The Ocean at the End of the Lane(24)

Thunder rumbled behind me, although I had seen no lightning. I climbed a fence, and my feet sank into the soft earth of a freshly ploughed field. I stumbled across it, falling sometimes, but I kept going. Over a stile and into the next field, this one unploughed, and I crossed it keeping close to the hedge, scared of being too far out in the open.

The lights of a car came down the lane, sudden and blinding. I froze where I was, closed my eyes, imagined myself asleep in my bed. The car drove past without slowing, and I caught a glimpse of its red rear lights as it moved away from me: a white van that I thought belonged to the Anders family.

Still, it made the lane seem less safe, and now I cut away across the meadow. I reached the next field, saw it was only divided from the one I was in by thin lengths of wire, easy to duck beneath, not even barbed wire, so I reached out my arm and pushed a bare wire up to make room to squeeze under, and—

It was as if I had been thumped, and thumped hard, in the chest. My arm, where it had grasped the wire of the fence, was convulsed, and my palm was burning just as if I had just slammed my funny bone into a wall.

I let go of the electric fence and stumbled back. I could not run any longer, but I hurried in the wind and the rain and the darkness along the side of the fence, careful now not to touch it, until I reached a five-bar gate. I went over the gate, and across the field, heading to the deeper darkness at the far end – trees, I thought, and woodland – and I did not go too close to the edge of the field in case there was another electric fence waiting for me.

I hesitated, uncertain where to go next. As if in answer, the world was illuminated, for a moment, but I only needed a moment, by lightning. I saw a wooden stile, and I ran for it.

Over the stile. I came down into a clump of nettles, I knew, as the hot-cold pricking burning covered my exposed ankles and the tops of my feet, but I ran again, now, ran as best I could. I hoped I was still heading for the Hempstocks’ farm. I had to be. I crossed one more field before I realised that I no longer knew where the lane was, or, for that matter, where I was. I knew only that the Hempstocks’ farm was at the end of my lane, but I was lost in a dark field, and the thunderclouds had lowered, and the night was so dark, and it was still raining, even if it was not raining hard yet, and now my imagination filled the darkness with wolves and ghosts. I wanted to stop imagining, to stop thinking, but I could not.

And behind the wolves and the ghosts and the trees that walked, there was Ursula Monkton, telling me that the next time I disobeyed her it would be so much worse for me, that she would lock me in the attic.

I was not brave. I was running away from everything, and I was cold, and wet and lost.

I shouted, at the top of my voice. ‘Lettie? Lettie Hempstock! Hello?’ but there was no reply, and I had not expected one.

The thunder grumbled and rumbled into a low continuous roar, a lion pushed into irritability, and the lightning was flashing and flickering like a malfunctioning fluorescent tube. In the flickers of light, I could see that the area of field I was in came to a point, with hedges on both sides, and no way through. I could see no gate, and no stile other than the one I had come in through, at the far end of the field.

Something crackled.

I looked up at the sky. I had seen lightning in films on the television, long jagged forks of light across the clouds. But the lightning I had seen until now with my own eyes was simply a white flash from above, like the flash of a camera, burning the world in a strobe of visibility. What I saw in the sky then was not that.

It was not forked lightning either.

It came and it went, a writhing, burning blue-whiteness in the sky. It died back and then it flared up, and its flares and flickers illuminated the meadow, made it something I could see. The rain pattered hard, and then it whipped against my face, moved in a moment from a drizzle to a downpour, and in seconds my dressing gown was soaked through. But in the light I saw – or thought I saw – an opening in the hedgerow to my right, and I walked, for I could no longer run, not any longer, as fast as I could, towards it, hoping it was something real. My wet gown flapped in the gusting wind, and the sound of it horrified me.

I did not look up in the sky. I did not look behind me.

But I could see the far end of the field, and there was indeed a space between the hedgerows. I had almost reached it when a voice said:

‘I thought I told you to stay in your room. And now I find you sneaking around like a drowned sailor.’

I turned, looked behind me, saw nothing at all. There was nobody there.

Then I looked up.

The thing that called itself Ursula Monkton hung in the air, about twenty feet above me, and lightnings crawled and flickered in the air behind her. She was not flying. She was floating, weightless as a balloon, although the sharp gusts of wind did not move her.

Wind howled and whipped at my face. The distant thunder roared and smaller thunders crackled and spat, and she spoke quietly, but I could hear every word she said as distinctly as if she were whispering into my ears.

‘Oh, sweety-weety-pudding-and-pie, you are in so much trouble.’

She was smiling, the hugest, toothiest grin I had ever seen on a human face, but she did not look amused.

I had been running from her through the darkness for, what, half an hour? An hour? I wished I had stayed on the lane and not tried to cut across the fields. I would have been at the Hempstocks’ farm by now. Instead, I was lost and I was trapped.

Ursula Monkton came lower. Her pink blouse was open and unbuttoned. She wore a white bra. Her midi skirt flapped in the wind, revealing her calves. She did not appear to be wet, despite the storm. Her clothes, her face, her hair were perfectly dry.