The Neil Gaiman Reader

by Neil Gaiman

  She showed me how the milk went from the cow down the black tubes and into the machine, through a cooler and into huge metal churns. The churns were left on a heavy wooden platform outside the barn, where they would be collected each day by a lorry.

  The old lady gave me a cup of creamy milk from Bessie the cow, the fresh milk before it had gone through the cooler. Nothing I had drunk had ever tasted like that before: rich and warm and perfectly happy in my mouth. I remembered that milk after I had forgotten everything else.

  “There’s more of them up the lane,” said the old woman, suddenly. “All sorts coming down with lights flashing and all. Such a palaver. You should get the boy into the kitchen. He’s hungry, and a cup of milk won’t do a growing boy.”

  The girl said, “Have you eaten?”

  “Just a piece of toast. It was burned.”

  She said, “My name’s Lettie. Lettie Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. Come on.” She took me in through the front door, and into their enormous kitchen, sat me down at a huge wooden table, so stained and patterned that it looked as if faces were staring up at me from the old wood.

  “We have breakfast here early,” she said. “Milking starts at first light. But there’s porridge in the saucepan, and jam to put in it.”

  She gave me a china bowl filled with warm porridge from the stovetop, with a lump of homemade blackberry jam, my favorite, in the middle of the porridge, then she poured cream on it. I swished it around with my spoon before I ate it, swirling it into a purple mess, and was as happy as I have ever been about anything. It tasted perfect.

  A stocky woman came in. Her red-brown hair was streaked with gray, and cut short. She had apple cheeks, a dark green skirt that went to her knees, and Wellington boots. She said, “This must be the boy from the top of the lane. Such a business going on with that car. There’ll be five of them needing tea soon.”

  Lettie filled a huge copper kettle from the tap. She lit a gas hob with a match and put the kettle onto the flame. Then she took down five chipped mugs from a cupboard, and hesitated, looking at the woman. The woman said, “You’re right. Six. The doctor will be here too.”

  Then the woman pursed her lips and made a tchutch! noise. “They’ve missed the note,” she said. “He wrote it so carefully too, folded it and put it in his breast pocket, and they haven’t looked there yet.”

  “What does it say?” asked Lettie.

  “Read it yourself,” said the woman. I thought she was Lettie’s mother. She seemed like she was somebody’s mother. Then she said, “It says that he took all the money that his friends had given him to smuggle out of South Africa and bank for them in England, along with all the money he’d made over the years mining for opals, and he went to the casino in Brighton, to gamble, but he only meant to gamble with his own money. And then he only meant to dip into the money his friends had given him until he had made back the money he had lost.

  “And then he didn’t have anything,” said the woman, “and all was dark.”

  “That’s not what he wrote, though,” said Lettie, squinting her eyes. “What he wrote was,

  “To all my friends,

  “Am so sorry it was not like I meant to and hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive me for I cannot forgive myself.”

  “Same thing,” said the older woman. She turned to me. “I’m Lettie’s ma,” she said. “You’ll have met my mother already, in the milking shed. I’m Mrs. Hempstock, but she was Mrs. Hempstock before me, so she’s Old Mrs. Hempstock. This is Hempstock Farm. It’s the oldest farm hereabouts. It’s in the Domesday Book.”

  I wondered why they were all called Hempstock, those women, but I did not ask, any more than I dared to ask how they knew about the suicide note or what the opal miner had thought as he died. They were perfectly matter-of-fact about it.

  Lettie said, “I nudged him to look in the breast pocket. He’ll think he thought of it himself.”

  “There’s a good girl,” said Mrs. Hempstock. “They’ll be in here when the kettle boils to ask if I’ve seen anything unusual and to have their tea. Why don’t you take the boy down to the pond?”

  “It’s not a pond,” said Lettie. “It’s my ocean.” She turned to me and said, “Come on.” She led me out of the house the way we had come.

  The day was still gray.

  We walked around the house, down the cow path.

  “Is it a real ocean?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  We came on it suddenly: a wooden shed, an old bench, and between them, a duck pond, dark water spotted with duckweed and lily pads. There was a dead fish, silver as a coin, floating on its side on the surface.

  “That’s not good,” said Lettie.

  “I thought you said it was an ocean,” I told her. “It’s just a pond, really.”

  “It is an ocean,” she said. “We came across it when I was just a baby, from the old country.”

  Lettie went into the shed and came out with a long bamboo pole, with what looked like a shrimping net on the end. She leaned over, carefully pushed the net beneath the dead fish. She pulled it out.

  “But Hempstock Farm is in the Domesday Book,” I said. “Your mum said so. And that was William the Conqueror.”

  “Yes,” said Lettie Hempstock.

  She took the dead fish out of the net and examined it. It was still soft, not stiff, and it flopped in her hand. I had never seen so many colors: it was silver, yes, but beneath the silver was blue and green and purple and each scale was tipped with black.

  “What kind of fish is it?” I asked.

  “This is very odd,” she said. “I mean, mostly fish in this ocean don’t die anyway.” She produced a horn-handled pocketknife, although I could not have told you from where, and she pushed it into the stomach of the fish, and sliced along, toward the tail.

  “This is what killed her,” said Lettie.

  She took something from inside the fish. Then she put it, still greasy from the fish-guts, into my hand. I bent down, dipped it into the water, rubbed my fingers across it to clean it off. I stared at it. Queen Victoria’s face stared back at me.

  “Sixpence?” I said. “The fish ate a sixpence?”

  “It’s not good, is it?” said Lettie Hempstock. There was a little sunshine now: it showed the freckles that clustered across her cheeks and nose, and, where the sunlight touched her hair, it was a coppery red. And then she said, “Your father’s wondering where you are. Time to be getting back.”

  I tried to give her the little silver sixpence, but she shook her head. “You keep it,” she said. “You can buy chocolates, or sherbet lemons.”

  “I don’t think I can,” I said. “It’s too small. I don’t know if shops will take sixpences like these nowadays.”

  “Then put it in your piggy bank,” she said. “It might bring you luck.” She said this doubtfully, as if she were uncertain what kind of luck it would bring.

  The policemen and my father and two men in brown suits and ties were standing in the farmhouse kitchen. One of the men told me he was a policeman, but he wasn’t wearing a uniform, which I thought was disappointing: if I were a policeman, I was certain, I would wear my uniform whenever I could. The other man with a suit and tie I recognized as Doctor Smithson, our family doctor. They were finishing their tea.

  My father thanked Mrs. Hempstock and Lettie for taking care of me, and they said I was no trouble at all, and that I could come again. The policeman who had driven us down to the Mini now drove us back to our house, and dropped us off at the end of the drive.

  “Probably best if you don’t talk about this to your sister,” said my father.

  I didn’t want to talk about it to anybody. I had found a special place, and made a new friend, and lost my comic, and I was holding an old-fashioned silver sixpence tightly in my hand.

  I said, “What makes the ocean different to the sea?”

  “Bigger,” said my father. “An ocean is much bigger than the sea. Why?”

 
“Just thinking,” I said. “Could you have an ocean that was as small as a pond?”

  “No,” said my father. “Ponds are pond-sized, lakes are lake-sized. Seas are seas and oceans are oceans. Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic. I think that’s all of the oceans there are.”

  My father went up to his bedroom, to talk to my mum and to be on the phone up there. I dropped the silver sixpence into my piggy bank. It was the kind of china piggy bank from which nothing could be removed. One day, when it could hold no more coins, I would be allowed to break it, but it was far from full.

  Click-Clack the Rattlebag

  2013

  BEFORE YOU TAKE me up to bed, will you tell me a story?”

  “Do you actually need me to take you up to bed?” I asked the boy.

  He thought for a moment. Then, with intense seriousness, “Yes, actually I think I do. It’s because of, I’ve finished my homework, and so it’s my bedtime, and I am a bit scared. Not very scared. Just a bit. But it is a very big house, and lots of times the lights don’t work and it’s sort of dark.”

  I reached over and tousled his hair.

  “I can understand that,” I said. “It is a very big old house.” He nodded. We were in the kitchen, where it was light and warm. I put down my magazine on the kitchen table. “What kind of story would you like me to tell you?”

  “Well,” he said, thoughtfully. “I don’t think it should be too scary, because then when I go up to bed, I will just be thinking about monsters the whole time. But if it isn’t just a little bit scary then I won’t be interested. And you make up scary stories, don’t you? I know she says that’s what you do.”

  “She exaggerates. I write stories, yes. Nothing that’s really been published, yet, though. And I write lots of different kinds of stories.”

  “But you do write scary stories?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy looked up at me from the shadows by the door, where he was waiting. “Do you know any stories about Click-Clack the Rattlebag?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Those are the best sorts of stories.”

  “Do they tell them at your school?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  “What’s a Click-Clack the Rattlebag story?”

  He was a precocious child, and was unimpressed by his sister’s boyfriend’s ignorance. You could see it on his face. “Everybody knows them.”

  “I don’t,” I said, trying not to smile.

  He looked at me as if he was trying to decide whether or not I was pulling his leg. He said, “I think maybe you should take me up to my bedroom, and then you can tell me a story before I go to sleep, but probably it should be a not-scary story because I’ll be up in my bedroom then, and it’s actually a bit dark up there, too.”

  I said, “Shall I leave a note for your sister, telling her where we are?”

  “You can. But you’ll hear when they get back. The front door is very slammy.”

  We walked out of the warm and cozy kitchen into the hallway of the big house, where it was chilly and drafty and dark. I flicked the light switch, but the hall remained dark.

  “The bulb’s gone,” the boy said. “That always happens.”

  Our eyes adjusted to the shadows. The moon was almost full, and blue-white moonlight shone in through the high windows on the staircase, down into the hall. “We’ll be all right,” I said.

  “Yes,” said the boy, soberly. “I am very glad you’re here.” He seemed less precocious now. His hand found mine, and he held on to my fingers comfortably, trustingly, as if he’d known me all his life. I felt responsible and adult. I did not know if the feeling I had for his sister, who was my girlfriend, was love, not yet, but I liked that the child treated me as one of the family. I felt like his big brother, and I stood taller, and if there was something unsettling about the empty house I would not have admitted it for worlds.

  The stairs creaked beneath the threadbare stair-carpet. “Click-Clacks,” said the boy, “are the best monsters ever.”

  “Are they from television?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think any people know where they come from. Mostly they come from the dark.”

  “Good place for a monster to come.”

  “Yes.”

  We walked along the upper corridor in the shadows, moving from patch of moonlight to patch of moonlight. It really was a big house. I wished I had a flashlight.

  “They come from the dark,” said the boy, holding on to my hand. “I think probably they’re made of dark. And they come in when you don’t pay attention. That’s when they come in. And then they take you back to their . . . not nests. What’s a word that’s like nests, but not?”

  “House?”

  “No. It’s not a house.”

  “Lair?”

  He was silent. Then, “I think that’s the word, yes. Lair.” He squeezed my hand. He stopped talking.

  “Right. So they take the people who don’t pay attention back to their lair. And what do they do then, your monsters? Do they suck all the blood out of you, like vampires?”

  He snorted. “Vampires don’t suck all the blood out of you. They only drink a little bit. Just to keep them going, and, you know, flying around. Click-Clacks are much scarier than vampires.”

  “I’m not scared of vampires,” I told him.

  “Me neither. I’m not scared of vampires either. Do you want to know what Click-Clacks do? They drink you,” said the boy.

  “Like a Coke?”

  “Coke is very bad for you,” said the boy. “If you put a tooth in Coke, in the morning, it will be dissolved into nothing. That’s how bad Coke is for you and why you must always clean your teeth, every night.”

  I’d heard the Coke story as a boy, and had been told, as an adult, that it wasn’t true, but was certain that a lie which promoted dental hygiene was a good lie, and I let it pass.

  “Click-Clacks drink you,” said the boy. “First they bite you, and then you go all ishy inside, and all your meat and all your brains and everything except your bones and your skin turns into a wet, milkshakey stuff and then the Click-Clack sucks it out through the holes where your eyes used to be.”

  “That’s disgusting,” I told him. “Did you make it up?”

  We’d reached the last flight of stairs, all the way into the big house. “No.”

  “I can’t believe you kids make up stuff like that.”

  “You didn’t ask me about the rattlebag,” he said. “Right. What’s the rattlebag?”

  “Well,” he said, sagely, soberly, a small voice from the darkness beside me, “once you’re just bones and skin, they hang you up on a hook, and you rattle in the wind.”

  “So what do these Click-Clacks look like?” Even as I asked him, I wished I could take the question back, and leave it unasked. I thought: Huge spidery creatures. Like the one in the shower this morning. I’m afraid of spiders.

  I was relieved when the boy said, “They look like what you aren’t expecting. What you aren’t paying attention to.”

  We were climbing wooden steps now. I held on to the railing on my left, held his hand with my right, as he walked beside me. It smelled like dust and old wood, that high in the house. The boy’s tread was certain, though, even though the moonlight was scarce.

  “Do you know what story you’re going to tell me, to put me to bed?” he asked. “Like I said. It doesn’t actually have to be scary.”

  “Not really.”

  “Maybe you could tell me about this evening. Tell me what you did?”

  “That won’t make much of a story for you. My girlfriend just moved into a new place on the edge of town. She inherited it from an aunt or someone. It’s very big and very old. I’m going to spend my first night with her, tonight, so I’ve been waiting for an hour or so for her and her housemates to come back with the wine and an Indian takeaway.”

  “See?” said the boy. There was that precocious amusement again; but all kids can be insufferable someti
mes, when they think they know something you don’t. It’s probably good for them. “You know all that. But you don’t think. You just let your brain fill in the gaps.”

  He pushed open the door to the attic room. It was perfectly dark, now, but the opening door disturbed the air, and I heard things rattle gently, like dry bones in thin bags, in the slight wind. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. Like that.

  I would have pulled away then, if I could; but small, firm fingers pulled me forward, unrelentingly, into the dark.

  The Sleeper and the Spindle

  2013

  IT WAS THE closest kingdom to the queen’s, as the crow flies, but not even the crows flew it. The high mountain range that served as the border between the two kingdoms discouraged crows as much as it discouraged people, and it was considered unpassable.

  More than one enterprising merchant, on each side of the mountains, had commissioned folk to hunt for the mountain pass that would, if it were there, have made a rich man or woman of anyone who controlled it. The silks of Dorimar could have been in Kanselaire in weeks, in months, not years. But there was no such pass to be found and so, although the two kingdoms shared a common border, nobody crossed from one kingdom to the next.

  Even the dwarfs, who were tough, and hardy, and composed of magic as much as of flesh and blood, could not go over the mountain range.

  This was not a problem for the dwarfs. They did not go over the mountain range. They went under it.

  THREE DWARFS, TRAVELING as swiftly as one through the dark paths beneath the mountains:

  “Hurry! Hurry!” said the dwarf in the rear. “We have to buy her the finest silken cloth in Dorimar. If we do not hurry, perhaps it will be sold, and we will be forced to buy her the second-finest cloth.”

  “We know! We know!” said the dwarf in the front. “And we shall buy her a case to carry the cloth back in, so it will remain perfectly clean and untouched by dust.”

  The dwarf in the middle said nothing. He was holding his stone tightly, not dropping it or losing it, and was concentrating on nothing else but this. The stone was a ruby, rough-hewn from the rock and the size of a hen’s egg. It would be worth a kingdom when cut and set, and would be easily exchanged for the finest silks of Dorimar.