The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Read online

  “She?” said Lettie.

  She was holding her horn-handled penknife, with the blade closed.

  “Tastes like a she,” said Lettie’s mother. “I might be wrong, mind.”

  “Don’t take the boy,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Asking for trouble, that is.”

  I was disappointed.

  “We’ll be fine,” said Lettie. “I’ll take care of him. Him and me. It’ll be an adventure. And he’ll be company. Please, Gran?”

  I looked up at Old Mrs. Hempstock with hope on my face, and waited.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, if it all goes wobbly,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock.

  “Thank you, Gran. I won’t. And I’ll be careful.”

  Old Mrs. Hempstock sniffed. “Now, don’t do anything stupid. Approach it with care. Bind it, close its ways, send it back to sleep.”

  “I know,” said Lettie. “I know all that. Honestly. We’ll be fine.”

  That’s what she said. But we weren’t.

  IV.

  Lettie led me to a hazel thicket beside the old road (the hazel catkins were hanging heavy in the spring) and she broke off a thin branch. Then, with her knife, as if she had done it ten thousand times before, she stripped the branch of bark, cut it again, so now it resembled a Y. She put the knife away (I did not see where it went) and held the two ends of the Y in her hands.

  “I’m not dowsing,” she told me. “Just using it as a guide. We’re looking for a blue . . . a bluebottle, I think to start with. Or something purply-blue, and shiny.”

  I looked around with her. “I can’t see one.”

  “It’ll be here,” she assured me.

  I gazed around, taking in the grass, a reddish-brown chicken pecking at the side of the driveway, some rusty farm machinery, the wooden trestle table beside the road and the six empty metal milk churns that sat upon it. I saw the Hempstocks’ red-brick farmhouse, crouched and comfortable like an animal at rest. I saw the spring flowers; the omnipresent white and yellow daisies, the golden dandelions and do-you-like-butter buttercups, and, late in the season, a lone bluebell in the shadows beneath the milk-churn table, still glistening with dew . . .

  “That?” I asked.

  “You’ve got sharp eyes,” she said, approvingly.

  We walked together to the bluebell. Lettie closed her eyes when we reached it. She moved her body back and forth, the hazel wand extended, as if she were the central point on a clock or a compass, her wand the hands, orienting toward a midnight or an east that I could not perceive. “Black,” she said suddenly, as if she were describing something from a dream. “And soft.”

  We walked away from the bluebell, along the lane that I imagined, sometimes, must have been a Roman road. We were a hundred yards up the lane, near where the Mini had been parked, when she spotted it: a scrap of black cloth caught on the barbed wire of the fence.

  Lettie approached it. Again, the outstretched hazel stick, again the slow turning and turning. “Red,” she said, with certainty. “Very red. That way.”

  We walked together in the direction she indicated. Across a meadow and into a clump of trees. “There,” I said, fascinated. The corpse of a very small animal—a vole, by the look of it—lay on a clump of green moss. It had no head, and bright blood stained its fur and beaded on the moss. It was very red.

  “Now, from here on,” said Lettie, “hold on to my arm. Don’t let go.”

  I put out my right hand and took her left arm, just below the elbow. She moved the hazel wand. “This way,” she said.

  “What are we looking for now?”

  “We’re getting closer,” she said. “The next thing we’re looking for is a storm.”

  We pushed our way into a clump of trees, and through the clump of trees into a wood, and squeezed our way through trees too close together, their foliage a thick canopy above our heads. We found a clearing in the wood, and walked along the clearing, in a world made green.

  From our left came a mumble of distant thunder.

  “Storm,” sang Lettie. She let her body swing again, and I turned with her, holding her arm. I felt, or imagined I felt, a throbbing going through me, holding her arm, as if I were touching mighty engines.

  She set off in a new direction. We crossed a tiny stream together. Then she stopped, suddenly, and stumbled, but did not fall.

  “Are we there?” I asked.

  “Not there,” she said. “No. It knows we’re coming. It feels us. And it does not want us to come to it.”

  The hazel wand was whipping around now like a magnet being pushed at a repelling pole. Lettie grinned.

  A gust of wind threw leaves and dirt up into our faces. In the distance I could hear something rumble, like a train. It was getting harder to see, and the sky that I could make out above the canopy of leaves was dark, as if huge storm-clouds had moved above our heads, or as if it had gone from morning directly to twilight.

  Lettie shouted, “Get down!” and she crouched on the moss, pulling me down with her. She lay prone, and I lay beside her, feeling a little silly. The ground was damp.

  “How long will we—?”

  “Shush!” She sounded almost angry. I said nothing.

  Something came through the woods, above our heads. I glanced up, saw something brown and furry, but flat, like a huge rug, flapping and curling at the edges, and, at the front of the rug, a mouth, filled with dozens of tiny sharp teeth, facing down.

  It flapped and floated above us, and then it was gone.

  “What was that?” I asked, my heart pounding so hard in my chest that I did not know if I would be able to stand again.

  “Manta wolf,” said Lettie. “We’ve already gone a bit further out than I thought.” She got to her feet and stared the way the furry thing had gone. She raised the tip of the hazel wand, and turned around slowly.

  “I’m not getting anything.” She tossed her head, to get the hair out of her eyes, without letting go of the fork of hazel wand. “Either it’s hiding or we’re too close.” She bit her lip. Then she said, “The shilling. The one from your throat. Bring it out.”

  I took it from my pocket with my left hand, offered it to her.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t touch it, not right now. Put it down on the fork of the stick.”

  I didn’t ask why. I just put the silver shilling down at the intersection of the Y. Lettie stretched her arms out, and turned very slowly, with the end of the stick pointing straight out. I moved with her, but felt nothing. No throbbing engines. We were over halfway around when she stopped and said, “Look!”

  I looked in the direction she was facing, but I saw nothing but trees, and shadows in the wood.

  “No, look. There.” She indicated with her head.

  The tip of the hazel wand had begun smoking, softly. She turned a little to the left, a little to the right, a little further to the right again, and the tip of the wand began to glow a bright orange.

  “That’s something I’ve not seen before,” said Lettie. “I’m using the coin as an amplifier, but it’s as if—”

  There was a whoompf! and the end of the stick burst into flame. Lettie pushed it down into the damp moss. She said, “Take your coin back,” and I did, picking it up carefully, in case it was hot, but it was icy cold. She left the hazel wand behind on the moss, the charcoal tip of it still smoking irritably.

  Lettie walked and I walked beside her. We held hands now, my right hand in her left. The air smelled strange, like fireworks, and the world grew darker with every step we took into the forest.

  “I said I’d keep you safe, didn’t I?” said Lettie.

  “Yes.”

  “I promised I wouldn’t let anything hurt you.”

  “Yes.”

  She said, “Just keep holding my hand. Don’t let go. Whatever happens, don’t let go.”

  Her hand was warm, but not sweaty. It was reassuring.

  “Hold my hand,” she repeated. “And don’t do anything unless I tell you. You’ve got that?” />
  I said, “I don’t feel very safe.”

  She did not argue. She said, “We’ve gone further than I imagined. Further than I expected. I’m not really sure what kinds of things live out here on the margins.”

  The trees ended, and we walked out into open country.

  I said, “Are we a long way from your farm?”

  “No. We’re still on the borders of the farm. Hempstock Farm stretches a very long way. We brought a lot of this with us from the old country, when we came here. The farm came with us, and brought things with it when it came. Gran calls them fleas.”

  I did not know where we were, but I could not believe we were still on the Hempstocks’ land, no more than I believed we were in the world I had grown up in. The sky of this place was the dull orange of a warning light; the plants, which were spiky, like huge, ragged aloes, were a dark silvery green, and looked as if they had been beaten from gunmetal.

  The coin, in my left hand, which had warmed to the heat of my body, began to cool down again, until it was as cold as an ice cube. My right hand held Lettie Hempstock’s hand as tightly as I could.

  She said, “We’re here.”

  I thought I was looking at a building at first: that it was some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of gray and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind, in that orange sky: a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time.

  And then it turned and I saw its face, and I heard something make a whimpering sound, like a dog that had been kicked, and I realized that the thing that was whimpering was me.

  Its face was ragged, and its eyes were deep holes in the fabric. There was nothing behind it, just a gray canvas mask, huger than I could have imagined, all ripped and torn, blowing in the gusts of storm wind.

  Something shifted, and the ragged thing looked down at us.

  Lettie Hempstock said, “Name yourself.”

  There was a pause. Empty eyes stared down at us. Then a voice as featureless as the wind said, “I am the lady of this place. I have been here for such a long time. Since before the little people sacrificed each other on the rocks. My name is my own, child. Not yours. Now leave me be, before I blow you all away.” It gestured with a limb like a broken mainsail, and I felt myself shivering.

  Lettie Hempstock squeezed my hand and I felt braver. She said, “Asked you to name yourself, I did. I en’t heard more’n empty boasts of age and time. Now, you tell me your name and I en’t asking you a third time.” She sounded more like a country girl than she ever had before. Perhaps it was the anger in her voice: her words came out differently when she was angry.

  “No,” whispered the gray thing, flatly. “Little girl, little girl . . . who’s your friend?”

  Lettie whispered, “Don’t say nothing.” I nodded, pressed my lips tightly together.

  “I am growing tired of this,” said the gray thing, with a petulant shake of its ragged-cloth arms. “Something came to me, and pleaded for love and help. It told me how I could make all the things like it happy. That they are simple creatures, and all any of them want is money, just money, and nothing more. Little tokens-of-work. If it had asked, I would have given them wisdom, or peace, perfect peace . . .”

  “None of that,” said Lettie Hempstock. “You’ve got nothing to give them that they want. Let them be.”

  The wind gusted and the gargantuan figure flapped with it, huge sails swinging, and when the wind was done the creature had changed position. Now it seemed to have crouched lower to the ground, and it was examining us like an enormous canvas scientist looking at two white mice.

  Two very scared white mice, holding hands.

  Lettie’s hand was sweating, now. She squeezed my hand, whether to reassure me or herself I did not know, and I squeezed her hand back.

  The ripped face, the place where the face should have been, twisted. I thought it was smiling. Perhaps it was smiling. I felt as if it was examining me, taking me apart. As if it knew everything about me—things I did not even know about myself.

  The girl holding my hand said, “If you en’t telling me your name, I’ll bind you as a nameless thing. And you’ll still be bounden, tied and sealed like a polter or a shuck.”

  She waited, but the thing said nothing, and Lettie Hempstock began to say words in a language I did not know. Sometimes she was talking, and sometimes it was more like singing, in a tongue that was nothing I had ever heard, or would ever encounter later in life. I knew the tune, though. It was a child’s song, the tune to which we sang the nursery rhyme “Girls and Boys Come Out to Play.” That was the tune, but her words were older words. I was certain of that.

  And as she sang, things happened, beneath the orange sky.

  The earth writhed and churned with worms, long gray worms that pushed up from the ground beneath our feet.

  Something came hurtling at us from the center mass of flapping canvas. It was a little bigger than a football. At school, during games, mostly I dropped things I was meant to catch, or closed my hand on them a moment too late, letting them hit me in the face or the stomach. But this thing was coming straight at me and Lettie Hempstock, and I did not think, I only did.

  I put both my hands out and I caught the thing, a flapping, writhing mass of cobwebs and rotting cloth. And as I caught it in my hands I felt something hurt me: a stabbing pain in the sole of my foot, momentary and then gone, as if I had trodden upon a pin.

  Lettie knocked the thing I was holding out of my hands, and it fell to the ground, where it collapsed into itself. She grabbed my right hand, held it firmly once more. And through all this, she continued to sing.

  I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and I had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything. In my dreams I have used that language to heal the sick and to fly; once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed-and-breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, “Be whole,” and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.

  And, because Lettie was speaking the language of shaping, even if I did not understand what she was saying, I understood what was being said. The thing in the clearing was being bound to that place for always, trapped, forbidden to exercise its influence on anything beyond its own domain.

  Lettie Hempstock finished her song.

  In my mind, I thought I could hear the creature screaming, protesting, railing, but the place beneath that orange sky was quiet. Only the flapping of canvas and the rattle of twigs in the wind broke the silence.

  The wind died down.

  A thousand pieces of torn gray cloth settled on the black earth like dead things, or like so much abandoned laundry. Nothing moved.

  Lettie said, “That should hold it.” She squeezed my hand. I thought she was trying to sound bright, but she didn’t. She sounded grim. “Let’s take you home.”

  We walked, hand in hand, through a wood of blue-tinged evergreens, and we crossed a lacquered red and yellow bridge over an ornamental pond; we walked along the edge of a field in which young corn was coming up, like green grass planted in rows; we climbed a wooden stile, hand in hand, and reached another field, planted with what looked like small reeds or furry snakes, black and white and brown and orange and gray and striped, all of them waving gently, curling and uncurling in the sun.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “You can pull one up and see, if you like,” said Lettie.

  I looked down: the furry tendril by my feet was perfectly black. I bent, grasped it at the base, firmly, with my left hand, and I pulled.

  Something came up from the earth, and swung around angrily
. My hand felt like a dozen tiny needles had been sunk into it. I brushed the earth from it, and apologized, and it stared at me, more with surprise and puzzlement than with anger. It jumped from my hand to my shirt, I stroked it: a kitten, black and sleek, with a pointed, inquisitive face, a white spot over one ear, and eyes of a peculiarly vivid blue-green.

  “At the farm, we get our cats the normal way,” said Lettie.

  “What’s that?”

  “Big Oliver. He turned up at the farm back in pagan times. All our farm cats trace back to him.”

  I looked at the kitten hanging on my shirt with tiny kitten-claws.

  “Can I take it home?” I asked.

  “It’s not an it. It’s a she. Not a good idea, taking anything home from these parts,” said Lettie.

  I put the kitten down at the edge of the field. She darted off after a butterfly, which floated up and out of her reach, then she scampered away, without a look back.

  “My kitten was run over,” I told Lettie. “It was only little. The man who died told me about it, although he wasn’t driving. He said they didn’t see it.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Lettie. We were walking beneath a canopy of apple-blossom then, and the world smelled like honey. “That’s the trouble with living things. Don’t last very long. Kittens one day, old cats the next. And then just memories. And the memories fade and blend and smudge together . . .”

  She opened a five-bar gate, and we went through it. She let go of my hand. We were at the bottom of the lane, near the wooden shelf by the road with the battered silver milk churns on it. The world smelled normal.

  I said, “We’re really back, now?”

  “Yes,” said Lettie Hempstock. “And we won’t be seeing any more trouble from her.” She paused. “Big, wasn’t she? And nasty? I’ve not seen one like that before. If I’d known she was going to be so old, and so big, and so nasty, I wouldn’t’ve brung you with me.”

  I was glad that she had taken me with her.