good,’ he’d say to his reflection, approvingly. ‘Looking good.’

‘Are you here to see Lettie?’ Mrs Hempstock asked.

‘Is she here?’ The idea surprised me. She had gone somewhere, hadn’t she? America?

The old woman shook her head. ‘I was just about to put the kettle on. Do you fancy a spot of tea?’

I hesitated. Then I said that, if she didn’t mind, I’d like it if she could point me towards the duckpond first.

‘Duckpond?’

I knew Lettie had had a funny name for it. I remembered that. ‘She called it the sea. Something like that.’

The old woman put the cloth down on the dresser. ‘Can’t drink the water from the sea, can you? Too salty. Like drinking life’s blood. Do you remember the way? You can get to it around the side of the house. Just follow the path.’

If you’d asked me an hour before, I would have said no, I did not remember the way. I do not even think I would have remembered Lettie Hempstock’s name. But standing in that hallway, it was all coming back to me. Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me. Had you told me that I was seven again, I might have half believed you, for a moment.

‘Thank you.’

I walked into the farmyard. I went past the chicken coop, past the old barn and along the edge of the field, remembering where I was, and what was coming next, and exulting in the knowledge. Hazels lined the side of the meadow. I picked a handful of the green nuts, put them in my pocket.

The pond is next, I thought. I just have to go around this shed, and I’ll see it.

I saw it and felt oddly proud of myself, as if that one act of memory had blown away some of the cobwebs of the day.

The pond was smaller than I remembered. There was a little wooden shed on the far side, and, by the path, an ancient, heavy wood-and-metal bench. The peeling wooden slats had been painted green a few years ago. I sat on the bench, and stared at the reflection of the sky in the water, at the scum of duckweed at the edges, and the half-dozen lily pads. Every now and again I tossed a hazelnut into the middle of the pond, the pond that Lettie Hempstock had called . . .

It wasn’t the sea, was it?

She would be older than I am now, Lettie Hempstock. She was only a handful of years older than I was back then, for all her funny talk. She was eleven. I was . . . what was I? It was after the bad birthday party. I knew that. So I would have been seven.

I wondered if we had ever fallen in the water. Had I pushed her into the duckpond, that strange girl who lived in the farm at the very bottom of the lane? I remembered her being in the water. Perhaps she had pushed me in too.

Where did she go? America? No, Australia. That was it. Somewhere a long way away.

And it wasn’t the sea. It was the ocean.

Lettie Hempstock’s ocean.

I remembered that, and, remembering that, I remembered everything.