The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

might have been a thousand. I could not explain it: perhaps they were from a place where such things as counting 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.

XII.
    T he shadows began to gather around the edges of the circle. Formless blotches that were 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 center, 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 toward 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