If I pulled against the cloths, they hurt me.

My world was gray. I gave up, then. I lay there, and did not move, concentrated only on breathing through the space the cloth strips had left for my nose. They held me, and they felt alive.

I lay on the carpet, and I listened. There was nothing else I could do.

Ursula said, “I need the boy safe. I promised I’d keep him in the attic, so the attic it shall be. But you, little farm-girl. What shall I do with you? Something appropriate. Perhaps I ought to turn you inside out, so your heart and brains and flesh are all naked and exposed on the outside, and the skin-side’s inside. Then I’ll keep you wrapped up in my room here, with your eyes staring forever at the darkness inside yourself. I can do that.”

“No,” said Lettie. She sounded sad, I thought. “Actually, you can’t. And I gave you your chance.”

“You threatened me. Empty threats.”

“I dunt make threats,” said Lettie. “I really wanted you to have a chance.” And then she said, “When you looked around the world for things like you, didn’t you wonder why there weren’t lots of other old things around? No, you never wondered. You were so happy it was just you here, you never stopped to think.

“Gran always calls your sort of thing fleas, Skarthach of the Keep. I mean, she could call you anything. I think she thinks fleas is funny . . . She doesn’t mind your kind. She says you’re harmless enough. Just a bit stupid. That’s cos there are things that eat fleas, in this part of creation. Varmints, Gran calls them. She dunt like them at all. She says they’re mean, and they’re hard to get rid of. And they’re always hungry.”

“I’m not scared,” said Ursula Monkton. She sounded scared. And then she said, “How did you know my name?”

“Went looking for it this morning. Went looking for other things too. Some boundary markers, to keep you from running too far, getting into more trouble. And a trail of breadcrumbs that leads straight here, to this room. Now, open the jam jar, take out the doorway, and let’s send you home.”

I waited for Ursula Monkton to respond, but she said nothing. There was no answer. Only the slamming of a door, and the sound of footsteps, fast and pounding, running down the stairs.

Lettie’s voice was close to me, and it said, “She would have been better off staying here, and taking me up on my offer.”

I felt her hands tugging at the cloths on my face. They came free with a wet, sucking sound, but they no longer felt alive, and when they came off they fell to the ground and lay there, unmoving. This time there was no blood beaded on my skin. The worst thing that had happened was that my arms and legs had gone to sleep.

Lettie helped me to my feet. She did not look happy.

“Where did she go?” I asked.

“She’s followed the trail out of the house. And she’s scared. Poor thing. She’s so scared.”

“You’re scared too.”

“A bit, yes. Right about now she’s going to find that she’s trapped inside the bounds I put down, I expect,” said Lettie.

We went out of the bedroom. Where the toy soldier at the top of the stairs had been, there was now a rip. That’s the best I can describe it: it was as if someone had taken a photograph of the stairs and then torn out the soldier from the photograph. There was nothing in the space where the soldier had been but a dim grayness that hurt my eyes if I looked at it too long.

“What’s she scared of?”

“You heard. Varmints.”

“Are you scared of varmints, Lettie?”

She hesitated, just a moment too long. Then she said simply, “Yes.”

“But you aren’t scared of her. Of Ursula.”

“I can’t be scared of her. It’s just like Gran says. She’s like a flea, all puffed up with pride and power and lust, like a flea bloated with blood. But she couldn’t have hurt me. I’ve seen off dozens like her, in my time. One as come through in Cromwell’s day—now there was something to talk about. He made folk lonely, that one. They’d hurt themselves just to make the loneliness stop—gouge out their eyes or jump down wells, and all the while that great lummocking thing sits in the cellar of the Duke’s Head, looking like a squat toad big as a bulldog.” We were at the bottom of the stairs, walking down the hall.

“How do you know where she went?”

“Oh, she couldn’t have gone anywhere but the way I laid out for her.” In the front room my sister was still playing “Chopsticks” on the piano.

Da da DUM da da

da da DUM da da

da da DUM da DUM da DUM da da . . .

We walked out of the front door. “He was nasty, that one, back in Cromwell’s day. But we got him out of there just before the hunger birds came.”

“Hunger birds?”

“What Gran calls varmints. The cleaners.”

They didn’t sound bad. I knew that Ursula had been scared of them, but I wasn’t. Why would you be scared of cleaners?

We caught up with Ursula Monkton on the lawn, by the rosebushes. She was holding the jam jar with the drifting wormhole inside it. She looked strange. She tugged at the lid, and then stopped and looked up at the sky. Then she looked back to the jam jar once more.

She ran over to my beech tree, the one with the rope ladder, and she threw the jam jar as hard as she could against the trunk. If she was trying to break it, she failed. The jar simply bounced off, and landed on the moss that half-covered the tangle of roots, and lay there, undamaged.

Ursula Monkton glared at Lettie. “Why?” she said.

“You know why,” said Lettie.

“Why would you let them in?” She had started to cry, and I felt uncomfortable. I did not know what to do when adults cried. It was something I had only seen twice before in my life: I had seen my grandparents cry, when my aunt had died, in hospital, and I had seen my mother cry. Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.

I wondered if Ursula Monkton had ever had a mother. She had mud on her face and on her knees, and she was wailing.

I heard a sound in the distance, odd and outlandish: a low thrumming, as if someone had plucked at a taut piece of string.

“It won’t be me that lets them in,” said Lettie Hempstock. “They go where they wants to. They usually don’t come here because there’s nothing for them to eat. Now, there is.”

“Send me back,” said Ursula Monkton. And now I did not think she looked even faintly human. Her face was wrong, somehow: an accidental assemblage of features that simply put me in mind of a human face, like the knobbly gray whorls and lumps on the side of my beech tree, or the patterns in the wooden headboard of the bed at my grandmother’s house, which, if I looked at them wrongly in the moonlight, showed me an old man with his mouth open wide, as if he were screaming.

Lettie picked up the jam jar from the green moss, and twisted the lid. “You’ve gone and got it stuck tight,” she said. She walked over to the rock path, turned the jam jar upside down, holding it at the bottom, and banged it, lid-side-down, once, confidently, against the ground. Then she turned it the right side up, and twisted. This time the lid came off in her hand.

She passed the jam jar to Ursula Monkton, who reached inside it, and pulled out the translucent thing that had once been a hole in my foot. It writhed and wiggled and flexed seemingly in delight at her touch.

She threw it down. It fell onto the grass, and it grew. Only it didn’t grow. It changed: as if it was closer to me than I had thought. I could see through it, from one end to the other. I could have run down it, if the far end of that tunnel had not ended in a bitter orange sky.