The Ocean at the End of the Lane(36)

If I pulled against the cloths, they hurt me.

My world was grey. I gave up, then. I lay there, and did not move, concentrated only on breathing through the space the cloth strips had left for my nose. They held me, and they felt alive.

I lay there, and I listened. There was nothing else I could do.

Ursula said, ‘I need the boy safe. I promised I’d keep him in the attic, so the attic it shall be. But you, little farm girl. What shall I do with you? Something appropriate. Perhaps I ought to turn you inside out, so your heart and brains and flesh are all on the outside, and the skin side’s inside. Then I’ll keep you wrapped up in my room here, with your eyes staring forever at the darkness inside yourself. I can do that.’

‘No,’ said Lettie. She sounded sad, I thought. ‘Actually, you can’t. And I gave you your chance.’

‘You threatened me. Empty threats.’

‘I dunt make threats,’ said Lettie. ‘I really wanted you to have a chance.’ And then she said, ‘When you looked around the world for things like you, didn’t you wonder why there weren’t lots of other old things around? No, you never wondered. You were so happy it was just you here, you never stopped to think.

‘Gran always calls your sort of thing fleas, Skarthach of the Keep. I mean, she could call you anything. I think she thinks fleas is funny … She dunt mind your kind. She says you’re harmless enough. Just a bit stupid. That’s ’cos there are things that eat fleas, in this part of creation. Varmints, Gran calls them. She dunt like them at all. She says they’re mean, and they’re hard to get rid of. And they’re always hungry.’

‘I’m not scared,’ said Ursula Monkton. She sounded scared. And then she said, ‘How did you know my name?’

‘Went looking for it this morning. Went looking for other things too. Some boundary markers, to keep you from running too far, getting into more trouble. And a trail of breadcrumbs that leads straight here, to this room. Now, open the bottle, take out the doorway, and let’s send you home.’

I waited for Ursula Monkton to respond, but she said nothing. There was no answer. Only the slamming of a door, and the sound of footsteps, fast and pounding, running down the stairs.

Lettie’s voice was close to me, and it said, ‘She would have been better off staying here and taking me up on my offer.’

I felt her hands tugging at the cloths on my face. They came free with a wet, sucking sound, but they no longer felt alive, and when they came off they fell to the ground and lay there, unmoving. This time there was no blood beaded on my skin. The worst thing that had happened was that my arms and legs had gone to sleep. Lettie helped me to my feet.

She did not look happy.

‘Where did she go?’ I asked.

‘She’s followed the trail out of the house. And she’s scared. Poor thing. She’s so scared.’

‘You’re scared too.’

‘A bit, yes. Right about now she’s going to find that she’s trapped inside the bounds I put down, I expect,’ said Lettie.

We went out of the bedroom. Where the toy soldier at the top of the stairs had been, there was now a rip. That’s the best I can describe it: it was as if someone had taken a photograph of the stairs and then torn out the soldier from the photograph. There was nothing in the space where the soldier had been but a dim greyness that hurt my eyes if I looked at it too long.

‘What’s she scared of?’

‘You heard. Varmints.’

‘Are you scared of varmints, Lettie?’

She hesitated, just a moment too long. Then she said simply, ‘Yes.’

‘But you aren’t scared of her. Of Ursula.’

‘I can’t be scared of her. It’s just like Gran says. She’s like a flea, all puffed up with pride and power and lust, like a flea bloated with blood. But she couldn’t have hurt me. I’ve seen off dozens like her, in my time. One as come through in Cromwell’s day – now there was something to talk about. He made folk lonely, that one. They’d hurt themselves just to make the loneliness stop – gouge out their eyes or jump down wells, and all the while that great lummocking thing sits in the cellar of the Duke’s Head, looking like a squat toad big as a bulldog.’ We were at the bottom of the stairs, walking down the hall.

‘How do you know where she went?’

‘Oh, she couldn’t have gone anywhere but the way I laid out for her.’ In the front room my sister was still playing ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano.

Da da DUM da da

da da DUM da da

da da DUM da DUM da DUM da da …

We walked out of the front door. ‘He was nasty, that one, back in Cromwell’s day. But we got him out of there just before the hunger birds came.’

‘Hunger birds?’

‘What Gran calls varmints. The cleaners.’

They didn’t sound bad. I knew that Ursula had been scared of them, but I wasn’t. Why would you be scared of cleaners?





We caught up with Ursula Monkton on the lawn, by the rose bushes. She was holding the jam jar with the drifting wormhole inside it. She looked strange. She tugged at the lid, and then stopped and looked up at the sky. Then she looked back to the jam jar once more.

She ran over to my beech tree, the one with the rope ladder, and she threw the jam jar as hard as she could against the trunk. If she was trying to break it, she failed. The jar simply bounced off, and landed on the moss that half covered the tangle of roots, and lay there, undamaged.