The Ocean at the End of the Lane (4 page)

“You must have very good eyesight,” I told her. I
was impressed. She gave me back the coin.

“Not as good as it once was, but then, when you get
to be my age, your eyesight won't be as sharp as it once was, neither.” And she
let out a guffaw as if she had said something very funny.

“How old is that?”

Lettie looked at me, and I was worried that I'd
said something rude. Sometimes adults didn't like to be asked their ages, and
sometimes they did. In my experience, old people did. They were proud of their
ages. Mrs. Wollery was seventy-seven, and Mr. Wollery was eighty-nine, and they
liked telling us how old they were.

Old Mrs. Hempstock went over to a cupboard, and
took out several colorful vases. “Old enough,” she said. “I remember when the
moon was made.”

“Hasn't there always been a moon?”

“Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the
day the moon came. We looked up in the sky—it was all dirty brown and sooty gray
here then, not green and blue . . .” She half-filled each of the vases
at the sink. Then she took a pair of blackened kitchen scissors, and snipped off
the bottom half-inch of stem from each of the daffodils.

I said, “Are you sure it's not that man's ghost
doing this? Are you sure we aren't being haunted?”

They both laughed then, the girl and the old woman,
and I felt stupid. I said, “Sorry.”

“Ghosts can't make things,” said Lettie. “They
aren't even good at moving things.”

Old Mrs. Hempstock said, “Go and get your mother.
She's doing laundry.” Then, to me, “You shall help me with the daffs.”

I helped her put the flowers into the vases, and
she asked my opinion on where to put the vases in the kitchen. We placed the
vases where I suggested, and I felt wonderfully important.

The daffodils sat like patches of sunlight, making
that dark wooden kitchen even more cheerful. The floor was made of red and
gray flagstones. The walls were whitewashed.

The old woman gave me a lump of honeycomb, from the
Hempstocks' own beehive, on a chipped saucer, and poured a little cream over it
from a jug. I ate it with a spoon, chewing the wax like gum, letting the honey
flow into my mouth, sweet and sticky with an aftertaste of wildflowers.

I was scraping the last of the cream and honey from
the saucer when Lettie and her mother came into the kitchen. Mrs. Hempstock
still had big Wellington boots on, and she strode in as if she were in an
enormous hurry. “Mother!” she said. “Giving the boy honey. You'll rot his
teeth.”

Old Mrs. Hempstock shrugged. “I'll have a word with
the wigglers in his mouth,” she said. “Get them to leave his teeth alone.”

“You can't just boss bacteria around like that,”
said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. “They don't like it.”

“Stuff and silliness,” said the old lady. “You
leave wigglers alone and they'll be carrying on like anything. Show them who's
boss and they can't do enough for you. You've tasted my cheese.” She turned to
me. “I've won medals for my cheese. Medals. Back in the old king's day there
were those who'd ride for a week to buy a round of my cheese. They said that the
king himself had it with his bread and his boys, Prince Dickon and Prince
Geoffrey and even little Prince John, they swore it was the finest cheese they
had ever tasted—”

“Gran,” said Lettie, and the old lady stopped,
mid-flow.

Lettie's mother said, “You'll be needing a hazel
wand. And,” she added, somewhat doubtfully, “I suppose you could take the lad.
It's his coin, and it'll be easier to carry if he's with you. Something she
made.”

“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.

L
ettie 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.