The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

how it is for you?” I asked.
    “Is what how it is for me?”
    “Do you still know everything, all the time?”
    She shook her head. She didn’t smile. She said, “Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.”
    “So you used to know everything?”
    She wrinkled her nose. “Everybody did. I told you. It’s nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.”
    “To play what ?”
    “This,” she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars.
    I wished I knew what she meant. It was as if she was talking about a dream we had shared. For a moment it was so close in my mind that I could almost touch it.
    “You must be so hungry,” said Lettie, and the moment was broken, and yes, I was so hungry, and the hunger took my head and swallowed my lingering dreams.
    There was a plate waiting for me in my place at the table in the farmhouse’s huge kitchen. On it was a portion of shepherd’s pie, the mashed potato a crusty brown on top, minced meat and vegetables and gravy beneath it. I was scared of eating food outside my home, scared that I might want to leave food I did not like and be told off, or be forced to sit and swallow it in minuscule portions until it was gone, as I was at school, but the food at the Hempstocks’ was always perfect. It did not scare me.
    Ginnie Hempstock was there, bustling about in her apron, rounded and welcoming. I ate without talking, head down, shoveling the welcome food into my mouth. The woman and the girl spoke in low, urgent tones.
    “They’ll be here soon enough,” said Lettie. “They aren’t stupid. And they won’t leave until they’ve taken the last little bit of what they came here for.”
    Her mother sniffed. Her red cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen fire. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “They’re all mouth, they are.”
    I had never heard that expression before, and I thought she was telling us that the creatures were just mouths and nothing more. It did not seem unlikely that the shadows were indeed all mouths. I had seen them devour the gray thing that had called itself Ursula Monkton.
    My grandmother would tell me off for eating like a wild animal. “You must essen, eat,” she would say, “like a person, not a chazzer, a pig. When animals eat, they fress . People essen . Eat like a person.” Fressen: that was how the hunger birds had taken Ursula Monkton and it was also, I had no doubt, how they would consume me.
    “I’ve never seen so many of them,” said Lettie. “When they came here in the old days there was only a handful of them.”
    Ginnie poured me a glass of water. “That’s your own fault,” she told Lettie. “You put up signals, and called them. Like banging the dinner bell, you were. Not surprising they all came.”
    “I just wanted to make sure that she left,” said Lettie.
    “Fleas,” said Ginnie, and she shook her head. “They’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and are so proud of themselves and so puffed up for being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.” She stirred the custard cooking on the hob, with a long wooden spoon in huge, irritated movements. “Anyway, now we’ve got foxes. And we’ll send them all home, same as we did the last times they were sniffing around. We did it before, didn’t we?”
    “Not really,” said Lettie. “Either we sent the flea home, and the varmints had nothing to hang around for, like the flea in the cellar in Cromwell’s time, or the varmints came and took what they came here for and then they went away. Like the fat flea who made people’s dreams come true in Red Rufus’s day. They took him and they upped and left. We’ve never had to get rid of them before.”
    Her mother shrugged. “It’s all the same sort of thing. We’ll just send them back where they came from.”
    “And where do they come from?” asked Lettie.
    I had slowed down now, and was making the final fragments of my shepherd’s pie last as long as I could, pushing them around the plate slowly with my fork.
    “That dunt matter,” said Ginnie. “They all go back eventually. Probably just get bored of waiting.”
    “I tried pushing them around,” said Lettie Hempstock, matter-of-factly. “Couldn’t get any traction. I held