The Ocean at the End of the Lane

  “I don’t care,” I told her.

  “Daddy said you ruined his tie. And he’s all wet,” said my sister, with satisfaction in her voice.

  Ursula Monkton was at the bedroom door. “We don’t talk to him,” she told my sister. “We won’t talk to him again until he’s allowed to rejoin the family.”

  My sister slipped out, heading to the next room, my parents’ room. “You aren’t in my family,” I told Ursula Monkton. “When Mummy comes back, I’ll tell her what Daddy did.”

  “She won’t be home for another two hours,” said Ursula Monkton. “And what can you say to her that will do anything? She backs up your father in everything, doesn’t she?”

  She did. They always presented a perfectly united front.

  “Don’t cross me,” said Ursula Monkton. “I have things to do here, and you are getting in my way. Next time it will be so much worse. Next time, I lock you in the attic.”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” I told her. I was afraid of her, more afraid than I had ever been of anything.

  “It’s hot in here,” she told me, and smiled. She walked over to the gas fire, reached down, turned it off, took the matches from the mantel.

  I said, “You’re still just a flea.”

  She stopped smiling. She reached up to the lintel above the door, higher than any child could reach, and she pulled down the key that rested there. She walked out of the room, and closed the door. I heard the key turn, heard the lock engage and click.

  I could hear television voices coming from the room next door. I heard the hallway door close, cutting off the two bedrooms from the rest of the house, and I knew that Ursula Monkton was going downstairs. I went over to the lock, and squinted through it. I had learned from a book that I could use a pencil to push a key through a keyhole onto a sheet of paper beneath, and free myself that way . . . but the keyhole was empty.

  I cried then, cold and still damp, in that bedroom, cried with pain and anger and terror, cried safely in the knowledge that no one would come in and see me, that no one would tease me for crying, as they teased any boys at my school who were unwise enough to give way to tears.

  I heard the gentle patter of raindrops against the glass of my bedroom window, and even that brought me no joy.

  I cried until I was all cried out. Then I breathed in huge gulps of air, and I thought, Ursula Monkton, flapping canvas monster, worm and flea, would get me if I tried to leave the property. I knew that.

  But Ursula Monkton had locked me in. She would not expect me to leave now.

  And, perhaps, if I was lucky, she might be distracted.

  I opened the bedroom window, and listened to the night. The gentle rain made a noise that was almost a rustling. It was a cold night, and I was already chilled. My sister was in the room next door, watching something on the television. She would not hear me.

  I went over to the door, and turned off the light.

  I walked through the dark bedroom, and climbed back on the bed.

  I’m in my bed, I thought. I’m lying in my bed, thinking about how upset I am. Soon, I’ll fall asleep. I’m in my bed, and I know she’s won, and if she checks up on me I’m in my bed, asleep.

  I’m in my bed and it’s time for me to sleep now . . . I can’t even keep my eyes open. I’m fast asleep. Fast asleep in my bed . . .

  I stood on the bed, and climbed out of the window. I hung for a moment, then let myself drop, as quietly as I could, onto the balcony. That was the easy bit.

  Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisors. In books, boys climbed trees, so I climbed trees, sometimes very high, always scared of falling. In books, people climbed up and down drainpipes to get in and out of houses, so I climbed up and down drainpipes too. They were the heavy iron drainpipes of old, clamped to the brick, not today’s lightweight plastic affairs.

  I had never climbed down a drainpipe in the dark, or in the rain, but I knew where the footholds were. I knew also that the biggest challenge would not be falling, a twenty-foot tumble down into the wet flower bed; it was that the drainpipe I was climbing down went past the television room, downstairs, in which, I had no doubt, Ursula Monkton and my father would be watching television.

  I tried not to think.

  I climbed over the brick wall that edged the balcony, reached out until I felt the iron drainpipe, cold and slick with rain. I held on to it, then took one large step toward it, letting my bare feet come to rest on the metal clamp that encircled the drainpipe, fixing it sturdily to the brick.

  I went down, a step at a time, imagining myself Batman, imagining myself a hundred heroes and heroines of school romances, then, remembering myself, I imagined that I was a drop of rain on the wall, a brick, a tree. I am on my bed, I thought. I was not here, with the light of the TV room, uncurtained, spilling out below me, making the rain that fell past the window into a series of glittering lines and streaks.

  Don’t look at me, I thought. Don’t look out of the window.

  I inched down. Usually I would have stepped from the drainpipe over to the TV room’s outer window ledge, but that was out of the question. Warily, I lowered myself another few inches, leaned further back into the shadows and away from the light, and I stole a terrified glance into the room, expecting to see my father and Ursula Monkton staring back at me.

  The room was empty.

  The lights were on, the television on as well, but nobody was sitting on the sofa and the door to the downstairs hallway was open.

  I took an easy step down onto the window ledge, hoping against all hope that neither of them would come back in and see me, then I let myself drop from the ledge into the flower bed. The wet earth was soft against my feet.

  I was going to run, just run, but there was a light on in the drawing room, where we children never went, the oak-paneled room kept only for best and for special occasions.

  The curtains were drawn. The curtains were green velvet, lined with white, and the light that escaped them, where they had not been closed all the way, was golden and soft.

  I walked over to the window. The curtains were not completely closed. I could see into the room, see what was immediately in front of me.

  I was not sure what I was looking at. My father had Ursula Monkton pressed up against the side of the big fireplace in the far wall. He had his back to me. She did too, her hands pressed against the huge, high mantelpiece. He was hugging her from behind. Her midi skirt was hiked up around her waist.

  I did not know exactly what they were doing, and I did not really care, not at that moment. All that mattered was that Ursula Monkton had her attention on something that was not me, and I turned away from the gap in the curtains and the light and the house, and I fled, barefoot, into the rainy dark.

  It was not pitch-black. It was the kind of cloudy night where the clouds seem to gather up light from distant streetlights and houses below, and throw it back at the earth. I could see enough, once my eyes adjusted. I made it to the bottom of the garden, past the compost heap and the grass cuttings, then down the hill to the lane. Brambles and thorns stuck my feet and pricked my legs, but I kept running.

  I went over the low metal fence, into the lane. I was off our property and it felt as if a headache I had not known that I had had suddenly lifted. I whispered, urgently, “Lettie? Lettie Hempstock?” and I thought, I’m in bed. I?
??m dreaming all this. Such vivid dreams. I am in my bed, but I did not believe that Ursula Monkton was thinking about me just then.

  As I ran, I thought of my father, his arms around the housekeeper-who-wasn’t, kissing her neck, and then I saw his face through the chilly bathwater as he held me under, and now I was no longer scared by what had happened in the bathroom; now I was scared by what it meant that my father was kissing the neck of Ursula Monkton, that his hands had lifted her midi skirt above her waist.

  My parents were a unit, inviolate. The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and was coming down the lane with me, then.

  The flints of the lane hurt my feet as I ran, but I did not care. Soon enough, I was certain, the thing that was Ursula Monkton would be done with my father. Perhaps they would go upstairs to check on me together. She would find that I was gone and she would come after me.

  I thought, If they come after me, they will be in a car. I looked for a gap in the hedgerow on either side of the lane. I spotted a wooden stile and clambered over it, and kept running across the meadow, heart pounding like the biggest loudest drum there was or had ever been, barefoot, with my pajamas and my dressing gown all soaked below the knee and clinging. I ran, not caring about the cow-pats. The meadow was easier on my feet than the flint lane had been. I was happier, and I felt more real, running on the grass.

  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 plowed field. I stumbled across it, falling sometimes, but I kept going. Over a stile and into the next field, this one unplowed, 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 rear red 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 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 realized 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 it whipped against my face, moved in a moment from a drizzle to a downpour. 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, toward it, hoping it was something real. My wet gown flapped in the gusting wind, and the sound of the flapping cloth 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 sky 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.

  She was floating above me, now, and she reached out her hands.

  Every move she made, everything she did, was strobed by the tame lightnings that flickered and writhed about her. Her fingers opened like flowers in a speeded-up film, and I knew that she was playing with me, and I knew what she wanted me to do, and I hated myself fo
r not standing my ground, but I did what she wanted: I ran.

  I was a little thing that amused her. She was playing, just as I had seen Monster, the big orange tomcat, play with a mouse—letting it go, so that it would run, and then pouncing, and batting it down with a paw. But the mouse still ran, and I had no choice, and I ran too.

  I ran for the break in the hedge, as fast as I could, stumbling and hurting and wet.

  Her voice was in my ears as I ran.

  “I told you I was going to lock you in the attic, didn’t I? And I will. Your daddy likes me now. He’ll do whatever I say. Perhaps from now on, every night, he’ll come up the ladder and let you out of the attic. He’ll make you climb down from the attic. Down the ladder. And every night, he’ll drown you in the bath, he’ll plunge you into the cold, cold water. I’ll let him do it every night until it bores me, and then I’ll tell him not to bring you back, to simply push you under the water until you stop moving and until there’s nothing but darkness and water in your lungs. I’ll have him leave you in the cold bath, and you’ll never move again. And every night I’ll kiss him and kiss him . . .”

  I was through the gap in the hedgerow, and running on soft grass.

  The crackle of the lightning, and a strange sharp, metallic smell, were so close they made my skin prickle. Everything around me got brighter and brighter, illuminated by the flickering blue-white light.

  “And when your daddy finally leaves you in the bath for good, you’ll be happy,” whispered Ursula Monkton, and I imagined that I could feel her lips brushing my ears. “Because you won’t like it in the attic. Not just because it’s dark up there, with the spiders, and the ghosts. But because I’m going to bring my friends. You can’t see them in the daylight, but they’ll be in the attic with you, and you won’t enjoy them at all. They don’t like little boys, my friends. They’ll pretend to be spiders as big as dogs. Old clothes with nothing inside that tug at you and never let you go. The inside of your head. And when you’re in the attic there will be no books, and no stories, not ever again.”