The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

happened—or now, had, perhaps, no longer happened—in the cold bath, the previous night.
    I had a thought.
    “Can’t you just snip it out? The thing in my heart, that they want? Maybe you could snip it out like your granny snipped things last night?”
    Lettie squeezed my hand in the dark.
    “Maybe Gran could do that if she was here,” she said. “I can’t. I don’t think Mum can either. It’s really hard, snipping things out of time: you have to make sure that the edges all line up, and even Gran doesn’t always get it right. And this would be harder than that. It’s a real thing. I don’t think even Gran could take it out of you without hurting your heart. And you need your heart.” Then she said, “They’re coming.”
    But I knew something was happening, knew it before she said anything. For the second time I saw the ground begin to glow golden; I watched the trees and the grass, the hedgerows and the willow clumps and the last stray daffodils begin to shine with a burnished half-light. I looked around, half-fearful, half with wonder, and I observed that the light was brightest behind the house and over to the west, where the pond was.
    I heard the beating of mighty wings, and a series of low thumps. I turned and I saw them: the vultures of the void, the carrion kind, the hunger birds.
    They were not shadows any longer, not here, not in this place. They were all-too-real, and they landed in the darkness, just beyond the golden glow of the ground. They landed in the air and in trees, and they shuffled forward, as close as they could get to the golden ground of the Hempstocks’ farm. They were huge—each of them was much bigger than I was.
    I would have been hard-pressed to describe their faces, though. I could see them, look at them, take in every feature, but the moment I looked away they were gone, and there was nothing in my mind where the hunger birds had been but tearing beaks and talons, or wriggling tentacles, or hairy, chitinous mandibles. I could not keep their true faces in my head. When I turned away the only knowledge I retained was that they had been looking directly at me, and that they were ravenous.
    “Right, my proud beauties,” said Ginnie Hempstock, loudly. Her hands were on the hips of her brown coat. “You can’t stay here. You know that. Time to get a move on.” And then she said simply, “Hop it.”
    They shifted but they did not move, the innumerable hunger birds, and began to make a noise. I thought that they were whispering amongst themselves, and then it seemed to me that the noise they were making was an amused chuckle.
    I heard their voices, distinct but twining together, so I could not tell which creature was speaking.
    – We are hunger birds. We have devoured palaces and worlds and kings and stars. We can stay wherever we wish to stay.
    – We perform our function.
    – We are necessary.
    And they laughed so loudly it sounded like a train approaching. I squeezed Lettie’s hand, and she squeezed mine.
    – Give us the boy.
    Ginnie said, “You’re wasting your time, and you’re wasting mine. Go home.”
    – We were summoned here. We do not need to leave until we have done what we came here for. We restore things to the way they are meant to be. Will you deprive us of our function?
    “Course I will,” said Ginnie. “You’ve had your dinner. Now you’re just making nuisances of yourselves. Be off with you. Blinking varmints. I wouldn’t give tuppence ha’penny for the lot of you. Go home!” And she shook her hand in a flicking gesture.
    One of the creatures let out a long, wailing scream of appetite and frustration.
    Lettie’s hold on my hand was firm. She said, “He’s under our protection. He’s on our land. And one step onto our land and that’s the end of you. So go away.”
    The creatures seemed to huddle closer. There was silence in the Sussex night: only the rustle of leaves in the wind, only the call of a distant owl, only the sigh of the breeze as it passed; but in that silence I could hear the hunger birds conferring, weighing up their options, plotting their course. And in that silence I felt their eyes upon me.
    Something in a tree flapped its huge wings and cried out, a shriek that mingled triumph and delight, an affirmative shout of hunger and joy. I felt something in my heart react to the scream, like the tiniest splinter of ice inside my chest.
    – We cannot cross the border. This is true. We cannot take the child from your