by Neil Gaiman
I heard a sound in the distance, odd and outlandish: a low thrumming, as if someone had plucked at a taut piece of string.
“It won’t be me that lets them in,” said Lettie Hempstock. “They go where they wants to. They usually don’t come here because there’s nothing for them to eat. Now, there is.”
“Send me back,” said Ursula Monkton. And now I did not think she looked even faintly human. Her face was wrong, somehow: an accidental assemblage of features that simply put me in mind of a human face, like the knobbly gray whorls and lumps on the side of my beech tree, or the patterns in the wooden headboard of the bed at my grandmother’s house, which, if I looked at them wrongly in the moonlight, showed me an old man with his mouth open wide, as if he were screaming.
Lettie picked up the jam jar from the green moss, and twisted the lid. “You’ve gone and got it stuck tight,” she said. She walked over to the rock path, turned the jam jar upside down, holding it at the bottom, and banged it, lid-side-down, once, confidently, against the ground. Then she turned it the right side up, and twisted. This time the lid came off in her hand.
She passed the jam jar to Ursula Monkton, who reached inside it, and pulled out the translucent thing that had once been a hole in my foot. It writhed and wiggled and flexed seemingly in delight at her touch.
She threw it down. It fell onto the grass, and it grew. Only it didn’t grow. It changed: as if it was closer to me than I had thought. I could see through it, from one end to the other. I could have run down it, if the far end of that tunnel had not ended in a bitter orange sky.
As I stared at it, my chest twinged again: an ice-cold feeling, as if I had just eaten so much ice cream that I had chilled my insides.
Ursula Monkton walked toward the tunnel mouth. (How could the tiny wormhole be a tunnel? I could not understand it. It was still a glistening translucent silver-black wormhole, on the grass, no more than a foot or so long. It was as if I had zoomed in on something small, I suppose. But it was also a tunnel, and you could have taken a house through it.)
Then she stopped, and she wailed.
She said, “The way back.” Only that. “Incomplete,” she said. “It’s broken. The last of the gate isn’t there . . .” And she looked around her, troubled and puzzled. She focused on me—not my face, but my chest. And she smiled.
Then she shook. One moment she was an adult woman, naked and muddy, the next, as if she was a flesh-colored umbrella, she unfurled.
And as she unfurled, she reached out, and she grabbed me, pulled me up and high off the ground, and I reached out in fear and held her in my turn.
I was holding flesh. I was fifteen feet or more above the ground, as high as a tree.
I was not holding flesh.
I was holding old fabric, a perished, rotting canvas, and, beneath it, I could feel wood. Not good, solid wood, but the kind of old decayed wood I’d find where trees had crumbled, the kind that always felt wet, that I could pull apart with my fingers, soft wood with tiny beetles in it and woodlice, all filled with threadlike fungus.
It creaked and swayed as it held me.
YOU HAVE BLOCKED THE WAYS, it said to Lettie Hempstock.
“I never blocked nothing,” Lettie said. “You’ve got my friend. Put him down.” She was a long way beneath me, and I was scared of heights and I was scared of the creature that was holding me.
THE PATH IS INCOMPLETE. THE WAYS ARE BLOCKED.
“Put him down. Now. Safely.”
HE COMPLETES THE PATH. THE PATH IS INSIDE HIM.
I was certain that I would die, then.
I did not want to die. My parents had told me that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody really died, when they died; that my kitten and the opal miner had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon enough. I did not know if this was true or not. I knew only that I was used to being me, and I liked my books and my grandparents and Lettie Hempstock, and that death would take all these things from me.
I WILL OPEN HIM. THE WAY IS BROKEN. IT REMAINS INSIDE HIM.
I would have kicked, but there was nothing to kick against. I pulled with my fingers at the limb holding me, but my fingernails dug into rotting cloth and soft wood, and beneath it, something as hard as bone; and the creature held me close.
“Let me go!” I shouted. “Let! Me! Go!”
NO.
“Mummy!” I shouted. “Daddy!” Then, “Lettie, make her put me down.”
My parents were not there. Lettie was. She said, “Skarthach. Put him down. I gave you a choice, before. Sending you home will be harder, with the end of your tunnel inside him. But we can do it—and Gran can do it if Mum and me can’t. So put him down.”
IT IS INSIDE HIM. IT IS NOT A TUNNEL. NOT ANY LONGER. IT DOES NOT END. I FASTENED THE PATH INSIDE HIM TOO WELL WHEN I MADE IT AND THE LAST OF IT IS STILL INSIDE HIM. NO MATTER. ALL I NEED TO DO TO GET AWAY FROM HERE IS TO REACH INTO HIS CHEST AND PULL OUT HIS BEATING HEART AND FINISH THE PATH AND OPEN THE DOOR.
It was talking without words, the faceless flapping thing, talking directly inside my head, and yet there was something in its words that reminded me of Ursula Monkton’s pretty, musical voice. I knew it meant what it said.
“All of your chances are used up,” said Lettie, as if she were telling us that the sky was blue. And she raised two fingers to her lips and, shrill and sweet and piercing sharp, she whistled.
They came as if they had been waiting for her call.
High in the sky they were, and black, jet-black, so black it seemed as if they were specks on my eyes, not real things at all. They had wings, but they were not birds. They were older than birds, and they flew in circles and in loops and whorls, dozens of them, hundreds perhaps, and each flapping unbird slowly, ever so slowly, descended.
I found myself imagining a valley filled with dinosaurs, millions of years ago, who had died in battle, or of disease: imagining first the carcasses of the rotting thunder-lizards, bigger than buses, and then the vultures of that aeon: gray-black, naked, winged but featherless; faces from nightmares—beak-like snouts filled with needle-sharp teeth, made for rending and tearing and devouring, and hungry red eyes. These creatures would have descended on the corpses of the great thunder-lizards and left nothing but bones.
Huge, they were, and sleek, and ancient, and it hurt my eyes to look at them.
“Now,” said Lettie Hempstock to Ursula Monkton. “Put him down.”
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 toward 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 gray 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 onto 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 l
eft 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 gray 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.
The hunger birds 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 gray 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 forever.
Once the black creatures had finished devouring the thing on the grass, and nothing remained, not even the tiniest scrap of gray 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 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.
The 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 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 dead tree in the center 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.
Fury said to a mouse that he met in the house let us both go to law I will prosecute you . . .
I had learned that poem by heart at my school. It was told by the Mouse from Alice in Wonderland, the Mouse she met swimming in the pool of her own tears. In my copy of Alice the words of the poem curled and shrank like a mouse’s tail.
I could say all of the poem in one long breath, and I did, all the way to the inevitable end.
I’ll be judge I’ll be jury said cunning old Fury I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.
When I opened my eyes and looked up the opal miner was no longer there.
The sky was going gray and the world was losing depth and flattening into twilight. If the shadows were still there I could no longer perceive them; or rather, the whole world had become shadows.
My little sister ran down from the house, calling my name. She stopped before she reached me, and she said, “What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Daddy’s on the phone. He says you have to come and talk to him.”
“No. He doesn’t.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t say that.”
“If you don’t come now, you’ll be in trouble.”
I did not know if this was my sister or not, but I was on the inside of the grass circle, and she was on the outside.
I wished I had brought a book with me, even though it was almost too dark to read. I sa
id the Mouse’s “Pool of Tears” poem again, in my head. Come I’ll take no denial we must have a trial for really this morning I’ve nothing to do . . .
“Where’s Ursula?” asked my sister. “She went up to her room, but she isn’t there anymore. She’s not in the kitchen and she’s not in the loo-lahs. I want my tea. I’m hungry.”
“You can make yourself something to eat,” I told her. “You’re not a baby.”
“Where’s Ursula?”
She was ripped to shreds by alien vulture-monsters and honestly I think you’re one of them or being controlled by them or something.
“Don’t know.”
“I’m telling Mummy and Daddy when they get home that you were horrible to me today. You’ll get into trouble.” I wondered if this was actually my sister or not. It definitely sounded like her. But she did not take a step over the circle of greener grass, into the ring. She stuck her tongue out at me, and ran back toward the house.
Said the mouse to the cur such a trial dear sir with no jury or judge would be wasting our breath . . .
Deep twilit dusk, all colorless and strained. Mosquitoes whined about my ears and landed, one by one, on my cheeks and my hands. I was glad I was wearing Lettie Hempstock’s cousin’s strange old-fashioned clothing, then, because I had less bare skin exposed. I slapped at the insects as they landed, and some of them flew off. One that didn’t fly away, gorging itself on the inside of my wrist, burst when I hit it, leaving a smeared teardrop of my blood to run down the inside of my arm.
There were bats flying above me. I liked bats, always had, but that night there were so many of them, and they made me think of the hunger birds, and I shuddered.
Twilight became, imperceptibly, night, and now I was sitting in a circle that I could no longer see, at the bottom of the garden. Lights, friendly electric lights, went on in the house.
I did not want to be scared of the dark. I was not scared of any real thing. I just did not want to be there any longer, waiting in the darkness for my friend who had run away from me and did not seem to be coming back.
