The Ocean at the End of the Lane (14 page)

“It's not a real fairy ring,” I told her. “That's
just our games. It's a green circle of grass.”

“It is what it is,” she said. “Nothing that wants
to hurt you can cross it. Now, stay inside.” She squeezed my hand, and walked me
into the green grass circle. Then she ran off, into the rhododendron bushes, and
she was gone.

XII.

T
he shadows
began to gather around the edges of the circle. Formless blotches that were only
there, really there, when glimpsed from the corners of my eyes. That was when
they looked birdlike. That was when they looked hungry.

I have never been as frightened as I was in that
grass circle with the dead tree in the center, on that afternoon. No birds sang,
no insects hummed or buzzed. Nothing changed. I heard the rustle of the leaves
and the sigh of the grass as the wind passed over it, but Lettie Hempstock was
not there, and I heard no voices in the breeze. There was nothing to scare me
but shadows, and the shadows were not even properly visible when I looked at
them directly.

The sun got lower in the sky, and the shadows
blurred into the dusk, became, if anything, more indistinct, so now I was not
certain that anything was there at all. But I did not leave the grass
circle.

“Hey! Boy!”

I turned. He walked across the lawn toward me. He
was dressed as he had been the last time I had seen him: a dinner jacket, a
frilly white shirt, a black bow-tie. His face was still an alarming cherry-red,
as if he had just spent too long on the beach, but his hands were white. He
looked like a waxwork, not a person, something you would expect to see in the
Chamber of Horrors. He grinned when he saw me looking at him, and now he looked
like a waxwork that was smiling, and I swallowed, and wished that the sun was
out again.

“Come on, boy,” said the opal miner. “You're just
prolonging the inevitable.”

I did not say a word. I watched him. His shiny
black shoes walked up to the grass circle, but they did not cross it.

My heart was pounding so hard in my chest I was
certain that he must have heard it. My neck and scalp prickled.

“Boy,” he said, in his sharp South African accent.
“They need to finish this up. It's what they do: they're the carrion kind, the
vultures of the void. Their job. Clean up the last remnants of the mess. Nice
and neat. Pull you from the world and it will be as if you never existed. Just
go with it. It won't hurt.”

I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when
it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.

The dead man in the dinner jacket turned his head
slowly, until his face was looking at mine. His eyes were rolled back in his
head, and seemed to be staring blindly at the sky above us, like a
sleepwalker.

“She can't save you, your little friend,” he said.
“Your fate was sealed and decided days ago, when their prey used you as a door
from its place to this one, and she fastened her path in your heart.”

“I didn't start it!” I told the dead man. “It's not
fair.
You
started it.”

“Yes,” said the dead man. “Are you coming?”

I sat down with my back to the dead tree in the
center of the fairy ring, and I closed my eyes, and I did not move. I remembered
poems to distract myself, recited them silently under my breath, mouthing the
words but making no sound.

Fury said to a mouse that he met in the house let
us both go to law I will prosecute you . . .

I had learned that poem by heart at my school. It
was told by the Mouse from
Alice in Wonderland,
the Mouse she met swimming in
the pool of her own tears. In my copy of
Alice
the words of the poem curled and
shrank like a mouse's tail.

I could say all of the poem in one long breath, and
I did, all the way to the inevitable end.

I'll be judge I'll be jury said cunning old Fury
I'll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.

When I opened my eyes and looked up the opal miner
was no longer there.

The sky was going gray and the world was losing
depth and flattening into twilight. If the shadows were still there I could no
longer perceive them; or rather, the whole world had become shadows.

My little sister ran down from the house, calling
my name. She stopped before she reached me, and she said, “What are you
doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Daddy's on the phone. He says you have to come and
talk to him.”

“No. He doesn't.”

“What?”

“He doesn't say that.”

“If you don't come now, you'll be in trouble.”

I did not know if this was my sister or not, but I
was on the inside of the grass circle, and she was on the outside.

I wished I had brought a book with me, even though
it was almost too dark to read. I said the Mouse's “Pool of Tears” poem again,
in my head.
Come I'll take no denial we must have a trial for really this
morning I've nothing to do . . .

“Where's Ursula?” asked my sister. “She went up to
her room, but she isn't there anymore. She's not in the kitchen and she's not in
the loo-lahs. I want my tea. I'm hungry.”

“You can make yourself something to eat,” I told
her. “You're not a baby.”

“Where's Ursula?”

She was ripped to shreds by alien vulture-monsters
and honestly I think you're one of them or being controlled by them or
something.

“Don't know.”

“I'm telling Mummy and Daddy when they get home
that you were horrible to me today. You'll get into trouble.” I wondered if this
was actually my sister or not. It definitely sounded like her. But she did not
take a step over the circle of greener grass, into the ring. She stuck her
tongue out at me, and ran back toward the house.

Said the mouse to the cur such a trial dear sir
with no jury or judge would be wasting our breath . . .

Deep twilit dusk, all colorless and strained.
Mosquitoes whined about my ears and landed, one by one, on my cheeks and my
hands. I was glad I was wearing Lettie Hempstock's cousin's strange
old-fashioned clothing, then, because I had less bare skin exposed. I slapped at
the insects as they landed, and some of them flew off. One that didn't fly away,
gorging itself on the inside of my wrist, burst when I hit it, leaving a smeared
teardrop of my blood to run down the inside of my arm.

There were bats flying above me. I liked bats,
always had, but that night there were so many of them, and they made me think of
the hunger birds, and I shuddered.

Twilight became, imperceptibly, night, and now I
was sitting in a circle that I could no longer see, at the bottom of the garden.
Lights, friendly electric lights, went on in the house.

I did not want to be scared of the dark. I was not
scared of any real thing. I just did not want to be there any longer, waiting in
the darkness for my friend who had run away from me and did not seem to be
coming back.

. . . said cunning old Fury I'll try the
whole cause and condemn you to death.

I stayed just where I was. I had seen Ursula
Monkton torn to shreds, and the shreds devoured by scavengers from outside the
universe of things that I understood. If I went out of the circle, I was
certain, they would do the same to me.

I moved from Lewis Carroll to Gilbert and
Sullivan.

When you're lying awake with a dismal headache and
repose is taboo'd by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to
indulge in without impropriety . . .

I loved the sound of the words, even if I was not
entirely sure what all of them meant.

I needed to wee. I turned my back on the house,
took a few steps away from the tree, scared I would take one step too far and
find myself outside the circle. I urinated into the darkness. I had just
finished when I was blinded by a torch beam, and my father's voice said, “What
on earth are you doing down here?”

“I . . . I'm just down here,” I said.

“Yes. Your sister said. Well, time to come back to
the house. Your dinner's on the table.”

I stayed where I was. “No,” I said, and shook my
head.

“Don't be silly.”

“I'm not being silly. I'm staying here.”

“Come on.” And then, more cheerful, “Come on,
Handsome George.” It had been his silly pet name for me, when I was a baby. He
even had a song that went with it that he would sing while bouncing me on his
lap. It was the best song in the world.

I didn't say anything.

“I'm not going to carry you back to the house,”
said my father. There was an edge starting to creep into his voice. “You're too
big for that.”

Yes,
I thought.
And you'd have to cross into the
fairy ring to pick me up.

But the fairy ring seemed foolish now. This was my
father, not some waxwork thing that the hunger birds had made to lure me out. It
was night. My father had come home from work. It was time.

I said, “Ursula Monkton's gone away. And she's not
ever coming back.”

He sounded irritated, then. “What did you do? Did
you say something horrible to her? Were you rude?”

“No.”

He shone the torch beam onto my face. The light was
almost blinding. He seemed to be fighting to keep his temper under control. He
said, “Tell me what you said to her.”

“I didn't say anything to her. She just went
away.”

It was true, or almost.

“Come back to the house, now.”

“Please, Daddy. I have to stay here.”

“You come back to the house this minute!” shouted
my father, at the top of his voice, and I could not help it: my lower lip shook,
my nose started to run, and tears sprang to my eyes. The tears blurred my vision
and stung, but they did not fall, and I blinked them away.

I did not know if I was talking to my own father or
not.

I said, “I don't like it when you shout at me.”

“Well, I don't like it when you act like a little
animal!” he shouted, and now I was crying, and the tears were running down my
face, and I wished that I was anywhere else but there that night.

I had stood up to worse things than him in the last
few hours. And suddenly, I didn't care anymore. I looked up at the dark shape
behind and above the torch beam, and I said, “Does it make you feel big to make
a little boy cry?” and I knew as I said it that it was the thing I should never
have said.

His face, what I could see of it in the reflected
torchlight, crumpled, and looked shocked. He opened his mouth to speak, then he
closed it again. I could not remember my father ever at a loss for words, before
or after. Only then. I felt terrible. I thought,
I will die here soon. I do not
want to die with those words on my lips.

But the torch beam was turning away from me. My
father said only, “We'll be up at the house. I'll put your dinner in the
oven.”

I watched the torchlight move back across the lawn,
past the rosebushes and up toward the house, until it went out, and was lost to
sight. I heard the back door open and close again.

Then you get some repose in the form of a doze with
hot eyeballs and head ever aching but your slumbering teems with such horrible
dreams that you'd very much better be waking . . .

Somebody laughed. I stopped singing, and looked
around, but saw nobody.

“ ‘The Nightmare Song,' ” a voice said. “How
appropriate.”

She walked closer, until I could see her face.
Ursula Monkton was still quite naked, and she was smiling. I had seen her torn
to pieces a few hours before, but now she was whole. Even so, she looked less
solid than any of the other people I had seen that night; I could see the lights
of the house glimmering behind her, through her. Her smile had not changed.

“You're dead,” I told her.

“Yes. I was eaten,” said Ursula Monkton.

“You're dead. You aren't real.”

“I was eaten,” she repeated. “I am nothing. And
they have let me out, just for a little while, from the place inside them. It's
cold in there, and very empty. But they have promised you to me, so I will have
something to play with; something to keep me company in the dark. And after you
have been eaten, you too will be nothing. But whatever remains of that nothing
will be mine to keep, eaten and together, my toy and my distraction, until the
end of time. We'll have such
fun
.”

A ghost of a hand was raised, and it touched the
smile, and it blew me the ghost of Ursula Monkton's kiss.

“I'll be waiting for you,” she said.

A rustle in the rhododendrons behind me and a
voice, cheerful and female and young, saying, “It's okay. Gran fixed it.
Everything's taken care of. Come on.”

The moon was visible now above the azalea bush, a
bright crescent like a thick nail paring.

I sat down by the dead tree, and did not move.