The Ocean at the End of the Lane (16 page)

Her mother shrugged. “It's all the same sort of
thing. We'll just send them back where they came from.”

“And where
do
they come from?” asked Lettie.

I had slowed down now, and was making the final
fragments of my shepherd's pie last as long as I could, pushing them around the
plate slowly with my fork.

“That dunt matter,” said Ginnie. “They all go back
eventually. Probably just get bored of waiting.”

“I tried pushing them around,” said Lettie
Hempstock, matter-of-factly. “Couldn't get any traction. I held them with a dome
of protection, but that wouldn't have lasted much longer. We're good here,
obviously—nothing's coming into this farm without our say-so.”

“In
or
out,” said Ginnie. She removed my empty
plate, replaced it with a bowl containing a steaming slice of spotted dick with
thick yellow custard drizzled all over it.

I ate it with joy.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took
pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control
the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that
hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy. The custard was sweet
and creamy in my mouth, the dark swollen currants in the spotted dick were tangy
in the cake-thick chewy blandness of the pudding, and perhaps I was going to die
that night and perhaps I would never go home again, but it was a good dinner,
and I had faith in Lettie Hempstock.

The world outside the kitchen was still waiting.
The Hempstocks' fog-colored house cat—I do not believe I ever knew her
name—padded through the kitchen. That reminded me . . .

“Mrs. Hempstock? Is the kitten still here? The
black one with the white ear?”

“Not tonight,” said Ginnie Hempstock. “She's out
and about. She was asleep on the chair in the hall all this afternoon.”

I wished I could stroke her soft fur. I wanted, I
realized, to say goodbye.

“Um. I suppose. If I
do
. Have to die. Tonight,” I
started, haltingly, not sure where I was going. I was going to ask for
something, I imagine—for them to say goodbye to my mummy and daddy, or to tell
my sister that it wasn't fair that nothing bad ever happened to her: that her
life was charmed and safe and protected, while I was forever stumbling into
disaster. But nothing seemed right, and I was relieved when Ginnie interrupted
me.

“Nobody is going to die tonight,” said Ginnie
Hempstock, firmly. She took my empty bowl and washed it out in the sink, then
she dried her hands on her apron. She took the apron off, went out into the
hallway and returned a few moments later wearing a plain brown coat and a pair
of large dark green Wellington boots.

Lettie seemed less confident than Ginnie. But
Lettie, with all her age and wisdom, was a girl, while Ginnie was an adult, and
her confidence reassured me. I had faith in them both.

“Where's Old Mrs. Hempstock?” I asked.

“Having a lie-down,” said Ginnie. “She's not as
young as she used to be.”

“How old
is
she?” I asked, not expecting to get an
answer. Ginnie just smiled, and Lettie shrugged.

I held Lettie's hand as we left the farmhouse,
promising myself that this time I would not let it go.

XIV.

W
hen I had
entered the farmhouse, through the back door, the moon had been full, and it was
a perfect summer's night. When I left, I went with Lettie Hempstock and her
mother out of the front door, and the moon was a thin white smile, high in a
cloudy sky, and the night was gusty with sudden, undecided spring breezes coming
first from one direction, then from another; every now and again a gust of wind
would contain a sprinkling of rain that never amounted to anything more than
that.

We walked through the manure-stinking farmyard and
up the lane. We passed a bend in the road, and we stopped. Although it was dark,
I knew exactly where I was. This was where it had all begun. It was the corner
where the opal miner had parked my family's white Mini, the place that he had
died all alone, with a face the color of pomegranate juice, aching for his lost
money, on the edge of the Hempstock land where the barriers between life and
death were thin.

I said, “I think we should wake up Old Mrs.
Hempstock.”

“It doesn't work like that,” said Lettie. “When she
gets tired, she sleeps until she wakes up on her own. A few minutes or a hundred
years. There's no waking her. Might as well try and wake up an atom bomb.”

Ginnie Hempstock planted herself in the middle of
the lane, facing away from the farmhouse.

“Right!” she shouted to the night. “Let's be having
you.”

Nothing. A wet wind that gusted and was gone.

Lettie said, “P'raps they've all gone home
. . . ?”

“Be nice if they had,” said Ginnie. “All this
palaver and nonsense.”

I felt guilty. It was, I knew, my fault. If I had
kept hold of Lettie's hand none of this would have happened. Ursula Monkton, the
hunger birds, these things were undoubtedly my responsibility. Even what had
happened—or now, had, perhaps, no longer happened—in the cold bath, the previous
night.

I had a thought.

“Can't you just snip it out? The thing in my heart,
that they want? Maybe you could snip it out like your granny snipped things last
night?”

Lettie squeezed my hand in the dark.

“Maybe Gran could do that if she was here,” she
said. “I can't. I don't think Mum can either. It's really hard, snipping things
out of time: you have to make sure that the edges all line up, and even Gran
doesn't always get it right. And this would be harder than that. It's a real
thing. I don't think even Gran could take it out of you without hurting your
heart. And you need your heart.” Then she said, “They're coming.”

But I knew something was happening, knew it before
she said anything. For the second time I saw the ground begin to glow golden; I
watched the trees and the grass, the hedgerows and the willow clumps and the
last stray daffodils begin to shine with a burnished half-light. I looked
around, half-fearful, half with wonder, and I observed that the light was
brightest behind the house and over to the west, where the pond was.

I heard the beating of mighty wings, and a series
of low thumps. I turned and I saw them: the vultures of the void, the carrion
kind, the hunger birds.

They were not shadows any longer, not here, not in
this place. They were all-too-real, and they landed in the darkness, just beyond
the golden glow of the ground. They landed in the air and in trees, and they
shuffled forward, as close as they could get to the golden ground of the
Hempstocks' farm. They were huge—each of them was much bigger than I was.

I would have been hard-pressed to describe their
faces, though. I could see them, look at them, take in every feature, but the
moment I looked away they were gone, and there was nothing in my mind where the
hunger birds had been but tearing beaks and talons, or wriggling tentacles, or
hairy, chitinous mandibles. I could not keep their true faces in my head. When I
turned away the only knowledge I retained was that they had been looking
directly at me, and that they were ravenous.

“Right, my proud beauties,” said Ginnie Hempstock,
loudly. Her hands were on the hips of her brown coat. “You can't stay here. You
know that. Time to get a move on.” And then she said simply, “Hop it.”

They shifted but they did not move, the innumerable
hunger birds, and began to make a noise. I thought that they were whispering
amongst themselves, and then it seemed to me that the noise they were making was
an amused chuckle.

I heard their voices, distinct but twining
together, so I could not tell which creature was speaking.

–
We are hunger birds. We have devoured palaces and
worlds and kings and stars. We can stay wherever we wish to stay.

–
We perform our function.

–
We are necessary.

And they laughed so loudly it sounded like a train
approaching. I squeezed Lettie's hand, and she squeezed mine.

–
Give us the boy.

Ginnie said, “You're wasting your time, and you're
wasting mine. Go home.”

–
We were summoned here. We do not need to leave
until we have done what we came here for. We restore things to the way they are
meant to be. Will you deprive us of our function?

“Course I will,” said Ginnie. “You've had your
dinner. Now you're just making nuisances of yourselves. Be off with you.
Blinking varmints. I wouldn't give tuppence ha'penny for the lot of you. Go
home!” And she shook her hand in a flicking gesture.

One of the creatures let out a long, wailing scream
of appetite and frustration.

Lettie's hold on my hand was firm. She said, “He's
under our protection. He's on our land. And one step onto our land and that's
the end of you. So go away.”

The creatures seemed to huddle closer. There was
silence in the Sussex night: only the rustle of leaves in the wind, only the
call of a distant owl, only the sigh of the breeze as it passed; but in that
silence I could hear the hunger birds conferring, weighing up their options,
plotting their course. And in that silence I felt their eyes upon me.

Something in a tree flapped its huge wings and
cried out, a shriek that mingled triumph and delight, an affirmative shout of
hunger and joy. I felt something in my heart react to the scream, like the
tiniest splinter of ice inside my chest.

–
We cannot cross the border. This is true. We
cannot take the child from your land. This also is true. We cannot hurt your
farm or your creatures . . .

“That's right. You can't. So get along with you! Go
home. Haven't you got a war to be getting back to?”

–
We cannot hurt your world, true.

–
But we can hurt this one.

One of the hunger birds reached a sharp beak down
to the ground at its feet, and began to tear at it—not as a creature that eats
earth and grass, but as if it were eating a curtain or a piece of scenery with
the world painted on it. Where it devoured the grass, nothing remained—a perfect
nothing, only a color that reminded me of gray, but a formless, pulsing gray
like the shifting static of our television screen when you dislodged the aerial
cord and the picture had gone completely.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness.
This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.

And the hunger birds began to flap and to
flock.

They landed on a huge oak tree and they tore at it
and they wolfed it down, and in moments the tree was gone, along with everything
that had been behind it.

A fox slipped out of a hedgerow and slunk down the
lane, its eyes and mask and brush illuminated golden by the farm-light. Before
it had made it halfway across the road it had been ripped from the world, and
there was only void behind it.

Lettie said, “What he said before. We have to wake
Gran.”

“She won't like that,” said Ginnie. “Might as well
try and wake a—”

“Dunt matter. If we can't wake her up, they'll
destroy the whole of this creation.”

Ginnie said only, “I don't know
how
.”

A clump of hunger birds flew up to a patch of the
night sky where stars could be seen through the breaks in the clouds, and they
tore at a kite-shaped constellation I could never have named, and they scratched
and they rent and they gulped and they swallowed. In a handful of heartbeats,
where the constellation and sky had been, there was now only a pulsing
nothingness that hurt my eyes if I looked at it directly.

I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was
selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were
not me, and I was certain, rock-solid unshakably certain, that I was the most
important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me
than I was.

Even so, I understood what I was seeing. The hunger
birds would—no, they
were
—ripping the world away, tearing it into nothing. Soon
enough, there would be no world. My mother, my father, my sister, my house, my
school friends, my town, my grandparents, London, the Natural History Museum,
France, television, books, ancient Egypt—because of me, all these things would
be gone, and there would be nothing in their place.

I did not want to die. More than that, I did not
want to die as Ursula Monkton had died, beneath the rending talons and beaks of
things that may not even have had legs or faces.

I did not want to die at all. Understand that.

But I could not let everything be destroyed, when I
had it in my power to stop the destruction.

I let go of Lettie Hempstock's hand and I ran, as
fast as I could, knowing that to hesitate, even to slow down, would be to change
my mind, which would be the worst thing that I could do, which would be to save
my life.

How far did I run? Not far, I suppose, as these
things go.

Lettie Hempstock was shouting at me to stop, but
still, I ran, crossing the farmland, where every blade of grass, every pebble on
the lane, every willow tree and hazel hedge glowed golden, and I ran toward the
darkness beyond the Hempstock land. I ran and I hated myself for running, as I
had hated myself the time I had jumped from the high board at the swimming pool.
I knew there was no going back, that there was no way that this could end in
anything but pain, and I knew that I was willing to exchange my life for the
world.

They took off into the air, the hunger birds, as I
ran toward them, as pigeons will rise when you run at them. They wheeled and
they circled, deep shadows in the dark.

I stood there in the darkness and I waited for them
to descend. I waited for their beaks to tear at my chest, and for them to devour
my heart.

I stood there for perhaps two heartbeats, and it
felt like forever.

It happened.

Something slammed into me from behind and knocked
me down into the mud on the side of the lane, face-first. I saw bursts of light
that were not there. The ground hit my stomach, and the wind was knocked out of
me.

(A ghost-memory rises, here: a phantom moment, a
shaky reflection in the pool of remembrance. I know how it would have felt when
the scavengers took my heart. How it felt as the hunger birds, all mouth, tore
into my chest and snatched out my heart, still pumping, and devoured it to get
at what was hidden inside it. I know how that feels, as if it was truly a part
of my life, of my death. And then the memory snips and rips, neatly, and—)

A voice said, “Idiot! Don't move. Just don't,” and
the voice was Lettie Hempstock's, and I could not have moved if I had wanted to.
She was on top of me, and she was heavier than I was, and she was pushing me
down, face-first, into the grass and the wet earth, and I could see nothing.

I felt them, though.

I felt them crash into her. She was holding me
down, making herself a barrier between me and the world.

I heard Lettie's voice wail in pain.

I felt her shudder and twitch.

There were ugly cries of triumph and hunger, and I
could hear my own voice whimpering and sobbing, so loud in my
ears . . .

A voice said, “This is unacceptable.”

It was a familiar voice, but still, I could not
place it, or move to see who was talking.

Lettie was on top of me, still shaking, but as the
voice spoke, she stopped moving. The voice continued, “On what authority do you
harm my child?”

A pause. Then,

–
She was between us and our lawful prey.

“You're scavengers. Eaters of offal, of rubbish, of
garbage. You're cleaners. Do you think that you can harm my family?”

I knew who was talking. The voice sounded like
Lettie's gran, like Old Mrs. Hempstock. Like her, I knew, and yet so unlike. If
Old Mrs. Hempstock had been an empress, she might have talked like that, her
voice more stilted and formal and yet more musical than the old-lady voice I
knew.