The Ocean at the End of the Lane(46)

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 on to 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 chest react to the scream, like the tiniest splinter of ice inside my heart.

– 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 colour that reminded me of grey, but a formless, pulsing grey 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, unshakeably 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 might not even have had legs or faces. I did not want to die at all. Understand that.

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 wrong thing, 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 towards the darkness. 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, knowing there was no going back, that there was no way that this could end in anything but pain.

They took off into the air, the hunger birds, as I ran towards them, as pigeons will rise when you run at them. I knew they were circling.

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