by Neil Gaiman
IX.
Lettie’s mother was prodding the huge fireplace with a poker, pushing the burning logs together.
Old Mrs. Hempstock was stirring a bulbous pot on the stove with a large wooden spoon. She lifted the spoon to her mouth, blew on it theatrically, sipped from it, pursed her lips, then added a pinch of something and a fistful of something else to it. She turned down the flame. Then she looked at me, from my wet hair to my bare feet, which were blue with cold. As I stood there a puddle began to appear on the flagstone floor around me, and the drips of water from my dressing gown splashed into it.
“Hot bath,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Or he’ll catch his death.”
“That was what I said,” said Lettie.
Lettie’s mother was already hauling a tin bath from beneath the kitchen table, and filling it with steaming water from the enormous black kettle that hung above the fireplace. Pots of cold water were added until she pronounced it the perfect temperature.
“Right. In you go,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Spit-spot.”
I looked at her, horrified. Was I going to have to undress in front of people I didn’t know?
“We’ll wash your clothes, and dry them for you, and mend that dressing gown,” said Lettie’s mother, and she took the dressing gown from me, and she took the kitten, which I had barely realized I was still holding, and then she walked away.
As quickly as possible I shed my red nylon pajamas—the bottoms were soaked and the legs were now ragged and ripped and would never be whole again. I dipped my fingers into the water, then I climbed in and sat down on the tin floor of the bath in that reassuring kitchen in front of the huge fire, and I leaned back in the hot water. My feet began to throb as they came back to life. I knew that naked was wrong, but the Hempstocks seemed indifferent to my nakedness: Lettie was gone, and my pajamas and dressing gown with her; her mother was getting out knives, forks, spoons, little jugs and bigger jugs, carving knives and wooden trenchers, and arranging them about the table.
Old Mrs. Hempstock passed me a mug, filled with soup from the black pot on the stove. “Get that down you. Heat you up from the inside, first.”
The soup was rich, and warming. I had never drunk soup in the bath before. It was a perfectly new experience. When I finished the mug I gave it back to her, and in return she passed me a large cake of white soap and a face-flannel and said, “Now get scrubbin’. Rub the life and the warmth back into your bones.”
She sat down in a rocking chair on the other side of the fire, and rocked gently, not looking at me.
I felt safe. It was as if the essence of grandmotherliness had been condensed into that one place, that one time. I was not at all afraid of Ursula Monkton, whatever she was, not then. Not there.
Young Mrs. Hempstock opened an oven door and took out a pie, its shiny crust brown and glistening, and put it on the window ledge to cool.
I dried myself off with a towel they brought me, the fire’s heat drying me as much as the towel did, then Lettie Hempstock returned and gave me a voluminous white thing, like a girl’s nightdress but made of white cotton, with long arms, and a skirt that draped to the floor, and a white cap. I hesitated to put it on until I realized what it was: a nightgown. I had seen pictures of them in books. Wee Willie Winkie ran through the town wearing one in every book of nursery rhymes I had ever owned.
I slipped into it. The nightcap was too big for me, and fell down over my face, and Lettie took it away once more.
Dinner was wonderful. There was a joint of beef, with roast potatoes, golden-crisp on the outside and soft and white inside, buttered greens I did not recognize, although I think now that they might have been nettles, roasted carrots all blackened and sweet (I did not think that I liked cooked carrots, so I nearly did not eat one, but I was brave, and I tried it, and I liked it, and was disappointed in boiled carrots for the rest of my childhood). For dessert there was the pie, stuffed with apples and with swollen raisins and crushed nuts, all topped with a thick yellow custard, creamier and richer than anything I had ever tasted at school or at home.
The kitten slept on a cushion beside the fire, until the end of the meal, when it joined a fog-colored house cat four times its size in a meal of scraps of meat.
While we ate, nothing was said about what had happened to me, or why I was there. The Hempstock ladies talked about the farm—there was the door to the milking shed needed a new coat of paint, a cow named Rhiannon who looked to be getting lame in her left hind leg, the path to be cleared on the way that led down to the reservoir.
“Is it just the three of you?” I asked. “Aren’t there any men?”
“Men!” hooted Old Mrs. Hempstock. “I dunno what blessed good a man would be! Nothing a man could do around this farm that I can’t do twice as fast and five times as well.”
Lettie said, “We’ve had men here, sometimes. They come and they go. Right now, it’s just us.”
Her mother nodded. “They went off to seek their fate and fortune, mostly, the male Hempstocks. There’s never any keeping them here when the call comes. They get a distant look in their eyes and then we’ve lost them, good and proper. Next chance they gets they’re off to towns and even cities, and nothing but an occasional postcard to even show they were here at all.”
Old Mrs. Hempstock said, “His parents are coming! They’re driving here. They just passed Parson’s elm tree. The badgers saw them.”
“Is she with them?” I asked. “Ursula Monkton?”
“Her?” said Old Mrs. Hempstock, amused. “That thing? Not her.”
I thought about it for a moment. “They will make me go back with them, and then she’ll lock me in the attic and let my daddy kill me when she gets bored. She said so.”
“She may have told you that, ducks,” said Lettie’s mother, “but she en’t going to do it, or anything like it, or my name’s not Ginnie Hempstock.”
I liked the name Ginnie, but I did not believe her, and I was not reassured. Soon the door to the kitchen would open, and my father would shout at me, or he would wait until we got into the car, and he would shout at me then, and they would take me back up the lane to my house, and I would be lost.
“Let’s see,” said Ginnie Hempstock. “We could be away when they get here. They could arrive last Tuesday, when there’s nobody home.”
“Out of the question,” said the old woman. “Just complicates things, playing with time . . . We could turn the boy into something else, so they’d never find him, look how hard they might.”
I blinked. Was that even possible? I wanted to be turned into something. The kitten had finished its portion of meat-scraps (indeed, it seemed to have eaten more than the house cat) and now it leapt into my lap, and began to wash itself.
Ginnie Hempstock got up and went out of the room. I wondered where she was going.
“We can’t turn him into anything,” said Lettie, clearing the table of the last of the plates and cutlery. “His parents will get frantic. And if they are being controlled by the flea, she’ll just feed the franticness. Next thing you know, we’ll have the police dragging the reservoir, looking for him. Or worse. The ocean.”
The kitten lay down on my lap and curled up, wrapping around itself until it was nothing more than a flattened circlet of fluffy black fur. It closed its vivid blue eyes, the color of an ocean, and it slept, and it purred.
“Well?” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “What do you suggest, then?”
Lettie thought, pushing her lips together, moving them over to one side. Her head tipped, and I thought she was running through alternatives. Then her face brightened. “Snip and cut?” she said.
Old Mrs. Hempstock sniffed. “You’re a good girl,” she said. “I’m not saying you’re not. But snippage . . . well, you couldn’t do that. Not yet. You’d have to cut the edges out exactly, sew them back without the seam showing. And what would you cut out? The flea won’t let you snip her. She’s not in the fabric. She’s outside of it.”
Ginnie Hempsto
ck returned. She was carrying my old dressing gown. “I put it through the mangle,” she said. “But it’s still damp. That’ll make the edges harder to line up. You don’t want to do needlework when it’s still damp.”
She put the dressing gown down on the table, in front of Old Mrs. Hempstock. Then she pulled out from the front pocket of her apron a pair of scissors, black and old, a long needle, and a spool of red thread.
“Rowanberry and red thread, stop a witch in her speed,” I recited. It was something I had read in a book.
“That’d work, and work well,” said Lettie, “if there was any witches involved in all this. But there’s not.”
Old Mrs. Hempstock was examining my dressing gown. It was brown and faded, with a sort of a sepia tartan across it. It had been a present from my father’s parents, my grandparents, several birthdays ago, when it had been comically big on me. “Probably . . . ,” she said, as if she was talking to herself, “it would be best if your father was happy for you to stay the night here. But for that to happen they couldn’t be angry with you, or even worried . . .”
The black scissors were in her hand and already snip-snip-snipping then, when I heard a knock on the front door, and Ginnie Hempstock got up to answer it. She went into the hall and closed the door behind her.
“Don’t let them take me,” I said to Lettie.
“Hush,” she said. “I’m working here, while Grandmother’s snipping. You just be sleepy, and at peace. Happy.”
I was far from happy, and not in the slightest bit sleepy. Lettie leaned across the table, and she took my hand. “Don’t worry,” she said.
And with that the door opened, and my father and my mother were in the kitchen. I wanted to hide, but the kitten shifted reassuringly, on my lap, and Lettie smiled at me, a reassuring smile.
“We are looking for our son,” my father was telling Mrs. Hempstock, “and we have reason to believe . . .” And even as he was saying that my mother was striding toward me. “There he is! Darling, we were worried silly!”
“You’re in a lot of trouble, young man,” said my father.
Snip! Snip! Snip! went the black scissors, and the irregular section of fabric that Old Mrs. Hempstock had been cutting fell to the table.
My parents froze. They stopped talking, stopped moving. My father’s mouth was still open, my mother stood on one leg, as unmoving as if she were a shop-window dummy.
“What . . . what did you do to them?” I was unsure whether or not I ought to be upset.
Ginnie Hempstock said, “They’re fine. Just a little snipping, then a little sewing and it’ll all be good as gold.” She reached down to the table, pointed to the scrap of faded dressing gown tartan resting upon it. “That’s your dad and you in the hallway, and that’s the bathtub. She’s snipped that out. So without any of that, there’s no reason for your daddy to be angry with you.”
I had not told them about the bathtub. I did not wonder how she knew.
Now the old woman was threading the needle with the red thread. She sighed, theatrically. “Old eyes,” she said. “Old eyes.” But she licked the tip of the thread and pushed it through the eye of the needle without any apparent difficulty.
“Lettie. You’ll need to know what his toothbrush looks like,” said the old woman. She began to sew the edges of the dressing gown together with tiny, careful stitches.
“What’s your toothbrush look like?” asked Lettie. “Quickly.”
“It’s green,” I said. “Bright green. A sort of appley green. It’s not very big. Just a green toothbrush, my size.” I wasn’t describing it very well, I knew. I pictured it in my head, tried to find something more about it that I could describe, to set it apart from all other toothbrushes. No good. I imagined it, saw it in my mind’s eye, with the other toothbrushes in its red-and-white-spotted beaker above the bathroom sink.
“Got it!” said Lettie. “Nice job.”
“Very nearly done here,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock.
Ginnie Hempstock smiled a huge smile, and it lit up her ruddy round face. Old Mrs. Hempstock picked up the scissors and snipped a final time, and a fragment of red thread fell to the tabletop.
My mother’s foot came down. She took a step and then she stopped.
My father said, “Um.”
Ginnie said, “ . . . and it made our Lettie so happy that your boy would come here and stay the night. It’s a bit old-fashioned here, I’m afraid.”
The old woman said, “We’ve got an inside lavvy nowadays. I don’t know how much more modern anybody could be. Outside lavvies and chamber pots were good enough for me.”
“He ate a fine meal,” said Ginnie to me. “Didn’t you?”
“There was pie,” I told my parents. “For dessert.”
My father’s brow was creased. He looked confused. Then he put his hand into the pocket of his car coat, and pulled out something long and green, with toilet paper wrapped around the top. “You forgot your toothbrush,” he said. “Thought you’d want it.”
“Now, if he wants to come home, he can come home,” my mother was saying to Ginnie Hempstock. “He went to stay the night at the Kovacses’ house a few months ago, and by nine he was calling us to come and get him.”
Christopher Kovacs was two years older and a head taller than me, and he lived with his mother in a large cottage opposite the entrance to our lane, by the old green water tower. His mother was divorced. I liked her. She was funny, and drove a VW Beetle, the first I had ever seen. Christopher owned many books I had not read, and was a member of the Puffin Club. I could read his Puffin books, but only if I went to his house. He would never let me borrow them.
There was a bunk bed in Christopher’s bedroom, although he was an only child. I was given the bottom bunk, the night I stayed there. Once I was in bed, and Christopher Kovacs’s mother had said good night to us and she had turned out the bedroom light and closed the door, he leaned down and began squirting me with a water pistol he had hidden beneath his pillow. I had not known what to do.
“This isn’t like when I went to Christopher Kovacs’s house,” I told my mother, embarrassed. “I like it here.”
“What are you wearing?” She stared at my Wee Willie Winkie nightgown in puzzlement.
Ginnie said, “He had a little accident. He’s wearing that while his pajamas are drying.”
“Oh. I see,” said my mother. “Well, good night, dear. Have a nice time with your new friend.” She peered down at Lettie. “What’s your name again, dear?”
“Lettie,” said Lettie Hempstock.
“Is it short for Letitia?” asked my mother. “I knew a Letitia when I was at university. Of course, everybody called her Lettuce.”
Lettie just smiled, and did not say anything at all.
My father put my toothbrush down on the table in front of me. I unwrapped the toilet paper around the head. It was, unmistakably, my green toothbrush. Under his car coat my father was wearing a clean white shirt, and no tie.
I said, “Thank you.”
“So,” said my mother. “What time should we be by to pick him up in the morning?”
Ginnie smiled even wider. “Oh, Lettie will bring him back to you. We should give them some time to play, tomorrow morning. Now, before you go, I baked some scones this afternoon . . .”
And she put some scones into a paper bag, which my mother took politely, and Ginnie ushered her and my father out of the door. I held my breath until I heard the sound of the Rover driving away back up the lane.
“What did you do to them?” I asked. And then, “Is this really my toothbrush?”
“That,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock, with satisfaction in her voice, “was a very respectable job of snipping and stitching, if you ask me.” She held up my dressing gown: I could not see where she had removed a piece, nor where she had stitched it up. It was seamless, the mend invisible. She passed me the scrap of fabric on the table that she had cut. “Here’s your evening,” she said. “You can keep it, if you wish. But if I were y
ou, I’d burn it.”
The rain pattered against the window, and the wind rattled the window frames.
I picked up the jagged-edged sliver of cloth. It was damp. I got up, waking the kitten, who sprang off my lap and vanished into the shadows. I walked over to the fireplace.
“If I burn this,” I asked them, “will it have really happened? Will my daddy have pushed me down into the bath? Will I forget it ever happened?”
Ginnie Hempstock was no longer smiling. Now she looked concerned. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I want to remember,” I said. “Because it happened to me. And I’m still me.” I threw the little scrap of cloth onto the fire.
There was a crackle and the cloth smoked, then it began to burn.
I was under the water. I was holding on to my father’s tie. I thought he was going to kill me . . .
I screamed.
I was lying on the flagstone floor of the Hempstocks’ kitchen and I was rolling and screaming. My foot felt like I had trodden, barefoot, on a burning cinder. The pain was intense. There was another pain, too, deep inside my chest, more distant, not as sharp: a discomfort, not a burning.
Ginnie was beside me. “What’s wrong?”
“My foot. It’s on fire. It hurts so much.”
She examined it, then licked her finger, touched it to the hole in my sole from which I had pulled the worm, two days before. There was a hissing noise, and the pain in my foot began to ease.
“En’t never seen one of these before,” said Ginnie Hempstock. “How did you get it?”
“There was a worm inside me,” I told her. “That was how it came with us from the place with the orangey sky. In my foot.” And then I looked at Lettie, who had crouched beside me and was now holding my hand, and I said, “I brought it back. It was my fault. I’m sorry.”
Old Mrs. Hempstock was the last to reach me. She leaned over, pulled the sole of my foot up and into the light. “Nasty,” she said. “And very clever. She left the hole inside you so she could use it again. She could have hidden inside you, if she needed to, used you as a door to go home. No wonder she wanted to keep you in the attic. So. Let’s strike while the iron’s hot, as the soldier said when he entered the laundry.” She prodded the hole in my foot with her finger. It still hurt, but the pain had faded, a little. Now it felt like a throbbing headache inside my foot.