The Ocean at the End of the Lane

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 towards the tunnel.

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 grey 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 on to 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, skinning my knees and the palms of my hands. Lettie pulled me up, helped me away from the fallen, crumpled remains of what had once called itself Ursula Monkton.

There was still grey 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.

They 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 grey 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 for ever.

Once the black creatures had finished devouring the thing on the grass, and when nothing remained, not even the tiniest scrap of grey cloth, then they turned their attentions to the translucent tunnel, which wiggled and wriggled and twitched like a living thing. Several of them grasped it in their claws, and they flew up with it, pulling it into the sky while the rest of them tore at it, demolishing it with their hungry mouths.

I thought that when they finished it they would go away, return to wherever they had come from, but they did not. They descended. I tried to count them as they landed, and I failed. I had thought that there were hundreds of them, but I might have been wrong. There might have been twenty of them. There might have been a thousand. I could not explain it; perhaps they were from a place where such things didn’t apply, somewhere outside of time and numbers.

They landed, and I stared at them, but saw nothing but shadows.

So many shadows.

And they were staring at us.

Lettie said, ‘You’ve done what you came here for. You got your prey. You cleaned up. You can go home now.’

The shadows did not move.

She said, ‘Go!’

The shadows on the grass stayed exactly where they were. If anything they seemed darker, more real than they had been before.

– You have no power over us.

‘Perhaps I don’t,’ said Lettie. ‘But I called you here, and now I’m telling you to go home. You devoured Skarthach of the Keep. You’ve done your business. Now clear off.’

– We are cleaners. We came to clean.

‘Yes, and you’ve cleaned the thing you came for. Go home.’

– Not everything, sighed the wind in the rhododendron bushes and the rustle of the grass.

Lettie turned to me, and put her arms around me. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Quickly.’

We walked across the lawn, rapidly. ‘I’m taking you down to the fairy ring,’ she said. ‘You have to wait there until I come and get you. Don’t leave. Not for anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because something bad could happen to you. I don’t think I could get you back to the farmhouse safely, and I can’t fix this on my own. But you’re safe in the ring. Whatever you see, whatever you hear, don’t leave it. Just stay where you are and you’ll be fine.’

‘It’s not a real fairy ring,’ I told her. ‘That’s just our games. It’s a green circle of grass.’

‘It is what it is,’ she said. ‘Nothing that wants to hurt you can cross it. Now, stay inside.’ She squeezed my hand, and walked me into the green grass circle. Then she ran off, into the rhododendron bushes, and she was gone.





The shadows began to gather around the edges of the circle. Formless blotches, only there, really there, when glimpsed from the corners of my eyes. That was when they looked birdlike. That was when they looked hungry.

I have never been as frightened as I was in that grass circle with the dead tree in the centre, on that afternoon. No birds sang, no insects hummed or buzzed. Nothing changed. I heard the rustle of the leaves and the sigh of the grass as the wind passed over it, but Lettie Hempstock was not there, and I heard no voices in the breeze. There was nothing to scare me but shadows, and the shadows were not even properly visible when I looked at them directly.

The sun got lower in the sky, and the shadows blurred into the dusk, became, if anything, more indistinct, so now I was not certain that anything was there at all. But I did not leave the grass circle.

‘Hey! Boy!’

I turned. He walked across the lawn towards me. He was dressed as he had been the last time I had seen him: a dinner jacket, a frilly white shirt, a black bow tie. His face was still an alarming cherry-red, as if he had just spent too long on the beach, but his hands were white. He looked like a waxwork, not a person, something you would expect to see in the Chamber of Horrors. He grinned when he saw me looking at him, and now he looked like a waxwork that was smiling, and I swallowed, and wished that the sun was out again.

‘Come on, boy,’ said the opal miner. ‘You’re just prolonging the inevitable.’

I did not say a word. I watched him. His shiny black shoes walked up to the grass circle, but they did not cross it.

My heart was pounding so hard in my chest I was certain that he must have heard it. My neck and scalp prickled.

‘Boy,’ he said, in his sharp South African accent. ‘They need to finish this up. It’s what they do: they’re the carrion kind, the vultures of the void. Their job. Clean up the last remnants of the mess. Nice and neat. Pull you from the world and it will be as if you never existed. Just go with it. It won’t hurt.’

I stared at him. Adults only ever said that when it, whatever it happened to be, was going to hurt so much.

The dead man in the dinner jacket turned his head slowly, until his face was looking at mine. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and seemed to be staring blindly at the sky above us, like a sleepwalker.

‘She can’t save you, your little friend,’ he said. ‘Your fate was sealed and decided days ago, when their prey used you as a door from its place to this one, and she fastened her path in your heart.’

‘I didn’t start it!’ I told the dead man. ‘It’s not fair. You started it.’

‘Yes,’ said the dead man. ‘Are you coming?’

I sat down with my back to the tree in the centre of the fairy ring, and I closed my eyes, and I did not move. I remembered poems to distract myself, recited them silently under my breath, mouthing the words but making no sound.