The Ocean at the End of the Lane(41)

I had stood up to worse things than him in the last few hours. And suddenly, I knew: I didn’t care any more. I looked up at the dark shape behind and above the torch beam, and I said, ‘Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?’ and I knew as I said it that it was the thing I should never have said.

His face, what I could see of it in the reflected torchlight, crumpled, and looked shocked. He opened his mouth to speak, then he closed it again. I could not remember my father ever being at a loss for words, before or after. Only then. I felt terrible. I thought, I will die here soon. I do not want to die with those words on my lips.

But the torch beam was turning away from me. My father said only, ‘We’ll be up at the house. I’ll put your dinner in the oven.’

I watched the torchlight move back across the lawn, past the rose bushes and up towards the house, until it went out, and was lost to sight. I heard the back door open and close again.

Then you get some repose in the form of a doze with hot eyeballs and head ever aching, but your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams that you’d very much better be waking …

Somebody laughed. I stopped singing, and looked around, but saw nobody.

‘“The Nightmare Song”,’ a voice said. ‘How appropriate.’

She walked closer, until I could see her face. She was still quite naked, and she was smiling. I had seen her torn to pieces a few hours before, but now she was whole. Even so, she looked less solid than any of the other people I had seen that night; I could see the lights of the house glimmering behind her, through her. Her smile had not changed.

‘You’re dead,’ I told her.

‘Yes. I was eaten,’ said Ursula Monkton.

‘You’re dead. You aren’t real.’

‘I was eaten,’ she repeated. ‘I am nothing. And they have let me out, just for a little while, from the place inside them. It’s cold in there, and very empty. But they have promised you to me, so I will have something to play with; something to keep me company in the dark. And after you have been eaten, you too will be nothing. But whatever remains of that nothing will be mine to keep, eaten and together, my toy and my distraction, until the end of time. We’ll have such fun.’

A ghost of a hand was raised, and it touched the smile, and it blew me the ghost of Ursula Monkton’s kiss.

‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ it said.

A rustle in the rhododendrons behind me and a voice, cheerful and female and young, saying, ‘It’s okay. Gran fixed it. Everything’s taken care of. Come on.’

The moon was visible now above the azalea bush, a bright crescent like a thick nail paring.

I sat down by the dead tree, and did not move.

‘Come on, silly. I told you. They’ve gone home,’ said Lettie Hempstock.

‘If you’re really Lettie Hempstock,’ I told her, ‘you come here.’

She stayed where she was, a shadowy girl. Then she laughed, and she stretched and she shook, and she was only another shadow: a shadow that filled the night.

‘You are hungry,’ said the voice in the night, and it was no longer Lettie’s voice, not any longer. It might have been the voice inside my own head, but it was speaking aloud. ‘You are tired. Your family hates you. You have no friends. And Lettie Hempstock, I regret to tell you, is never coming back.’

I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.

‘Nobody cares,’ said the voice, so resigned, so practical. ‘Now, step out of the circle and come to us. One step is all it will take. Just put one foot across the threshold and we will make all the pain go away for ever: the pain you feel now and the pain that is still to come. It will never happen.’

It was not one voice, not any longer. It was two people talking in unison. Or a hundred people. I could not tell. So many voices.

‘How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived. But you won’t grow. You can come out, and we will end it, cleanly, or you can die in there, of hunger and of fear. And when you are dead, your circle will mean nothing, and we will tear out your heart and take your soul for a keepsake.’

‘P’raps it will be like that,’ I said, to the darkness and the shadows, ‘and p’raps it won’t. And p’raps if it is, it would have been like that anyway. I don’t care. I’m still going to wait here for Lettie Hempstock, and she’s going to come back to me. And if I die here, then I still die waiting for her, and that’s a better way to go than you and all you stupid horrible things tearing me to bits because I’ve got something inside me that I don’t even want!’

There was silence. The shadows seemed to have become part of the night once again. I thought over what I’d said, and I knew that it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the dark, and I was perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old, certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she was my friend.