The ocean at the end of the lane

As I stared at it, my chest twinged again: an ice-cold feeling, as if I had just eaten so much ice cream that I had chilled my insides.

Ursula Monkton walked toward the tu

Then she stopped, and she wailed.

She said, “The way back.” Only that. “Incomplete,” she said. “It’s broken. The last of the gate isn’t there . . .” And she looked around her, troubled and puzzled. She focused on me—not my face, but my chest. And she smiled.

Then she shook. One moment she was an adult woman, naked and muddy, the next, as if she was a flesh-colored umbrella, she unfurled.

And as she unfurled, she reached out, and she grabbed me, pulled me up and high off the ground, and I reached out in fear and held her in my turn.

I was holding flesh. I was fifteen feet or more above the ground, as high as a tree.

I was not holding flesh.

I was holding old fabric, a perished, rotting canvas, and, beneath it, I could feel wood. Not good, solid wood, but the kind of old decayed wood I’d find where trees had crumbled, the kind that always felt wet, that I could pull apart with my fingers, soft wood with tiny beetles in it and woodlice, all filled with threadlike fungus.

It creaked and swayed as it held me.

YOU HAVE BLOCKED THE WAYS, it said to Lettie Hempstock.

“I never blocked nothing,” Lettie said. “You’ve got my friend. Put him down.” She was a long way beneath me, and I was scared of heights and I was scared of the creature that was holding me.

THE PATH IS INCOMPLETE. THE WAYS ARE BLOCKED.

“Put him down. Now. Safely.”

HE COMPLETES THE PATH. THE PATH IS INSIDE HIM.

I was certain that I would die, then.

I did not want to die. My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough. I did not know if this was true or not. I knew only that I was used to being me, and I liked my books and my grandparents and Lettie Hempstock, and that death would take all these things from me.

I WILL OPEN HIM. THE WAY IS BROKEN. IT REMAINS INSIDE HIM.

I would have kicked, but there was nothing to kick against. I pulled with my fingers at the limb holding me, but my fingernails dug into rotting cloth and soft wood, and beneath it, something as hard as bone; and the creature held me close.

“Let me go!” I shouted. “Let! Me! Go!”

NO.

“Mummy!” I shouted. “Daddy!” Then, “Lettie, make her put me down.”

My parents were not there. Lettie was. She said, “Skarthach. Put him down. I gave you a choice, before. Sending you home will be harder, with the end of your tu

IT IS INSIDE HIM. IT IS NOT A TUNNEL. NOT ANY LONGER. IT DOES NOT END. I FASTENED THE PATH INSIDE HIM TOO WELL WHEN I MADE IT AND THE LAST OF IT IS STILL INSIDE HIM. NO MATTER. ALL I NEED TO DO TO GET AWAY FROM HERE IS TO REACH INTO HIS CHEST AND PULL OUT HIS BEATING HEART AND FINISH THE PATH AND OPEN THE DOOR.

It was talking without words, the faceless flapping thing, talking directly inside my head, and yet there was something in its words that reminded me of Ursula Monkton’s pretty, musical voice. I knew it meant what it said.

“All of your chances are used up,” said Lettie, as if she were telling us that the sky was blue. And she raised two fingers to her lips and, shrill and sweet and piercing sharp, she whistled.

They came as if they had been waiting for her call.

High in the sky they were, and black, jet-black, so black it seemed as if they were specks on my eyes, not real things at all. They had wings, but they were not birds. They were older than birds, and they flew in circles and in loops and whorls, dozens of them, hundreds perhaps, and each flapping unbird slowly, ever so slowly, descended.

I found myself imagining a valley filled with dinosaurs, millions of years ago, who had died in battle, or of disease: imagining first the carcasses of the rotting thunder-lizards, bigger than buses, and then the vultures of that aeon: gray-black, naked, winged but featherless; faces from nightmares—beak-like snouts filled with needle-sharp teeth, made for rending and tearing and devouring, and hungry red eyes. These creatures would have descended on the corpses of the great thunder-lizards and left nothing but bones.

Huge, they were, and sleek, and ancient, and it hurt my eyes to look at them.

“Now,” said Lettie Hempstock to Ursula Monkton. “Put him down.”

The thing that held me made no move to drop me. It said nothing, just moved swiftly, like a raggedy tall ship, across the grass toward the tu

I could see the anger in Lettie Hempstock’s face, her fists clenched so tightly the knuckles were white. I could see above us the hunger birds circling, circling . . .

And then one of them dropped from the sky, dropped faster than the mind could imagine. I felt a rush of air beside me, saw a black, black jaw filled with needles and eyes that burned like gas jets, and I heard a ripping noise, like a curtain being torn apart.

The flying thing swooped back up into the sky with a length of gray cloth between its jaws.

I heard a voice wailing inside my head and out of it, and the voice was Ursula Monkton’s.

They descended, then, as if they had all been waiting for the first of their number to move. They fell from the sky onto the thing that held me, nightmares tearing at a nightmare, pulling off strips of fabric, and through it all I heard Ursula Monkton crying.

I ONLY GAVE THEM WHAT THEY NEEDED, she was saying, petulant and afraid. I MADE THEM HAPPY.

“You made my daddy hurt me,” I said, as the thing that was holding me flailed at the nightmares that tore at its fabric. The hunger birds ripped at it, each bird silently tearing away strips of cloth and flapping heavily back into the sky, to wheel and descend again.

I NEVER MADE ANY OF THEM DO ANYTHING, it told me. For a moment I thought it was laughing at me, then the laughter became a scream, so loud it hurt my ears and my mind.

It was as if the wind left the tattered sails then, and the thing that was holding me crumpled slowly to the ground.

I hit the grass hard, ski

There was still gray cloth, but it was not cloth: it writhed and rolled on the ground around me, blown by no wind that I could perceive, a squirming maggoty mess.

The hunger birds landed on it like seagulls on a beach of stranded fish, and they tore at it as if they had not eaten for a thousand years and needed to stuff themselves now, as it might be another thousand years or longer before they would eat again. They tore at the gray stuff and in my mind I could hear it screaming the whole time as they crammed its rotting-canvas flesh into their sharp maws.

Lettie held my arm. She didn’t say anything.

We waited.

And when the screaming stopped, I knew that Ursula Monkton was gone forever.

Once the black creatures had finished devouring the thing on the grass, and nothing remained, not even the tiniest scrap of gray cloth, then they turned their attentions to the translucent tu