The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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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?





We caught up with Ursula Monkton on the lawn, by the rose bushes. 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 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.’