‘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.
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: grey-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 towards 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 grey 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 on to 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 left 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 grey 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.
They 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 grey 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 for ever.
Once the black creatures had finished devouring the thing on the grass, and when nothing remained, not even the tiniest scrap of grey 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 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.’