The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

path in your heart.”
    “I didn’t start it!” I told the dead man. “It’s not fair. You started it.”
    “Yes,” said the dead man. “Are you coming?”
    I sat down with my back to the dead tree in the center of the fairy ring, and I closed my eyes, and I did not move. I remembered poems to distract myself, recited them silently under my breath, mouthing the words but making no sound.
    Fury said to a mouse that he met in the house let us both go to law I will prosecute you…
    I had learned that poem by heart at my school. It was told by the Mouse from Alice in Wonderland, the Mouse she met swimming in the pool of her own tears. In my copy of Alice the words of the poem curled and shrank like a mouse’s tail.
    I could say all of the poem in one long breath, and I did, all the way to the inevitable end.
    I’ll be judge I’ll be jury said cunning old Fury I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.
    When I opened my eyes and looked up the opal miner was no longer there.
    The sky was going gray and the world was losing depth and flattening into twilight. If the shadows were still there I could no longer perceive them; or rather, the whole world had become shadows.
    My little sister ran down from the house, calling my name. She stopped before she reached me, and she said, “What are you doing?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Daddy’s on the phone. He says you have to come and talk to him.”
    “No. He doesn’t.”
    “What?”
    “He doesn’t say that.”
    “If you don’t come now, you’ll be in trouble.”
    I did not know if this was my sister or not, but I was on the inside of the grass circle, and she was on the outside.
    I wished I had brought a book with me, even though it was almost too dark to read. I said the Mouse’s “Pool of Tears” poem again, in my head. Come I’ll take no denial we must have a trial for really this morning I’ve nothing to do…
    “Where’s Ursula?” asked my sister. “She went up to her room, but she isn’t there anymore. She’s not in the kitchen and she’s not in the loo-lahs. I want my tea. I’m hungry.”
    “You can make yourself something to eat,” I told her. “You’re not a baby.”
    “Where’s Ursula?”
    She was ripped to shreds by alien vulture-monsters and honestly I think you’re one of them or being controlled by them or something.
    “Don’t know.”
    “I’m telling Mummy and Daddy when they get home that you were horrible to me today. You’ll get into trouble.” I wondered if this was actually my sister or not. It definitely sounded like her. But she did not take a step over the circle of greener grass, into the ring. She stuck her tongue out at me, and ran back toward the house.
    Said the mouse to the cur such a trial dear sir with no jury or judge would be wasting our breath…
    Deep twilit dusk, all colorless and strained. Mosquitoes whined about my ears and landed, one by one, on my cheeks and my hands. I was glad I was wearing Lettie Hempstock’s cousin’s strange old-fashioned clothing, then, because I had less bare skin exposed. I slapped at the insects as they landed, and some of them flew off. One that didn’t fly away, gorging itself on the inside of my wrist, burst when I hit it, leaving a smeared teardrop of my blood to run down the inside of my arm.
    There were bats flying above me. I liked bats, always had, but that night there were so many of them, and they made me think of the hunger birds, and I shuddered.
    Twilight became, imperceptibly, night, and now I was sitting in a circle that I could no longer see, at the bottom of the garden. Lights, friendly electric lights, went on in the house.
    I did not want to be scared of the dark. I was not scared of any real thing. I just did not want to be there any longer, waiting in the darkness for my friend who had run away from me and did not seem to be coming back.
    . . . said cunning old Fury I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.
    I stayed just where I was. I had seen Ursula Monkton torn to shreds, and the shreds devoured by scavengers from outside the universe of things that I understood. If I went out of the circle, I was certain, they would do the same to me.
    I moved from Lewis Carroll to Gilbert and Sullivan.
    When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache and repose is taboo’d by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety…
    I loved the sound of the words, even if I was not entirely sure what