Hollow City

Page 15

Later they told us the story of how, during the First World War, the British army had taken all their horses, and for a while they’d had none to pull their wagons. They had been left stranded in the forest—this very forest—when one day a herd of long-horned goats wandered into their camp. They looked wild but were tame enough to eat out of your hand, so someone got the idea to hitch one to a wagon, and these goats turned out to be nearly as strong as the horses they’d lost. So the Gypsies got unstuck, and until the end of the war their wagons were pulled by these peculiarly strong goats, which is how they became known throughout Wales as Goat People. As proof they passed around a photo of Bekhir’s uncle riding a goat-pulled wagon. We knew without anyone having to say it that this was the lost herd of peculiar goats Addison had talked about. After the war, the army gave back the Gypsies’ horses, and the goats, no longer needed, disappeared again into the forest.
Finally, campfires dwindling, they laid out sleeping rolls for us and sang a lullaby in a lilting foreign language, and I felt pleasantly like a child. The ventriloquist came to say good night to Emma. She shooed him away, but not before he left a calling card. On the back was an address in Cardiff where he picked up mail every few months, whenever the Gypsies stopped through. On the front was his photo, with dummies, and a little note written to Emma. She showed it to me and snickered, but I felt bad for the guy. He was guilty only of liking her, same as me.
I curled up with Emma in a sleeping roll at the forest’s edge. Just as we were drifting off, I heard footsteps in the grass nearby, and opened my eyes to see no one at all. It was Millard, back again after having spent the evening talking with the Gypsy boy.
“He wants to come with us,” said Millard.
“Who?” Emma mumbled groggily. “Where?”
“The boy. With us.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him it was a bad idea. But I didn’t say no, precisely.”
“You know we can’t take on anyone else,” Emma said. “He’ll slow us down.”
“I know, I know,” said Millard. “But he’s disappearing very rapidly, and he’s frightened. Soon he’ll be entirely invisible, and he’s afraid he’ll fall behind their group one day and the Gypsies won’t notice and he’ll be lost forever in the woods among the wolves and spiders.”
Emma groaned and rolled over to face Millard. He wasn’t going to let us sleep until this was decided. “I know he’ll be disappointed,” she said. “But it’s really impossible. I’m sorry, Mill.”
“Fair enough,” Millard said heavily. “I’ll give him the news.”
He rose and slipped away.
Emma sighed, and for a while she tossed and turned, restless.
“You did the right thing,” I whispered. “It isn’t easy being the one everybody looks to.”
She said nothing, but snuggled into the hollow of my chest. Gradually we drifted off, the whispers of breeze-blown branches and the breathing of horses gentling us to sleep.
* * *
It was a night of thin sleep and bad dreams, spent much as I’d spent the previous day: being chased by packs of nightmare dogs. By morning I was worn out. My limbs felt heavy as wood, my head cottony. I might’ve felt better if I hadn’t slept at all.
Bekhir woke us at dawn. “Rise and shine, syndrigasti!” he shouted, tossing out hunks of brick-hard bread. “There’ll be time for sleeping when you’re dead!”
Enoch knocked his bread against a rock and it clacked like wood. “We’ll be dead soon enough, with breakfast like this!”
Bekhir roughed Enoch’s hair, grinning. “Ahh, come on. Where’s your peculiar spirit this morning?”
“In the wash,” said Enoch, covering his head with the sleeping roll.
Bekhir gave us ten minutes to prepare for the ride to town. He was making good on his promise and would have us there before the morning’s first train. I got up, stumbled to a bucket of water, splashed some on my face, brushed my teeth with my finger. Oh, how I missed my toothbrush. How I longed for my minty floss, my ocean-breeze-scented deodorant stick. What I wouldn’t have given, just then, to find a Smart Aid store.
My kingdom for a pack of fresh underwear!
As I raked bits of hay from my hair with my fingers and bit into a loaf of inedible bread, the Gypsies and their children watched us with mournful faces. It was as if they knew, somehow, that the previous night’s fun had been a last hurrah, and now we were being led off to the gallows. I tried to cheer one of them up. “It’s okay,” I said to a towheaded little boy who seemed on the verge of tears. “We’re going to be fine.”
He looked at me as if I were a talking ghost, his eyes wide and uncertain.
Eight horses were rounded up, and eight Gypsy riders—one for each of us. Horses would get us to town much faster than a caravan of wagons could. They were also terrifying to me.
I’d never ridden a horse. I was probably the only marginally rich kid in America who hadn’t. It wasn’t because I didn’t think horses were beautiful, majestic creatures, the pinnacle of animal creation, etc., etc.—it’s just that I didn’t believe any animal had the slightest interest in being mounted or ridden by a human being. Besides, horses were very large, with rippling muscles and big, grinding teeth, and they looked at me as if they knew I was afraid and were hoping for an opportunity to kick my head in. Not to mention the lack of a seatbelt on a horse—no secondary restraint systems of any kind—and yet horses could go nearly as fast as cars but were much bouncier. So the whole endeavor just seemed inadvisable.
I said none of this, of course. I shut up and set my jaw and hoped I’d live at least long enough to die in a more interesting way than by falling off a horse.
From the first giddyap! we were at full gallop. I abandoned my dignity right away and bear-hugged the Gypsy man on the saddle in front of me who held the reins—so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to wave goodbye to the Gypsies who had gathered to see us off. Which was just as well: goodbyes had never been my strong suit anyway, and lately my life had felt like an unbroken series of them. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
We rode. My thighs went numb from squeezing the horse. Bekhir led the pack, his peculiar boy riding with him in the saddle. The boy rode with his back straight and arms at his sides, confident and unafraid, such a contrast from last night. He was in his element here, among the Gypsies. He didn’t need us. These were his people.
Eventually we slowed to a trot and I found the courage to un-bury my face from the rider’s jacket and take in the changing landscape. The forest had flattened into fields. We were descending into a valley, in the middle of which was a town that, from here, looked no bigger than a postage stamp, overwhelmed by green on all sides. Tracing toward it from the north was a long ellipsis of puffy white dots: the smoky breath of a train.
Bekhir stopped the horses just shy of the town gates. “This is as far as we go,” he said. “We’re not much welcome in towns. You don’t want the sort of attention we’d draw.”
It was hard to imagine anyone objecting to these kindly people. Then again, similar prejudices were among the reasons peculiars had withdrawn from society. Such was the way the sad world turned.
The children and I dismounted. I stood behind the others, hoping no one would notice my trembling legs. Just as we were about to go, Bekhir’s boy sprang down from his father’s horse and cried, “Wait! Take me with you!”
“I thought you were going to talk to him,” Emma said to Millard.
“I did,” Millard replied.
The boy pulled a knapsack from the saddlebag and slung it over his shoulder. He was packed and ready to go. “I can cook,” he said, “and chop wood, and ride a horse, and tie all sorts of knots!”
“Someone give him a merit badge,” said Enoch.
“I’m afraid it’s impossible,” Emma said to him gently.
“But I’m like you—and becoming more so all the time!” The boy began to unbuckle his pants. “Look what’s happening to me!”
Before anyone could stop him, he’d sent his pants to his ankles. The girls gasped and looked away. Hugh shouted, “Keep your trousers on, you depraved lunatic!”
But there was nothing to see—he was invisible from the mid-section down. Morbid curiosity compelled me to peek at the underside of his visible half, which earned me a crystal-clear view of the inner workings of his bowels.
“Look how much I’ve disappeared since yesterday,” Radi said, his voice panicky. “Soon I’ll be gone altogether!”
The Gypsy men gawked and murmured. Even their horses seemed disturbed, shying away from what seemed to be a disembodied child.
“I’ll be winged!” said Enoch. “He’s only half there.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” said Bronwyn. “Can’t we keep him?”
“We aren’t some traveling circus you can join whenever the notion takes you,” said Enoch. “We’re on a dangerous mission to save our ymbryne, and in no position to play babysitter to a clueless new peculiar!”
The boy’s eyes grew wide and began to water, and he let his knapsack slide off his shoulder and fall to the road.
Emma took Enoch aside. “That was too harsh,” she said. “Now tell him you’re sorry.”
“I won’t. This is a ridiculous waste of our precious and dwindling time.”
“These people saved our lives!”
“Our lives wouldn’t have needed saving if they hadn’t stuck us in that blessed cage!”
Emma gave up on Enoch and turned to the boy. “If circumstances were different, we’d welcome you with open arms. But as it stands, our entire civilization and way of life are in danger of being snuffed out. So it’s rather bad timing, you see.”
“It isn’t fair,” the boy moped. “Why couldn’t I have started disappearing ages ago? Why did it have to happen now?”
“Every peculiar’s ability manifests in its own time,” said Millard. “Some in infancy; others not until they’re quite old. I once heard of a man who didn’t realize he could levitate objects with his mind until he was ninety-two years of age.”
“I was lighter than air from the minute I was born,” Olive said proudly. “I popped out of me mum and floated straight up to the hospital ceiling! Only thing that stopped me from rolling out the window and into the clouds was the umbilical cord. They say the doctor fainted from the shock!”
“You’re still quite shocking, love,” Bronwyn said, giving her a reassuring pat on the back.
Millard, visible thanks to the coat and boots he wore, went to the boy. “What does your father think about all of this?” he said.
“Naturally, we don’t want him to go,” Bekhir said, “but how can we properly care for our son if we can’t even see him? He wants to leave—and I wonder if perhaps he’d be better off among his own kind.”
“Do you love him?” Millard asked bluntly. “Does he love you?”
Bekhir’s brow furrowed. He was a man of traditional sensibilities, and the question made him uncomfortable. But after some hemming and hawing, he growled, “Of course. He’s my child.”
“Then you are his kind,” said Millard. “The boy belongs with you, not us.”
Bekhir was loath to show emotion in front of his men, but at this I saw his eyes flicker and his jaw tighten. He nodded, looked down at his son, and said, “Come on, then. Pick up your bag and let’s go. Your mother’ll have tea waiting.”
“All right, Papa,” the boy said, seeming at once disappointed and relieved.
“You’ll be fine,” Millard assured the boy. “Better than fine. And when this is all over, I’ll look for you. There are more like us out there, and we’ll find them one day, together.”
“Promise?” the boy said, his eyes full of hope.
“I do,” said Millard.
And with that the boy climbed back onto his father’s horse, and we turned and walked through the gates into town.
6
The town was named Coal. Not Coaltown or Coalville. Just Coal. The stuff was everywhere, piled in gritty drifts by the side doors of houses, wafting up from the chimneys as oily smoke, smeared on the overalls of men walking to work. We hurried past them toward the depot in a tight pack.
“Quickly now,” Emma said. “No talking. Eyes down.”
It was a well-established rule that we were to avoid unnecessary eye contact with normals, because looks could lead to conversations, and conversations to questions, and peculiar children found questions posed by normal adults difficult to answer in a way that didn’t invite still more questions. Of course, if anything was going to invite questions, it was a group of bedraggled-looking children traveling alone during wartime—especially with a big, sharp-taloned bird of prey perched on one of the girls’ shoulders—but the townspeople hardly seemed to notice us. They haunted the laundry lines and pub doorways of Coal’s twisting lanes, drooping like wilted flowers, eyes flicking toward us and away again. They had other worries.
The train depot was so small I wondered if trains ever bothered stopping there. The only covered portion was the ticket counter, a little hut in the middle of an open-air platform. Inside the hut was a man asleep in a chair, bottle-thick bifocals slipping down his nose.
Emma rapped sharply on the window, startling the clerk awake. “Eight tickets to London!” she said. “We must be there this very afternoon.”