Her mother shrugged. “It’s all the same sort of thing. We’ll just send them back where they came from.”

“And where do they come from?” asked Lettie.

I had slowed down now, and was making the final fragments of my shepherd’s pie last as long as I could, pushing them around the plate slowly with my fork.

“That dunt matter,” said Ginnie. “They all go back eventually. Probably just get bored of waiting.”

“I tried pushing them around,” said Lettie Hempstock, matter-of-factly. “Couldn’t get any traction. I held them with a dome of protection, but that wouldn’t have lasted much longer. We’re good here, obviously—nothing’s coming into this farm without our say-so.”

“In or out,” said Ginnie. She removed my empty plate, replaced it with a bowl containing a steaming slice of spotted dick with thick yellow custard drizzled all over it.

I ate it with joy.

I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy. The custard was sweet and creamy in my mouth, the dark swollen currants in the spotted dick were tangy in the cake-thick chewy blandness of the pudding, and perhaps I was going to die that night and perhaps I would never go home again, but it was a good dinner, and I had faith in Lettie Hempstock.

The world outside the kitchen was still waiting. The Hempstocks’ fog-colored house cat—I do not believe I ever knew her name—padded through the kitchen. That reminded me . . .

“Mrs. Hempstock? Is the kitten still here? The black one with the white ear?”

“Not tonight,” said Ginnie Hempstock. “She’s out and about. She was asleep on the chair in the hall all this afternoon.”

I wished I could stroke her soft fur. I wanted, I realized, to say goodbye.

“Um. I suppose. If I do. Have to die. Tonight,” I started, haltingly, not sure where I was going. I was going to ask for something, I imagine—for them to say goodbye to my mummy and daddy, or to tell my sister that it wasn’t fair that nothing bad ever happened to her: that her life was charmed and safe and protected, while I was forever stumbling into disaster. But nothing seemed right, and I was relieved when Ginnie interrupted me.

“Nobody is going to die tonight,” said Ginnie Hempstock, firmly. She took my empty bowl and washed it out in the sink, then she dried her hands on her apron. She took the apron off, went out into the hallway and returned a few moments later wearing a plain brown coat and a pair of large dark green Wellington boots.

Lettie seemed less confident than Ginnie. But Lettie, with all her age and wisdom, was a girl, while Ginnie was an adult, and her confidence reassured me. I had faith in them both.

“Where’s Old Mrs. Hempstock?” I asked.

“Having a lie-down,” said Ginnie. “She’s not as young as she used to be.”

“How old is she?” I asked, not expecting to get an answer. Ginnie just smiled, and Lettie shrugged.

I held Lettie’s hand as we left the farmhouse, promising myself that this time I would not let it go.

When I had entered the farmhouse, through the back door, the moon had been full, and it was a perfect summer’s night. When I left, I went with Lettie Hempstock and her mother out of the front door, and the moon was a thin white smile, high in a cloudy sky, and the night was gusty with sudden, undecided spring breezes coming first from one direction, then from another; every now and again a gust of wind would contain a sprinkling of rain that never amounted to anything more than that.

We walked through the manure-stinking farmyard and up the lane. We passed a bend in the road, and we stopped. Although it was dark, I knew exactly where I was. This was where it had all begun. It was the corner where the opal miner had parked my family’s white Mini, the place that he had died all alone, with a face the color of pomegranate juice, aching for his lost money, on the edge of the Hempstock land where the barriers between life and death were thin.

I said, “I think we should wake up Old Mrs. Hempstock.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Lettie. “When she gets tired, she sleeps until she wakes up on her own. A few minutes or a hundred years. There’s no waking her. Might as well try and wake up an atom bomb.”

Ginnie Hempstock planted herself in the middle of the lane, facing away from the farmhouse.

“Right!” she shouted to the night. “Let’s be having you.”

Nothing. A wet wind that gusted and was gone.

Lettie said, “P’raps they’ve all gone home . . . ?”

“Be nice if they had,” said Ginnie. “All this palaver and nonsense.”

I felt guilty. It was, I knew, my fault. If I had kept hold of Lettie’s hand none of this would have happened. Ursula Monkton, the hunger birds, these things were undoubtedly my responsibility. Even what had 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.