by Neil Gaiman
I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. “Is that how it is for you?” I asked.
“Is what how it is for me?”
“Do you still know everything, all the time?”
She shook her head. She didn’t smile. She said, “Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.”
“So you used to know everything?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Everybody did. I told you. It’s nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.”
“To play what?”
“This,” she said. She waved at the house and the sky and the impossible full moon and the skeins and shawls and clusters of bright stars.
I wished I knew what she meant. It was as if she was talking about a dream we had shared. For a moment it was so close in my mind that I could almost touch it.
“You must be so hungry,” said Lettie, and the moment was broken, and yes, I was so hungry, and the hunger took my head and swallowed my lingering dreams.
There was a plate waiting for me in my place at the table in the farmhouse’s huge kitchen. On it was a portion of shepherd’s pie, the mashed potato a crusty brown on top, minced meat and vegetables and gravy beneath it. I was scared of eating food outside my home, scared that I might want to leave food I did not like and be told off, or be forced to sit and swallow it in minuscule portions until it was gone, as I was at school, but the food at the Hempstocks’ was always perfect. It did not scare me.
Ginnie Hempstock was there, bustling about in her apron, rounded and welcoming. I ate without talking, head down, shoveling the welcome food into my mouth. The woman and the girl spoke in low, urgent tones.
“They’ll be here soon enough,” said Lettie. “They aren’t stupid. And they won’t leave until they’ve taken the last little bit of what they came here for.”
Her mother sniffed. Her red cheeks were flushed from the heat of the kitchen fire. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said. “They’re all mouth, they are.”
I had never heard that expression before, and I thought she was telling us that the creatures were just mouths and nothing more. It did not seem unlikely that the shadows were indeed all mouths. I had seen them devour the gray thing that had called itself Ursula Monkton.
My grandmother would tell me off for eating like a wild animal. “You must essen, eat,” she would say, “like a person, not a chazzer, a pig. When animals eat, they fress. People essen. Eat like a person.” Fressen: that was how the hunger birds had taken Ursula Monkton and it was also, I had no doubt, how they would consume me.
“I’ve never seen so many of them,” said Lettie. “When they came here in the old days there was only a handful of them.”
Ginnie poured me a glass of water. “That’s your own fault,” she told Lettie. “You put up signals, and called them. Like banging the dinner bell, you were. Not surprising they all came.”
“I just wanted to make sure that she left,” said Lettie.
“Fleas,” said Ginnie, and she shook her head. “They’re like chickens who get out of the henhouse, and are so proud of themselves and so puffed up for being able to eat all the worms and beetles and caterpillars they want, that they never think about foxes.” She stirred the custard cooking on the hob, with a long wooden spoon in huge, irritated movements. “Anyway, now we’ve got foxes. And we’ll send them all home, same as we did the last times they were sniffing around. We did it before, didn’t we?”
“Not really,” said Lettie. “Either we sent the flea home, and the varmints had nothing to hang around for, like the flea in the cellar in Cromwell’s time, or the varmints came and took what they came here for and then they went away. Like the fat flea who made people’s dreams come true in Red Rufus’s day. They took him and they upped and left. We’ve never had to get rid of them before.”
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.
When 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, benea
th 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—)