The Ocean at the End of the Lane(30)

Lettie just smiled, and did not say anything at all.

My father put my toothbrush down on the table in front of me. I unwrapped the toilet paper around the head. It was, unmistakably, my green toothbrush. Under his car coat my father was wearing a clean white shirt, and no tie.

I said, ‘Thank you.’

‘So,’ said my mother. ‘What time should we be by to pick him up in the morning?’

Ginnie smiled even wider. ‘Oh, Lettie will bring him back to you. We should give them some time to play, tomorrow morning. Now, before you go, I baked some scones this afternoon …’

And she put some scones into a paper bag, which my mother took politely, and Ginnie ushered her and my father out of the door. I held my breath until I heard the sound of the Rover being driven away back up the lane.

‘What did you do to them?’ I asked. And then, ‘Is this really my toothbrush?’

‘That,’ said Old Mrs Hempstock, with satisfaction in her voice, ‘was a very respectable job of snipping and stitching, if you ask me.’ She held up my dressing gown: I could not see where she had removed a piece, where she had stitched it up. It was seamless, the mend invisible. She pushed the scrap of fabric that she had cut across the table. ‘Here’s your evening,’ she said. ‘You can keep it, if you wish. But if I were you, I’d burn it.’

The rain pattered against the window, and the wind rattled the window frames.

I picked up the jagged-edged sliver of cloth. It was damp. I got up, waking the kitten, who sprang off and vanished into the shadows. I walked over to the fireplace.

‘If I burn this,’ I asked them, ‘will it have really happened? Will my daddy have pushed me down into the bath? Will I forget it ever happened?’

Ginnie Hempstock was no longer smiling. Now she looked concerned. ‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘I want to remember,’ I said. ‘Because it happened to me. And I’m still me.’ I threw the little scrap of cloth on to the fire.

There was a crackle and the cloth smoked, then it began to burn.

I was under the water. I was holding on to my father’s tie. I thought he was going to kill me…

I screamed.

I was lying on the flagstone floor of the Hempstocks’ kitchen and I was rolling and screaming. My foot felt like I had trodden, barefoot, on a burning cinder. The pain was intense. There was another pain, too, deep inside my chest, more distant, not as sharp: a discomfort, not a burning.

Ginnie was beside me. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘My foot. It’s on fire. It hurts so much.’

She examined it, then licked her finger, touched it to the hole in my sole from which I had pulled the worm, two days before. There was a hissing noise, and the pain in my foot began to ease.

‘En’t never seen one of these before,’ said Ginnie Hempstock. ‘How did you get it?’

‘There was a worm inside it,’ I told her. ‘That was how it came with us from the place with the orangey sky. In my foot.’ And then I looked at Lettie, who had crouched beside me and was now holding my hand, and I said, ‘I brought it back. It was my fault. I’m sorry.’

Old Mrs Hempstock was the last to reach me. She leaned over, pulled the sole of my foot up and into the light. ‘Nasty,’ she said. ‘And very clever. She left the hole inside you so she could use it again. She could have hidden inside you, if she needed to, used you as a door to go home. No wonder she wanted to keep you in the attic. So. Let’s strike while the iron’s hot, as the soldier said when he entered the laundry.’ She prodded the hole in my foot with her finger. It still hurt, but the pain had faded, a little. Now it felt like a throbbing headache inside my foot.

Something fluttered in my chest, like a tiny moth, and then was still.

Old Mrs Hempstock said, ‘Can you be brave?’

I did not know. I did not think so. It seemed to me that all I had done so far that night was to run from things. She was holding the needle she had used to sew up my dressing gown, and she grasped it now, not as if she were going to sew with it, but as if she were planning to stab me.

I pulled my foot back. ‘What are you going to do?’

Lettie squeezed my hand. ‘She’s going to make the hole go away,’ she said. ‘I’ll hold your hand. You don’t have to look, not if you don’t want to.’

‘It will hurt,’ I said.

‘Stuff and nonsense,’ said the old woman. She pulled my foot towards her, so the sole was facing her, and stabbed the needle down … not into my foot, I realised, but into the hole itself.

It did not hurt.

Then she twisted the needle and pulled it back towards her. I watched, amazed, as something that glistened – it seemed black, at first, then translucent, then reflective like mercury – was pulled out from the sole of my foot, on the end of the needle.

I could feel it leaving my leg – it seemed to travel up all the way inside me, up my leg, through my groin and my stomach and into my chest. I felt it leave me with relief: the burning sensation abated, as did my terror.

My heart pounded strangely.

I watched Old Mrs Hempstock reel the thing in, and I was still unable, somehow, to entirely make sense of what I was seeing. It was a hole with nothing around it, over two feet long, thinner than an earthworm, like the shed skin of a translucent snake.