He opened his own hands, showed them, one after the other, to be completely empty. Then he pushed the glass eye into the leathery palm of the old man’s hand and left it there.
“How did you do that?”
“Magic,” said Shadow, without smiling.
The old man grinned and laughed and clapped his hands together. He looked at the eye, holding it between finger and thumb, and nodded, as if he knew exactly what it was, and then he slipped it into a leather bag that hung by his waist. “Takk kærlega. I shall take care of this.”
“You’re welcome,” said Shadow. He stood up, brushed the grass from his jeans.
“Again,” said the Lord of Asgard, with an imperious motion of his head, his voice deep and commanding. “More. Do again.”
“You people,” said Shadow. “You’re never satisfied. Okay. This is one I learned from a guy who’s dead now.”
He reached into nowhere, and took a gold coin from the air. It was a normal sort of gold coin. It couldn’t bring back the dead or heal the sick, but it was a gold coin sure enough.
“And that’s all there is,” he said, displaying it between finger and thumb. “That’s all she wrote.”
He tossed the coin into the air with a flick of his thumb.
It spun golden at the top of its arc, in the sunlight, and it glittered and glinted and hung there in the midsummer sky as if it was never going to come down. Maybe it never would. Shadow didn’t wait to see. He walked away and he kept on walking.
An Excerpt from The Ocean at the End of the Lane
“They say you cannot go home again, and that is as true as a knife . . .”
#1 New York Times bestseller
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
From the bestselling author Neil Gaiman comes a novel of the impossible made all too frighteningly real. Read an excerpt of the novel now.
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It was only a duck pond, 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 toward the town center, so I turned, randomly, down another road, and took a left, and a right. It was only then that I realized where I was going, where I had been going all along, and I grimaced at my own foolishness.
I had been driving toward 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-story sun-room. 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.