The Ocean at the End of the Lane

The children find Ursula outside, staring at the wormhole jar. She throws it against a tree, but it bounces off. She asks why Lettie brought the hunger birds; Lettie says they simply go wherever there’s food. Ursula begins to cry; the narrator feels awkward, watching an adult weep.

Ursula’s face changes, and her eyes look like whorls on tree bark. She says she’ll go. Lettie gives her the jar, and Ursula pulls from it the wormhole and tosses it to the ground, where it grows into a gigantic tunnel. The narrator feels an icy pain in his chest. Ursula approaches the tunnel, then declares that it’s blocked. She looks at the boy, then turns into a flapping thing like an unfurling umbrella, grabs the boy, and lifts him high in the air. He kicks and pulls, but the creature feels like “rotting cloth and soft wood” (173) and weighs him down.

The narrator hears Ursula talking inside his mind, saying that the way through the tunnel includes something still stuck inside his heart. She must reach into his chest, pull out his heart, and use it to fully open the tunnel. Lettie lets out a sharp whistle, and hundreds of black flying things appear overhead and descend toward them. Ursula hurries to the tunnel, but the flying things, hunger birds, dive and tear off pieces of her fabric body. She screams and says it’s unfair, that she never forced anyone to do anything. The birds keep tearing at her, and she collapses. The boy falls to the ground. Lettie pulls him away as the birds land on the remaining bits of squirming cloth, tearing them to shreds until the screaming stops and nothing is left.

The hunger birds pull the wormhole up into the sky and devour it. They then sit on the lawn like patches of darkness. Lettie tells them to go, but they say there’s more to eat. She puts her arms around the narrator and hustles him to a patch of green grass, a fairy ring, at the bottom of the garden. She says he’ll be safe there, but must not leave for anything until she gets back.

The hunger birds, mere shadows, gather around the ring. The narrator can’t see them except out of the corner of his eye. He’s terrified and waits a long time.

At dusk, the opal miner walks toward him. He looks like a wax figure. He tells the narrator, “You’re just prolonging the inevitable” (182). The opal miner explains that the carrion birds must clean up every last scrap, which includes the boy. He insists it’s a painless way to go. The boy closes his eyes and recites from memory a poem from Alice in Wonderland. He opens his eyes, and the opal miner is gone.

The narrator’s sister comes out and tells him that their father is on the phone. She threatens to get him in trouble if he doesn’t go inside. The boy is uncertain if this sister is real, and stays within the ring. She leaves. It gets dark; lights come on in the house. The boy recites a Gilbert and Sullivan poem about being ill and having nightmares.

The narrator’s father comes out and tells him to come inside. He refuses; his father gets angry and shouts at him. The boy cries and says he doesn’t like his father’s shouting. His father continues to shout. The boy asks, “Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?” (189) and immediately regrets it. His father, stunned, walks away.

Ursula appears. She’s still naked, and the narrator can see through her. She says the creatures have let her out so she can tell him he’ll belong to her as a plaything when they’ve eaten him. She blows him a kiss.

Lettie arrives and tells the narrator that everything is fixed, that he can leave the circle. He tells her to walk inside the circle instead. She laughs and changes into a shadow. Voices in his head say nobody loves him, that Lettie will never come back, and that he can save himself from all the pain in his life, now and in the future, by stepping out of the ring. The voices say that the hole in his heart will always haunt him with places he can’t go to.

The narrator decides that, if he’s going to die, he’ll do so waiting for Lettie. The voices and specters stop. He keeps reciting the nightmare poem: “[…] and your flesh is a-creep for your left leg’s asleep and you’ve cramp in your toes and a fly on your nose […]” (194).

Lettie arrives carrying a heavy bucket of water. She walks into the circle and sets the bucket down. She explains that, since the narrator couldn’t go to the “ocean,” she’d bring it to him. However, it took a while to get the pond to cooperate.

The narrator is hungry and tired. Lettie asks if he was scared, and he affirms it. She asks if the shadows tried to lure him out, and he says they did. She takes the boy’s hands and says she’s proud of him. Lettie tells him to stand in the bucket. He does so and immediately falls as if in a swimming pool.

Underwater, the narrator closes his eyes and holds his breath as long as he can, then exhales and inhales water, but it doesn’t hurt. Suddenly, he understands everything: the universe, the thin world of his life that lies atop a dark, writhing place of nightmares, the whispers between everything and everything else, the dark matter that contains what can’t be seen.

The narrator opens his eyes. Lettie is still holding his hand, but she looks like “silken sheets the color of ice, filled with tiny flickering candle flames” (199). He loves this place and wants to stay, but Lettie says he’ll dissolve into it and no longer be himself.

Suddenly, the narrator is coughing water, standing in Lettie’s pond. She pulls him from the pond, and he’s completely dry and remembers that, a moment earlier, he knew everything. He asks if Lettie knows everything; she says she did, but that one must give up this knowledge to play in the world.

The children go to the farmhouse, where the narrator eats delicious shepherd’s pie while Lettie and Ginnie discuss the hunger birds. Lettie is surprised at the large number of them, but Ginnie points out that “You put up signals, and called them. Like banging the dinner bell, you were” (204). Lettie wonders why the creatures won’t leave, like they normally do. Ginnie insists they’ll go away eventually. The boy trusts them, but worries aloud that he’ll get eaten and die. Ginnie says this won’t happen. The boy and Lettie leave the farmhouse; he holds her hand and promises himself not to let go.

Old Mrs. Hempstock sleeps and can’t be woken until she’s ready, perhaps in 100 years. Lettie, Ginnie, and the narrator walk up the lane in the dark. They stop where the opal miner died at the edge of the farm property. Ginnie calls out to the hunger birds. The farm begins to glow, and the birds land just outside it, each of them now much bigger than the boy.

Imperiously, Ginnie tells the hunger birds to leave, but they laugh that they can go where they please, have eaten entire worlds, and are a necessary function. They flock to a tree and eat it until it’s gone and only a blankness remains. A fox wanders by and is consumed completely. The birds fly up and devour a constellation of stars in the sky. They mean to ingest the entire universe unless they get the narrator.

The narrator doesn’t want to die, but can’t let his world be destroyed. He lets go of Lettie’s hand, runs across the farm and beyond, and waits. The hunger birds descend on him, but something knocks him down. It’s Lettie, protecting him from the birds. They slam into her, and she wails in pain.

A voice interrupts: “On what authority do you harm my child?” (219). The voice has imperial might, but the narrator knows it’s Old Mrs. Hempstock. She accuses the hunger birds of breaking the pacts. Ginnie grabs the boy and Lettie, and holds them tightly. The boy looks up and sees Old Mrs. Hempstock, but she’s tall and blindingly bright. She threatens to have the birds removed from reality. Fearful, they apologize and start to leave, but she makes them return everything they just ate—the tree and fox and grouping of stars.

The narrator hears someone humming. It’s him, intoning a nursery rhyme, “Girls and Boys Come Out to Play”: “the moon doth shine as bright as day. / Leave your supper and leave your meat, / and join your playfellows in the street. / Come with a whoop and come with a call. / Come with a whole heart or not at all” (222).

The hunger birds are gone. The narrator realizes that Lettie sacrificed herself to save him and is close to death. Old Mrs. Hempstock, again her usual self, wearing an old, patched nightgown, says the girl won’t die—a Hempstock wouldn’t do something so “common”—but Ginnie says her daughter still needs help.

The narrator apologizes for being reckless, but Old Mrs. Hempstock says that he meant well. Ginnie carries Lettie, who’s limp as a rag doll, and they go to the pond. Ginnie walks into the water, lays Lettie on its surface, and backs away. A roaring noise erupts, and great waves crash across the pond, which now appears as an ocean. Old Mrs. Hempstock says Lettie is returning to the sea, and she’ll come back again in time. The boy asks if she’ll be the same; the old woman laughs and says everything changes all the time.

A giant wave approaches from far away and crashes down on Lettie. The narrator raises his arm, but nothing touches him. He looks and the pond has returned to its former self. Lettie is gone, and so is Old Mrs. Hempstock. Ginnie stares into the water for a moment, then says to the boy, “I’ll take you home” (228).

Ginnie drives the narrator back. He’s surprised she has a car; she says, “You can’t know everything” (229). At the boy’s house, Ginnie rings the bell, and his mother answers. Ginnie thanks her for letting the boy stay over, and says that Lettie is moving to Australia. Already, the boy can’t remember what exactly happened with Lettie; he wonders when she’ll return from Australia.

The narrator’s mother announces that Ursula had to move away on urgent family business. The boy still hates Ursula but can’t remember why. His mother asks if he’d like his bedroom back; for some reason, he refuses. He never sleeps in it again. Five years later, the family moves out and the house is demolished to make way for a housing development. Decades later, the boy’s sister says she thinks their mother fired Ursula for having an affair with their father. She remembers Ursula fondly, though.

Weeks after the narrator returns from Hempstock Farm, a black cat with blue-green eyes shows up at the house. The boy feeds her, and she takes up residence. She becomes his companion; at night, she sleeps on the pillow next to him, purring softly. For some reason he can’t quite explain, he calls her “Ocean.”

Still sitting by the pond at dusk, the middle-aged narrator remembers that he adored his cat Ocean, who lived for many years. The old woman emerges from the farmhouse with a snack for him, a cheese-and-tomato sandwich on freshly baked bread. He realizes that the old woman isn’t Ginnie but Old Mrs. Hempstock. In this moment, he realizes the two are part of the same being.

The narrator asks Old Mrs. Hempstock why he came back. She says he’s been back multiple times to visit things he has missed. He doesn’t remember these times. Ginnie appears—looking younger and smaller than the narrator remembers—and says he’s here because Lettie wants to know if he was worth her sacrifice.

Ginnie says the hunger birds “tore out your heart. You screamed so piteously as you died. She couldn’t abide that” (240). The narrator doesn’t remember dying. He wants to see Lettie, then realizes she’s already seen him, while he sat there and remembered his childhood. He asks if he passed Lettie’s test; Old Mrs. Hempstock says, “You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear” (241-42). Still, she adds that he’s improved since his last visit and is finally growing a new heart.

The narrator walks to the pond and thanks Lettie for saving his life. Old Mrs. Hempstock says it was Lettie’s mistake for taking him with her to the farm’s magical realm. Ginnie says he needs to leave, and he realizes he’s been there for hours: His sister and her family will be wondering what happened to him.

A black cat that reminds the narrator of his childhood cat, Ocean, appears and nuzzles against him. He pets it. He says goodbye to Old Mrs. Hempstock and drives off. As the narrator leaves, he sees two moons in his rearview mirror: Old Mrs. Hempstock’s favorite full moon, and the half-moon of the human world. He turns to look, and there’s just a half-moon. He realizes something important, but it slips from his mind, “faded into the past like a memory forgotten, or a shadow into the dusk” (246).