by Neil Gaiman
. . . said cunning old Fury I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.
I stayed just where I was. I had seen Ursula Monkton torn to shreds, and the shreds devoured by scavengers from outside the universe of things that I understood. If I went out of the circle, I was certain, they would do the same to me.
I moved from Lewis Carroll to Gilbert and Sullivan.
When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache and repose is taboo’d by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety . . .
I loved the sound of the words, even if I was not entirely sure what all of them meant.
I needed to wee. I turned my back on the house, took a few steps away from the tree, scared I would take one step too far and find myself outside the circle. I urinated into the darkness. I had just finished when I was blinded by a torch beam, and my father’s voice said, “What on earth are you doing down here?”
“I . . . I’m just down here,” I said.
“Yes. Your sister said. Well, time to come back to the house. Your dinner’s on the table.”
I stayed where I was. “No,” I said, and shook my head.
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly. I’m staying here.”
“Come on.” And then, more cheerful, “Come on, Handsome George.” It had been his silly pet name for me, when I was a baby. He even had a song that went with it that he would sing while bouncing me on his lap. It was the best song in the world.
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not going to carry you back to the house,” said my father. There was an edge starting to creep into his voice. “You’re too big for that.”
Yes, I thought. And you’d have to cross into the fairy ring to pick me up.
But the fairy ring seemed foolish now. This was my father, not some waxwork thing that the hunger birds had made to lure me out. It was night. My father had come home from work. It was time.
I said, “Ursula Monkton’s gone away. And she’s not ever coming back.”
He sounded irritated, then. “What did you do? Did you say something horrible to her? Were you rude?”
“No.”
He shone the torch beam onto my face. The light was almost blinding. He seemed to be fighting to keep his temper under control. He said, “Tell me what you said to her.”
“I didn’t say anything to her. She just went away.”
It was true, or almost.
“Come back to the house, now.”
“Please, Daddy. I have to stay here.”
“You come back to the house this minute!” shouted my father, at the top of his voice, and I could not help it: my lower lip shook, my nose started to run, and tears sprang to my eyes. The tears blurred my vision and stung, but they did not fall, and I blinked them away.
I did not know if I was talking to my own father or not.
I said, “I don’t like it when you shout at me.”
“Well, I don’t like it when you act like a little animal!” he shouted, and now I was crying, and the tears were running down my face, and I wished that I was anywhere else but there that night.
I had stood up to worse things than him in the last few hours. And suddenly, I didn’t care anymore. I looked up at the dark shape behind and above the torch beam, and I said, “Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?” and I knew as I said it that it was the thing I should never have said.
His face, what I could see of it in the reflected torchlight, crumpled, and looked shocked. He opened his mouth to speak, then he closed it again. I could not remember my father ever at a loss for words, before or after. Only then. I felt terrible. I thought, I will die here soon. I do not want to die with those words on my lips.
But the torch beam was turning away from me. My father said only, “We’ll be up at the house. I’ll put your dinner in the oven.”
I watched the torchlight move back across the lawn, past the rosebushes and up toward the house, until it went out, and was lost to sight. I heard the back door open and close again.
Then you get some repose in the form of a doze with hot eyeballs and head ever aching but your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams that you’d very much better be waking . . .
Somebody laughed. I stopped singing, and looked around, but saw nobody.
“ ‘The Nightmare Song,’ ” a voice said. “How appropriate.”
She walked closer, until I could see her face. Ursula Monkton was still quite naked, and she was smiling. I had seen her torn to pieces a few hours before, but now she was whole. Even so, she looked less solid than any of the other people I had seen that night; I could see the lights of the house glimmering behind her, through her. Her smile had not changed.
“You’re dead,” I told her.
“Yes. I was eaten,” said Ursula Monkton.
“You’re dead. You aren’t real.”
“I was eaten,” she repeated. “I am nothing. And they have let me out, just for a little while, from the place inside them. It’s cold in there, and very empty. But they have promised you to me, so I will have something to play with; something to keep me company in the dark. And after you have been eaten, you too will be nothing. But whatever remains of that nothing will be mine to keep, eaten and together, my toy and my distraction, until the end of time. We’ll have such fun.”
A ghost of a hand was raised, and it touched the smile, and it blew me the ghost of Ursula Monkton’s kiss.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said.
A rustle in the rhododendrons behind me and a voice, cheerful and female and young, saying, “It’s okay. Gran fixed it. Everything’s taken care of. Come on.”
The moon was visible now above the azalea bush, a bright crescent like a thick nail paring.
I sat down by the dead tree, and did not move.
“Come on, silly. I told you. They’ve gone home,” said Lettie Hempstock.
“If you’re really Lettie Hempstock,” I told her, “you come here.”
She stayed where she was, a shadowy girl. Then she laughed, and she stretched and she shook, and now she was only another shadow: a shadow that filled the night.
“You are hungry,” said the voice in the night, and it was no longer Lettie’s voice, not any longer. It might have been the voice inside my own head, but it was speaking aloud. “You are tired. Your family hates you. You have no friends. And Lettie Hempstock, I regret to tell you, is never coming back.”
I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something specific and visible to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.
“Nobody cares,” said the voice, so resigned, so practical. “Now, step out of the circle and come to us. One step is all it will take. Just put one foot across the threshold and we will make all the pain go away forever: the pain you feel now and the pain that is still to come. It will never happen.”
It was not one voice, not any longer. It was two people talking in unison. Or a hundred people. I could not tell. So many voices.
“How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived. But you won’t grow. You can come out, and we will end it, cleanly, or you can die in there, of hunger and of fear. And when you are dead your circle will mean nothing, and we will tear out your heart and take your soul for a keepsake.”
“P’raps it will be like that,” I said, to the darkness and the shadows, “and p’raps it won’t. And p’raps if it is, it would have been like
that anyway. I don’t care. I’m still going to wait here for Lettie Hempstock, and she’s going to come back to me. And if I die here, then I still die waiting for her, and that’s a better way to go than you and all you stupid horrible things tearing me to bits because I’ve got something inside me that I don’t even want!”
There was silence. The shadows seemed to have become part of the night once again. I thought over what I’d said, and I knew that it was true. At that moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the dark, and I was perfectly willing to die (as willing as any seven-year-old, certain of his immortality, can be) if I died waiting for Lettie. Because she was my friend.
Time passed. I waited for the night to begin to talk to me again, for people to come, for all the ghosts and monsters of my imagination to stand beyond the circle and call me out, but nothing more happened. Not then. I simply waited.
The moon rose higher. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness. I sang, under my breath, mouthing the words over and over.
You’re a regular wreck with a crick in your neck
and no wonder you snore for your head’s on the floor
and you’ve needles and pins from your sole to your shins
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
you’ve got fluff in your lung and a feverish tongue
and a thirst that’s intense and a general sense that you haven’t been sleeping in clover . . .
I sang it to myself, the whole song, all the way through, two or three times, and I was relieved that I remembered the words, even if I did not always understand them.
XIII.
When Lettie arrived, the real Lettie, this time, she was carrying a bucket of water. It must have been heavy judging from the way she carried it. She stepped over where the edge of the ring in the grass must have been and she came straight to me.
“Sorry,” she said. “That took a lot longer than I expected. It didn’t want to cooperate, neither, and in the end it took me and Gran to do it, and she did most of the heavy lifting. It wasn’t going to argue with her, but it didn’t help, and it’s not easy—”
“What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
She put the metal bucket down on the grass beside me without spilling a drop. “The ocean,” she said. “It didn’t want to go. It gave Gran such a struggle that she said she was going to have to go and have a lie-down afterwards. But we still got it into the bucket in the end.”
The water in the bucket was glowing, emitting a greenish-blue light. I could see Lettie’s face by it. I could see the waves and ripples on the surface of the water, watch them crest and splash against the side of the bucket.
“I don’t understand.”
“I couldn’t get you to the ocean,” she said. “But there was nothing stopping me bringing the ocean to you.”
I said, “I’m hungry, Lettie. And I don’t like this.”
“Mum’s made dinner. But you’re going to have to stay hungry for a little bit longer. Were you scared, up here on your own?”
“Yes.”
“Did they try and get you out of the circle?”
“Yes.”
She took my hands in hers, then, and squeezed them. “But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn’t listen to them. Well done. That’s quality, that is.” And she sounded proud. In that moment I forgot my hunger and I forgot my fear.
“What do I do now?” I asked her.
“Now,” she said, “you step into the bucket. You don’t have to take your shoes off or anything. Just step in.”
It did not even seem a strange request. She let go of one of my hands, kept hold of the other. I thought, I will never let go of your hand, not unless you tell me to. I put one foot into the glimmering water of the bucket, raising the water level almost to the edge. My foot rested on the tin floor of the bucket. The water was cool on my foot, not cold. I put the other foot into the water and I went down with it, down like a marble statue, and the waves of Lettie Hempstock’s ocean closed over my head.
I felt the same shock you would feel if you had stepped backwards, without looking, and had fallen into a swimming pool. I closed my eyes at the water’s sting and kept them tightly shut, so tightly.
I could not swim. I did not know where I was, or what was happening, but even under the water I could feel that Lettie was still holding my hand.
I was holding my breath.
I held it until I could hold it no longer, and then I let the air out in a bubbling rush and gulped a breath in, expecting to choke, to splutter, to die.
I did not choke. I felt the coldness of the water—if it was water—pour into my nose and my throat, felt it fill my lungs, but that was all it did. It did not hurt me.
I thought, This is the kind of water you can breathe. I thought, Perhaps there is just a secret to breathing water, something simple that everyone could do, if only they knew. That was what I thought.
That was the first thing I thought.
The second thing I thought was that I knew everything. Lettie Hempstock’s ocean flowed inside me, and it filled the entire universe, from Egg to Rose. I knew that. I knew what Egg was—where the universe began, to the sound of uncreated voices singing in the void—and I knew where Rose was—the peculiar crinkling of space on space into dimensions that fold like origami and blossom like strange orchids, and which would mark the last good time before the eventual end of everything and the next Big Bang, which would be, I knew now, nothing of the kind.
I knew that Old Mrs. Hempstock would be here for that one, as she had been for the last.
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real. I saw all these things and understood them and they filled me, just as the waters of the ocean filled me.
Everything whispered inside me. Everything spoke to everything, and I knew it all.
I opened my eyes, curious to learn what I would see in the world outside me, if it would be anything like the world inside.
I was hanging deep beneath the water.
I looked down, and the blue world below me receded into darkness. I looked up and the world above me did the same. Nothing was pulling me down deeper, nothing was forcing me toward the surface.
I turned my head, a little, to look at her, because she was still holding my hand, she had never let go of my hand, and I saw Lettie Hempstock.
At first, I do not think I knew what I was looking at. I could make no sense of it. Where Ursula Monkton had been made of gray cloth that flapped and snapped and gusted in the storm-winds, Lettie Hempstock was made of silken sheets the color of ice, filled with tiny flickering candle flames, a hundred hundred candle flames.
Could there be candle flames burning under the water? There could. I knew that, when I was in the ocean, and I even knew how. I understood it just as I understood Dark Matter, the material of the universe that makes up everything that must be there but we cannot find. I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely.
Lettie Hempstock looked like pale silk and candle flames. I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I looked inward I would see only infinite mirrors, staring into myself for eternity.
The silk filled with candle flames moved then, a slow, graceful, under-the-water sort of a movement. The current pulled at it, and now it had arms and the hand that had never let go of mine, and a body and a frec
kled face that was familiar, and it opened its mouth and, in Lettie Hempstock’s voice, it said, “I’m really sorry.”
“What for?”
She did not reply. The currents of the ocean pulled at my hair and my clothes like summer breezes. I was no longer cold and I knew everything and I was not hungry and the whole big, complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered. I would stay here forever.
“You can’t,” said Lettie. “It would destroy you.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that nothing could kill me, not now, but she said, “Not kill you. Destroy you. Dissolve you. You wouldn’t die in here, nothing ever dies in here, but if you stayed here for too long, after a while just a little of you would exist everywhere, all spread out. And that’s not a good thing. Never enough of you all together in one place, so there wouldn’t be anything left that would think of itself as an ‘I.’ No point of view any longer, because you’d be an infinite sequence of views and of points . . .”
I was going to argue with her. She was wrong, she had to be: I loved that place, that state, that feeling, and I was never going to leave it.
And then my head broke water, and I blinked and coughed, and I was standing, thigh-deep in the pond at the back of the Hempstocks’ farm, and Lettie Hempstock was standing beside me, holding my hand.
I coughed again, and it felt like the water fled my nose, my throat, my lungs. I pulled clean air into my chest, in the light of the huge, full harvest moon, that shone on the Hempstocks’ red-tiled roof, and, for one final, perfect moment, I still knew everything: I remember that I knew how to make it so the moon would be full when you needed it to be, and shining just on the back of the house, every night.
I knew everything, but Lettie Hempstock was pulling me up out of the pond.
I was still wearing the strange old-fashioned clothes I had been given that morning, and as I stepped out of the pond, up onto the grass that edged it, I discovered that my clothes and my skin were now perfectly dry. The ocean was back in the pond, and the only knowledge I was left with, as if I had woken from a dream on a summer’s day, was that it had not been long ago since I had known everything.