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 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 rises, here: a phantom moment, a shaky reflection in the pool of remembrance. I know how it would have felt when the scavengers took my heart. How it felt as the hunger birds, all mouth, tore into my chest and snatched out my heart, still pumping, and devoured it to get at what was hidden inside it. I know how that feels, as if it was truly a part of my life, of my death. And then the memory snips and rips, neatly, and—)

A voice said, “Idiot! Don’t move. Just don’t,” and the voice was Lettie Hempstock’s, and I could not have moved if I had wanted to. She was on top of me, and she was heavier than I was, and she was pushing me down, face-first, into the grass and the wet earth, and I could see nothing.

I felt them, though.

I felt them crash into her. She was holding me down, making herself a barrier between me and the world.

I heard Lettie’s voice wail in pain.

I felt her shudder and twitch.

There were ugly cries of triumph and hunger, and I could hear my own voice whimpering and sobbing, so loud in my ears . . .

A voice said, “This is unacceptable.”

It was a familiar voice, but still, I could not place it, or move to see who was talking.

Lettie was on top of me, still shaking, but as the voice spoke, she stopped moving. The voice continued, “On what authority do you harm my child?”

A pause. Then,

– She was between us and our lawful prey.

“You’re scavengers. Eaters of offal, of rubbish, of garbage. You’re cleaners. Do you think that you can harm my family?”