The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘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 grey whorls and lumps on the side of my beech tree, or the patterns in the 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 on to 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 towards the tunnel mouth. (How could that 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 still 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-coloured umbrella, she unfurled.

And as she unfurled, she stretched 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 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 PATHIS INCOMPLETE. THE WAYS ARE BLOCKED.

‘Put him down. Now. Safely.’

HE COMPLETES THE PATH. THE PATHIS 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 it 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, wood as hard as bone; and the thing 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 IS A DOOR. IT IS A GATE. IT CREPT UP SO NOW IT IS INSIDE HIM. 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.

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.

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: grey-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 towards 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 grey 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 on to 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 grey 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.

They 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 grey 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 for ever.

Once the black creatures had finished devouring the thing on the grass, and when nothing remained, not even the tiniest scrap of grey 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 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.’

‘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.

Chapter 12

The shadows began to gather around the edges of the circle. Formless blotches, 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 centre, 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 towards 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.