The ocean at the end of the lane

“You can’t just boss bacteria around like that,” said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. “They don’t like it.”

“Stuff and silliness,” said the old lady. “You leave wigglers alone and they’ll be carrying on like anything. Show them who’s boss and they can’t do enough for you. You’ve tasted my cheese.” She turned to me. “I’ve won medals for my cheese. Medals. Back in the old king’s day there were those who’d ride for a week to buy a round of my cheese. They said that the king himself had it with his bread and his boys, Prince Dickon and Prince Geoffrey and even little Prince John, they swore it was the finest cheese they had ever tasted—”

“Gran,” said Lettie, and the old lady stopped, mid-flow.

Lettie’s mother said, “You’ll be needing a hazel wand. And,” she added, somewhat doubtfully, “I suppose you could take the lad. It’s his coin, and it’ll be easier to carry if he’s with you. Something she made.”

“She?” said Lettie.

She was holding her horn-handled penknife, with the blade closed.

“Tastes like a she,” said Lettie’s mother. “I might be wrong, mind.”

“Don’t take the boy,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Asking for trouble, that is.”

I was disappointed.

“We’ll be fine,” said Lettie. “I’ll take care of him. Him and me. It’ll be an adventure. And he’ll be company. Please, Gran?”

I looked up at Old Mrs. Hempstock with hope on my face, and waited.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you, if it all goes wobbly,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock.

“Thank you, Gran. I won’t. And I’ll be careful.”

Old Mrs. Hempstock sniffed. “Now, don’t do anything stupid. Approach it with care. Bind it, close its ways, send it back to sleep.”

“I know,” said Lettie. “I know all that. Honestly. We’ll be fine.”

That’s what she said. But we weren’t.

IV.

Lettie led me to a hazel thicket beside the old road (the hazel catkins were hanging heavy in the spring) and she broke off a thin branch. Then, with her knife, as if she had done it ten thousand times before, she stripped the branch of bark, cut it again, so now it resembled a Y. She put the knife away (I did not see where it went) and held the two ends of the Y in her hands.

“I’m not dowsing,” she told me. “Just using it as a guide. We’re looking for a blue . . . a bluebottle, I think to start with. Or something purply-blue, and shiny.”

I looked around with her. “I can’t see one.”

“It’ll be here,” she assured me.

I gazed around, taking in the grass, a reddish-brown chicken pecking at the side of the driveway, some rusty farm machinery, the wooden trestle table beside the road and the six empty metal milk churns that sat upon it. I saw the Hempstocks’ red-brick farmhouse, crouched and comfortable like an animal at rest. I saw the spring flowers; the omnipresent white and yellow daisies, the golden dandelions and do-you-like-butter buttercups, and, late in the season, a lone bluebell in the shadows beneath the milk-churn table, still glistening with dew . . .

“That?” I asked.

“You’ve got sharp eyes,” she said, approvingly.

We walked together to the bluebell. Lettie closed her eyes when we reached it. She moved her body back and forth, the hazel wand extended, as if she were the central point on a clock or a compass, her wand the hands, orienting toward a midnight or an east that I could not perceive. “Black,” she said suddenly, as if she were describing something from a dream. “And soft.”

We walked away from the bluebell, along the lane that I imagined, sometimes, must have been a Roman road. We were a hundred yards up the lane, near where the Mini had been parked, when she spotted it: a scrap of black cloth caught on the barbed wire of the fence.

Lettie approached it. Again, the outstretched hazel stick, again the slow turning and turning. “Red,” she said, with certainty. “Very red. That way.”

We walked together in the direction she indicated. Across a meadow and into a clump of trees. “There,” I said, fascinated. The corpse of a very small animal—a vole, by the look of it—lay on a clump of green moss. It had no head, and bright blood stained its fur and beaded on the moss. It was very red.

“Now, from here on,” said Lettie, “hold on to my arm. Don’t let go.”

I put out my right hand and took her left arm, just below the elbow. She moved the hazel wand. “This way,” she said.

“What are we looking for now?”

“We’re getting closer,” she said. “The next thing we’re looking for is a storm.”

We pushed our way into a clump of trees, and through the clump of trees into a wood, and squeezed our way through trees too close together, their foliage a thick canopy above our heads. We found a clearing in the wood, and walked along the clearing, in a world made green.

From our left came a mumble of distant thunder.

“Storm,” sang Lettie. She let her body swing again, and I turned with her, holding her arm. I felt, or imagined I felt, a throbbing going through me, holding her arm, as if I were touching mighty engines.

She set off in a new direction. We crossed a tiny stream together. Then she stopped, suddenly, and stumbled, but did not fall.

“Are we there?” I asked.

“Not there,” she said. “No. It knows we’re coming. It feels us. And it does not want us to come to it.”

The hazel wand was whipping around now like a magnet being pushed at a repelling pole. Lettie gri

A gust of wind threw leaves and dirt up into our faces. In the distance I could hear something rumble, like a train. It was getting harder to see, and the sky that I could make out above the canopy of leaves was dark, as if huge storm-clouds had moved above our heads, or as if it had gone from morning directly to twilight.

Lettie shouted, “Get down!” and she crouched on the moss, pulling me down with her. She lay prone, and I lay beside her, feeling a little silly. The ground was damp.

“How long will we—?”

“Shush!” She sounded almost angry. I said nothing.

Something came through the woods, above our heads. I glanced up, saw something brown and furry, but flat, like a huge rug, flapping and curling at the edges, and, at the front of the rug, a mouth, filled with dozens of tiny sharp teeth, facing down.

It flapped and floated above us, and then it was gone.

“What was that?” I asked, my heart pounding so hard in my chest that I did not know if I would be able to stand again.

“Manta wolf,” said Lettie. “We’ve already gone a bit further out than I thought.” She got to her feet and stared the way the furry thing had gone. She raised the tip of the hazel wand, and turned around slowly.

“I’m not getting anything.” She tossed her head, to get the hair out of her eyes, without letting go of the fork of hazel wand. “Either it’s hiding or we’re too close.” She bit her lip. Then she said, “The shilling. The one from your throat. Bring it out.”

I took it from my pocket with my left hand, offered it to her.

“No,” she said. “I can’t touch it, not right now. Put it down on the fork of the stick.”

I didn’t ask why. I just put the silver shilling down at the intersection of the Y. Lettie stretched her arms out, and turned very slowly, with the end of the stick pointing straight out. I moved with her, but felt nothing. No throbbing engines. We were over halfway around when she stopped and said, “Look!”

I looked in the direction she was facing, but I saw nothing but trees, and shadows in the wood.

“No, look. There.” She indicated with her head.

The tip of the hazel wand had begun smoking, softly. She turned a little to the left, a little to the right, a little further to the right again, and the tip of the wand began to glow a bright orange.