The Ocean at the End of the Lane(13)

Two very scared white mice, holding hands.

Lettie’s hand was sweating, now. She squeezed my hand, whether to reassure me or herself I did not know, and I squeezed back.

The ripped face, the place where the face should have been, twisted. I thought it was smiling. Perhaps it was smiling. I felt as if it was examining me, taking me apart. As if it knew everything about me – things I did not even know about myself.

The girl holding my hand said, ‘If you en’t telling me your name, I’ll bind you as a nameless thing. And you’ll still be bounden, tied and sealed like a polter or a shuck.’

She waited, but the thing said nothing, and Lettie Hempstock began to say words in a language I did not know. Sometimes she was talking, and sometimes it was more like singing, in a tongue that was nothing I had ever heard, or would ever encounter later in life. I knew the tune, though. It was a child’s song, the tune to which we sang the nursery rhyme ‘Girls and Boys Come Out to Play’. That was the tune, but her words were older words. I was certain of that.

And as she sang, things happened, beneath the orange sky.

The earth writhed and churned with worms, long grey worms that pushed up from the ground beneath our feet.

Something came hurtling at us from the centre mass of flapping canvas. It was a little bigger than a football. At school, during games, mostly I dropped things I was meant to catch, or closed my hand on them a moment too late, letting them hit me in the face or the stomach. But this thing was coming straight at me and Lettie Hempstock, and I did not think, I only did.

I put both my hands out and I caught the thing, a flapping, writhing mass of cobwebs and rotting cloth. And as I caught it in my hands I felt something hurt me: a stabbing pain in the sole of my foot, momentary and then gone, as if I had trodden upon a pin.

Lettie knocked the thing I was holding out of my hands, and it fell to the ground, where it collapsed into itself. She grabbed my right hand, held it firmly once more. And through all this, she continued to sing.

I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and I had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything. In my dreams I have used that language to heal the sick and to fly; once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed and breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, ‘Be whole,’ and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.

And because Lettie was speaking the language of shaping, even if I did not understand what she was saying, I understood what was being said. The thing in the clearing was being bound to that place for always, trapped, forbidden to exercise its influence on anything beyond its own domain.

Lettie Hempstock finished singing.

In my mind, I thought I could hear the creature screaming, protesting, railing, but the place beneath that orange sky was quiet, only the flapping of canvas and the rattle of twigs in the wind breaking the silence.

The wind died down.

A thousand pieces of torn grey cloth settled on the black earth like dead things, or like so much abandoned laundry. Nothing moved.

Lettie said, ‘That should hold it.’ She squeezed my hand. I thought she was trying to sound bright, but she didn’t. She sounded grim. ‘Let’s take you home.’

We walked, hand in hand, through a wood of blue-tinged evergreens, and we crossed a lacquered red and yellow bridge over an ornamental pond; we walked along the edge of a field in which young corn was coming up, like green grass planted in rows; we climbed a wooden stile, hand in hand, and reached another field, planted with what looked like small reeds or furry snakes, black and white and brown and orange and grey and striped, all of them waving gently, curling and uncurling in the sun.

‘What are they?’ I asked.

‘You can pull one up and see, if you like,’ said Lettie.

I looked down: the furry tendril by my feet was perfectly black. I bent, grasped it at the base, firmly, with my left hand, and I pulled.

Something came up from the earth, and swung around angrily. My hand felt like a dozen tiny needles had been sunk into it. I brushed the earth from it, and apologised, and it stared at me, more with surprise and puzzlement than with anger. It jumped from my hand to my shirt, I stroked it: a kitten, black and sleek, with a pointed, inquisitive face, a white spot over one ear, and eyes of a peculiarly vivid blue-green.

‘At the farm, we get our cats the normal way,’ said Lettie.

‘What’s that?’

‘Big Oliver. He turned up at the farm back in pagan times. All our farm cats trace back to him.’

I looked at the kitten hanging on my shirt with tiny kitten claws.

‘Can I take it home?’ I asked.

‘It’s not an it. It’s a she. Not a good idea, taking anything home from these parts,’ said Lettie.

I put the kitten down at the edge of the field. She darted off after a butterfly, which floated up and out of reach, then scampered away, without a look back.

‘My kitten was run over,’ I told Lettie. ‘It was only little. The man who died told me about it, although he wasn’t driving. He said they didn’t see it.’