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—)
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 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.
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.
Something wet and warm was soaking my back.
– No … No, lady.
That was the first time I heard fear or doubt in the voice of one of the hunger birds.
‘There are pacts, and there are laws and there are treaties, and you have violated all of them.’
Silence then, and it was louder than words could have been. They had nothing to say.
I felt Lettie’s body being rolled off mine, and I looked up to see Ginnie Hempstock’s sensible face. She sat on the ground on the edge of the road, and I buried my face in her bosom. She took me in one arm, Lettie in the other.
From the shadows, a hunger bird spoke, with a voice that was not a voice, and it said only,
– We are sorry for your loss.
‘Sorry?’ The word was spat, not said.
Ginnie Hempstock swayed from side to side, crooning low and wordlessly to me and to her daughter. Her arms were around me. I lifted my head and I looked back at the person speaking, my vision blurred by tears.
I stared at her.
It was Old Mrs Hempstock, I suppose. But it wasn’t. It was Lettie’s gran in the same way that …
I mean …
She shone silver. Her hair was still long, still white, but now she stood as straight as a teenager. My eyes had become used to the darkness, and I could not look at her face to see if it was the face I was familiar with: it was too bright. Magnesium-flare bright. Fireworks Night bright. Midday sun reflecting off a silver coin bright.
I looked at her as long as I could bear to look, and then I turned my head, screwing my eyes tightly shut, unable to see anything but a pulsating after-image.
The voice that was like Old Mrs Hempstock’s said, ‘Shall I bind you in the heart of a dark star, to feel your pain in a place where every fragment of a moment lasts a thousand years? Shall I invoke the compacts of Creation, and have you all removed from the list of created things, so there never will have been any hunger birds, and anything that wishes to traipse from world to world can do so with impunity?’
I listened for a reply, but heard nothing. Only a whimper, a mewl of pain or of frustration.
‘I’m done with you. I will deal with you in my own time and in my own way. For now I must tend to the children.’
– Yes, lady.
– Thank you, lady.
‘Not so fast. Nobody’s going anywhere before you put all those things back like they was. There’s Boötes missing from the sky. There’s an oak tree gone, and a fox. You put them all back, the way they were.’ And then the silvery empress added, in a voice that was now also unmistakably Old Mrs Hempstock’s, ‘Varmints.’
Somebody was humming a tune. I realised, as if from a long way away, that it was me, at the same moment that I remembered what the tune was:
Girls and boys come out to play,
the moon doth shine as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your meat,
and join your playfellows in the street.
Come with a whoop and come with a call.
Come with a whole heart or not at all …
I held on to Ginnie Hempstock. She smelled like a farm and like a kitchen, like animals and like food. She smelled very real, and the realness was what I needed at that moment.
I reached out a hand, tentatively touched Lettie’s shoulder. She did not move or respond.
Ginnie started speaking, then, but at first I did not know if she was talking to herself or to Lettie or to me. ‘They overstepped their bounds,’ she said. ‘They could have hurt you, child, and it would have meant nothing. They could have hurt this world without anything being said – it’s only a world, after all, and they’re just sand grains in the desert, worlds. But Lettie’s a Hempstock. She’s outside of their dominion, my little one. And they hurted her.’
I looked at Lettie. Her head had flopped down, hiding her face. Her eyes were closed.
‘Is she going to be all right?’ I asked.
Ginnie didn’t reply, just hugged us both the tighter to her bosom, and rocked, and crooned a wordless song.
The farm and its land no longer glowed golden. I could not feel anything in the shadows watching me, not any longer.
‘Don’t you worry,’ said an old voice, now familiar once more. ‘You’re safe as houses. Safer’n most houses I’ve seen. They’ve gone.’
‘They’ll come back again,’ I said. ‘They want my heart.’
‘They’d not come back to this world again for all the tea in China,’ said Old Mrs Hempstock. ‘Not that they’ve got any use for tea – or for China – no more than a carrion crow does.’
Why had I thought her dressed in silver? She wore a much-patched grey dressing gown over what had to have been a nightie, but a nightie of a kind that had not been fashionable for several hundred years.
The old woman put a hand on her granddaughter’s pale forehead, lifted it up, then let it go.
Lettie’s mother shook her head. ‘It’s over,’ she said.
I understood it then, at the last, and felt foolish for not understanding it sooner. The girl beside me, on her mother’s lap, at her mother’s breast, had given her life for mine.
‘They were meant to hurt me, not her,’ I said.
‘No reason they should’ve taken either of you,’ said the old lady, with a sniff. I felt guilt then, guilt beyond anything I had ever felt before.
‘We should get her to a hospital,’ I said, hopefully. ‘We can call a doctor. Maybe they can make her better.’
Ginnie shook her head.
‘Is she dead?’ I asked.
‘Dead?’ repeated the old woman in the dressing gown. She sounded offended. ‘Has hif,’ she said, grandly aspirating each aitch as if that were the only way to convey the gravity of her words. ‘Has hif han ’Empstock would hever do hanything so … common …’
‘She’s hurt,’ said Ginnie Hempstock, cuddling me close. ‘Hurt as badly as she can be hurt. She’s so close to death as makes no odds if we don’t do something about it, and quickly.’ A final hug, then, ‘Off with you, now.’ I clambered reluctantly from her lap, and stood up.
Ginnie Hempstock rose to her feet, her daughter’s body limp in her arms. Lettie lolled and was jogged like a rag doll as her mother got up, and I stared at her, shocked beyond measure.
I said, ‘It was my fault. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.’
Old Mrs Hempstock said, ‘You meant well,’ but Ginnie Hempstock said nothing at all. She walked down the lane towards the farm, and then she turned off behind the milking shed. I thought that Lettie was too big to be carried, but Ginnie carried her as if she weighed no more than a kitten, her head and upper body resting on Ginnie’s shoulder, like a sleeping infant being taken upstairs to bed. Ginnie carried her down that path, and beside the hedge, and back, and back, until we reached the pond.
There were no breezes back there, and the night was perfectly still; our path was lit by moonlight and nothing more; the pond, when we got there, was just a pond. No golden, glimmering light. No magical full moon. It was black and dull, with the moon, the true moon, the quarter-moon, reflected in it.
I stopped at the edge of the pond, and Old Mrs Hempstock stopped beside me.
But Ginnie Hempstock kept walking.
She staggered down into the pond, until she was wading thigh deep, her coat and skirt floating on the water as she waded, breaking the reflected moon into dozens of tiny moons that scattered and re-formed around her.
At the centre of the pond, with the black water above her hips, she stopped. She took Lettie from her shoulder, so the girl’s body was supported at the head and at the knees by Ginnie Hempstock’s practical hands; then slowly, so very slowly, she laid Lettie down in the water.
The girl’s body floated on the surface of the pond.
Ginnie took a step back, and then another, never looking away from her daughter.
I heard a rushing noise, as if of an enormous wind coming towards us.
Lettie’s body shook.
There was no breeze, but now there were whitecaps on the surface of the pond. I saw waves, gentle, lapping waves at first, and then bigger waves that broke and slapped at the edge of the pond. One wave crested and crashed down close to me, splashing my clothes and face. I could taste the water’s wetness on my lips, and it was salt.
I whispered, ‘I’m sorry, Lettie.’
I should have been able to see the other side of the pond. I had seen it a few moments before. But the crashing waves had taken it away, and I could see nothing beyond Lettie’s floating body but the vastness of the lonely ocean, and the dark.
The waves grew bigger. The water began to glow in the moonlight, as it had glowed when it was in the bucket, a pale, perfect blue. The black shape on the surface of the water was the body of the girl who had saved my life.
Bony fingers rested on my shoulder. ‘What are you apologising for, boy? For killing her?’
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
‘She’s not dead. You didn’t kill her, nor did the hunger birds, although they did their best to get to you through her. She’s been given to her ocean. One day, in its own time, the ocean will give her back.’
I thought of corpses and of skeletons with pearls for eyes. I thought of mermaids with tails that flicked when they moved, like my goldfish’s tail had flicked before my goldfish had stopped moving, to lie, belly up, like Lettie, on the top of the water. I said, ‘Will she be the same?’
The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe. ‘Nothing’s ever the same,’ she said. ‘Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.’
Ginnie clambered out of the water, and she stood at the water’s edge beside me, her head bowed. The waves crashed and smacked and splashed and retreated. There was a distant rumble that became a louder and louder rumble: something was coming towards us, across the ocean. From miles away, from hundreds and hundreds of miles away it came: a thin white line etched in the glowing blue, and it grew as it approached.