by Neil Gaiman
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.
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, and her daughter 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 tall and as straight as a teenager. My eyes had become too 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 afterimage.
The voice that was like Old Mrs. Hempstock’s said, “Shall I bind you creatures 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 it 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 voice added, in a voice that was now also unmistakably Old Mrs. Hempstock’s, “Varmints.”
Somebody was humming a tune. I realized, 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 gray 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 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 to me. “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 I stood up.
Ginnie Hempstock got 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 toward 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 center 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 toward 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 a bucket, glowed 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 apologizing 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 goldfishes’ tails 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 toward 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.
The great wave came, and the world rumbled, and I looked up as it reached us: it was taller than trees, than houses, than mind or eyes could hold, or heart could follow.
Only when it reached Lettie Hempstock’s floating body did the enormous wave crash down. I expected to be soaked, or, worse, to be swept away by the angry ocean water, and I raised my arm to cover my face.
There was no splash of breakers, no deafening crash, and when I lowered my arm I could see nothing but the still black water of a pond in the night, and there was nothing on the surface of the pond but a smattering of lily pads and the thoughtful, incomplete reflection of the moon.
Old Mrs. Hempstock was gone, too. I had thought that she was standing beside me, but only Ginnie stood there, next to me, staring down silently into the dark mirror of the little pond.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll take you home.”
XV.
There was a Land Rover parked behind the cowshed. The doors were open and the ignition key was in the lock. I sat on the newspaper-covered passenger seat and watched Ginnie Hempstock turn the key. The engine sputtered a few times before it started.
I had not imagined any of the Hempstocks driving. I said, “I didn’t know you had a car.”
“Lots of things you don’t know,” said Mrs. Hempstock, tartly. Then she glanced at me more gently and said, “You can’t know everything.” She backed the Land Rover up and it bumped its way forward across the ruts and the puddles of the back of the farmyard.
There was something on my mind.
“Old Mrs. Hempstock says that Lettie isn’t really dead,” I said. “But she looked dead. I think she is actually dead. I don’t think it’s true that she’s not dead.”
Ginnie looked like she was going to say something about the nature of truth, but all she said was, “Lettie’s hurt. Very badly hurt. The ocean has taken her. Honestly, I don’t know if it will ever give her back. But we can hope, can’t we?”
“Yes.” I squeezed my hands into fists, and I hoped as hard as I knew how.
We bumped and jolted up the lane at fifteen miles per hour.
I said, “Was she—is she—really your daughter?” I didn’t know, I still don’t know, why I asked her that. Perhaps I just wanted to know more about the girl who had saved my life, who had rescued me more than once. I didn’t know anything about her.
“More or less,” said Ginnie. “The men Hempstocks, my brothers, they went out into the world, and they had babies who’ve had babies. There are Hempstock women out there in your world, and I’ll wager each of them is a wonder in her own way. But only Gran and me and Lettie are the pure thing.”
“She didn’t have a daddy?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did you have a daddy?”
“You’re all questions, aren’t you? No, love. We never went in for that sort of thing. You only need men if you want to breed more men.”
I said, “You don’t have to take me home. I could stay with you. I could wait until Lettie comes back from the ocean. I could work on your farm, and carry stuff, and learn to drive a tractor.”
She said, “No,” but she said it kindly. “You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.”
A flash of resentment. It’s hard enough being alive, trying to survive in the world and find your place in it, to do the things you need to do to get by, without wondering if the thing you just did, whatever it was, was worth someone having . . . if not died, then having given up her life. It wasn’t fair.
“Life’s not fair,” said Ginnie, as if I had spoken aloud.
She turned into our driveway, pulled up outside the front door. I got out and she did too.
“Better make it easier for you to go home,” she said.
Mrs. Hempstock rang the doorbell, although the door was never locked, and industriously scraped the soles of her Wellington boots on the doormat until my mother opened the door. She was dressed for bed, and wearing her quilted pink dressing gown.
“Here he is,” said Ginnie. “Safe and sound, the soldier back from the wars. He had a lovely time at our Lettie’s going-away party, but now it’s time for this young man to get his rest.”
My mother looked blank—almost confused—and then the confusion was replaced by a smile, as if the world had just reconfigured itself into a form that made sense.
“Oh, you didn’t have to br
ing him back,” said my mother. “One of us would have come and picked him up.” Then she looked down at me. “What do you say to Mrs. Hempstock, darling?”
I said it automatically. “Thank-you-for-having-me.”
My mother said, “Very good, dear.” Then, “Lettie’s going away?”
“To Australia,” said Ginnie. “To be with her father. We’ll miss having this little fellow over to play, but, well, we’ll let you know when Lettie comes back. He can come over and play, then.”
I was getting tired. The party had been fun, although I could not remember much about it. I knew that I would not visit the Hempstock farm again, though. Not unless Lettie was there.
Australia was a long, long way away. I wondered how long it would be until she came back from Australia with her father. Years, I supposed. Australia was on the other side of the world, across the ocean . . .
A small part of my mind remembered an alternate pattern of events and then lost it, as if I had woken from a comfortable sleep and looked around, pulled the bedclothes over me, and returned to my dream.
Mrs. Hempstock got back into her ancient Land Rover, so bespattered with mud (I could now see, in the light above the front door) that there was almost no trace of the original paintwork visible, and she backed it up, down the drive, toward the lane.
My mother seemed unbothered that I had returned home in fancy dress clothes at almost eleven at night. She said, “I have some bad news, dear.”
“What’s that?”
“Ursula’s had to leave. Family matters. Pressing family matters. She’s already left. I know how much you children liked her.”
I knew that I didn’t like her, but I said nothing.
There was now nobody sleeping in my bedroom at the top of the stairs. My mother asked if I would like my room back for a while. I said no, unsure of why I was saying no. I could not remember why I disliked Ursula Monkton so much—indeed, I felt faintly guilty for disliking her so absolutely and so irrationally—but I had no desire to return to that bedroom, despite the little yellow handbasin just my size, and I remained in the shared bedroom until our family moved out of that house half a decade later (we children protesting, the adults I think just relieved that their financial difficulties were over).