The Ocean at the End of the Lane (10 page)

My mother's foot came down. She took a step and
then she stopped.

My father said, “Um.”

Ginnie said, “ . . . and it made our
Lettie so happy that your boy would come here and stay the night. It's a bit
old-fashioned here, I'm afraid.”

The old woman said, “We've got an inside lavvy
nowadays. I don't know how much more modern anybody could be. Outside lavvies
and chamber pots were good enough for me.”

“He ate a fine meal,” said Ginnie to me. “Didn't
you?”

“There was pie,” I told my parents. “For
dessert.”

My father's brow was creased. He looked confused.
Then he put his hand into the pocket of his car coat, and pulled out something
long and green, with toilet paper wrapped around the top. “You forgot your
toothbrush,” he said. “Thought you'd want it.”

“Now, if he wants to come home, he can come home,”
my mother was saying to Ginnie Hempstock. “He went to stay the night at the
Kovacses' house a few months ago, and by nine he was calling us to come and get
him.”

Christopher Kovacs was two years older and a head
taller than me, and he lived with his mother in a large cottage opposite the
entrance to our lane, by the old green water tower. His mother was divorced. I
liked her. She was funny, and drove a VW Beetle, the first I had ever seen.
Christopher owned many books I had not read, and was a member of the Puffin
Club. I could read his Puffin books, but only if I went to his house. He would
never let me borrow them.

There was a bunk bed in Christopher's bedroom,
although he was an only child. I was given the bottom bunk, the night I stayed
there. Once I was in bed, and Christopher Kovacs's mother had said good night to
us and she had turned out the bedroom light and closed the door, he leaned down
and began squirting me with a water pistol he had hidden beneath his pillow. I
had not known what to do.

“This isn't like when I went to Christopher
Kovacs's house,” I told my mother, embarrassed. “I
like
it here.”

“What
are
you wearing?” She stared at my Wee Willie
Winkie nightgown in puzzlement.

Ginnie said, “He had a little accident. He's
wearing that while his pajamas are drying.”

“Oh. I see,” said my mother. “Well, good night,
dear. Have a nice time with your new friend.” She peered down at Lettie. “What's
your name again, dear?”

“Lettie,” said Lettie Hempstock.

“Is it short for Letitia?” asked my mother. “I knew
a Letitia when I was at university. Of course, everybody called her
Lettuce.”

Lettie just smiled, and did not say anything at
all.

My father put my toothbrush down on the table in
front of me. I unwrapped the toilet paper around the head. It was, unmistakably,
my green toothbrush. Under his car coat my father was wearing a clean white
shirt, and no tie.

I said, “Thank you.”

“So,” said my mother. “What time should we be by to
pick him up in the morning?”

Ginnie smiled even wider. “Oh, Lettie will bring
him back to you. We should give them some time to play, tomorrow morning. Now,
before you go, I baked some scones this afternoon . . .”

And she put some scones into a paper bag, which my
mother took politely, and Ginnie ushered her and my father out of the door. I
held my breath until I heard the sound of the Rover driving away back up the
lane.

“What did you do to them?” I asked. And then, “Is
this really my toothbrush?”

“That,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock, with satisfaction
in her voice, “was a very respectable job of snipping and stitching, if you ask
me.” She held up my dressing gown: I could not see where she had removed a
piece, nor where she had stitched it up. It was seamless, the mend invisible.
She passed me the scrap of fabric on the table that she had cut. “Here's your
evening,” she said. “You can keep it, if you wish. But if I were you, I'd burn
it.”

The rain pattered against the window, and the wind
rattled the window frames.

I picked up the jagged-edged sliver of cloth. It
was damp. I got up, waking the kitten, who sprang off my lap and vanished into
the shadows. I walked over to the fireplace.

“If I burn this,” I asked them, “will it have
really happened? Will my daddy have pushed me down into the bath? Will I forget
it ever happened?”

Ginnie Hempstock was no longer smiling. Now she
looked concerned. “What do
you
want?” she asked.

“I
want
to remember,” I said. “Because it happened
to me. And I'm still me.” I threw the little scrap of cloth onto the fire.

There was a crackle and the cloth smoked, then it
began to burn.

I was under the water. I was holding on to my
father's tie. I thought he was going to kill me . . .

I screamed.

I was lying on the flagstone floor of the
Hempstocks' kitchen and I was rolling and screaming. My foot felt like I had
trodden, barefoot, on a burning cinder. The pain was intense. There was another
pain, too, deep inside my chest, more distant, not as sharp: a discomfort, not a
burning.

Ginnie was beside me. “What's wrong?”

“My foot. It's on fire. It hurts so much.”

She examined it, then licked her finger, touched it
to the hole in my sole from which I had pulled the worm, two days before. There
was a hissing noise, and the pain in my foot began to ease.

“En't never seen one of these before,” said Ginnie
Hempstock. “How did you get it?”

“There was a worm inside me,” I told her. “That was
how it came with us from the place with the orangey sky. In my foot.” And then I
looked at Lettie, who had crouched beside me and was now holding my hand, and I
said, “I brought it back. It was my fault. I'm sorry.”

Old Mrs. Hempstock was the last to reach me. She
leaned over, pulled the sole of my foot up and into the light. “Nasty,” she
said. “And very clever. She left the hole inside you so she could use it again.
She could have hidden inside you, if she needed to, used you as a door to go
home. No wonder she wanted to keep you in the attic. So. Let's strike while the
iron's hot, as the soldier said when he entered the laundry.” She prodded the
hole in my foot with her finger. It still hurt, but the pain had faded, a
little. Now it felt like a throbbing headache inside my foot.

Something fluttered in my chest, like a tiny moth,
and then was still.

Old Mrs. Hempstock said, “Can you be brave?”

I did not know. I did not think so. It seemed to me
that all I had done so far that night was to run from things. The old woman was
holding the needle she had used to sew up my dressing gown, and she grasped it
now, not as if she were going to sew anything with it, but as if she were
planning to stab me.

I pulled my foot back. “What are you going to
do?”

Lettie squeezed my hand. “She's going to make the
hole go away,” she said. “I'll hold your hand. You don't have to look, not if
you don't want to.”

“It will hurt,” I said.

“Stuff and nonsense,” said the old woman. She
pulled my foot toward her, so the sole was facing her, and stabbed the needle
down . . . not into my foot, I realized, but into the hole itself.

It did not hurt.

Then she twisted the needle and pulled it back
toward her. I watched, amazed, as something that glistened—it seemed black, at
first, then translucent, then reflective like mercury—was pulled out from the
sole of my foot, on the end of the needle.

I could feel it leaving my leg—the sensation seemed
to travel up all the way inside me, up my leg, through my groin and my stomach
and into my chest. I felt it leave me with relief: the burning feeling abated,
as did my terror.

My heart pounded strangely.

I watched Old Mrs. Hempstock reel the thing in, and
I was still unable, somehow, to entirely make sense of what I was seeing. It was
a hole with nothing around it, over two feet long, thinner than an earthworm,
like the shed skin of a translucent snake.

And then she stopped reeling it in. “Doesn't want
to come out,” she said. “It's holding on.”

There was a coldness in my heart, as if a chip of
ice were lodged there. The old woman gave an expert flick of her wrist, and then
the glistening thing was dangling from her needle (I found myself thinking now
not of mercury, but of the silvery slime trails that snails leave in the
garden), and it no longer went into my foot.

She let go of my sole and I pulled the foot back.
The tiny round hole had vanished completely, as if it had never been there.

Old Mrs. Hempstock cackled with glee. “Thinks she's
so clever,” she said, “leaving her way home inside the boy. Is that clever? I
don't think that's clever. I wouldn't give tuppence for the lot of them.”

Ginnie Hempstock produced an empty jam jar, and the
old woman put the bottom of the dangling thing into it, then raised the jar to
hold it. At the end, she slipped the glistening invisible trail off the needle
and put the lid on the jam jar with a decisive flick of her bony wrist.

“Ha!” she said. And again, “Ha!”

Lettie said, “Can I see it?” She took the jam jar,
held it up to the light. Inside the jar the thing had begun lazily to uncurl. It
seemed to be floating, as if the jar had been filled with water. It changed
color as it caught the light in different ways, sometimes black, sometimes
silver.

An experiment that I had found in a book of things
boys could do, and which I had, of course, done: if you take an egg, and blacken
it completely with soot from a candle flame, and then put it into a clear
container filled with salt water, it will hang in the middle of the water, and
it will seem to be silver: a peculiar, artificial silver, that is only a trick
of the light. I thought of that egg, then.

Lettie seemed fascinated. “You're right. She left
her way home inside him. No wonder she didn't want him to leave.”

I said, “I'm sorry I let go of your hand,
Lettie.”

“Oh, hush,” she said. “It's always too late for
sorries, but I appreciate the sentiment. And next time, you'll keep hold of my
hand no matter what she throws at us.”

I nodded. The ice chip in my heart seemed to warm
then, and melt, and I began to feel whole and safe once more.

“So,” said Ginnie. “We've got her way home. And
we've got the boy safe. That's a good night's work or I don't know what is.”

“But she's got the boy's parents,” said Old Mrs.
Hempstock. “And his sister. And we can't just leave her running around. Remember
what happened in Cromwell's day? And before that? When Red Rufus was running
around? Fleas attract varmints.” She said it as if it were a natural law.

“That can wait until the morrow,” said Ginnie.
“Now, Lettie. Take the lad and find a room for him to sleep in. He's had a long
day.”

The black kitten was curled up on the rocking chair
beside the fireplace. “Can I bring the kitten with me?”

“If you don't,” said Lettie, “she'll just come and
find you.”

Ginnie produced two candlesticks, the kind with big
round handles, each one with a shapeless mound of white wax in it. She lit a
wooden taper from the kitchen fire, then transferred the flame from the taper
first to one candlewick and then to the other. She handed one candlestick to me,
the other to Lettie.

“Don't you have electricity?” I asked. There were
electric lights in the kitchen, big old-fashioned bulbs hanging from the
ceiling, their filaments glowing.

“Not in that part of the house,” said Lettie. “The
kitchen's new. Sort of. Put your hand in front of your candle as you walk, so it
doesn't blow out.”

She cupped her own hand around the flame as she
said this, and I copied her, and I walked behind her. The black kitten followed
us, out of the kitchen, through a wooden door painted white, down a step, and
into the farmhouse.

It was dark, and our candles cast huge shadows, so
it looked to me, as we walked, as if everything was moving, pushed and shaped by
the shadows, the grandfather clock and the stuffed animals and birds (
Were
they
stuffed? I wondered. Did that owl move, or was it just the flickering candle
flame that made me think that it had turned its head as we passed?), the hall
table, the chairs. All of them moved in the candlelight, and all of them stayed
perfectly still. We went up a set of stairs, and then up some steps, and we
passed an open window.

Moonlight spilled onto the stairs, brighter than
our candle flames. I glanced up through the window and I saw the full moon. The
cloudless sky was splashed with stars beyond all counting.

“That's the moon,” I said.

“Gran likes it like that,” said Lettie
Hempstock.

“But it was a crescent moon yesterday. And now it's
full. And it was raining. It
is
raining. But now it's not.”

“Gran always likes the full moon to shine on this
side of the house. She says it's restful, and it reminds her of when she was a
girl,” said Lettie. “And it means you don't trip on the stairs.”

The kitten followed us up the stairs in a sequence
of bounces. It made me smile.

At the top of the house was Lettie's room, and
beside it, another room, and it was this room that we entered. A fire blazed in
the hearth, illuminating the room with oranges and yellows. The room was warm
and inviting. The bed had posts at each corner, and it had its own curtains. I
had seen something like it in cartoons, but never in real life.