The Ocean at the End of the Lane(26)

Lettie Hempstock’s hand in my hand made me braver. But Lettie was just a girl, even if she was a big girl, even if she was eleven, even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult. It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch, every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight children, adults always win.

Lettie said, ‘You should go back where you came from in the first place. It’s not healthy for you to be here. For your own good, go back.’

A noise in the air, a horrible, twisted scratching noise, filled with pain and with wrongness, a noise that set my teeth on edge and made the kitten, its front paws resting on my chest, stiffen and its fur prickle. The little thing twisted and clawed up on to my shoulder, and it hissed and it spat. I looked up at Ursula Monkton. It was only when I saw her face that I knew what the noise was.

Ursula Monkton was laughing.

‘Go back? When your people ripped the hole in Forever, I seized my chance. I could have ruled worlds, but I followed you, and I waited, and I had patience. I knew that sooner or later the bounds would loosen, that I would walk the true Earth, beneath the Sun of Heaven.’ She was not laughing now. ‘Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this world, like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush.’

I did not let go of Lettie’s hand, not this time. I stroked the kitten, whose needle claws were digging into my shoulder, and was bitten for my trouble, but the bite was not hard, just scared.

Her voice came from all around us, as the storm wind gusted. ‘You kept me away from here for a long time. But then you brought me a door, and I used him to carry me out of my cell. And what can you do now that I am out?’

Lettie didn’t seem angry. She thought about it, then she said, ‘I could make you a new door. Or, better still, I could get Granny to send you across the ocean, all the way to wherever you came from in the beginning.’

Ursula Monkton spat on to the grass, and a tiny ball of flame sputtered and fizzed on the ground, where the spit had fallen.

‘Give me the boy,’ was all she said. ‘He belongs to me. I came here inside him. I own him.’

‘You don’t own nuffink, you don’t,’ said Lettie Hempstock, angrily. ‘’Specially not him.’ Lettie helped me to my feet, and she stood behind me and put her arms around me. We were two children in a field in the night. She held me, and I held the kitten, while above us and all around us a voice said:

‘What will you do? Take him home with you? This world is a world of rules, little girl. He belongs to his parents, after all. Take him away and his parents will come to bring him home, and his parents belong to me.’

‘I’m all bored of you now,’ said Lettie Hempstock. ‘I gived you a chance. You’re on my land. Go away.’

As she said that, my skin felt like it did when I’d rubbed a balloon on my sweater then touched it to my face and hair. Everything prickled and tickled. My hair was soaked, but even wet, it felt like it was starting to stand on end.

Lettie Hempstock held me tightly. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered, and I was going to say something, to ask why I shouldn’t worry, what I had to be afraid of, when the field we were standing in began to glow.

It glowed golden. Every blade of grass glowed and glimmered, every leaf on every tree. Even the hedges were glowing. It was a warm light. It seemed, to my eyes, as if the soil beneath the grass had transmuted from base matter into pure light, and in the golden glow of the meadow the blue-white lightnings that still crackled around Ursula Monkton seemed much less impressive.

Ursula Monkton rose unsteadily, as if the air had just become hot and was carrying her upwards. Then Lettie Hempstock whispered old words into the world and the meadow exploded into a golden light. I saw Ursula Monkton swept up and away, although I felt no wind, but there had to be a wind, for she was flailing and tipping like a dead leaf in a gale. I watched her tumble into the night, and then Ursula Monkton and her lightnings were gone.

‘Come on,’ said Lettie Hempstock. ‘We should get you in front of a kitchen fire. And a hot bath. You’ll catch your death.’ She let go of my hand, stopped hugging me, stepped back. The golden glow dimmed, so slowly, and then it was gone, leaving only vanishing glimmers and twinkles in the bushes, like the final moments of the fireworks on Bonfire Night.

‘Is she dead?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Then she’ll come back. And you’ll get in trouble.’

‘That’s as maybe,’ said Lettie. ‘Are you hungry?’

She asked me, and I knew that I was. I had forgotten, somehow, but now I remembered. I was so hungry it hurt.

‘Let’s see …’ Lettie was talking as she led me through the fields. ‘You’re wet through. We’ll need to get you something to wear. I’ll have a look in the chest of drawers in the green bedroom. I think Cousin Japeth left some of his clothes there when he went off to fight in the Mouse Wars. He wasn’t much bigger than you.’

The kitten was licking my fingers with a small, rough tongue.

‘I found a kitten,’ I said.

‘I can see that. She must have followed you back from the fields where you pulled her up.’

‘This is that kitten? The same one that I picked?’