The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

the waters of the ocean filled me.
    Everything whispered inside me. Everything spoke to everything, and I knew it all.
    I opened my eyes, curious to learn what I would see in the world outside me, if it would be anything like the world inside.
    I was hanging deep beneath the water.
    I looked down, and the blue world below me receded into darkness. I looked up and the world above me did the same. Nothing was pulling me down deeper, nothing was forcing me toward the surface.
    I turned my head, a little, to look at her, because she was still holding my hand, she had never let go of my hand, and I saw Lettie Hempstock.
    At first, I do not think I knew what I was looking at. I could make no sense of it. Where Ursula Monkton had been made of gray cloth that flapped and snapped and gusted in the storm-winds, Lettie Hempstock was made of silken sheets the color of ice, filled with tiny flickering candle flames, a hundred hundred candle flames.
    Could there be candle flames burning under the water? There could. I knew that, when I was in the ocean, and I even knew how. I understood it just as I understood Dark Matter, the material of the universe that makes up everything that must be there but we cannot find. I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely.
    Lettie Hempstock looked like pale silk and candle flames. I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I looked inward I would see only infinite mirrors, staring into myself for eternity.
    The silk filled with candle flames moved then, a slow, graceful, under-the-water sort of a movement. The current pulled at it, and now it had arms and the hand that had never let go of mine, and a body and a freckled face that was familiar, and it opened its mouth and, in Lettie Hempstock’s voice, it said, “I’m really sorry.”
    “What for?”
    She did not reply. The currents of the ocean pulled at my hair and my clothes like summer breezes. I was no longer cold and I knew everything and I was not hungry and the whole big, complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered. I would stay here forever.
    “You can’t,” said Lettie. “It would destroy you.”
    I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could kill me, not now, but she said, “Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You wouldn’t die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that’s not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn’t be anything left that would think of itself as an ‘I.’ No point of view any longer, because you’d be an infinite sequence of views and of points . . .”
    I was going to argue with her. She was wrong, she had to be: I loved that place, that state, that feeling, and I was never going to leave it.
    And then my head broke water, and I blinked and coughed, and I was standing, thigh-deep in the pond at the back of the Hempstocks’ farm, and Lettie Hempstock was standing beside me, holding my hand.
    I coughed again, and it felt like the water fled my nose, my throat, my lungs. I pulled clean air into my chest, in the light of the huge, full harvest moon, that shone on the Hempstocks’ red-tiled roof, and, for one final, perfect moment, I still knew everything: I remember that I knew how to make it so the moon would be full when you needed it to be, and shining just on the back of the house, every night.
    I knew everything, but Lettie Hempstock was pulling me up out of the pond.
    I was still wearing the strange old-fashioned clothes I had been given that morning, and as I stepped out of the pond, up onto the grass that edged it, I discovered that my clothes and my skin were now perfectly dry. The ocean was back in the pond, and the only knowledge I was left with, as if I had woken from a dream on a summer’s day, was that it had not been long ago since I had known everything.
    I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. “Is that