The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

she said. “I’m being kind, and I’m being nice. Trust me. Take it. I don’t think you can get any further to home than the place we met you, with the orange sky, but that’s far enough. I can’t get you from there to where you came from in the first place—I asked Gran, and she says it isn’t even there anymore—but once you’re back we can find a place for you, somewhere similar. Somewhere you’ll be happy. Somewhere you’ll be safe.”
    Ursula Monkton got off the bed. She stood up and looked down at us. There were no lightnings wreathing her, not any longer, but she was scarier standing naked in that bedroom than she had been floating in the storm. She was an adult—no, more than an adult. She was old. And I have never felt more like a child.
    “I’m so happy here,” she said. “So very, very happy here.” And then she said, almost regretfully, “You’re not.”
    I heard a sound, a soft, raggedy, flapping sound. The gray cloths began to detach themselves from the ceiling, one by one. They fell, but not in a straight line. They fell toward us, from all over the room, as if we were magnets, pulling them toward our bodies. The first strip of gray cloth landed on the back of my left hand, and it stuck there. I reached out my right hand and grabbed it, and I pulled the cloth off: it adhered, for a moment, and as it pulled off it made a sucking sound. There was a discolored patch on the back of my left hand, where the cloth had been, and it was as red as if I had been sucking on it for a long, long time, longer and harder than I ever had in real life, and it was beaded with blood. There were pinpricks of red wetness that smeared as I touched it, and then a long bandage-cloth began to attach itself to my legs, and I moved away as a cloth landed on my face and my forehead, and another wrapped itself over my eyes, blinding me, so I pulled at the cloth on my eyes, but now another cloth circled my wrists, bound them together, and my arms were wrapped and bound to my body, and I stumbled, and fell to the floor.
    If I pulled against the cloths, they hurt me.
    My world was gray. 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 on the carpet, 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 naked and exposed 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 doesn’t 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 jam jar, 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