The Ocean at the End of the Lane (15 page)

“Come on, silly. I told you. They've gone home,”
said Lettie Hempstock.

“If you're really Lettie Hempstock,” I told her,
“you come here.”

She stayed where she was, a shadowy girl. Then she
laughed, and she stretched and she shook, and now she was only another shadow: a
shadow that filled the night.

“You are hungry,” said the voice in the night, and
it was no longer Lettie's voice, not any longer. It might have been the voice
inside my own head, but it was speaking aloud. “You are tired. Your family hates
you. You have no friends. And Lettie Hempstock, I regret to tell you, is never
coming back.”

I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you
have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be
anything, it is easier.

“Nobody cares,” said the voice, so resigned, so
practical. “Now, step out of the circle and come to us. One step is all it will
take. Just put one foot across the threshold and we will make all the pain go
away forever: the pain you feel now and the pain that is still to come. It will
never happen.”

It was not one voice, not any longer. It was two
people talking in unison. Or a hundred people. I could not tell. So many
voices.

“How can you be happy in this world? You have a
hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you
know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget
them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have,
something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your
sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time,
until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to
anatomy,
and even then you
will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life
ill-lived. But you won't grow. You can come out, and we will end it, cleanly, or
you can die in there, of hunger and of fear. And when you are dead your circle
will mean nothing, and we will tear out your heart and take your soul for a
keepsake.”

“P'raps it will be like that,” I said, to the
darkness and the shadows, “and p'raps it won't. And p'raps if it is, it would
have been like that anyway. I don't care. I'm still going to wait here for
Lettie Hempstock, and she's going to come back to me. And if I die here, then I
still die waiting for her, and that's a better way to go than you and all you
stupid horrible things tearing me to bits because I've got something inside me
that I don't even
want
!”

There was silence. The shadows seemed to have
become part of the night once again. I thought over what I'd said, and I knew
that it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of
the dark, and I
was
perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old,
certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she
was my friend.

Time passed. I waited for the night to begin to
talk to me again, for people to come, for all the ghosts and monsters of my
imagination to stand beyond the circle and call me out, but nothing more
happened. Not then. I simply waited.

The moon rose higher. My eyes had adjusted to the
darkness. I sang, under my breath, mouthing the words over and over.

You're a regular wreck with a crick in your
neck

and no wonder you snore for your head's on
the floor

and you've needles and pins from your sole to
your shins

and your flesh is a-creep for your left leg's
asleep

and you've cramp in your toes and a fly on
your nose

you've got fluff in your lung and a feverish
tongue

and a thirst that's intense and a general
sense that you haven't been sleeping in clover . . .

I sang it to myself, the whole song, all the way
through, two or three times, and I was relieved that I remembered the words,
even if I did not always understand them.

XIII.

W
hen Lettie
arrived, the real Lettie, this time, she was carrying a bucket of water. It must
have been heavy judging from the way she carried it. She stepped over where the
edge of the ring in the grass must have been and she came straight to me.

“Sorry,” she said. “That took a lot longer than I
expected. It didn't want to cooperate, neither, and in the end it took me and
Gran to do it, and she did most of the heavy lifting. It wasn't going to argue
with her, but it didn't help, and it's not easy—”

“What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

She put the metal bucket down on the grass beside
me without spilling a drop. “The ocean,” she said. “It didn't want to go. It
gave Gran such a struggle that she said she was going to have to go and have a
lie-down afterwards. But we still got it into the bucket in the end.”

The water in the bucket was glowing, emitting a
greenish-blue light. I could see Lettie's face by it. I could see the waves and
ripples on the surface of the water, watch them crest and splash against the
side of the bucket.

“I don't understand.”

“I couldn't get you to the ocean,” she said. “But
there was nothing stopping me bringing the ocean to you.”

I said, “I'm hungry, Lettie. And I don't like
this.”

“Mum's made dinner. But you're going to have to
stay hungry for a little bit longer. Were you scared, up here on your own?”

“Yes.”

“Did they try and get you out of the circle?”

“Yes.”

She took my hands in hers, then, and squeezed them.
“But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn't listen to them. Well
done. That's quality, that is.” And she sounded proud. In that moment I forgot
my hunger and I forgot my fear.

“What do I do now?” I asked her.

“Now,” she said, “you step into the bucket. You
don't have to take your shoes off or anything. Just step in.”

It did not even seem a strange request. She let go
of one of my hands, kept hold of the other. I thought,
I will never let go of
your hand, not unless you tell me to.
I put one foot into the glimmering water
of the bucket, raising the water level almost to the edge. My foot rested on the
tin floor of the bucket. The water was cool on my foot, not cold. I put the
other foot into the water and I went down with it, down like a marble statue,
and the waves of Lettie Hempstock's ocean closed over my head.

I felt the same shock you would feel if you had
stepped backwards, without looking, and had fallen into a swimming pool. I
closed my eyes at the water's sting and kept them tightly shut, so tightly.

I could not swim. I did not know where I was, or
what was happening, but even under the water I could feel that Lettie was still
holding my hand.

I was holding my breath.

I held it until I could hold it no longer, and then
I let the air out in a bubbling rush and gulped a breath in, expecting to choke,
to splutter, to die.

I did not choke. I felt the coldness of the
water—if it was water—pour into my nose and my throat, felt it fill my lungs,
but that was all it did. It did not hurt me.

I thought,
This is the kind of water you can
breathe.
I thought,
Perhaps there is just a secret to breathing water, something
simple that everyone could do, if only they knew. That was what I thought.

That was the first thing I thought.

The second thing I thought was that I knew
everything. Lettie Hempstock's ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire
universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was—where the universe
began, to the sound of uncreated voices singing in the void—and I knew where
Rose was—the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like
origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good
time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang, which would
be, I knew now, nothing of the kind.

I knew that Old Mrs. Hempstock would be here for
that one, as she had been for the last.

I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I
understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing
on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I
saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and
paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they
filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.

Everything whispered inside me. Everything spoke to
everything, and I knew it all.

I opened my eyes, curious to learn what I would see
in the world outside me, if it would be anything like the world inside.

I was hanging deep beneath the water.

I looked down, and the blue world below me receded
into darkness. I looked up and the world above me did the same. Nothing was
pulling me down deeper, nothing was forcing me toward the surface.

I turned my head, a little, to look at her, because
she was still holding my hand, she had never let go of my hand, and I saw Lettie
Hempstock.

At first, I do not think I knew what I was looking
at. I could make no sense of it. Where Ursula Monkton had been made of gray
cloth that flapped and snapped and gusted in the storm-winds, Lettie Hempstock
was made of silken sheets the color of ice, filled with tiny flickering candle
flames, a hundred hundred candle flames.

Could there be candle flames burning under the
water? There could. I knew that, when I was in the ocean, and I even knew how. I
understood it just as I understood Dark Matter, the material of the universe
that makes up everything that must be there but we cannot find. I found myself
thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater
that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from
forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have
Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely.

Lettie Hempstock looked like pale silk and candle
flames. I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a
place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know.
That if I looked inward I would see only infinite mirrors, staring into myself
for eternity.

The silk filled with candle flames moved then, a
slow, graceful, under-the-water sort of a movement. The current pulled at it,
and now it had arms and the hand that had never let go of mine, and a body and a
freckled face that was familiar, and it opened its mouth and, in Lettie
Hempstock's voice, it said, “I'm really sorry.”

“What for?”

She did not reply. The currents of the ocean pulled
at my hair and my clothes like summer breezes. I was no longer cold and I knew
everything and I was not hungry and the whole big, complicated world was simple
and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the
ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered. I
would stay here forever.

“You can't,” said Lettie. “It would destroy
you.”

I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could
kill me, not now, but she said, “Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You
wouldn't die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too
long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out.
And that's not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so
there wouldn't be anything left that would think of itself as an ‘I.' No point
of view any longer, because you'd be an infinite sequence of views and of points
. . .”

I was going to argue with her. She was wrong, she
had to be: I loved that place, that state, that feeling, and I was never going
to leave it.

And then my head broke water, and I blinked and
coughed, and I was standing, thigh-deep in the pond at the back of the
Hempstocks' farm, and Lettie Hempstock was standing beside me, holding my
hand.

I coughed again, and it felt like the water fled my
nose, my throat, my lungs. I pulled clean air into my chest, in the light of the
huge, full harvest moon, that shone on the Hempstocks' red-tiled roof, and, for
one final, perfect moment, I still knew everything: I remember that I knew how
to make it so the moon would be full when you needed it to be, and shining just
on the back of the house, every night.

I knew everything, but Lettie Hempstock was pulling
me up out of the pond.

I was still wearing the strange old-fashioned
clothes I had been given that morning, and as I stepped out of the pond, up onto
the grass that edged it, I discovered that my clothes and my skin were now
perfectly dry. The ocean was back in the pond, and the only knowledge I was left
with, as if I had woken from a dream on a summer's day, was that it had not been
long ago since I had known everything.

I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. “Is that how
it is for you?” I asked.

“Is
what
how it is for me?”

“Do you still know everything, all the time?”

She shook her head. She didn't smile. She said, “Be
boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going
to muck about here.”

“So you
used
to know everything?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Everybody did. I told you.
It's nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it
all up if you want to play.”

“To play
what
?”

“This,” she said. She waved at the house and the
sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of
bright stars.

I wished I knew what she meant. It was as if she
was talking about a dream we had shared. For a moment it was so close in my mind
that I could almost touch it.

“You must be so hungry,” said Lettie, and the
moment was broken, and yes, I was so hungry, and the hunger took my head and
swallowed my lingering dreams.

There was a plate waiting for me in my place at the
table in the farmhouse's huge kitchen. On it was a portion of shepherd's pie,
the mashed potato a crusty brown on top, minced meat and vegetables and gravy
beneath it. I was scared of eating food outside my home, scared that I might
want to leave food I did not like and be told off, or be forced to sit and
swallow it in minuscule portions until it was gone, as I was at school, but the
food at the Hempstocks' was always perfect. It did not scare me.

Ginnie Hempstock was there, bustling about in her
apron, rounded and welcoming. I ate without talking, head down, shoveling the
welcome food into my mouth. The woman and the girl spoke in low, urgent
tones.

“They'll be here soon enough,” said Lettie. “They
aren't stupid. And they won't leave until they've taken the last little bit of
what they came here for.”

Her mother sniffed. Her red cheeks were flushed
from the heat of the kitchen fire. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “They're all
mouth, they are.”

I had never heard that expression before, and I
thought she was telling us that the creatures were just mouths and nothing more.
It did not seem unlikely that the shadows were indeed all mouths. I had seen
them devour the gray thing that had called itself Ursula Monkton.

My grandmother would tell me off for eating like a
wild animal. “You must
essen,
eat,” she would say, “like a person, not a
chazzer,
a pig. When animals eat, they
fress
. People
essen
. Eat like a person.”
Fressen:
that was how the hunger birds had taken Ursula Monkton and it was also,
I had no doubt, how they would consume me.

“I've never seen so many of them,” said Lettie.
“When they came here in the old days there was only a handful of them.”

Ginnie poured me a glass of water. “That's your own
fault,” she told Lettie. “You put up signals, and called them. Like banging the
dinner bell, you were. Not surprising they all came.”

“I just wanted to make sure that
she
left,” said
Lettie.

“Fleas,” said Ginnie, and she shook her head.
“They're like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and are so proud of
themselves and so puffed up for being able to eat all the worms and beetles and
caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.” She stirred the
custard cooking on the hob, with a long wooden spoon in huge, irritated
movements. “Anyway, now we've got foxes. And we'll send them all home, same as
we did the last times they were sniffing around. We did it before, didn't
we?”

“Not really,” said Lettie. “Either we sent the flea
home, and the varmints had nothing to hang around for, like the flea in the
cellar in Cromwell's time, or the varmints came and took what they came here for
and then they went away. Like the fat flea who made people's dreams come true in
Red Rufus's day. They took him and they upped and left. We've never had to get
rid of them before.”