Neil Gaiman Young Readers' Collection Read online

  “Sorry,” she said. “I did the best I could do. It’s better, but it’s not right, yet.” She seemed lost in thought, then she said brightly, “Why don’t I replace it entirely? What about a cat’s rear leg? Or a chicken’s?”

  Odd smiled, and shook his head. “My leg is fine,” he said.

  Odd stood up cautiously, put his weight on his right leg, trying to pretend he had not just seen his leg unhooked at the knee. It did not hurt. Not really. Not like it used to.

  “Give it time,” said Freya.

  A huge hand came down and clapped Odd on the shoulder, sending him flying.

  “Now, laddie,” boomed Thor. “Tell us just how you defeated the might of the Frost Giants.” He seemed much more cheerful than when he had been a bear.

  “There was only one of them,” said Odd.

  “When I tell the story,” said Thor, “there will be at least a dozen.”

  “I want my shoes back,” said Loki.

  There was a feast that night in the great mead hall of the Gods. Odin sat at the end of the table, in the magnificent, carved chair, saying almost as little as he had when he was an eagle. Thor, on his left side, boomed enthusiastically. Loki, who had to sit down at the far end of the table, was pleasant enough to everyone until he got drunk, and then, like a candle suddenly blowing out, he became unpleasant, and he said mean, foolish, unrepeatable things, and he leered at the Goddesses, and soon enough Thor and a large man with one hand, who Odd thought might have been called Tyr, were carrying Loki from the hall.

  “He doesn’t learn,” said Odd.

  He thought he had said it to himself, in his head, but Freya, who was sitting beside him, said, “No. He doesn’t learn. None of them do. And they don’t change, either. They can’t. It’s all part of being a God.”

  Odd nodded. He thought he understood, a little.

  Then Freya said, “Have you eaten enough? Have you drunk your fill?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Odd.

  Old Odin left his chair, and walked towards them. He wiped the goose grease from his mouth with his sleeve, smearing even more grease all over his grey beard. He said, quietly, into Odd’s ear, “Do you know what spring it was you drank from, boy? Where the water came from? Do you know what it cost me to drink there, many years ago? You didn’t think you defeated the Frost Giants alone, did you?”

  Odd said only, “Thank you.”

  “No,” said Odin. “Thank you.” The All-father was leaning on a staff carved with faces—dogs and horses and men and birds, skulls and reindeer and mice and women—all of them wrapped around Odin’s stick. You could look at it for hours and still not see every detail on that stick. Odin pushed the staff towards Odd and said, “This is for you.”

  Odd said, “But . . .”

  The old God looked at him gravely through his one good eye. “It is never wise to refuse the gifts of the Gods, boy.”

  Odd said, “Well, thank you.” And he took the staff. It was comfortable. It felt as though he could walk a long way, as long as he was leaning on that staff.

  Odin dipped his hand into a pitcher, brought it out holding a small globe of water no larger than a man’s eyeball. He placed the water ball in front of a candle flame. “Look into this,” he said.

  Odd looked into the ball of water, and his world became a rainbow, and then it went dark.

  When he opened his eyes, he was home.

  CHAPTER 8

  AFTERWARDS

  ODD LEANED HIS WEIGHT on the staff and looked down at the village. Then he began to walk the path that would take him home. He was still limping, a little. His right foot would never be as strong as his left. But it did not hurt, and he was grateful to Freya for that.

  As he headed down the path to the village, he heard a rushing noise. It was the sound of snow melting, of new water trying to find its way to lower ground. Sometimes he heard a clump as snow fell from a tree onto the ground beneath, sometimes the deep thrum thrum thrum, followed by a harsh cracking sound, as the ice that had covered the edge of the bay through this eternal winter began to cleave and to break up.

  In a few days, Odd thought, this will all be mud. In a few weeks it will be a riot of greenery.

  Odd reached the village. For a moment he wondered if he had come to the wrong place, for nothing looked as he remembered it looking when he had left, less than a week before. He remembered how the animals had grown, when they reached Asgard, and then, how they seemed, later, to have shrunk.

  He wondered if it was the air of Asgard that did it, or if it had happened when he drank the water of the pool.

  He reached Fat Elfred’s door and he rapped upon it sharply with his staff.

  “Who is it?” called a voice.

  “It’s me. Odd,” he said.

  There was a noise inside the hut, an urgent whispering, then people talking in low voices. Odd could hear the loudest of the voices as it grumbled about good-for-nothings who stole a side of salmon, and how it was high time for someone to be taught a lesson he would never forget. He heard the sound of a door being unbarred.

  The door opened and Fat Elfred looked out. He stared at Odd, confused.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, in a most un-sorry tone of voice. “I thought my runaway stepson was here.”

  Odd looked down at the man. Then he smiled and he said, “It is him. I mean, it’s me. I’m him. I’m Odd.”

  “It is him. I mean, it’s me. I’m him. I’m Odd.”

  Fat Elfred said nothing. The heads of his various sons and daughters appeared around him. They looked up at Odd nervously.

  “Is my mother here?” asked Odd.

  Fat Elfred coughed. “You grew,” he said. “If that is you.”

  Odd just smiled—a smile so irritating that it had to be him.

  The smallest of Fat Elfred’s children said, “They got into fights after you went away. She said we had to go and look for you and that it was Dad’s fault you’d run off, and he said it wasn’t and he wouldn’t and good riddance to bad rubbish and she said right then, and she went back to your father’s old house on the other side of town.”

  Odd winked down at the boy, as Thor had once winked at him, and turned around and, leaning on his carved staff, limped through the village, which already seemed much too small for him and not just because he had grown so much since he had left. Soon the ice would melt and longships would be sailing. He did not imagine anyone would refuse him a berth on a ship. Not now that he was big. They would need a good pair of hands on the oars, after all. Nor would they argue if he chose to bring a passenger . . .

  He reached down and knocked on the door of the house in which he had been born. And when his mother opened the door, before she could hug him, before she could cry and laugh and cry once more, before she could offer him food and exclaim over how big he had grown and how fast children do spring up when they are out of your sight, before any of these things could happen, Odd said, “Hello, Mother. How would you like to go back to Scotland? For a while, at least.”

  “That would be a fine thing,” she said.

  And Odd smiled, and ducked his head to get through the door, and went inside.

  Copyright

  ODD AND THE FROST GIANTS. Text copyright © 2009 by Neil Gaiman. Illustrations copyright © 2009 by Brett Helquist. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gaiman, Neil.

  Odd and the Frost Gia
nts / Neil Gaiman ; illustrated by Brett Helquist. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: An unlucky twelve-year-old Norwegian boy named Odd leads the Norse gods Loki, Thor, and Odin in an attempt to outwit evil Frost Giants who have taken over Asgard.

  ISBN 978-0-06-167173-9 (trade bdg.)

  EPub Edition August 2009 ISBN 9780061964879

  Version 07172014

  [1. Heroes—Fiction. 2. Loki (Norse deity)—Fiction. 3. Thor (Norse deity)—Fiction. 4. Odin (Norse deity)—Fiction. 5. Giants—Fiction. 6. Mythology, Norse—Fiction.] I. Helquist, Brett, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.G1273Odd 2009 2009014574

  [Fic]—dc22 CIP

  AC

  * * *

  09 10 11 12 13 LP/RRDC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FIRST EDITION

  Credits

  Cover art © 2009 by Brett Helquist

  Cover design by Hilary Zarycky

  Coraline

  Neil Gaiman

  with illustrations by Dave McKean

  Dedication

  I started this for Holly

  I finished it for Maddy

  Epigraph

  Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

  —G. K. Chesterton

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Coraline Tenth Anniversary Edition

  The Coraline Reading Group Guide

  A Coraline Q&A with Neil Gaiman

  Praise for Coraline

  Credits

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Coraline

  WE MOVED INTO OUR flat in Littlemead, in the tiny Sussex town of Nutley, in the South of England, in 1987. Once on a time it had been a manor house, built for—the old man who had once owned the house, before he sold it to a pair of local builders, told me—the physician to the king of England himself. It had been a manor house then, but it was now converted into flats.

  Flat number Four, where we lived, was a good place, if a little odd. Above us, a Greek family. Beneath us, a little old lady, half blind, who would telephone me whenever my little children moved, and tell me that she was not certain what was happening upstairs, but she thought that it must be elephants. I was never entirely certain how many flats there were in the house, nor how many of them were occupied.

  We had a hallway running the length of the flat, as big as any room. At the end of the hall hung a wardrobe door, as a mirror.

  When I started to write a book for Holly, my five-year-old daughter, I set it in the house. It seemed easy. That way I wouldn’t have to explain to her where anything was. I changed a couple of things, of course, swapped the position of Holly’s bedroom and the lounge. Then I took a closed oak-paneled door that opened onto a brick wall, and a sense of place, from the drawing room in the house I grew up in.

  That house was big and old, and it had been split into two just before we moved there. We had the servants’ quarters, except for one room, the oak-paneled drawing room, “only for best,” with a door at the end that had once been the family’s entrance, and that now led nowhere. It opened onto a brick wall.

  I took that room and that door, along with the front room of my grandmother’s house (only for best, not for the family, still-life oil paintings of fruit on the walls), and I put them into the book I had started writing.

  The book was called Coraline. I had typed the name Caroline, and it came out wrong. I looked at the word Coraline, and knew it was someone’s name. I wanted to know what happened to her.

  Holly liked scary stories, with witches and brave little girls in them. Those were the kinds of stories she told me. So Holly’s story was going to be scary.

  I wrote an opening that I later deleted. It went,

  This is the story of Coraline, who was small for her age, and found herself in darkest danger.

  Before it was all over Coraline had seen what lay behind mirrors, and had a close call with a bad hand, and had come face-to-face with her other mother; she had rescued her true parents from a fate worse than death and triumphed against overwhelming odds.

  This is the story of Coraline, who lost her parents, and found them again, and (more or less) escaped (more or less) unscathed.

  I stopped writing Holly’s book when we moved to America. (I had been writing it in my own time. It didn’t seem like I had any “own time” any longer.)

  Six years later I picked it up and continued from the middle of the sentence I’d stopped at in August 1992.

  It was “Hullo,” said Coraline. “How did you get in?” The cat didn’t say anything. Coraline got out of bed

  I started it again because I realized that if I didn’t, my youngest daughter, Maddy, would be too old for it by the time I was done. I started it for Holly. I finished it for Maddy.

  Now we were living in a gothic old house in the middle of America, with a turret and a wraparound porch, with steps up to it. It’s a house built over a hundred years ago by a German immigrant, a cartographer (that’s someone who makes maps) and an artist. His son, Henry, was said to have been the first man to put an engine on a boat or on a bicycle and was described as “the greatest creative figure in the history of the racing car.”

  Now I was writing Coraline again, I still had no time, so I would write fifty words a night in bed, before I fell asleep. I went on a cruise to raise money for the First Amendment (that’s the one about freedom of speech) in comics. I finished it in a little cabin on a lake in the woods.

  Dave McKean, artist and friend, took photographs of Littlemead, which he then played with to make the house on the back cover of Coraline.

  When Henry Selick made his stop-motion animated film of Coraline, he invited me to the studio. There were a lot of sets there, each behind a black curtain. Henry proudly showed me the house that Coraline lived in in the film. She’d moved from somewhere in England to Oregon, now, and the house she was in was called the Pink Palace.

  “That’s my house,” I told Henry.

  And it was. Henry Selick’s Pink Palace was the house I live in now, turret and porch and all. None of us are quite sure how that happened. But it seemed strangely appropriate for a book that was started for one daughter in one house and finished for another in another house.

  The book was published in 2002, and people liked it. It won awards. More importantly than that, it worked, at least for some people.

  I’d wanted to write a story for my daughters that told them something I wished I’d known when I was a boy: that being brave didn’t mean you weren’t scared. Being brave meant you were scared, really scared, badly scared, and you did the right thing anyway.

  So now, ten years later, I’ve started running into women who tell me that Coraline got them through hard times in their lives. That when they were scared they thought of Coraline, and they did the right thing anyway.

  And that, more than anything, makes it all worthwhile.

  Neil Gaiman

  December 5, 2011

  I.

  CORALINE DISCOVERED THE DOOR a little while after they moved into the house.

  It was a very old house—it had an attic under the roof and a cellar under the ground and an overgrown garden with huge old trees in it.

  Coraline’s family didn’t own all of the house—it was too big for that. Instead they owned part of it.

  There were other people who lived in the old house.

  Miss Spink and Miss Forcible lived in the flat below Coraline’s, on the ground floor. They were both old and round, and they lived in their flat with a number of
ageing Highland terriers who had names like Hamish and Andrew and Jock. Once upon a time Miss Spink and Miss Forcible had been actresses, as Miss Spink told Coraline the first time she met her.

  “You see, Caroline,” Miss Spink said, getting Coraline’s name wrong, “both myself and Miss Forcible were famous actresses, in our time. We trod the boards, luvvy. Oh, don’t let Hamish eat the fruitcake, or he’ll be up all night with his tummy.”

  “It’s Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline,” said Coraline.

  In the flat above Coraline’s, under the roof, was a crazy old man with a big mustache. He told Coraline that he was training a mouse circus. He wouldn’t let anyone see it.

  “One day, little Caroline, when they are all ready, everyone in the whole world will see the wonders of my mouse circus. You ask me why you cannot see it now. Is that what you asked me?”

  “No,” said Coraline quietly, “I asked you not to call me Caroline. It’s Coraline.”

  “The reason you cannot see the mouse circus,” said the man upstairs, “is that the mice are not yet ready and rehearsed. Also, they refuse to play the songs I have written for them. All the songs I have written for the mice to play go oompah oompah. But the white mice will only play toodle oodle, like that. I am thinking of trying them on different types of cheese.”