The Ocean at the End of the Lane (13 page)

“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.

Da da DUM da da

da da DUM da da

da da DUM da DUM da DUM da da
. . .

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?

XI.

W
e caught
up with Ursula Monkton on the lawn, by the rosebushes. She was holding the jam
jar with the drifting wormhole inside it. She looked strange. She tugged at the
lid, and then stopped and looked up at the sky. Then she looked back to the jam
jar once more.

She ran over to my beech tree, the one with the
rope ladder, and she threw the jam jar as hard as she could against the trunk.
If she was trying to break it, she failed. The jar simply bounced off, and
landed on the moss that half-covered the tangle of roots, and lay there,
undamaged.

Ursula Monkton glared at Lettie. “Why?” she
said.

“You know why,” said Lettie.

“Why would you let them in?” She had started to
cry, and I felt uncomfortable. I did not know what to do when adults cried. It
was something I had only seen twice before in my life: I had seen my
grandparents cry, when my aunt had died, in hospital, and I had seen my mother
cry. Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort
them.

I wondered if Ursula Monkton had ever had a mother.
She had mud on her face and on her knees, and she was wailing.

I heard a sound in the distance, odd and
outlandish: a low thrumming, as if someone had plucked at a taut piece of
string.

“It won't be me that lets them in,” said Lettie
Hempstock. “They go where they wants to. They usually don't come here because
there's nothing for them to eat. Now, there is.”

“Send me back,” said Ursula Monkton. And now I did
not think she looked even faintly human. Her face was wrong, somehow: an
accidental assemblage of features that simply put me in mind of a human face,
like the knobbly gray whorls and lumps on the side of my beech tree, or the
patterns in the wooden headboard of the bed at my grandmother's house, which, if
I looked at them wrongly in the moonlight, showed me an old man with his mouth
open wide, as if he were screaming.

Lettie picked up the jam jar from the green moss,
and twisted the lid. “You've gone and got it stuck tight,” she said. She walked
over to the rock path, turned the jam jar upside down, holding it at the bottom,
and banged it, lid-side-down, once, confidently, against the ground. Then she
turned it the right side up, and twisted. This time the lid came off in her
hand.

She passed the jam jar to Ursula Monkton, who
reached inside it, and pulled out the translucent thing that had once been a
hole in my foot. It writhed and wiggled and flexed seemingly in delight at her
touch.

She threw it down. It fell onto the grass, and it
grew. Only it didn't grow. It
changed:
as if it was closer to me than I had
thought. I could see through it, from one end to the other. I could have run
down it, if the far end of that tunnel had not ended in a bitter orange sky.

As I stared at it, my chest twinged again: an
ice-cold feeling, as if I had just eaten so much ice cream that I had chilled my
insides.

Ursula Monkton walked toward the tunnel mouth. (How
could the tiny wormhole be a tunnel? I could not understand it. It was still a
glistening translucent silver-black wormhole, on the grass, no more than a foot
or so long. It was as if I had zoomed in on something small, I suppose. But it
was also a tunnel, and you could have taken a house through it.)

Then she stopped, and she wailed.

She said, “The way back.” Only that. “Incomplete,”
she said. “It's broken. The last of the gate isn't there . . .” And
she looked around her, troubled and puzzled. She focused on me—not my face, but
my chest. And she smiled.

Then she
shook.
One moment she was an adult woman,
naked and muddy, the next, as if she was a flesh-colored umbrella, she
unfurled.

And as she unfurled, she reached out, and she
grabbed me, pulled me up and high off the ground, and I reached out in fear and
held her in my turn.

I was holding flesh. I was fifteen feet or more
above the ground, as high as a tree.

I was not holding flesh.

I was holding old fabric, a perished, rotting
canvas, and, beneath it, I could feel wood. Not good, solid wood, but the kind
of old decayed wood I'd find where trees had crumbled, the kind that always felt
wet, that I could pull apart with my fingers, soft wood with tiny beetles in it
and woodlice, all filled with threadlike fungus.

It creaked and swayed as it held me.

YOU HAVE BLOCKED THE WAYS, it said to Lettie
Hempstock.

“I never blocked nothing,” Lettie said. “You've got
my friend. Put him down.” She was a long way beneath me, and I was scared of
heights and I was scared of the creature that was holding me.

THE PATH IS INCOMPLETE. THE WAYS ARE BLOCKED.

“Put him down. Now. Safely.”

HE COMPLETES THE PATH. THE PATH IS INSIDE HIM.

I was certain that I would die, then.

I did not want to die. My parents had told me that
I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they
died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be
back again, soon enough. I did not know if this was true or not. I knew only
that I was used to being me, and I liked my books and my grandparents and Lettie
Hempstock, and that death would take all these things from me.

I WILL OPEN HIM. THE WAY IS BROKEN. IT REMAINS
INSIDE HIM.

I would have kicked, but there was nothing to kick
against. I pulled with my fingers at the limb holding me, but my fingernails dug
into rotting cloth and soft wood, and beneath it, something as hard as bone; and
the creature held me close.

“Let me go!” I shouted. “Let! Me! Go!”

NO.

“Mummy!” I shouted. “Daddy!” Then, “Lettie, make
her put me down.”

My parents were not there. Lettie was. She said,
“Skarthach. Put him down. I gave you a choice, before. Sending you home will be
harder, with the end of your tunnel inside him. But we can do it—and Gran can do
it if Mum and me can't. So put him down.”

IT IS INSIDE HIM. IT IS NOT A TUNNEL. NOT ANY
LONGER. IT DOES NOT END. I FASTENED THE PATH INSIDE HIM TOO WELL WHEN I MADE IT
AND THE LAST OF IT IS STILL INSIDE HIM. NO MATTER. ALL I NEED TO DO TO GET AWAY
FROM HERE IS TO REACH INTO HIS CHEST AND PULL OUT HIS BEATING HEART AND FINISH
THE PATH AND OPEN THE DOOR.

It was talking without words, the faceless flapping
thing, talking directly inside my head, and yet there was something in its words
that reminded me of Ursula Monkton's pretty, musical voice. I knew it meant what
it said.

“All of your chances are used up,” said Lettie, as
if she were telling us that the sky was blue. And she raised two fingers to her
lips and, shrill and sweet and piercing sharp, she whistled.

They came as if they had been waiting for her
call.

High in the sky they were, and black, jet-black, so
black it seemed as if they were specks on my eyes, not real things at all. They
had wings, but they were not birds. They were older than birds, and they flew in
circles and in loops and whorls, dozens of them, hundreds perhaps, and each
flapping unbird slowly, ever so slowly, descended.

I found myself imagining a valley filled with
dinosaurs, millions of years ago, who had died in battle, or of disease:
imagining first the carcasses of the rotting thunder-lizards, bigger than buses,
and then the vultures of that aeon: gray-black, naked, winged but featherless;
faces from nightmares—beak-like snouts filled with needle-sharp teeth, made for
rending and tearing and devouring, and hungry red eyes. These creatures would
have descended on the corpses of the great thunder-lizards and left nothing but
bones.

Huge, they were, and sleek, and ancient, and it
hurt my eyes to look at them.

“Now,” said Lettie Hempstock to Ursula Monkton.
“Put him down.”

The thing that held me made no move to drop me. It
said nothing, just moved swiftly, like a raggedy tall ship, across the grass
toward the tunnel.

I could see the anger in Lettie Hempstock's face,
her fists clenched so tightly the knuckles were white. I could see above us the
hunger birds circling, circling . . .

And then one of them dropped from the sky, dropped
faster than the mind could imagine. I felt a rush of air beside me, saw a black,
black jaw filled with needles and eyes that burned like gas jets, and I heard a
ripping noise, like a curtain being torn apart.

The flying thing swooped back up into the sky with
a length of gray cloth between its jaws.

I heard a voice wailing inside my head and out of
it, and the voice was Ursula Monkton's.

They descended, then, as if they had all been
waiting for the first of their number to move. They fell from the sky onto the
thing that held me, nightmares tearing at a nightmare, pulling off strips of
fabric, and through it all I heard Ursula Monkton crying.

I ONLY GAVE THEM WHAT THEY NEEDED, she was saying,
petulant and afraid. I MADE THEM HAPPY.

“You made my daddy hurt me,” I said, as the thing
that was holding me flailed at the nightmares that tore at its fabric. The
hunger birds ripped at it, each bird silently tearing away strips of cloth and
flapping heavily back into the sky, to wheel and descend again.

I NEVER MADE ANY OF THEM DO ANYTHING, it told me.
For a moment I thought it was laughing at me, then the laughter became a scream,
so loud it hurt my ears and my mind.

It was as if the wind left the tattered sails then,
and the thing that was holding me crumpled slowly to the ground.

I hit the grass hard, skinning my knees and the
palms of my hands. Lettie pulled me up, helped me away from the fallen, crumpled
remains of what had once called itself Ursula Monkton.

There was still gray cloth, but it was not cloth:
it writhed and rolled on the ground around me, blown by no wind that I could
perceive, a squirming maggoty mess.

The hunger birds landed on it like seagulls on a
beach of stranded fish, and they tore at it as if they had not eaten for a
thousand years and needed to stuff themselves now, as it might be another
thousand years or longer before they would eat again. They tore at the gray
stuff and in my mind I could hear it screaming the whole time as they crammed
its rotting-canvas flesh into their sharp maws.

Lettie held my arm. She didn't say anything.

We waited.

And when the screaming stopped, I knew that Ursula
Monkton was gone forever.

Once the black creatures had finished devouring the
thing on the grass, and nothing remained, not even the tiniest scrap of gray
cloth, then they turned their attentions to the translucent tunnel, which
wiggled and wriggled and twitched like a living thing. Several of them grasped
it in their claws, and they flew up with it, pulling it into the sky while the
rest of them tore at it, demolishing it with their hungry mouths.

I thought that when they finished it they would go
away, return to wherever they had come from, but they did not. They descended. I
tried to count them, as they landed, and I failed. I had thought that there were
hundreds of them, but I might have been wrong. There might have been twenty of
them. There might have been a thousand. I could not explain it: perhaps they
were from a place where such things as counting didn't apply, somewhere outside
of time and numbers.

They landed, and I stared at them, but saw nothing
but shadows.

So many shadows.

And they were staring at us.

Lettie said, “You've done what you came here for.
You got your prey. You cleaned up. You can go home now.”

The shadows did not move.

She said, “Go!”

The shadows on the grass stayed exactly where they
were. If anything they seemed darker, more real than they had been before.

–
You have no power over us.

“Perhaps I don't,” said Lettie. “But I called you
here, and now I'm telling you to go home. You devoured Skarthach of the Keep.
You've done your business. Now clear off.”

–
We are cleaners. We came to clean.

“Yes, and you've cleaned the thing you came for. Go
home.”

–
Not everything,
sighed the wind in the
rhododendron bushes and the rustle of the grass.

Lettie turned to me, and put her arms around me.
“Come on,” she said. “Quickly.”

We walked across the lawn, rapidly. “I'm taking you
down to the fairy ring,” she said. “You have to wait there until I come and get
you. Don't leave. Not for anything.”

“Why not?”

“Because something bad could happen to you. I don't
think I could get you back to the farmhouse safely, and I can't fix this on my
own. But you're safe in the ring. Whatever you see, whatever you hear, don't
leave it. Just stay where you are and you'll be fine.”