‘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.
Chapter 12
The shadows began to gather around the edges of the circle. Formless blotches, 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 centre, 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 towards 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 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.’