The Ocean at the End of the Lane (8 page)

I hesitated, uncertain where to go next. As if in
answer, the world was illuminated, for a moment, but I only needed a moment, by
lightning. I saw a wooden stile, and I ran for it.

Over the stile. I came down into a clump of
nettles, I knew, as the hot-cold pricking burning covered my exposed ankles and
the tops of my feet, but I ran again, now, ran as best I could. I hoped I was
still heading for the Hempstocks' farm. I had to be. I crossed one more field
before I realized that I no longer knew where the lane was, or for that matter,
where I was. I knew only that the Hempstocks' farm was at the end of my lane,
but I was lost in a dark field, and the thunderclouds had lowered, and the night
was so dark, and it was still raining, even if it was not raining hard yet, and
now my imagination filled the darkness with wolves and ghosts. I wanted to stop
imagining, to stop thinking, but I could not.

And behind the wolves and the ghosts and the trees
that walked, there was Ursula Monkton, telling me that the next time I disobeyed
her it would be so much worse for me, that she would lock me in the attic.

I was not brave. I was running away from
everything, and I was cold, and wet and lost.

I shouted, at the top of my voice, “Lettie? Lettie
Hempstock! Hello?” but there was no reply, and I had not expected one.

The thunder grumbled and rumbled into a low
continuous roar, a lion pushed into irritability, and the lightning was flashing
and flickering like a malfunctioning fluorescent tube. In the flickers of light,
I could see that the area of field I was in came to a point, with hedges on both
sides, and no way through. I could see no gate, and no stile other than the one
I had come in through, at the far end of the field.

Something crackled.

I looked up at the sky. I had seen lightning in
films on the television, long jagged forks of light across the clouds. But the
lightning I had seen until now with my own eyes was simply a white flash from
above, like the flash of a camera, burning the world in a strobe of visibility.
What I saw in the sky then was not that.

It was not forked lightning either.

It came and it went, a writhing, burning
blue-whiteness in the sky. It died back and then it flared up, and its flares
and flickers illuminated the meadow, made it something I could see. The rain
pattered hard, and it whipped against my face, moved in a moment from a drizzle
to a downpour. In seconds my dressing gown was soaked through. But in the light
I saw—or thought I saw—an opening in the hedgerow to my right, and I walked, for
I could no longer run, not any longer, as fast as I could, toward it, hoping it
was something real. My wet gown flapped in the gusting wind, and the sound of
the flapping cloth horrified me.

I did not look up in the sky. I did not look behind
me.

But I could see the far end of the field, and there
was indeed a space between the hedgerows. I had almost reached it when a voice
said,

“I thought I told you to stay in your room. And now
I find you sneaking around like a drowned sailor.”

I turned, looked behind me, saw nothing at all.
There was nobody there.

Then I looked up.

The thing that called itself Ursula Monkton hung in
the air, about twenty feet above me, and lightnings crawled and flickered in the
sky behind her. She was not flying. She was floating, weightless as a balloon,
although the sharp gusts of wind did not move her.

Wind howled and whipped at my face. The distant
thunder roared and smaller thunders crackled and spat, and she spoke quietly,
but I could hear every word she said as distinctly as if she were whispering
into my ears.

“Oh, sweety-weety-pudding-and-pie, you are in so
much trouble.”

She was smiling, the hugest, toothiest grin I had
ever seen on a human face, but she did not look amused.

I had been running from her through the darkness
for, what, half an hour? An hour? I wished I had stayed on the lane and not
tried to cut across the fields. I would have been at the Hempstocks' farm by
now. Instead, I was lost and I was trapped.

Ursula Monkton came lower. Her pink blouse was open
and unbuttoned. She wore a white bra. Her midi skirt flapped in the wind,
revealing her calves. She did not appear to be wet, despite the storm. Her
clothes, her face, her hair, were perfectly dry.

She was floating above me, now, and she reached out
her hands.

Every move she made, everything she did, was
strobed by the tame lightnings that flickered and writhed about her. Her fingers
opened like flowers in a speeded-up film, and I knew that she was playing with
me, and I knew what she wanted me to do, and I hated myself for not standing my
ground, but I did what she wanted: I ran.

I was a little thing that amused her. She was
playing, just as I had seen Monster, the big orange tomcat, play with a
mouse—letting it go, so that it would run, and then pouncing, and batting it
down with a paw. But the mouse still ran, and I had no choice, and I ran
too.

I ran for the break in the hedge, as fast as I
could, stumbling and hurting and wet.

Her voice was in my ears as I ran.

“I told you I was going to lock you in the attic,
didn't I? And I will. Your daddy likes me now. He'll do whatever I say. Perhaps
from now on, every night, he'll come up the ladder and let you out of the attic.
He'll make you climb down from the attic. Down the ladder. And every night,
he'll drown you in the bath, he'll plunge you into the cold, cold water. I'll
let him do it every night until it bores me, and then I'll tell him not to bring
you back, to simply push you under the water until you stop moving and until
there's nothing but darkness and water in your lungs. I'll have him leave you in
the cold bath, and you'll never move again. And every night I'll kiss him and
kiss him . . .”

I was through the gap in the hedgerow, and running
on soft grass.

The crackle of the lightning, and a strange sharp,
metallic smell, were so close they made my skin prickle. Everything around me
got brighter and brighter, illuminated by the flickering blue-white light.

“And when your daddy finally leaves you in the bath
for good, you'll be happy,” whispered Ursula Monkton, and I imagined that I
could feel her lips brushing my ears. “Because you won't like it in the attic.
Not just because it's dark up there, with the spiders, and the ghosts. But
because I'm going to bring my friends. You can't see them in the daylight, but
they'll be in the attic with you, and you won't enjoy them at all. They don't
like little boys, my friends. They'll pretend to be spiders as big as dogs. Old
clothes with nothing inside that tug at you and never let you go. The inside of
your head. And when you're in the attic there will be no books, and no stories,
not ever again.”

I had not imagined it. Her lips had brushed my ear.
She was floating in the air beside me, so her head was beside mine, and when she
caught me looking at her she smiled her pretend-smile, and I could not run any
longer. I could barely move. I had a stitch in my side, and I could not catch my
breath, and I was done.

My legs gave way beneath me, and I stumbled and
fell, and this time I did not get up.

I felt heat on my legs, and I looked down to see a
yellow stream coming from the front of my pajama trousers. I was seven years
old, no longer a little child, but I was wetting myself with fear, like a baby,
and there was nothing I could do about it, while Ursula Monkton hung in the air
a few feet above me and watched, dispassionately.

The hunt was done.

She stood up straight in the air, three feet above
the ground. I was sprawled beneath her, on my back, in the wet grass. She began
to descend, slowly, inexorably, like a person on a broken television screen.

Something touched my left hand. Something soft. It
nosed my hand, and I looked over, fearing a spider as big as a dog. Illuminated
by the lightnings that writhed about Ursula Monkton, I saw a patch of darkness
beside my hand. A patch of darkness with a white spot over one ear. I picked the
kitten up in my hand, and brought it to my heart, and I stroked it.

I said, “I won't come with you. You can't make me.”
I sat up, because I felt less vulnerable sitting, and the kitten curled and made
itself comfortable in my hand.

“Pudding-and-pie boy,” said Ursula Monkton. Her
feet touched the ground. She was illuminated by her own lightnings, like a
painting of a woman in grays and greens and blues, and not a real woman at all.
“You're just a little boy. I'm a grown-up. I was an adult when your world was a
ball of molten rock. I can do whatever I wish to you. Now, stand up. I'm taking
you home.”

The kitten, which was burrowing into my chest with
its face, made a high-pitched noise, not a mew. I turned, looking away from
Ursula Monkton, looking behind me.

The girl who was walking toward us, across the
field, wore a shiny red raincoat, with a hood, and a pair of black Wellington
boots that seemed too big for her. She walked out of the darkness, unafraid. She
looked up at Ursula Monkton.

“Get off my land,” said Lettie Hempstock.

Ursula Monkton took a step backwards and she rose,
at the same time, so she hung in the air above us. Lettie Hempstock reached out
to me, without glancing down at where I sat, and she took my hand, twining her
fingers into mine.

“I'm not touching your land,” said Ursula Monkton.
“Go away, little girl.”

“You are on my land,” said Lettie Hempstock.

Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed
and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air.
She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its
power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty. She winked at
me.

I was a seven-year-old boy, and my feet were
scratched and bleeding. I had just wet myself. And the thing that floated above
me was huge and greedy, and it wanted to take me to the attic, and, when it
tired of me, it would make my daddy kill me.

Lettie Hempstock's hand in my hand made me braver.
But Lettie was just a girl, even if she was a big girl, even if she was eleven,
even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult.
It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch,
every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight
children, adults always win.

Lettie said, “You should go back where you came
from in the first place. It's not healthy for you to be here. For your own good,
go back.”

A noise in the air, a horrible, twisted scratching
noise, filled with pain and with wrongness, a noise that set my teeth on edge
and made the kitten, its front paws resting on my chest, stiffen and its fur
prickle. The little thing twisted and clawed up onto my shoulder, and it hissed
and it spat. I looked up at Ursula Monkton. It was only when I saw her face that
I knew what the noise was.

Ursula Monkton was laughing.

“Go back? When your people ripped the hole in
Forever, I seized my chance. I could have ruled worlds, but I followed you, and
I waited, and I had patience. I knew that sooner or later the bounds would
loosen, that I would walk the true Earth, beneath the Sun of Heaven.” She was
not laughing now. “Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so
easily. They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this world,
like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush.”

I did not let go of Lettie's hand, not this time. I
stroked the kitten, whose needle-claws were digging into my shoulder, and I was
bitten for my trouble, but the kitten's bite was not hard, just scared.

Her voice came from all around us, as the
storm-wind gusted. “You kept me away from here for a long time. But then you
brought me a door, and I used him to carry me out of my cell. And what can you
do now that I am out?”

Lettie didn't seem angry. She thought about it,
then she said, “I could make you a new door. Or, better still, I could get
Granny to send you across the ocean, all the way to wherever you came from in
the beginning.”

Ursula Monkton spat onto the grass, and a tiny ball
of flame sputtered and fizzed on the ground, where the spit had fallen.

“Give me the boy,” was all she said. “He belongs to
me. I came here inside him. I own him.”

“You don't own nuffink, you don't,” said Lettie
Hempstock, angrily. “ 'Specially not him.” Lettie helped me to my feet, and she
stood behind me and put her arms around me. We were two children in a field in
the night. Lettie held me, and I held the kitten, while above us and all around
us a voice said,

“What will you do? Take him home with you? This
world is a world of rules, little girl. He belongs to his parents, after all.
Take him away and his parents will come to bring him home, and his parents
belong to me.”

“I'm all bored of you now,” said Lettie Hempstock.
“I gived you a chance. You're on my land. Go away.”

As she said that, my skin felt like it did when I'd
rubbed a balloon on my sweater, then touched it to my face and hair. Everything
prickled and tickled. My hair was soaked, but even wet, it felt like it was
starting to stand on end.

Lettie Hempstock held me tightly. “Don't worry,”
she whispered, and I was going to say something, to ask why I shouldn't worry,
what I had to be afraid of, when the field we were standing in began to
glow.

It glowed golden. Every blade of grass glowed and
glimmered, every leaf on every tree. Even the hedges were glowing. It was a warm
light. It seemed, to my eyes, as if the soil beneath the grass had transmuted
from base matter into pure light, and in the golden glow of the meadow the
blue-white lightnings that still crackled around Ursula Monkton seemed much less
impressive.