The Ocean at the End of the Lane Read Online Free PDF

She ran over to me angrily when she saw me. She said, “I hate
you. I’m telling Mummy and Daddy when they come home.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou know,” she said. “I know it was you.”
    â€œWhat was me?”
    â€œThrowing coins at me. At all of us. From the
bushes. That was just nasty.”
    â€œBut I didn’t.”
    â€œIt hurt.”
    She went back to her friends, and they all glared
at me. My throat felt painful and ragged.
    I walked down the drive. I don’t know where I was
thinking of going—I just didn’t want to be there any longer.
    Lettie Hempstock was standing at the bottom of the
drive, beneath the chestnut trees. She looked as if she had been waiting for a
hundred years and could wait for another hundred. She wore a white dress, but
the light coming through the chestnut’s young spring leaves stained it
green.
    I said, “Hello.”
    She said, “You were having bad dreams, weren’t
you?”
    I took the shilling out of my pocket and showed it
to her. “I was choking on it,” I told her. “When I woke up. But I don’t know how
it got into my mouth. If someone had put it into my mouth, I would have woken
up. It was just in there, when I woke.”
    â€œYes,” she said.
    â€œMy sister says I threw coins at them from the
bushes, but I didn’t.”
    â€œNo,” she agreed. “You didn’t.”
    I said, “Lettie? What’s happening?”
    â€œOh,” she said, as if it was obvious. “Someone’s
just trying to give people money, that’s all. But it’s doing it very badly, and
it’s stirring things up around here that should be asleep. And that’s not
good.”
    â€œIs it something to do with the man who died?”
    â€œSomething to do with him. Yes.”
    â€œIs he doing this?”
    She shook her head. Then she said, “Have you had
breakfast?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œWell then,” she said. “Come on.”
    We walked down the lane together. There were a few
houses down the lane, here and there, back then, and she pointed to them as we
went past. “In that house,” said Lettie Hempstock, “a man dreamed of being sold
and of being turned into money. Now he’s started seeing things in mirrors.”
    â€œWhat kinds of things?”
    â€œHimself. But with fingers poking out of his eye
sockets. And things coming out of his mouth. Like crab claws.”
    I thought about people with crab legs coming out of
their mouths, in mirrors. “Why did I find a shilling in my throat?”
    â€œHe wanted people to have money.”
    â€œThe opal miner? Who died in the car?”
    â€œYes. Sort of. Not exactly. He started this all
off, like someone lighting a fuse on a firework. His death lit the touchpaper.
The thing that’s exploding right now, that isn’t him. That’s somebody else.
Something else.”
    She rubbed her freckled nose with a grubby
hand.
    â€œA lady’s gone mad in that house,” she told me, and
it would not have occurred to me to doubt her. “She has money in the mattress.
Now she won’t get out of bed, in case someone takes it from her.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    She shrugged. “Once you’ve been around for a bit,
you get to know stuff.”
    I kicked a stone. “By ‘a bit’ do you mean ‘a really
long time’?”
    She nodded.
    â€œHow old are you, really?” I asked.
    â€œEleven.”
    I thought for a bit. Then I asked, “How long have
you been eleven for?”
    She smiled at me.
    We walked past Caraway Farm. The farmers, whom one
day I would come to know as Callie Anders’s parents, were standing in their
farmyard, shouting at each other. They stopped when they saw us.
    When we rounded a bend in the lane, and were out of
sight, Lettie said, “Those poor people.”
    â€œWhy are they poor people?”
    â€œBecause