The Ocean at the End of the Lane

‘It’ll be here,’ she assured me.

I gazed around, taking in the grass, a reddish-brown chicken pecking at the side of the driveway, some rusty farm machinery, the wooden trestle table beside the road and the six empty metal milk churns that sat upon it. I saw the Hempstocks’ red-brick farmhouse, crouched and comfortable like an animal at rest. I saw the spring flowers; the omnipresent white and yellow daisies, the golden dandelions and do-you-like-butter buttercups, and, late in the season, a lone bluebell in the shadows beneath the milk-churn table, still glistening with dew …

‘That?’ I asked.

‘You’ve got sharp eyes,’ she said, approvingly.

We walked together to the bluebell. Lettie closed her eyes when we reached it. She moved her body back and forth, the hazel wand extended, as if she were the central point on a clock or a compass, her wand the hands, orienting towards a midnight or an East that I could not perceive. ‘Black,’ she said suddenly, as if she were describing something from a dream. ‘And soft.’

We walked away from the bluebell, along the lane that I imagined, sometimes, must have been a Roman road. We were a hundred yards up the lane, near where the Mini had been parked, when she spotted it: a scrap of black cloth caught on the barbed wire of the fence.

Lettie approached it. Again the outstretched hazel stick, again the slow turning and turning. ‘Red,’ she said, with certainty. ‘Very red. That way.’

We walked together in the direction she indicated. Across a meadow and into a clump of trees. ‘There,’ I said, fascinated. The corpse of a very small animal – a vole, by the look of it – lay on a clump of green moss. It had no head, and bright blood stained its fur and beaded on the moss. It was very red.

‘Now, from here on,’ said Lettie, ‘hold on to my arm. Don’t let go.’

I put out my right hand and took her left arm, just below the elbow. She moved the hazel wand. ‘This way,’ she said.

‘What are we looking for now?’

‘We’re getting closer,’ she said. ‘The next thing we’re looking for is a storm.’

We pushed our way into a clump of trees, and through the clump of trees into a wood, and squeezed our way through trees too close together, their foliage a thick canopy above our heads. We found a clearing in the wood, and walked along the clearing, in a world made green.

From our left came a mumble of distant thunder.

‘Storm,’ sang Lettie. She let her body swing again, and I turned with her, holding her arm. I felt, or imagined I felt, a throbbing going through me, holding her arm, as if I were touching mighty engines.

She set off in a new direction. We crossed a tiny stream together. Then she stopped, suddenly, and stumbled, but did not fall.

‘Are we there?’ I asked.

‘Not there,’ she said. ‘No. It knows we’re coming. It feels us. And it does not want us to come to it.’

The hazel wand was whipping around now like a magnet being pushed at a repelling pole. Lettie grinned.

A gust of wind threw leaves and dirt up into our faces. In the distance I could hear something rumble, like a train. It was getting harder to see, and the sky that I could make out above the canopy of leaves was dark, as if huge storm clouds had moved above our heads, or as if it had gone from morning directly to twilight.

Lettie shouted, ‘Get down!’ and she crouched on the moss, pulling me down with her. She lay prone, and I lay beside her, feeling a little silly. The ground was damp.

‘How long will we …?’

‘Shush!’ She sounded almost angry. I said nothing.

Something came through the woods, above our heads. I glanced up, saw something brown and furry, but flat, like a huge rug, flapping and curling at the edges, and at the front of the rug, a mouth, filled with dozens of tiny sharp teeth, facing down.

It flapped and floated above us, and then it was gone.

‘What was that?’ I asked, my heart pounding so hard in my chest that I did not know if I would be able to stand again.

‘Manta wolf,’ said Lettie. ‘We’ve already gone a bit further out than I thought.’ She got to her feet and stared the way the furry thing had gone. She raised the tip of the hazel wand, and turned around slowly.

‘I’m not getting anything.’ She tossed her head, to get the hair out of her eyes, without letting go of the forks of the hazel wand. ‘Either it’s hiding or we’re too close.’ She bit her lip. Then she said, ‘The shilling. The one from your throat. Bring it out.’

I took it from my pocket with my left hand, offered it to her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t touch it, not right now. Put it down on the fork of the stick.’

I didn’t ask why. I just put the silver shilling down at the intersection of the Y. Lettie stretched her arms out, and turned very slowly, with the end of the stick pointing straight out. I moved with her, but felt nothing. No throbbing engines. We were over halfway around when she stopped and said, ‘Look!’

I looked in the direction she was facing, but I saw nothing but trees, and shadows in the wood.

‘No, look. There.’ She indicated with her head.

The tip of the hazel wand had begun smoking, softly. She turned a little to the left, a little to the right, a little further to the right again, and the tip of the wand began to glow a bright orange.

‘That’s something I’ve not seen before,’ said Lettie. ‘I’m using the coin as an amplifier, but it’s as if—’

There was a whoompf! and the end of the stick burst into flame. Lettie pushed it down into the damp moss. She said, ‘Take your coin back,’ and I did, picking it up carefully, in case it was hot, but it was icy cold. She left the hazel wand behind on the moss, the charcoal tip of it still smoking irritably.

Lettie walked and I walked beside her. We held hands now, my right hand in her left. The air smelled strange, like fireworks, and the world grew darker with every step we took into the forest.

‘I said I’d keep you safe, didn’t I?’ said Lettie.

‘Yes.’

‘I promised I wouldn’t let anything hurt you.’

‘Yes.’

She said, ‘Just keep holding my hand. Don’t let go. Whatever happens, don’t let go.’

Her hand was warm, but not sweaty. It was reassuring.

‘Hold my hand,’ she repeated. ‘And don’t do anything unless I tell you. You’ve got that?’

I said, ‘I don’t feel very safe.’

She did not argue. She said, ‘We’ve gone further than I imagined. Further than I expected. I’m not really sure what kinds of things live out here on the margins.’

The trees ended, and we walked out into open country.

I said, ‘Are we a long way from your farm?’

‘No. We’re still on the borders of the farm. Hempstock Farm stretches a very long way. We brought a lot of this with us from the old country, when we came here. The farm came with us, and brought things with it when it came. Gran calls them fleas.’

I did not know where we were, but I could not believe we were still on the Hempstocks’ land, no more than I believed we were in the world I had grown up in. The sky of this place was the dull orange of a warning light; the plants, which were spiky, like huge, ragged aloes, were a dark silvery green, and looked as if they had been beaten from gun-metal.

The coin, in my left hand, which had warmed to the heat of my body, began to cool down again, until it was as cold as an ice cube. My right hand held Lettie Hempstock’s hand as tightly as it could.

She said, ‘We’re here.’

I thought I was looking at a building at first: that it was some kind of tent, as high as a country church, made of grey and pink canvas that flapped in the gusts of storm wind, in that orange sky: a lopsided canvas structure aged by weather and ripped by time.

And then it turned and I saw its face, and I heard something make a whimpering sound, like a dog that had been kicked, and I realised that the thing that was whimpering was me.