The Ocean at the End of the Lane (12 page)

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, just 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, half-squashed,
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 jam jar 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 you 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 thing
fleas,
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.