The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel

land. This also is true. We cannot hurt your farm or your creatures…
    “That’s right. You can’t. So get along with you! Go home. Haven’t you got a war to be getting back to?”
    – We cannot hurt your world, true.
    – But we can hurt this one.
    One of the hunger birds reached a sharp beak down to the ground at its feet, and began to tear at it—not as a creature that eats earth and grass, but as if it were eating a curtain or a piece of scenery with the world painted on it. Where it devoured the grass, nothing remained—a perfect nothing, only a color that reminded me of gray, but a formless, pulsing gray like the shifting static of our television screen when you dislodged the aerial cord and the picture had gone completely.
    This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.
    And the hunger birds began to flap and to flock.
    They landed on a huge oak tree and they tore at it and they wolfed it down, and in moments the tree was gone, along with everything that had been behind it.
    A fox slipped out of a hedgerow and slunk down the lane, its eyes and mask and brush illuminated golden by the farm-light. Before it had made it halfway across the road it had been ripped from the world, and there was only void behind it.
    Lettie said, “What he said before. We have to wake Gran.”
    “She won’t like that,” said Ginnie. “Might as well try and wake a—”
    “Dunt matter. If we can’t wake her up, they’ll destroy the whole of this creation.”
    Ginnie said only, “I don’t know how .”
    A clump of hunger birds flew up to a patch of the night sky where stars could be seen through the breaks in the clouds, and they tore at a kite-shaped constellation I could never have named, and they scratched and they rent and they gulped and they swallowed. In a handful of heartbeats, where the constellation and sky had been, there was now only a pulsing nothingness that hurt my eyes if I looked at it directly.
    I was a normal child. Which is to say, I was selfish and I was not entirely convinced of the existence of things that were not me, and I was certain, rock-solid unshakably certain, that I was the most important thing in creation. There was nothing that was more important to me than I was.
    Even so, I understood what I was seeing. The hunger birds would—no, they were —ripping the world away, tearing it into nothing. Soon enough, there would be no world. My mother, my father, my sister, my house, my school friends, my town, my grandparents, London, the Natural History Museum, France, television, books, ancient Egypt—because of me, all these things would be gone, and there would be nothing in their place.
    I did not want to die. More than that, I did not want to die as Ursula Monkton had died, beneath the rending talons and beaks of things that may not even have had legs or faces.
    I did not want to die at all. Understand that.
    But I could not let everything be destroyed, when I had it in my power to stop the destruction.
    I let go of Lettie Hempstock’s hand and I ran, as fast as I could, knowing that to hesitate, even to slow down, would be to change my mind, which would be the worst thing that I could do, which would be to save my life.
    How far did I run? Not far, I suppose, as these things go.
    Lettie Hempstock was shouting at me to stop, but still, I ran, crossing the farmland, where every blade of grass, every pebble on the lane, every willow tree and hazel hedge glowed golden, and I ran toward the darkness beyond the Hempstock land. I ran and I hated myself for running, as I had hated myself the time I had jumped from the high board at the swimming pool. I knew there was no going back, that there was no way that this could end in anything but pain, and I knew that I was willing to exchange my life for the world.
    They took off into the air, the hunger birds, as I ran toward them, as pigeons will rise when you run at them. They wheeled and they circled, deep shadows in the dark.
    I stood there in the darkness and I waited for them to descend. I waited for their beaks to tear at my chest, and for them to devour my heart.
    I stood there for perhaps two heartbeats, and it felt like forever.
    It happened.
    Something slammed into me from behind and knocked me down into the mud on the side of the lane, face-first. I saw bursts of light that were not there. The ground hit my stomach, and the wind was knocked out of me.
    (A ghost-memory