The ocean at the end of the lane

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 Gi

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.

Gi

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 Gi

I reached out a hand, tentatively touched Lettie’s shoulder. She did not move or respond.

Gi

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.

Gi

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.”

Gi

“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 Gi

Gi

I said, “It was my fault. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Old Mrs. Hempstock said, “You meant well,” but Gi

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 Gi

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 Gi