‘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.
Fury said to the 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 grey 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 said 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 any more. 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 towards 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 colourless 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.
I’ll be judge I’ll be jury said cunning old Fury I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.
I stayed just where I was. I had seen Ursula Monkton torn to shreds, and the shreds devoured by scavengers from outside the universe of things that I understood. If I went out of the circle, I was certain, they would do the same to me.
I moved from Lewis Carroll to Gilbert and Sullivan.
When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache and repose is taboo’d by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in without impropriety …
I loved the sound of the words, even if I was not entirely sure what all of them meant.
I needed to wee. I turned my back on the house, took a few steps away from the tree, scared that I would take one step too far and find myself outside the circle. I urinated into the darkness. I had just finished when I was blinded by a torch beam, and my father’s voice said, ‘What on earth are you doing down here?’
‘I … I’m just down here,’ I said.
‘Yes. Your sister said. Well, time to come back to the house. Your dinner’s on the table.’
I stayed where I was. ‘No,’ I said, and shook my head.
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I’m not being silly. I’m staying here.’
‘Come on.’ And then, more cheerful, ‘Come on, Handsome George.’ It had been his silly pet name for me, when I was a baby. He even had a song that went with it that he would sing while bouncing me on his lap. It was the best song in the world.
I didn’t say anything.
‘I’m not going to carry you back to the house,’ said my father. There was an edge starting to creep into his voice. ‘You’re too big for that.’
Yes, I thought. And you’d have to cross into the fairy ring to pick me up.
But the fairy ring seemed foolish now. This was my father, not some waxwork thing that the hunger birds had made to lure me out. It was night. My father had come home from work. It was time.
I said, ‘Ursula Monkton’s gone away. And she’s not ever coming back.’
He sounded irritated, then. ‘What did you do? Did you say something horrible to her? Were you rude?’
‘No.’
He shone the torch beam on to my face. The light was almost blinding. He seemed to be fighting to keep his temper under control. He said, ‘Tell me what you said to her.’
‘I didn’t say anything to her. She just went away.’
It was true, or almost.
‘Come back to the house, now.’
‘Please, Daddy. I have to stay here.’
‘You come back to the house this minute!’ shouted my father, at the top of his voice, and I could not help it: my lower lip shook, my nose started to run, and tears sprang to my eyes. The tears blurred my vision and stung, but they did not fall, and I blinked them away.
I did not know if I was talking to my own father or not.
I said, ‘I don’t like it when you shout at me.’
‘Well, I don’t like it when you act like a little animal!’ he shouted, and now I was crying, and the tears were running down my face, and I wished that I was anywhere else but there that night.
I had stood up to worse things than him in the last few hours. And suddenly, I knew: I didn’t care any more. I looked up at the dark shape behind and above the torch beam, and I said, ‘Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry?’ and I knew as I said it that it was the thing I should never have said.
His face, what I could see of it in the reflected torchlight, crumpled, and looked shocked. He opened his mouth to speak, then he closed it again. I could not remember my father ever being at a loss for words, before or after. Only then. I felt terrible. I thought, I will die here soon. I do not want to die with those words on my lips.
But the torch beam was turning away from me. My father said only, ‘We’ll be up at the house. I’ll put your dinner in the oven.’
I watched the torchlight move back across the lawn, past the rose bushes and up towards the house, until it went out, and was lost to sight. I heard the back door open and close again.
Then you get some repose in the form of a doze with hot eyeballs and head ever aching, but your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams that you’d very much better be waking …
Somebody laughed. I stopped singing, and looked around, but saw nobody.
‘“The Nightmare Song”,’ a voice said. ‘How appropriate.’
She walked closer, until I could see her face. She was still quite naked, and she was smiling. I had seen her torn to pieces a few hours before, but now she was whole. Even so, she looked less solid than any of the other people I had seen that night; I could see the lights of the house glimmering behind her, through her. Her smile had not changed.
‘You’re dead,’ I told her.
‘Yes. I was eaten,’ said Ursula Monkton.
‘You’re dead. You aren’t real.’
‘I was eaten,’ she repeated. ‘I am nothing. And they have let me out, just for a little while, from the place inside them. It’s cold in there, and very empty. But they have promised you to me, so I will have something to play with; something to keep me company in the dark. And after you have been eaten, you too will be nothing. But whatever remains of that nothing will be mine to keep, eaten and together, my toy and my distraction, until the end of time. We’ll have such fun.’
A ghost of a hand was raised, and it touched the smile, and it blew me the ghost of Ursula Monkton’s kiss.
‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ it said.
A rustle in the rhododendrons behind me and a voice, cheerful and female and young, saying, ‘It’s okay. Gran fixed it. Everything’s taken care of. Come on.’
The moon was visible now above the azalea bush, a bright crescent like a thick nail paring.
I sat down by the dead tree, and did not move.
‘Come on, silly. I told you. They’ve gone home,’ said Lettie Hempstock.
‘If you’re really Lettie Hempstock,’ I told her, ‘you come here.’
She stayed where she was, a shadowy girl. Then she laughed, and she stretched and she shook, and she was only another shadow: a shadow that filled the night.
‘You are hungry,’ said the voice in the night, and it was no longer Lettie’s voice, not any longer. It might have been the voice inside my own head, but it was speaking aloud. ‘You are tired. Your family hates you. You have no friends. And Lettie Hempstock, I regret to tell you, is never coming back.’
I wished I could have seen who was talking. If you have something to fear, rather than something that could be anything, it is easier.
‘Nobody cares,’ said the voice, so resigned, so practical. ‘Now, step out of the circle and come to us. One step is all it will take. Just put one foot across the threshold and we will make all the pain go away for ever: the pain you feel now and the pain that is still to come. It will never happen.’
It was not one voice, not any longer. It was two people talking in unison. Or a hundred people. I could not tell. So many voices.
‘How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived. But you won’t grow. You can come out, and we will end it, cleanly, or you can die in there, of hunger and of fear. And when you are dead, your circle will mean nothing, and we will tear out your heart and take your soul for a keepsake.’