The Ocean at the End of the Lane

X.

I had strange dreams in that house, that night. I woke myself in the darkness, and I knew only that a dream had scared me so badly that I had to wake up or die, and yet, try as I might, I could not remember what I had dreamed. The dream was haunting me: standing behind me, present and yet invisible, like the back of my head, simultaneously there and not there.

I missed my father and I missed my mother, and I missed my bed in my house, only a mile or so away. I missed yesterday, before Ursula Monkton, before my father’s anger, before the bathtub. I wanted that yesterday back again, and I wanted it so badly.

I tried to pull the dream that had upset me so to the front of my mind, but it would not come. There had been betrayal in it, I knew, and loss, and time. The dream had left me scared to go back to sleep: the fireplace was almost dark now, with only the deep red glow of embers in the hearth to mark that it had once been burning, once had given light.

I climbed down from the four-poster bed, and felt beneath it until I found the heavy china chamber pot. I hitched up my nightgown and I used it. Then I walked to the window and looked out. The moor was still full, but now it was low in the sky, and a dark orange: what my mother called a harvest moon. But things were harvested in autumn, I knew, not in spring.

In the orange moonlight I could see an old woman—I was almost certain it was Old Mrs. Hempstock, although it was hard to see her face properly—walking up and down. She had a big long stick she was leaning on as she walked, like a staff. She reminded me of the soldiers I had seen on a trip to London, outside Buckingham Palace, as they marched backwards and forwards on parade.

I watched her, and I was comforted.

I climbed back into my bed in the dark, lay my head on the empty pillow, and thought, I’ll never go back to sleep, not now, and then I opened my eyes and saw that it was morning.

There were clothes I had never seen before on a chair by the bed. There were two china jugs of water—one steaming hot, one cold—beside a white china bowl that I realized was a handbasin, set into a small wooden table. The fluffy black kitten had returned to the foot of the bed. It opened its eyes as I got up: they were a vivid blue-green, unnatural and odd, like the sea in summer, and it mewed a high-pitched questioning noise. I stroked it, then I got out of bed.

I mixed the hot water and the cold in the basin, and I washed my face and my hands. I cleaned my teeth with the cold water. There was no toothpaste, but there was a small round tin box on which was written Max Melton’s Remarkably Efficacious Tooth Powder, in old-fashioned letters. I put some of the white powder on my green toothbrush, and cleaned my teeth with it. It tasted minty and lemony in my mouth.

I examined the clothes that had been left out for me. They were unlike anything I had ever worn before. There were no underpants. There was a white undershirt, with no buttons but with a long shirttail. There were brown trousers that stopped at the knees, a pair of long white stockings, and a chestnut-colored jacket with a V cut into the back, like a swallow’s tail. The light brown socks were more like stockings. I put the clothes on as best I could, wishing there were zips or clasps, rather than hooks and buttons and stiff, unyielding buttonholes.

The shoes had silver buckles in the front, but the shoes were too big and did not fit me, so I went out of the room in my stockinged feet, and the kitten followed me.

To reach my room the night before I had walked upstairs and, at the top of the stairs, turned left. Now I turned right, and walked past Lettie’s bedroom (the door was ajar, the room was empty) and made for the stairs. But the stairs were not where I remembered them The corridor ended in a blank wall, and a window that looked out over woodland and fields.

The black kitten with the blue-green eyes mewed, loudly, as if to attract my attention, and turned back down the corridor in a self-important strut, tail held high. It led me down the hall, round a corner and down a passage I had never seen before, to a staircase. The kitten bounced amiably down the stairs, and I followed.

Ginnie Hempstock was standing at the foot of the stairs. “You slept long and well,” she said. “We’ve already milked the cows. Your breakfast is on the table, and there’s a saucer of cream by the fireplace for your friend.”

“Where’s Lettie, Mrs. Hempstock?”

“Off on an errand, getting stuff she may need. It has to go, the thing at your house, or there will be trouble, and worse will follow. She’s already bound it once, and it slipped the bounds, so she needs to send it home.”

“I just want Ursula Monkton to go away,” I said. “I hate her.”

Ginnie Hempstock put out a finger, ran it across my jacket. “It’s not what anyone else hereabouts is wearing these days,” she said. “But my mam put a little glamour on it, so it’s not as if anyone will notice. You can walk around in it all you want, and not a soul will think there’s anything odd about it. No shoes?”

“They didn’t fit.”

“I’ll leave something that will fit you by the back door, then.”

“Thank you.”

She said, “I don’t hate her. She does what she does, according to her nature. She was asleep, she woke up, she’s trying to give everyone what they want.”

“She hasn’t given me anything I want. She says she wants to put me in the attic.”

“That’s as may be. You were her way here, and it’s a dangerous thing to be a door.” She tapped my chest, above my heart, with her forefinger. “And she was better off where she was. We would have sent her home safely—done it before for her kind a dozen times. But she’s headstrong, that one. No teaching them. Right. Your breakfast is on the table. I’ll be up in the nine-acre field if anyone needs me.”

There was a bowl of porridge on the kitchen table and beside it, a saucer with a lump of golden honeycomb on it, and a jug of rich yellow cream.

I spooned up a lump of the honeycomb and mixed it into the thick porridge, then I poured in the cream.

There was toast, too, cooked beneath the grill as my father cooked it, with homemade blackberry jam. There was the best cup of tea I have ever drunk. By the fireplace, the kitten lapped at a saucer ol creamy milk, and purred so loudly I could hear it across the room.

I wished I could purr too. I would have purred then.

Lettie came in, carrying a shopping bag, the old-fashioned kind you never seem to see anymore: elderly women used to carry them to the shops, big woven bags that were almost baskets, raffia-work outside and lined with cloth, with rope handles. This basket was almost full. Her cheek had been scratched, and had bled, although the blood had dried. She looked miserable.

“Hello,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Let me tell you, if you think that was fun, that wasn’t any fun, not one bit. Mandrakes are so loud when you pull them up, and I didn’t have earplugs, and once I’d got it I had tc swap it for a shadow-bottle, an old-fashioned one with lots of shadows dissolved in vinegar . . .” She buttered some toast, then crushed a lump of golden honeycomb onto it and started munching. “And that was just to get me to the bazaar, and they aren’t even meant to be open yet. But I got most of what I needed there.”

“Can I look?”

“If you want to.”

I looked into the basket. It was filled with broken toys: dolls’ eyes and heads and hands, cars with no wheels, chipped cat’s-eye glass marbles. Lettie reached up and took down the jam jar from the window ledge. Inside it, the silvery-translucent wormhole shifted and twisted and spiraled and turned. Lettie dropped the jam jar into the shopping bag, with the broken toys. The kitten slept, and ignored us entirely.

Lettie said, “You don’t have to come with, for this bit. You can stay here while I go and talk to her.”

I thought about it. “I’d feel safer with you,” I told her.

She did not look happy at this. She said, “Let’s go down to the ocean.” The kitten opened its too- green and blue eyes and stared at us disinterestedly as we left.

There was a pair of black leather boots, like riding boots, waiting for me, by the back door. They looked old, but well cared for, and were just my size. I put them on, although I felt more comfortable in sandals. Together, Lettie and I walked down to her ocean, by which I mean, the pond.

We sat on the old bench, and looked at the placid brown surface of the pond, and the lily pads, and the scum of duckweed by the water’s edge.

“You Hempstocks aren’t people,” I said.

“Are too.”

I shook my head. “I bet you don’t actually even look like that,” I said. “Not really.”

Lettie shrugged. “Nobody actually looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”

I said, “Are you a monster? Like Ursula Monkton?”

Lettie threw a pebble into the pond. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.”

I said, “People should be scared of Ursula Monkton.”

“P’raps. What do you think Ursula Monkton is scared of?”

“Dunno. Why do you think she’s scared of anything? She’s a grown-up, isn’t she? Grown-ups and monsters aren’t scared of things.”

“Oh, monsters are scared,” said Lettie. “That’s why they’re monsters. And as for grown-ups . . .” She stopped talking, rubbed her freckled nose with a finger. Then, “I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.” She thought for a moment. Then she smiled. “Except for Granny, of course.”

We sat there, side by side, on the old wooden bench, not saying anything. I thought about adults. I wondered if that was true: if they were all really children wrapped in adult bodies, like children’s books hidden in the middle of dull, long adult books, the kind with no pictures or conversations.

“I love my ocean,” Lettie said, and I knew our time by the pond was done.

“It’s just pretending, though,” I told her, feeling like I was letting childhood down by admitting it. “Your pond. It’s not an ocean. It can’t be. Oceans are bigger than seas. Your pond is just a pond.”

“It’s as big as it needs to be,” said Lettie Hempstock, nettled. She sighed. “We’d better get on with sending Ursula whatsername back where she came from.” Then she said, “I do know what she’s scared of. And you know what? I’m scared of them too.”

The kitten was nowhere to be seen when we returned to the kitchen, although the fog-colored cat was sitting on a windowsill, staring out at the world. The breakfast things had all been tidied up and put away, and my red pajamas and my dressing gown, neatly folded, were waiting for me on the table, in a large brown-paper bag, along with my green toothbrush.

“You won’t let her get me, will you?” I asked Lettie.

She shook her head, and together we walked up the winding flinty lane that led to my house and to the thing who called herself Ursula Monkton. I carried the brown-paper bag with my nightwear in it, and Lettie carried her too-big-for-her raffia shopping bag, filled with broken toys, which she had obtained in exchange for a mandrake that screamed and shadows dissolved in vinegar.

Children, as I have said, use back ways and hidden paths, while adults take roads and official paths. We went off the road, took a shortcut that Lettie knew that took us through some fields, then into the extensive abandoned gardens of a rich man’s crumbling house, and then back onto the lane again. We came out just before the place where I had gone over the metal fence.

Lettie sniffed the air. “No varmints yet,” she said. “That’s good.”

“What are varmints?”

She said only, “You’ll know ’em when you see ’em And I hope you’ll never see ’em”

“Are we going to sneak in?”

“Why would we do that? We’ll go up the drive and through the front door, like gentry.”

We started up the drive. I said, “Are you going to make a spell and send her away?”

“We don’t do spells,” she said. She sounded a little disappointed to admit it. “We’ll do recipes sometimes. But no spells or cantrips. Gran doesn’t hold with none of that. She says it’s common.”

“So what’s the stuff in the shopping bag for, then?”

“It’s to stop things traveling when you don’t want them to. Mark boundaries.”

In the morning sunlight, my house looked so welcoming and so friendly, with its warm red bricks, and red tile roof. Lettie reached into the shopping bag. She took a marble from it, pushed it into the still-damp soil. Then, instead of going into the house, she turned left, walking the edge of the property. By Mr. Wollery’s vegetable patch we stopped and she took something else from her shopping bag: a headless, legless, pink doll-body, with badly chewed hands. She buried it beside the pea plants.

We picked some pea pods, opened them and ate the peas inside. Peas baffled me. I could not understand why grown-ups would take things that tasted so good when they were freshly-picked and raw, and put them in tin cans, and make them revolting.

Lettie placed a toy giraffe, the small plastic kind you would find in a children’s zoo, or a Noah’s Ark, in the coal shed, beneath a large lump of coal. The coal shed smelled of damp and blackness and of old, crushed forests.

“Will these things make her go away?”

“No.”

“Then what are they for?”

“To stop her going away.”

“But we want her to go away.”

“No. We want her to go home”

I stared at her: at her short brownish-red hair, her snub-nose, her freckles. She looked three or four years older than me. She might have been three or four thousand years older, or a thousand times older again. I would have trusted her to the gates of Hell and back. But still . . .

“I wish you’d explain properly,” I said. “You talk in mysteries all the time.”

I was not scared, though, and I could not have told you why I was not scared. I trusted Lettie, jusi as I had trusted her when we had gone in search of the flapping thing beneath the orange sky. I believed in her, and that meant I would come to no harm while I was with her. I knew it in the way I knew that grass was green, that roses had sharp, woody thorns, that breakfast cereal was sweet.

We went into my house through the front door. It was not locked—unless we went away on holidays I do not ever remember it being locked—and we went inside.

My sister was practicing the piano in the front room We went in. She heard the noise, stopped playing “Chopsticks” and turned around.

She looked at me curiously. “What happened last night?” she asked. “I thought you were in trouble, but then Mummy and Daddy came back and you were just staying with your friends. Why would they say you were sleeping at your friends’? You don’t have any friends.” She noticed Lettie Hempstock, then. “Who’s this?”

“My friend,” I told her. “Where’s the horrible monster?”

“Don’t call her that,” said my sister. “She’s nice. She’s having a lie-down.”

My sister did not say anything about my strange clothes.

Lettie Hempstock took a broken xylophone from her shopping bag and dropped it onto the scree of toys that had accumulated between the piano and the blue toy-box with the detached lid.

“There,” she said. “Now it’s time to go and say hello.”

The first faint stirrings of fear inside my chest, inside my mind. “Go up to her room, you mean?” “Yup.”

“What’s she doing up there?”

“Doing things to people’s lives,” said Lettie. “Only local people so far. She finds what they think they need and she tries to give it to them She’s doing it to make the world into something she’ll be happier in. Somewhere more comfortable for her. Somewhere cleaner. And she doesn’t care so much about giving them money, not anymore. Now what she cares about more is people hurting.”

As we went up the stairs Lettie placed something on each step: a clear glass marble with a twist of green inside it; one of the little metal objects we called knucklebones; a bead; a pair of bright blue doll’s eyes, connected at the back with white plastic, to make them open or close; a small red and white horseshoe magnet; a black pebble; a badge, the kind that came attached to birthday cards, with I Am Seven on it; a book of matches; a plastic ladybird with a black magnet in the base; a toy car, halfsquashed, its wheels gone; and, last of all, a lead soldier. It was missing a leg.

We were at the top of the stairs. The bedroom door was closed. Lettie said, “She won’t put you in the attic.” Then, without knocking, she opened the door, and she went into the bedroom that had once been mine and, reluctantly, I followed.

Ursula Monkton was lying on the bed with her eyes closed. She was the first adult woman who was not my mother that I had seen naked, and I glanced at her curiously. But the room was more interesting to me than she was.

It was my old bedroom, but it wasn’t. Not anymore. There was the little yellow handbasin, just my size, and the walls were still robin’s-egg blue, as they had been when it was mine. But now strips of cloth hung from the ceiling, gray, ragged cloth strips, like bandages, some only a foot long, others dangling almost all the way to the floor. The window was open and the wind rustled and pushed them, so they swayed, grayly, and it seemed as if perhaps the room was moving, like a tent or a ship at sea.

“You have to go now,” said Lettie.

Ursula Monkton sat up on the bed, and then she opened her eyes, which were now the same gray as the hanging cloths. She said, in a voice that still sounded half-asleep, “I wondered what I would have to do to bring you both here, and look, you came.”

“You didn’t bring us here,” Lettie said. “We came because we wanted to. And I came to give you one last chance to go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Ursula Monkton, and she sounded petulant, like a very small child who wanted something. “I’ve only just got here. I have a house, now. I have pets—his father is just the sweetest thing. I’m making people happy. There is nothing like me anywhere in this whole world. I was looking, just now when you came in. I’m the only one there is. They can’t defend themselves. They don’t know how. So this is the best place in the whole of creation.”

She smiled at us both, brightly. She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identity to her for the asking, as my father did.

“You think this world’s like that,” said Lettie. “You think it’s easy. But it en’t.”

“Of course it is. What are you saying? That you and your family will defend this world against me? You’re the only one who ever leaves the borders of your farm—and you tried to bind me without knowing my name. Your mother wouldn’t have been that foolish. I’m not scared of you, little girl.”

Lettie reached deep into the shopping bag. She pulled out the jamjar with the translucent wormhole inside, and held it out.

“Here’s your way back,” she said. “I’m being kind, and I’m being nice. Trust me. Take it. I don’t think you can get any further to home than the place we met you, with the orange sky, but that’s far enough. I can’t get you from there to where you came from in the first place—I asked Gran, and she says it isn’t even there anymore—but once you’re back we can find a place for you, somewhere similar. Somewhere you’ll be happy. Somewhere you’ll be safe.”

Ursula Monkton got off the bed. She stood up and looked down at us. There were no lightnings wreathing her, not any longer, but she was scarier standing naked in that bedroom than she had been floating in the storm. She was an adult—no, more than an adult. She was old. And I have never felt more like a child.

“I’m so happy here,” she said. “So very, very happy here.” And then she said, almost regretfully, “You’re not.”

I heard a sound, a soft, raggedy, flapping sound. The gray cloths began to detach themselves from the ceiling, one by one. They fell, but not in a straight line. They fell toward us, from all over the room, as if we were magnets, pulling them toward our bodies. The first strip of gray cloth landed on the back of my left hand, and it stuck there. I reached out my right hand and grabbed it, and I pulled the cloth off: it adhered, for a moment, and as it pulled off it made a sucking sound. There was a discolored patch on the back of my left hand, where the cloth had been, and it was as red as if I had been sucking on it for a long, long time, longer and harder than I ever had in real life, and it was beaded with blood. There were pinpricks of red wetness that smeared as I touched it, and then a long bandage-cloth began to attach itself to my legs, and I moved away as a cloth landed on my face and my forehead, and another wrapped itself over my eyes, blinding me, so I pulled at the cloth on my eyes, but now another cloth circled my wrists, bound them together, and my arms were wrapped and bound to my body, and I stumbled, and fell to the floor.

If I pulled against the cloths, they hurt me.

My world was gray. I gave up, then. I lay there, and did not move, concentrated only on breathing through the space the cloth strips had left for my nose. They held me, and they felt alive.

I lay on the carpet, and I listened. There was nothing else I could do.

Ursula said, “I need the boy safe. I promised I’d keep him in the attic, so the attic it shall be. But you, little farm-girl. What shall I do with you? Something appropriate. Perhaps I ought to turn yoi inside out, so your heart and brains and flesh are all naked and exposed on the outside, and the skin- side’s inside. Then I’ll keep you wrapped up in my room here, with your eyes staring forever at the darkness inside yourself. I can do that.”

“No,” said Lettie. She sounded sad, I thought. “Actually, you can’t. And I gave you your chance.”

“You threatened me. Empty threats.”

“I dunt make threats,” said Lettie. “I really wanted you to have a chance.” And then she said, “When you looked around the world for things like you, didn’t you wonder why there weren’t lots of other old things around? No, you never wondered. You were so happy it was just you here, you never stopped to think.

“Gran always calls your sort of thingfleas, Skarthach of the Keep. I mean, she could call you anything. I think she thinks fleas is funny . . . She doesn’t mind your kind. She says you’re harmless enough. Just a bit stupid. That’s cos there are things that eat fleas, in this part of creation. Varmints, Gran calls them. She dunt like them at all. She says they’re mean, and they’re hard to get rid of. And

they’re always hungry.”

“I’m not scared,” said Ursula Monkton. She sounded scared. And then she said, “How did you know my name?”

“Went looking for it this morning. Went looking for other things too. Some boundary markers, to keep you from running too far, getting into more trouble. And a trail of breadcrumbs that leads straight here, to this room Now, open the jam jar, take out the doorway, and let’s send you home.”

I waited for Ursula Monkton to respond, but she said nothing. There was no answer. Only the slamming of a door, and the sound of footsteps, fast and pounding, running down the stairs.

Lettie’s voice was close to me, and it said, “She would have been better off staying here, and taking me up on my offer.”

I felt her hands tugging at the cloths on my face. They came free with a wet, sucking sound, but they no longer felt alive, and when they came off they fell to the ground and lay there, unmoving. This time there was no blood beaded on my skin. The worst thing that had happened was that my arms and legs had gone to sleep.

Lettie helped me to my feet. She did not look happy.

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“She’s followed the trail out of the house. And she’s scared. Poor thing. She’s so scared.”

“You’re scared too.”

“A bit, yes. Right about now she’s going to find that she’s trapped inside the bounds I put down, I expect,” said Lettie.

We went out of the bedroom Where the toy soldier at the top of the stairs had been, there was now a rip. That’s the best I can describe it: it was as if someone had taken a photograph of the stairs and then torn out the soldier from the photograph. There was nothing in the space where the soldier had been but a dim grayness that hurt my eyes if I looked at it too long.

“What’s she scared of?”

“You heard. Varmints.”

“Are you scared of varmints, Lettie?”

She hesitated, just a moment too long. Then she said simply, “Yes.”

“But you aren’t scared of her. Of Ursula.”

“I can’t be scared of her. It’s just like Gran says. She’s like a flea, all puffed up with pride and power and lust, like a flea bloated with blood. But she couldn’t have hurt me. I’ve seen off dozens like her, in my time. One as come through in Cromwell’s day—now there was something to talk about. He made folk lonely, that one. They’d hurt themselves just to make the loneliness stop—gouge out their eyes or jump down wells, and all the while that great lummocking thing sits in the cellar of the Duke’s Head, looking like a squat toad big as a bulldog.” We were at the bottom of the stairs, walking down the hall.

“How do you know where she went?”

“Oh, she couldn’t have gone anywhere but the way I laid out for her.” In the front room my sister was still playing “Chopsticks” on the piano.

We walked out of the front door. “He was nasty, that one, back in Cromwell’s day. But we got him out of there just before the hunger birds came.”

“Hunger birds?”

“What Gran calls varmints. The cleaners.”

They didn’t sound bad. I knew that Ursula had been scared of them, but I wasn’t. Why would you be scared of cleaners?