The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

all of them meant.
    I needed to wee. I turned my back on the house, took a few steps away from the tree, scared I would take one step too far and find myself outside the circle. I urinated into the darkness. I had just finished when I was blinded by a torch beam, and my father’s voice said, “What on earth are you doing down here?”
    “I… I’m just down here,” I said.
    “Yes. Your sister said. Well, time to come back to the house. Your dinner’s on the table.”
    I stayed where I was. “No,” I said, and shook my head.
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “I’m not being silly. I’m staying here.”
    “Come on.” And then, more cheerful, “Come on, Handsome George.” It had been his silly pet name for me, when I was a baby. He even had a song that went with it that he would sing while bouncing me on his lap. It was the best song in the world.
    I didn’t say anything.
    “I’m not going to carry you back to the house,” said my father. There was an edge starting to creep into his voice. “You’re too big for that.”
    Yes, I thought. And you’d have to cross into the fairy ring to pick me up.
    But the fairy ring seemed foolish now. This was my father, not some waxwork thing that the hunger birds had made to lure me out. It was night. My father had come home from work. It was time.
    I said, “Ursula Monkton’s gone away. And she’s not ever coming back.”
    He sounded irritated, then. “What did you do? Did you say something horrible to her? Were you rude?”
    “No.”
    He shone the torch beam onto my face. The light was almost blinding. He seemed to be fighting to keep his temper under control. He said, “Tell me what you said to her.”
    “I didn’t say anything to her. She just went away.”
    It was true, or almost.
    “Come back to the house, now.”
    “Please, Daddy. I have to stay here.”
    “You come back to the house this minute!” shouted my father, at the top of his voice, and I could not help it: my lower lip shook, my nose started to run, and tears sprang to my eyes. The tears blurred my vision and stung, but they did not fall, and I blinked them away.
    I did not know if I was talking to my own father or not.
    I said, “I don’t like it when you shout at me.”
    “Well, I don’t like it when you act like a little animal!” he shouted, and now I was crying, and the tears were running down my face, and I wished that I was anywhere else but there that night.
    I had stood up to worse things than him in the last few hours. And suddenly, I didn’t care anymore. I looked up at the dark shape behind and above the torch beam, and I said, “Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?” and I knew as I said it that it was the thing I should never have said.
    His face, what I could see of it in the reflected torchlight, crumpled, and looked shocked. He opened his mouth to speak, then he closed it again. I could not remember my father ever at a loss for words, before or after. Only then. I felt terrible. I thought, I will die here soon. I do not want to die with those words on my lips.
    But the torch beam was turning away from me. My father said only, “We’ll be up at the house. I’ll put your dinner in the oven.”
    I watched the torchlight move back across the lawn, past the rosebushes and up toward the house, until it went out, and was lost to sight. I heard the back door open and close again.
    Then you get some repose in the form of a doze with hot eyeballs and head ever aching but your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams that you’d very much better be waking…
    Somebody laughed. I stopped singing, and looked around, but saw nobody.
    “ ‘The Nightmare Song,’ ” a voice said. “How appropriate.”
    She walked closer, until I could see her face. Ursula Monkton was still quite naked, and she was smiling. I had seen her torn to pieces a few hours before, but now she was whole. Even so, she looked less solid than any of the other people I had seen that night; I could see the lights of the house glimmering behind her, through her. Her smile had not changed.
    “You’re dead,” I told her.
    “Yes. I was eaten,” said Ursula Monkton.
    “You’re dead. You aren’t real.”
    “I was eaten,” she repeated. “I am nothing. And they have let me out, just for a little while, from the place inside them. It’s cold in there, and very empty. But they have promised you to me, so I will have something to play with; something to keep me company in the dark. And