The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

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