Hollow City
Page 19
He’d sent one of his bees trailing after us, which allowed him to follow from a careful distance. “Then it was just a matter of finding the perfect time to strike,” he said proudly, as if victory had been assured from the moment he decided to save us.
“And if you hadn’t accidentally stumbled across a field packed with bees?” Enoch said.
Hugh dug something from his pocket and held it up: a peculiar chicken egg. “Plan B,” he said.
Bekhir hobbled to Hugh and shook his hand. “Young man,” he said, “we owe you our lives.”
“What about your peculiar boy?” Millard asked Bekhir.
“He managed to escape with two of my men, thank God. We lost three fine animals today, but no people.” Bekhir bowed to Hugh, and I thought for a moment he might even take Hugh’s hand and kiss it. “You must allow us to repay you!”
Hugh blushed. “There’s no need, I assure you—”
“And no time, either,” said Emma, pushing Hugh out the door.
“We have a train to catch!”
Those of us who hadn’t yet realized Miss Peregrine was gone went pale.
“We’ll take their jeep,” said Millard. “If we’re lucky—and if that wight was correct—we might just be able to catch the train during its stopover in Porthmadog.”
“I know a shortcut,” Bekhir said, and he drew a simple map in the dirt with his shoe.
We thanked the Gyspies. I told Bekhir we were sorry we’d caused them so much trouble, and he unleashed a big, booming laugh and waved us on down the path. “We’ll meet again, syndrigasti,” he said. “I’m certain of it!”
* * *
We squeezed into the wights’ jeep, eight kids packed like sardines into a vehicle built for three. Because I was the only one who’d driven a car before, I took the wheel. I spent way too long figuring out how to start the damn thing—not with a key, it turned out, but by pushing a button on the floor—and then there was the matter of shifting gears; I’d only driven a manual transmission a few times, and always with my dad coaching me from the passenger seat. Despite all that, after a minute or two we were—bumpily, jerkily, somewhat hesitatingly—on our way.
I stomped the accelerator and drove as fast as the overloaded jeep would take us, while Millard shouted directions and everyone else held on for dear life. We reached the town of Porthmadog twenty minutes later, the train’s whistle blowing as we sped down the main street toward the station. We came to a skidding stop by the depot and tumbled out. I didn’t even bother to kill the engine. Racing through the station like cheetahs after a gazelle, we leapt on board the last car of the train just as it was pulling out of the station.
We stood doubled over and panting in the aisle while astonished passengers pretended not to stare. Sweating, dirty, and disheveled—we must’ve been a sight.
“We made it,” Emma gasped. “I can’t believe we made it.”
“I can’t believe I drove stick,” I said.
The conductor appeared. “You’re back,” he said with a beleaguered sigh. “I trust you still have your tickets?”
Horace fished them from his pocket in a wad.
“This way to your cabin,” said the conductor.
“Our trunk!” Bronwyn said, clutching at the conductor’s elbow. “Is it still there?”
The conductor pried his arm away. “I tried taking it to lost and found. Couldn’t move the blessed thing an inch.”
We ran from car to car until we reached the first-class cabin, where we found Bronwyn’s trunk sitting just where she’d left it. She rushed to it and threw open the latches, then the lid.
Miss Peregrine wasn’t inside. I had a mini heart attack.
“My bird!” Bronwyn cried. “Where’s my bird?!”
“Calm down, it’s right here,” said the conductor, and he pointed above our heads. Miss Peregrine was perched on a luggage rack, fast asleep.
Bronwyn stumbled back against the wall, so relieved she nearly fainted. “How did she get up there?”
The conductor raised an eyebrow. “It’s a very lifelike toy.” He turned and went to the door, then stopped and said, “By the way, where can I get one? My daughter would just love it.”
“I’m afraid she’s one of a kind,” Bronwyn said, and she took Miss Peregrine down and hugged her to her chest.
* * *
After all we’d been through over the past few days—not to mention the past few hours—the luxury of the first-class cabin came as a shock. Our car had plush leather couches, a dining table, and wide picture windows. It looked like a rich man’s living room, and we had it all to ourselves.
We took turns washing up in the wood-paneled bathroom, then availed ourselves of the dining menu. “Order anything you like,” Enoch said, picking up a telephone that was attached to the arm of a reclining chair. “Hello, do you have goose liver pâté? I should like all of it. Yes, all that you have. And toast triangles.”
No one said anything about what had happened. It was too much, too awful, and for now we just wanted to recover and forget. There was so much else to be done, so many more dangers left to reckon with.
We settled in for the journey. Outside, Porthmadog’s squat houses shrank away and Miss Wren’s mountain came into view, rising grayly above the hills. While the others drifted into conversations, my nose stayed glued to the window, and the endless unfolding thereness of 1940 beyond it—1940 being a place that had until recently been merely pocket-sized in my experience, no wider than a tiny island, and a place I could leave any time I wished by passing through the dark belly of Cairnholm’s cairn. Since leaving the island, though, it had become a world, a whole world of marshy forests and smoke-wreathed towns and valleys crisscrossed with shining rivers; and of people and things that looked old but weren’t yet, like props and extras in some elaborately staged but plotless period movie—all of it flashing by and by and by out my window like a dream without end.
I fell asleep and woke, fell asleep and woke, the train’s rhythm hypnotizing me into a hazy state in which it was easy to forget that I was more than just a passive viewer, my window more than just a movie screen; that out there was every bit as real as in here. Then, slowly, I remembered how I’d come to be part of this: my grandfather; the island; the children. The pretty, flint-eyed girl next to me, her hand resting atop mine.
“Am I really here?” I asked her.
“Go back to sleep,” she said.
“Do you think we’ll be all right?”
She kissed me on the tip of my nose.
“Go back to sleep.”
7
More terrible dreams, all mixed up, fading in and out of one another. Snippets of horrors from recent days: the steel eye of a gun barrel staring me down from close range; a road strewn with fallen horses; a hollowgast’s tongues straining toward me across a chasm; that awful, grinning wight and his empty eyes.
Then this: I’m back home again, but I’m a ghost. I drift down my street, through my front door, into my house. I find my father asleep at the kitchen table, a cordless phone clutched to his chest.
I’m not dead, I say, but my words don’t make sound.
I find my mother sitting on the edge of her bed, still in night-clothes, staring out the window at a pale afternoon. She’s gaunt, wrung out from crying. I reach out to touch her shoulder, but my hand passes right through it.
Then I’m at my own funeral, looking up from my grave at a rectangle of gray sky.
My three uncles peer down, their fat necks bulging from starched white collars.
Uncle Les: What a pity. Right?
Uncle Jack: You really gotta feel for Frank and Maryann right now.
Uncle Les: Yeah. What’re people gonna think? Uncle Bobby: They’ll think the kid had a screw loose. Which he did.
Uncle Jack: I knew it, though. That he’d pull something like this one day. He had that look, you know? Just a little …
Uncle Bobby: Screwy.
Uncle Les: That comes from his dad’s side of the family, not ours.
Uncle Jack: Still. Terrible.
Uncle Bobby: Yeah.
Uncle Jack: …
Uncle Les: …
Uncle Bobby: Buffet?
My uncles shuffle away. Ricky comes along, his green hair extra spiked for the occasion.
Bro. Now that you’re dead, can I have your bike?
I try to shout: I’m not dead!
I am just far away I’m sorry
But the words echo back at me, trapped inside my head.
The minister peers down. It’s Golan, holding a Bible, dressed in robes. He grins.
We’re waiting for you, Jacob.
A shovelful of dirt rains down on me.
We’re waiting.
* * *
I bolted upright, suddenly awake, my mouth dry as paper. Emma was next to me, hands on my shoulders. “Jacob! Thank God—you gave us a scare!”
“I did?”
“You were having a nightmare,” said Millard. He was seated across from us, looking like an empty suit of clothes starched into position. “Talking in your sleep, too.”
“I was?”
Emma dabbed sweat from my forehead with one of the first-class napkins. (Real cloth!) “You were,” she said. “But it sounded like gobbledygook. I couldn’t understand a word.”
I looked around self-consciously, but no else seemed to have noticed. The other children were spread throughout the car, catnapping, daydreaming out the window, or playing cards.
I sincerely hoped I was not starting to lose it.
“Do you often have nightmares?” asked Millard. “You should describe them to Horace. He’s good at sussing hidden meanings from dreams.”
Emma rubbed my arm. “You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and because I don’t like being fussed over, I changed the subject. Seeing that Millard had the Tales of the Peculiar open in his lap, I said, “Doing some light reading?”
“Studying,” he replied. “And to think I once dismissed these as just stories for children. They are, in fact, extraordinarily complex—cunning, even—in the way they conceal secret information about peculiardom. It would take me years, probably, to decode them all.”
“But what good is that to us now?” Emma said. “What good are loops if they can be breached by hollowgast? Even the secret ones in that book will be found out eventually.”
“Maybe it was just the one loop that was breached,” I said hopefully. “Maybe the hollow in Miss Wren’s loop was a freak, somehow.”
“A peculiar hollow!” said Millard. “That’s amusing—but no. He was no accident. I’m certain these ‘enhanced’ hollows were an integral part of the assault on our loops.”
“But how?” said Emma. “What’s changed about hollows that they can get into loops now?”
“That’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal,” said Millard. “We don’t know a lot about hollows, having never had the chance to examine one in a controlled setting. But it’s thought that, like normals, they lack something which you and I and everyone in this train car possesses—some essential peculiarness—which is what allows us to interact with loops; to bind with and be absorbed into them.”
“Like a key,” I said.
“Something like that,” said Millard. “Some believe that, like blood or spinal fluid, our peculiarness has physical substance. Others think it’s inside us but insubstantial. A second soul.”
“Huh,” I said. I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn’t a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn’t we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.
“I hate all that crackpot stuff,” said Emma. “The idea that you could capture the second soul in a jar? Gives me the quivers.”
“And yet, over the years, some attempts have been made to do just this,” said Millard. “What did that wight soldier say to you, Emma? ‘I wish I could bottle what you have,’ or something to that effect?”
Emma shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”
“The theory goes that if somehow our peculiar essence could be distilled and captured—in a bottle, as he said, or more likely a petri dish—then perhaps that essence could also be transferred from one being to another. If this were possible, imagine the black market in peculiar souls that might spring up among the wealthy and unscrupulous. Peculiarities like your spark or Bronwyn’s great strength sold to the highest bidder!”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
“Most peculiars agree with you,” said Millard, “which is why such research was outlawed many years ago.”
“As if the wights cared about our laws,” said Emma.
“But the whole idea seems crazy,” I said. “It couldn’t really work, could it?”
“I didn’t think so,” said Millard. “At least, not until yesterday. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Because of the hollow in the menagerie loop?”
“Right. Before yesterday I wasn’t even certain I believed in a ‘second soul.’ To my mind, there was only one compelling argument for its existence: that when a hollowgast consumes enough of us, it transforms into a different sort of creature—one that can travel through time loops.”
“It becomes a wight,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “But only if it consumes peculiars. It can eat as many normals as it likes and it will never turn into a wight. Therefore, we must have something normals lack.”
“And if you hadn’t accidentally stumbled across a field packed with bees?” Enoch said.
Hugh dug something from his pocket and held it up: a peculiar chicken egg. “Plan B,” he said.
Bekhir hobbled to Hugh and shook his hand. “Young man,” he said, “we owe you our lives.”
“What about your peculiar boy?” Millard asked Bekhir.
“He managed to escape with two of my men, thank God. We lost three fine animals today, but no people.” Bekhir bowed to Hugh, and I thought for a moment he might even take Hugh’s hand and kiss it. “You must allow us to repay you!”
Hugh blushed. “There’s no need, I assure you—”
“And no time, either,” said Emma, pushing Hugh out the door.
“We have a train to catch!”
Those of us who hadn’t yet realized Miss Peregrine was gone went pale.
“We’ll take their jeep,” said Millard. “If we’re lucky—and if that wight was correct—we might just be able to catch the train during its stopover in Porthmadog.”
“I know a shortcut,” Bekhir said, and he drew a simple map in the dirt with his shoe.
We thanked the Gyspies. I told Bekhir we were sorry we’d caused them so much trouble, and he unleashed a big, booming laugh and waved us on down the path. “We’ll meet again, syndrigasti,” he said. “I’m certain of it!”
* * *
We squeezed into the wights’ jeep, eight kids packed like sardines into a vehicle built for three. Because I was the only one who’d driven a car before, I took the wheel. I spent way too long figuring out how to start the damn thing—not with a key, it turned out, but by pushing a button on the floor—and then there was the matter of shifting gears; I’d only driven a manual transmission a few times, and always with my dad coaching me from the passenger seat. Despite all that, after a minute or two we were—bumpily, jerkily, somewhat hesitatingly—on our way.
I stomped the accelerator and drove as fast as the overloaded jeep would take us, while Millard shouted directions and everyone else held on for dear life. We reached the town of Porthmadog twenty minutes later, the train’s whistle blowing as we sped down the main street toward the station. We came to a skidding stop by the depot and tumbled out. I didn’t even bother to kill the engine. Racing through the station like cheetahs after a gazelle, we leapt on board the last car of the train just as it was pulling out of the station.
We stood doubled over and panting in the aisle while astonished passengers pretended not to stare. Sweating, dirty, and disheveled—we must’ve been a sight.
“We made it,” Emma gasped. “I can’t believe we made it.”
“I can’t believe I drove stick,” I said.
The conductor appeared. “You’re back,” he said with a beleaguered sigh. “I trust you still have your tickets?”
Horace fished them from his pocket in a wad.
“This way to your cabin,” said the conductor.
“Our trunk!” Bronwyn said, clutching at the conductor’s elbow. “Is it still there?”
The conductor pried his arm away. “I tried taking it to lost and found. Couldn’t move the blessed thing an inch.”
We ran from car to car until we reached the first-class cabin, where we found Bronwyn’s trunk sitting just where she’d left it. She rushed to it and threw open the latches, then the lid.
Miss Peregrine wasn’t inside. I had a mini heart attack.
“My bird!” Bronwyn cried. “Where’s my bird?!”
“Calm down, it’s right here,” said the conductor, and he pointed above our heads. Miss Peregrine was perched on a luggage rack, fast asleep.
Bronwyn stumbled back against the wall, so relieved she nearly fainted. “How did she get up there?”
The conductor raised an eyebrow. “It’s a very lifelike toy.” He turned and went to the door, then stopped and said, “By the way, where can I get one? My daughter would just love it.”
“I’m afraid she’s one of a kind,” Bronwyn said, and she took Miss Peregrine down and hugged her to her chest.
* * *
After all we’d been through over the past few days—not to mention the past few hours—the luxury of the first-class cabin came as a shock. Our car had plush leather couches, a dining table, and wide picture windows. It looked like a rich man’s living room, and we had it all to ourselves.
We took turns washing up in the wood-paneled bathroom, then availed ourselves of the dining menu. “Order anything you like,” Enoch said, picking up a telephone that was attached to the arm of a reclining chair. “Hello, do you have goose liver pâté? I should like all of it. Yes, all that you have. And toast triangles.”
No one said anything about what had happened. It was too much, too awful, and for now we just wanted to recover and forget. There was so much else to be done, so many more dangers left to reckon with.
We settled in for the journey. Outside, Porthmadog’s squat houses shrank away and Miss Wren’s mountain came into view, rising grayly above the hills. While the others drifted into conversations, my nose stayed glued to the window, and the endless unfolding thereness of 1940 beyond it—1940 being a place that had until recently been merely pocket-sized in my experience, no wider than a tiny island, and a place I could leave any time I wished by passing through the dark belly of Cairnholm’s cairn. Since leaving the island, though, it had become a world, a whole world of marshy forests and smoke-wreathed towns and valleys crisscrossed with shining rivers; and of people and things that looked old but weren’t yet, like props and extras in some elaborately staged but plotless period movie—all of it flashing by and by and by out my window like a dream without end.
I fell asleep and woke, fell asleep and woke, the train’s rhythm hypnotizing me into a hazy state in which it was easy to forget that I was more than just a passive viewer, my window more than just a movie screen; that out there was every bit as real as in here. Then, slowly, I remembered how I’d come to be part of this: my grandfather; the island; the children. The pretty, flint-eyed girl next to me, her hand resting atop mine.
“Am I really here?” I asked her.
“Go back to sleep,” she said.
“Do you think we’ll be all right?”
She kissed me on the tip of my nose.
“Go back to sleep.”
7
More terrible dreams, all mixed up, fading in and out of one another. Snippets of horrors from recent days: the steel eye of a gun barrel staring me down from close range; a road strewn with fallen horses; a hollowgast’s tongues straining toward me across a chasm; that awful, grinning wight and his empty eyes.
Then this: I’m back home again, but I’m a ghost. I drift down my street, through my front door, into my house. I find my father asleep at the kitchen table, a cordless phone clutched to his chest.
I’m not dead, I say, but my words don’t make sound.
I find my mother sitting on the edge of her bed, still in night-clothes, staring out the window at a pale afternoon. She’s gaunt, wrung out from crying. I reach out to touch her shoulder, but my hand passes right through it.
Then I’m at my own funeral, looking up from my grave at a rectangle of gray sky.
My three uncles peer down, their fat necks bulging from starched white collars.
Uncle Les: What a pity. Right?
Uncle Jack: You really gotta feel for Frank and Maryann right now.
Uncle Les: Yeah. What’re people gonna think? Uncle Bobby: They’ll think the kid had a screw loose. Which he did.
Uncle Jack: I knew it, though. That he’d pull something like this one day. He had that look, you know? Just a little …
Uncle Bobby: Screwy.
Uncle Les: That comes from his dad’s side of the family, not ours.
Uncle Jack: Still. Terrible.
Uncle Bobby: Yeah.
Uncle Jack: …
Uncle Les: …
Uncle Bobby: Buffet?
My uncles shuffle away. Ricky comes along, his green hair extra spiked for the occasion.
Bro. Now that you’re dead, can I have your bike?
I try to shout: I’m not dead!
I am just far away I’m sorry
But the words echo back at me, trapped inside my head.
The minister peers down. It’s Golan, holding a Bible, dressed in robes. He grins.
We’re waiting for you, Jacob.
A shovelful of dirt rains down on me.
We’re waiting.
* * *
I bolted upright, suddenly awake, my mouth dry as paper. Emma was next to me, hands on my shoulders. “Jacob! Thank God—you gave us a scare!”
“I did?”
“You were having a nightmare,” said Millard. He was seated across from us, looking like an empty suit of clothes starched into position. “Talking in your sleep, too.”
“I was?”
Emma dabbed sweat from my forehead with one of the first-class napkins. (Real cloth!) “You were,” she said. “But it sounded like gobbledygook. I couldn’t understand a word.”
I looked around self-consciously, but no else seemed to have noticed. The other children were spread throughout the car, catnapping, daydreaming out the window, or playing cards.
I sincerely hoped I was not starting to lose it.
“Do you often have nightmares?” asked Millard. “You should describe them to Horace. He’s good at sussing hidden meanings from dreams.”
Emma rubbed my arm. “You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and because I don’t like being fussed over, I changed the subject. Seeing that Millard had the Tales of the Peculiar open in his lap, I said, “Doing some light reading?”
“Studying,” he replied. “And to think I once dismissed these as just stories for children. They are, in fact, extraordinarily complex—cunning, even—in the way they conceal secret information about peculiardom. It would take me years, probably, to decode them all.”
“But what good is that to us now?” Emma said. “What good are loops if they can be breached by hollowgast? Even the secret ones in that book will be found out eventually.”
“Maybe it was just the one loop that was breached,” I said hopefully. “Maybe the hollow in Miss Wren’s loop was a freak, somehow.”
“A peculiar hollow!” said Millard. “That’s amusing—but no. He was no accident. I’m certain these ‘enhanced’ hollows were an integral part of the assault on our loops.”
“But how?” said Emma. “What’s changed about hollows that they can get into loops now?”
“That’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal,” said Millard. “We don’t know a lot about hollows, having never had the chance to examine one in a controlled setting. But it’s thought that, like normals, they lack something which you and I and everyone in this train car possesses—some essential peculiarness—which is what allows us to interact with loops; to bind with and be absorbed into them.”
“Like a key,” I said.
“Something like that,” said Millard. “Some believe that, like blood or spinal fluid, our peculiarness has physical substance. Others think it’s inside us but insubstantial. A second soul.”
“Huh,” I said. I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn’t a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn’t we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.
“I hate all that crackpot stuff,” said Emma. “The idea that you could capture the second soul in a jar? Gives me the quivers.”
“And yet, over the years, some attempts have been made to do just this,” said Millard. “What did that wight soldier say to you, Emma? ‘I wish I could bottle what you have,’ or something to that effect?”
Emma shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”
“The theory goes that if somehow our peculiar essence could be distilled and captured—in a bottle, as he said, or more likely a petri dish—then perhaps that essence could also be transferred from one being to another. If this were possible, imagine the black market in peculiar souls that might spring up among the wealthy and unscrupulous. Peculiarities like your spark or Bronwyn’s great strength sold to the highest bidder!”
“That’s disgusting,” I said.
“Most peculiars agree with you,” said Millard, “which is why such research was outlawed many years ago.”
“As if the wights cared about our laws,” said Emma.
“But the whole idea seems crazy,” I said. “It couldn’t really work, could it?”
“I didn’t think so,” said Millard. “At least, not until yesterday. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Because of the hollow in the menagerie loop?”
“Right. Before yesterday I wasn’t even certain I believed in a ‘second soul.’ To my mind, there was only one compelling argument for its existence: that when a hollowgast consumes enough of us, it transforms into a different sort of creature—one that can travel through time loops.”
“It becomes a wight,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “But only if it consumes peculiars. It can eat as many normals as it likes and it will never turn into a wight. Therefore, we must have something normals lack.”
