Read The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel for Free Online

teeth.”
    Old Mrs. Hempstock shrugged. “I’ll have a word with the wigglers in his mouth,” she said. “Get them to leave his teeth alone.”
    “You can’t just boss bacteria around like that,” said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. “They don’t like it.”
    “Stuff and silliness,” said the old lady. “You leave wigglers alone and they’ll be carrying on like anything. Show them who’s boss and they can’t do enough for you. You’ve tasted my cheese.” She turned to me. “I’ve won medals for my cheese. Medals. Back in the old king’s day there were those who’d ride for a week to buy a round of my cheese. They said that the king himself had it with his bread and his boys, Prince Dickon and Prince Geoffrey and even little Prince John, they swore it was the finest cheese they had ever tasted—”
    “Gran,” said Lettie, and the old lady stopped, mid-flow.
    Lettie’s mother said, “You’ll be needing a hazel wand. And,” she added, somewhat doubtfully, “I suppose you could take the lad. It’s his coin, and it’ll be easier to carry if he’s with you. Something she made.”
    “She?” said Lettie.
    She was holding her horn-handled penknife, with the blade closed.
    “Tastes like a she,” said Lettie’s mother. “I might be wrong, mind.”
    “Don’t take the boy,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock. “Asking for trouble, that is.”
    I was disappointed.
    “We’ll be fine,” said Lettie. “I’ll take care of him. Him and me. It’ll be an adventure. And he’ll be company. Please, Gran?”
    I looked up at Old Mrs. Hempstock with hope on my face, and waited.
    “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, if it all goes wobbly,” said Old Mrs. Hempstock.
    “Thank you, Gran. I won’t. And I’ll be careful.”
    Old Mrs. Hempstock sniffed. “Now, don’t do anything stupid. Approach it with care. Bind it, close its ways, send it back to sleep.”
    “I know,” said Lettie. “I know all that. Honestly. We’ll be fine.”
    That’s what she said. But we weren’t.

IV.
    L ettie led me to a hazel thicket beside the old road (the hazel catkins were hanging heavy in the spring) and she broke off a thin branch. Then, with her knife, as if she had done it ten thousand times before, she stripped the branch of bark, cut it again, so now it resembled a Y. She put the knife away (I did not see where it went) and held the two ends of the Y in her hands.
    “I’m not dowsing,” she told me. “Just using it as a guide. We’re looking for a blue… a bluebottle, I think to start with. Or something purply-blue, and shiny.”
    I looked around with her. “I can’t see one.”
    “It’ll be here,” she assured me.
    I gazed around, taking in the grass, a reddish-brown chicken pecking at the side of the driveway, some rusty farm machinery, the wooden trestle table beside the road and the six empty metal milk churns that sat upon it. I saw the Hempstocks’ red-brick farmhouse, crouched and comfortable like an animal at rest. I saw the spring flowers; the omnipresent white and yellow daisies, the golden dandelions and do-you-like-butter buttercups, and, late in the season, a lone bluebell in the shadows beneath the milk-churn table, still glistening with dew…
    “That?” I asked.
    “You’ve got sharp eyes,” she said, approvingly.
    We walked together to the bluebell. Lettie closed her eyes when we reached it. She moved her body back and forth, the hazel wand extended, as if she were the central point on a clock or a compass, her wand the hands, orienting toward a midnight or an east that I could not perceive. “Black,” she said suddenly, as if she were describing something from a dream. “And soft.”
    We walked away from the bluebell, along the lane that I imagined, sometimes, must have been a Roman road. We were a hundred yards up the lane, near where the Mini had been parked, when she spotted it: a scrap of black cloth caught on the barbed wire of the fence.
    Lettie approached it. Again, the outstretched