The Ocean at the End of the Lane

by Neil Gaiman

  The kitten lay down on my lap and curled up, wrapping around itself until it was nothing more than a flattened circlet of fluffy black fur. It closed its vivid blue eyes, the color of an ocean, and it slept, and it purred.

  “Well?” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “What do you suggest, then?”

  Lettie thought, pushing her lips together, moving them over to one side. Her head tipped, and I thought she was running through alternatives. Then her face brightened. “Snip and cut?” she said.

  Old Mrs. Hempstock sniffed. “You’re a good girl,” she said. “I’m not saying you’re not. But snippage . . . well, you couldn’t do that. Not yet. You’d have to cut the edges out exactly, sew them back without the seam showing. And what would you cut out? The flea won’t let you snip her. She’s not in the fabric. She’s outside of it.”

  Ginnie Hempstock returned. She was carrying my old dressing gown. “I put it through the mangle,” she said. “But it’s still damp. That’ll make the edges harder to line up. You don’t want to do needlework when it’s still damp.”

  She put the dressing gown down on the table, in front of Old Mrs. Hempstock. Then she pulled out from the front pocket of her apron a pair of scissors, black and old, a long needle, and a spool of red thread.

  “Rowanberry and red thread, stop a witch in her speed,” I recited. It was something I had read in a book.

  “That’d work, and work well,” said Lettie, “if there was any witches involved in all this. But there’s not.”

  Old Mrs. Hempstock was examining my dressing gown. It was brown and faded, with a sort of a sepia tartan across it. It had been a present from my father’s parents, my grandparents, several birthdays ago, when it had been comically big on me. “Probably . . . ,” she said, as if she was talking to herself, “it would be best if your father was happy for you to stay the night here. But for that to happen they couldn’t be angry with you, or even worried . . .”

  The black scissors were in her hand and already snip-snip-snipping then, when I heard a knock on the front door, and Ginnie Hempstock got up to answer it. She went into the hall and closed the door behind her.

  “Don’t let them take me,” I said to Lettie.

  “Hush,” she said. “I’m working here, while Grandmother’s snipping. You just be sleepy, and at peace. Happy.”

  I was far from happy, and not in the slightest bit sleepy. Lettie leaned across the table, and she took my hand. “Don’t worry,” she said.

  And with that the door opened, and my father and my mother were in the kitchen. I wanted to hide, but the kitten shifted reassuringly, on my lap, and Lettie smiled at me, a reassuring smile.

  “We are looking for our son,” my father was telling Mrs. Hempstock, “and we have reason to believe . . .” And even as he was saying that my mother was striding toward me. “There he is! Darling, we were worried silly!”

  “You’re in a lot of trouble, young man,” said my father.

  Snip! Snip! Snip! went the black scissors, and the irregular section of fabric that Old Mrs. Hempstock had been cutting fell to the table.

  My parents froze. They stopped talking, stopped moving. My father’s mouth was still open, my mother stood on one leg, as unmoving as if she were a shop-window dummy.

  “What . . . what did you do to them?” I was unsure whether or not I ought to be upset.

  Ginnie Hempstock said, “They’re fine. Just a little snipping, then a little sewing and it’ll all be good as gold.” She reached down to the table, pointed to the scrap of faded dressing gown tartan resting upon it. “That’s your dad and you in the hallway, and that’s the bathtub. She’s snipped that out. So without any of that, there’s no reason for your daddy to be angry with you.”

  I had not told them about the bathtub. I did not wonder how she knew.

  Now the old woman was threading the needle with the red thread. She sighed, theatrically. “Old eyes,” she said. “Old eyes.” But she licked the tip of the thread and pushed it through the eye of the needle without any apparent difficulty.

  “Lettie. You’ll need to know what his toothbrush looks like,” said the old woman. She began to sew the edges of the dressing gown together with tiny, careful stitches.

  “What’s your toothbrush look like?” asked Lettie. “Quickly.”

  “It’s green,” I said. “Bright green. A sort of appley green. It’s not very big. Just a green toothbrush, my size.” I wasn’t describing it very well, I knew. I pictured it in my head, tried to find something more about it that I could describe, to set it apart from all other toothbrushes. No good. I imagined it, saw it in my mind’s eye, with the other toothbrushes in its red-and-white-spotted beaker above the bathroom sink.

  “Got it!” said Lettie. “Nice job.”

  “Very nearly done here,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock.

  Ginnie Hempstock smiled a huge smile, and it lit up her ruddy round face. Old Mrs. Hempstock picked up the scissors and snipped a final time, and a fragment of red thread fell to the tabletop.

  My mother’s foot came down. She took a step and then she stopped.

  My father said, “Um.”

  Ginnie said, “ . . . and it made our Lettie so happy that your boy would come here and stay the night. It’s a bit old-fashioned here, I’m afraid.”

  The old woman said, “We’ve got an inside lavvy nowadays. I don’t know how much more modern anybody could be. Outside lavvies and chamber pots were good enough for me.”

  “He ate a fine meal,” said Ginnie to me. “Didn’t you?”

  “There was pie,” I told my parents. “For dessert.”

  My father’s brow was creased. He looked confused. Then he put his hand into the pocket of his car coat, and pulled out something long and green, with toilet paper wrapped around the top. “You forgot your toothbrush,” he said. “Thought you’d want it.”

  “Now, if he wants to come home, he can come home,” my mother was saying to Ginnie Hempstock. “He went to stay the night at the Kovacses’ house a few months ago, and by nine he was calling us to come and get him.”

  Christopher Kovacs was two years older and a head taller than me, and he lived with his mother in a large cottage opposite the entrance to our lane, by the old green water tower. His mother was divorced. I liked her. She was funny, and drove a VW Beetle, the first I had ever seen. Christopher owned many books I had not read, and was a member of the Puffin Club. I could read his Puffin books, but only if I went to his house. He would never let me borrow them.

  There was a bunk bed in Christopher’s bedroom, although he was an only child. I was given the bottom bunk, the night I stayed there. Once I was in bed, and Christopher Kovacs’s mother had said good night to us and she had turned out the bedroom light and closed the door, he leaned down and began squirting me with a water pistol he had hidden beneath his pillow. I had not known what to do.

  “This isn’t like when I went to Christopher Kovacs’s house,” I told my mother, embarrassed. “I like it here.”

  “What are you wearing?” She stared at my Wee Willie Winkie nightgown in puzzlement.

  Ginnie said, “He had a little accident. He’s wearing that while his pajamas are drying.”

  “Oh. I see,” said my mother. “Well, good night, dear. Have a nice time with your new friend.” She peered down at Lettie. “What’s your name again, dear?”

  “Lettie,” said Lettie Hempstock.

  “Is it short for Letitia?�
� asked my mother. “I knew a Letitia when I was at university. Of course, everybody called her Lettuce.”

  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 driving 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, nor where she had stitched it up. It was seamless, the mend invisible. She passed me the scrap of fabric on the table that she had cut. “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 my lap 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 onto 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 me,” 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. The old woman 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 anything 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 toward her, so the sole was facing her, and stabbed the needle down . . . not into my foot, I realized, but into the hole itself.

  It did not hurt.

  Then she twisted the needle and pulled it back toward 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—the sensation 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 feeling 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.

  And then she stopped reeling it in. “Doesn’t want to come out,” she said. “It’s holding on.”

  There was a coldness in my heart, as if a chip of ice were lodged there. The old woman gave an expert flick of her wrist, and then the glistening thing was dangling from her needle (I found myself thinking now not of mercury, but of the silvery slime trails that snails leave in the garden), and it no longer went into my foot.

  She let go of my sole and I pulled the foot back. The tiny round hole had vanished completely, as if it had never been there.

  Old Mrs. Hempstock cackled with glee. “Thinks she’s so clever,” she said, “leaving her way home inside the boy. Is that clever? I don’t think that’s clever. I wouldn’t give tuppence for the lot of them.”

  Ginnie Hempstock produced an empty jam jar, and the old woman put the bottom of the dangling thing into it, then raised the jar to hold it. At the end, she slipped the glistening invisible trail off the needle and put the lid on the jam jar with a decisive flick of her bony wrist.

  “Ha!” she said. And again, “Ha!”

  Lettie said, “Can I see it?” She took the jam jar, held it up to the light. Inside the jar the thing had begun lazily to uncurl. It seemed to be floating, as if the jar had been filled with water. It changed color as it caught the light in different ways, sometimes black, sometimes silver.

  An experiment that I had found in a book of things boys could do, and which I had, of course, done: if you take an egg, and blacken it completely with soot from a candle flame, and then put it into a clear container filled with salt water, it will hang in the middle of the water, and it will seem to be silver: a peculiar, artificial silver, that is only a trick of the light. I thought of that egg, then.

  Lettie seemed fascinated. “You’re right. She left her way home inside him. No wonder she didn’t want him to leave.”

  I said, “I’m sorry I let go of your hand, Lettie.”

  “Oh, hush,” she said. “It’s always too late for sorr
ies, but I appreciate the sentiment. And next time, you’ll keep hold of my hand no matter what she throws at us.”

  I nodded. The ice chip in my heart seemed to warm then, and melt, and I began to feel whole and safe once more.

  “So,” said Ginnie. “We’ve got her way home. And we’ve got the boy safe. That’s a good night’s work or I don’t know what is.”

  “But she’s got the boy’s parents,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “And his sister. And we can’t just leave her running around. Remember what happened in Cromwell’s day? And before that? When Red Rufus was running around? Fleas attract varmints.” She said it as if it were a natural law.

  “That can wait until the morrow,” said Ginnie. “Now, Lettie. Take the lad and find a room for him to sleep in. He’s had a long day.”

  The black kitten was curled up on the rocking chair beside the fireplace. “Can I bring the kitten with me?”

  “If you don’t,” said Lettie, “she’ll just come and find you.”

  Ginnie produced two candlesticks, the kind with big round handles, each one with a shapeless mound of white wax in it. She lit a wooden taper from the kitchen fire, then transferred the flame from the taper first to one candlewick and then to the other. She handed one candlestick to me, the other to Lettie.

  “Don’t you have electricity?” I asked. There were electric lights in the kitchen, big old-fashioned bulbs hanging from the ceiling, their filaments glowing.

  “Not in that part of the house,” said Lettie. “The kitchen’s new. Sort of. Put your hand in front of your candle as you walk, so it doesn’t blow out.”

  She cupped her own hand around the flame as she said this, and I copied her, and I walked behind her. The black kitten followed us, out of the kitchen, through a wooden door painted white, down a step, and into the farmhouse.