The Ocean at the End of the Lane Page 9

  I had not imagined it. Her lips had brushed my ear. She was floating in the air beside me, so her head was beside mine, and when she caught me looking at her she smiled her pretend-smile, and I could not run any longer. I could barely move. I had a stitch in my side, and I could not catch my breath, and I was done.

  My legs gave way beneath me, and I stumbled and fell, and this time I did not get up.

  I felt heat on my legs, and I looked down to see a yellow stream coming from the front of my pajama trousers. I was seven years old, no longer a little child, but I was wetting myself with fear, like a baby, and there was nothing I could do about it, while Ursula Monkton hung in the air a few feet above me and watched, dispassionately.

  The hunt was done.

  She stood up straight in the air, three feet above the ground. I was sprawled beneath her, on my back, in the wet grass. She began to descend, slowly, inexorably, like a person on a broken television screen.

  Something touched my left hand. Something soft. It nosed my hand, and I looked over, fearing a spider as big as a dog. Illuminated by the lightnings that writhed about Ursula Monkton, I saw a patch of darkness beside my hand. A patch of darkness with a white spot over one ear. I picked the kitten up in my hand, and brought it to my heart, and I stroked it.

  I said, “I won’t come with you. You can’t make me.” I sat up, because I felt less vulnerable sitting, and the kitten curled and made itself comfortable in my hand.

  “Pudding-and-pie boy,” said Ursula Monkton. Her feet touched the ground. She was illuminated by her own lightnings, like a painting of a woman in grays and greens and blues, and not a real woman at all. “You’re just a little boy. I’m a grown-up. I was an adult when your world was a ball of molten rock. I can do whatever I wish to you. Now, stand up. I’m taking you home.”

  The kitten, which was burrowing into my chest with its face, made a high-pitched noise, not a mew. I turned, looking away from Ursula Monkton, looking behind me.

  The girl who was walking toward us, across the field, wore a shiny red raincoat, with a hood, and a pair of black Wellington boots that seemed too big for her. She walked out of the darkness, unafraid. She looked up at Ursula Monkton.

  “Get off my land,” said Lettie Hempstock.

  Ursula Monkton took a step backwards and she rose, at the same time, so she hung in the air above us. Lettie Hempstock reached out to me, without glancing down at where I sat, and she took my hand, twining her fingers into mine.

  “I’m not touching your land,” said Ursula Monkton. “Go away, little girl.”

  “You are on my land,” said Lettie Hempstock.

  Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty. She winked at me.

  I was a seven-year-old boy, and my feet were scratched and bleeding. I had just wet myself. And the thing that floated above me was huge and greedy, and it wanted to take me to the attic, and, when it tired of me, it would make my daddy kill me.

  Lettie Hempstock’s hand in my hand made me braver. But Lettie was just a girl, even if she was a big girl, even if she was eleven, even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.

  Lettie said, “You should go back where you came from in the first place. It’s not healthy for you to be here. For your own good, go back.”

  A noise in the air, a horrible, twisted scratching noise, filled with pain and with wrongness, a noise that set my teeth on edge and made the kitten, its front paws resting on my chest, stiffen and its fur prickle. The little thing twisted and clawed up onto my shoulder, and it hissed and it spat. I looked up at Ursula Monkton. It was only when I saw her face that I knew what the noise was.

  Ursula Monkton was laughing.

  “Go back? When your people ripped the hole in Forever, I seized my chance. I could have ruled worlds, but I followed you, and I waited, and I had patience. I knew that sooner or later the bounds would loosen, that I would walk the true Earth, beneath the Sun of Heaven.” She was not laughing now. “Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this world, like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush.”

  I did not let go of Lettie’s hand, not this time. I stroked the kitten, whose needle-claws were digging into my shoulder, and I was bitten for my trouble, but the kitten’s bite was not hard, just scared.

  Her voice came from all around us, as the storm-wind gusted. “You kept me away from here for a long time. But then you brought me a door, and I used him to carry me out of my cell. And what can you do now that I am out?”

  Lettie didn’t seem angry. She thought about it, then she said, “I could make you a new door. Or, better still, I could get Granny to send you across the ocean, all the way to wherever you came from in the beginning.”

  Ursula Monkton spat onto the grass, and a tiny ball of flame sputtered and fizzed on the ground, where the spit had fallen.

  “Give me the boy,” was all she said. “He belongs to me. I came here inside him. I own him.”

  “You don’t own nuffink, you don’t,” said Lettie Hempstock, angrily. “ ’Specially not him.” Lettie helped me to my feet, and she stood behind me and put her arms around me. We were two children in a field in the night. Lettie held me, and I held the kitten, while above us and all around us a voice said,

  “What will you do? Take him home with you? This world is a world of rules, little girl. He belongs to his parents, after all. Take him away and his parents will come to bring him home, and his parents belong to me.”

  “I’m all bored of you now,” said Lettie Hempstock. “I gived you a chance. You’re on my land. Go away.”

  As she said that, my skin felt like it did when I’d rubbed a balloon on my sweater, then touched it to my face and hair. Everything prickled and tickled. My hair was soaked, but even wet, it felt like it was starting to stand on end.

  Lettie Hempstock held me tightly. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, and I was going to say something, to ask why I shouldn’t worry, what I had to be afraid of, when the field we were standing in began to glow.

  It glowed golden. Every blade of grass glowed and glimmered, every leaf on every tree. Even the hedges were glowing. It was a warm light. It seemed, to my eyes, as if the soil beneath the grass had transmuted from base matter into pure light, and in the golden glow of the meadow the blue-white lightnings that still crackled around Ursula Monkton seemed much less impressive.

  Ursula Monkton rose unsteadily, as if the air had just become hot and was carrying her upwards. Then Lettie Hempstock whispered old words into the world and the meadow exploded into a golden light. I saw Ursula Monkton swept up and away, although I felt no wind, but there had to be a wind, for she was flailing and tipping like a dead leaf in a gale. I watched her tumble into the night, and then Ursula Monkton and her lightnings were gone.

  “Come on,” said Lettie Hempstock. “We should get you in front of a kitchen fire. And a hot bath. You’ll catch your death.” She let go of my hand, stopped hugging me, stepped back. The golden glow dimmed, so slowly, and then it was go
ne, leaving only vanishing glimmers and twinkles in the bushes, like the final moments of the fireworks on Bonfire Night.

  “Is she dead?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then she’ll come back. And you’ll get in trouble.”

  “That’s as may be,” said Lettie. “Are you hungry?”

  She asked me, and I knew that I was. I had forgotten, somehow, but now I remembered. I was so hungry it hurt.

  “Let’s see . . .” Lettie was talking as she led me through the fields. “You’re wet through. We’ll need to get you something to wear. I’ll have a look in the chest of drawers in the green bedroom. I think Cousin Japeth left some of his clothes there when he went off to fight in the Mouse Wars. He wasn’t much bigger than you.”

  The kitten was licking my fingers with a small, rough tongue.

  “I found a kitten,” I said.

  “I can see that. She must have followed you back from the fields where you pulled her up.”

  “This is that kitten? The same one that I picked?”

  “Yup. Did she tell you her name, yet?”

  “No. Do they do that?”

  “Sometimes. If you listen.”

  I saw the lights of the Hempstocks’ farm in front of us, welcoming, and I was cheered, although I could not understand how we had got from the field we were in to the farmhouse so quickly.

  “You were lucky,” said Lettie. “Fifteen feet further back, and the field belongs to Colin Anders.”

  “You would have come anyway,” I told her. “You would have saved me.”

  She squeezed my arm with her hand but she said nothing.

  I said, “Lettie. I don’t want to go home.” That was not true. I wanted to go home more than anything, just not to the place I had fled that night. I wanted to go back to the home I had lived in before the opal miner had killed himself in our little white Mini, or before he had run over my kitten.

  The ball of dark fur pressed itself into my chest, and I wished she was my kitten, and knew that she was not. The rain had become a drizzle once again.

  We splashed through deep puddles, Lettie in her Wellington boots, my stinging feet bare. The smell of manure was sharp in the air as we reached the farmyard, and then we walked through a side door and into the huge farmhouse kitchen.

  IX.

  Lettie’s mother was prodding the huge fireplace with a poker, pushing the burning logs together.

  Old Mrs. Hempstock was stirring a bulbous pot on the stove with a large wooden spoon. She lifted the spoon to her mouth, blew on it theatrically, sipped from it, pursed her lips, then added a pinch of something and a fistful of something else to it. She turned down the flame. Then she looked at me, from my wet hair to my bare feet, which were blue with cold. As I stood there a puddle began to appear on the flagstone floor around me, and the drips of water from my dressing gown splashed into it.

  “Hot bath,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Or he’ll catch his death.”

  “That was what I said,” said Lettie.

  Lettie’s mother was already hauling a tin bath from beneath the kitchen table, and filling it with steaming water from the enormous black kettle that hung above the fireplace. Pots of cold water were added until she pronounced it the perfect temperature.

  “Right. In you go,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Spit-spot.”

  I looked at her, horrified. Was I going to have to undress in front of people I didn’t know?

  “We’ll wash your clothes, and dry them for you, and mend that dressing gown,” said Lettie’s mother, and she took the dressing gown from me, and she took the kitten, which I had barely realized I was still holding, and then she walked away.

  As quickly as possible I shed my red nylon pajamas—the bottoms were soaked and the legs were now ragged and ripped and would never be whole again. I dipped my fingers into the water, then I climbed in and sat down on the tin floor of the bath in that reassuring kitchen in front of the huge fire, and I leaned back in the hot water. My feet began to throb as they came back to life. I knew that naked was wrong, but the Hempstocks seemed indifferent to my nakedness: Lettie was gone, and my pajamas and dressing gown with her; her mother was getting out knives, forks, spoons, little jugs and bigger jugs, carving knives and wooden trenchers, and arranging them about the table.

  Old Mrs. Hempstock passed me a mug, filled with soup from the black pot on the stove. “Get that down you. Heat you up from the inside, first.”

  The soup was rich, and warming. I had never drunk soup in the bath before. It was a perfectly new experience. When I finished the mug I gave it back to her, and in return she passed me a large cake of white soap and a face-flannel and said, “Now get scrubbin’. Rub the life and the warmth back into your bones.”

  She sat down in a rocking chair on the other side of the fire, and rocked gently, not looking at me.

  I felt safe. It was as if the essence of grandmotherliness had been condensed into that one place, that one time. I was not at all afraid of Ursula Monkton, whatever she was, not then. Not there.

  Young Mrs. Hempstock opened an oven door and took out a pie, its shiny crust brown and glistening, and put it on the window ledge to cool.

  I dried myself off with a towel they brought me, the fire’s heat drying me as much as the towel did, then Lettie Hempstock returned and gave me a voluminous white thing, like a girl’s nightdress but made of white cotton, with long arms, and a skirt that draped to the floor, and a white cap. I hesitated to put it on until I realized what it was: a nightgown. I had seen pictures of them in books. Wee Willie Winkie ran through the town wearing one in every book of nursery rhymes I had ever owned.

  I slipped into it. The nightcap was too big for me, and fell down over my face, and Lettie took it away once more.

  Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, roasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one, but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood). For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home.

  The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire, until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its size in a meal of scraps of meat.

  While we ate, nothing was said about what had happened to me, or why I was there. The Hempstock ladies talked about the farm—there was the door to the milking shed needed a new coat of paint, a cow named Rhiannon who looked to be getting lame in her left hind leg, the path to be cleared on the way that led down to the reservoir.

  “Is it just the three of you?” I asked. “Aren’t there any men?”

  “Men!” hooted Old Mrs. Hempstock. “I dunno what blessed good a man would be! Nothing a man could do around this farm that I can’t do twice as fast and five times as well.”

  Lettie said, “We’ve had men here, sometimes. They come and they go. Right now, it’s just us.”

  Her mother nodded. “They went off to seek their fate and fortune, mostly, the male Hempstocks. There’s never any keeping them here when the call comes. They get a distant look in their eyes and then we’ve lost them, good and proper. Ne
xt chance they gets they’re off to towns and even cities, and nothing but an occasional postcard to even show they were here at all.”

  Old Mrs. Hempstock said, “His parents are coming! They’re driving here. They just passed Parson’s elm tree. The badgers saw them.”

  “Is she with them?” I asked. “Ursula Monkton?”

  “Her?” said Old Mrs. Hempstock, amused. “That thing? Not her.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “They will make me go back with them, and then she’ll lock me in the attic and let my daddy kill me when she gets bored. She said so.”

  “She may have told you that, ducks,” said Lettie’s mother, “but she en’t going to do it, or anything like it, or my name’s not Ginnie Hempstock.”

  I liked the name Ginnie, but I did not believe her, and I was not reassured. Soon the door to the kitchen would open, and my father would shout at me, or he would wait until we got into the car, and he would shout at me then, and they would take me back up the lane to my house, and I would be lost.

  “Let’s see,” said Ginnie Hempstock. “We could be away when they get here. They could arrive last Tuesday, when there’s nobody home.”

  “Out of the question,” said the old woman. “Just complicates things, playing with time . . . We could turn the boy into something else, so they’d never find him, look how hard they might.”

  I blinked. Was that even possible? I wanted to be turned into something. The kitten had finished its portion of meat-scraps (indeed, it seemed to have eaten more than the house cat) and now it leapt into my lap, and began to wash itself.

  Ginnie Hempstock got up and went out of the room. I wondered where she was going.

  “We can’t turn him into anything,” said Lettie, clearing the table of the last of the plates and cutlery. “His parents will get frantic. And if they are being controlled by the flea, she’ll just feed the franticness. Next thing you know, we’ll have the police dragging the reservoir, looking for him. Or worse. The ocean.”