The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman Page B

big girl, even if she was eleven,
even if she had been eleven for a very long time. Ursula Monkton was an adult.
It did not matter, at that moment, that she was every monster, every witch,
every nightmare made flesh. She was also an adult, and when adults fight
children, adults always win.
    Lettie said, “You should go back where you came
from in the first place. It’s not healthy for you to be here. For your own good,
go back.”
    A noise in the air, a horrible, twisted scratching
noise, filled with pain and with wrongness, a noise that set my teeth on edge
and made the kitten, its front paws resting on my chest, stiffen and its fur
prickle. The little thing twisted and clawed up onto my shoulder, and it hissed
and it spat. I looked up at Ursula Monkton. It was only when I saw her face that
I knew what the noise was.
    Ursula Monkton was laughing.
    â€œGo back? When your people ripped the hole in
Forever, I seized my chance. I could have ruled worlds, but I followed you, and
I waited, and I had patience. I knew that sooner or later the bounds would
loosen, that I would walk the true Earth, beneath the Sun of Heaven.” She was
not laughing now. “Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so
easily. They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this world,
like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries from a bush.”
    I did not let go of Lettie’s hand, not this time. I
stroked the kitten, whose needle-claws were digging into my shoulder, and I was
bitten for my trouble, but the kitten’s bite was not hard, just scared.
    Her voice came from all around us, as the
storm-wind gusted. “You kept me away from here for a long time. But then you
brought me a door, and I used him to carry me out of my cell. And what can you
do now that I am out?”
    Lettie didn’t seem angry. She thought about it,
then she said, “I could make you a new door. Or, better still, I could get
Granny to send you across the ocean, all the way to wherever you came from in
the beginning.”
    Ursula Monkton spat onto the grass, and a tiny ball
of flame sputtered and fizzed on the ground, where the spit had fallen.
    â€œGive me the boy,” was all she said. “He belongs to
me. I came here inside him. I own him.”
    â€œYou don’t own nuffink, you don’t,” said Lettie
Hempstock, angrily. “ ’Specially not him.” Lettie helped me to my feet, and she
stood behind me and put her arms around me. We were two children in a field in
the night. Lettie held me, and I held the kitten, while above us and all around
us a voice said,
    â€œWhat will you do? Take him home with you? This
world is a world of rules, little girl. He belongs to his parents, after all.
Take him away and his parents will come to bring him home, and his parents
belong to me.”
    â€œI’m all bored of you now,” said Lettie Hempstock.
“I gived you a chance. You’re on my land. Go away.”
    As she said that, my skin felt like it did when I’d
rubbed a balloon on my sweater, then touched it to my face and hair. Everything
prickled and tickled. My hair was soaked, but even wet, it felt like it was
starting to stand on end.
    Lettie Hempstock held me tightly. “Don’t worry,”
she whispered, and I was going to say something, to ask why I shouldn’t worry,
what I had to be afraid of, when the field we were standing in began to
glow.
    It glowed golden. Every blade of grass glowed and
glimmered, every leaf on every tree. Even the hedges were glowing. It was a warm
light. It seemed, to my eyes, as if the soil beneath the grass had transmuted
from base matter into pure light, and in the golden glow of the meadow the
blue-white lightnings that still crackled around Ursula Monkton seemed much less
impressive.
    Ursula Monkton rose unsteadily, as if the air had
just become hot and was carrying her upwards. Then Lettie Hempstock whispered
old