The Ocean at the End of the Lane(45)

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





When I 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 curved 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. Although it was dark, I knew exactly where we were. This was where it had all begun. It was the corner where the opal miner had parked my family’s white Mini, the place he had died all alone, with a face the colour 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 stopped, and she 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 could 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 they 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 chuckling.

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. Would 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.