Hollow City
Page 27
The elder echolocator said, “It’s just twenty paces ahead there, you—”
“Can’t miss it,” said the younger.
So we plodded ahead, waving our hands in front of us. I kicked something with my foot and stumbled. My left shoulder scraped the wall.
“Keep it straight!” Emma said, pulling me to the right.
My stomach lurched. I could feel it: the hollows had made it down the well shaft. Now, even if they couldn’t sense us, there was a fifty-fifty chance they’d choose the right spur of the tunnel and find us anyway.
The time for sneaking around was over. We had to run.
“Screw it,” I said. “Emma, give me a light!”
“Gladly!” She let my hand go and made a flame so large I felt the hair on the right side of my head singe.
I saw the transition point right away. It was just ahead of us, marked by a vertical line painted on the tunnel wall. We took off running for it in a mob.
The moment we passed it, I felt a pressure in my ears. We were back in 1940.
We bolted through the catacombs, Emma’s fire casting manic shadows across the walls, the blind boys clicking loudly with their tongues and shouting out “Left!” or “Right!” when we came to splits in the tunnel.
We passed the stack of coffins, the landslide of bones. Finally we returned to the dead end and the ladder to the crypt. I shoved Horace up ahead of me, then Enoch, and then Olive took off her shoes and floated up.
“We’re taking too long!” I shouted.
Down the passage I could feel them coming. Could hear their tongues pounding the stone floor, propelling them forward. Could picture their jaws beginning to drip black goo in anticipation of a kill.
Then I saw them. A blur of dark motion in the distance.
I screamed, “Go!” and leapt onto the ladder, the last one to climb it. When I was near the top, Bronwyn reached down her arm and yanked me up the last few rungs, and then I was in the crypt with everyone else.
Groaning loudly, Bronwyn picked up the stone slab that topped Christopher Wren’s tomb and dropped it back in place. Not two seconds later, something slammed violently against the underside of it, making the heavy slab leap. It wouldn’t hold the hollows for long—not two of them.
They were so close. Alarms blared inside me, my stomach aching like I’d drunk acid. We dashed up the spiral staircase and into the nave. The cathedral was dark now, the only illumination a weird orange glow eking through the stained-glass windows. I thought for a moment it was the last strains of sunset, but then, as we dashed toward the exit, I caught a glimpse of the sky through the broken roof.
Night had fallen. The bombs were falling still, thudding like an irregular heartbeat.
We ran outside.
10
From where we stood, arrested in awe on the cathedral steps, it looked as if the whole city had caught fire. The sky was a panorama of orange flame bright enough to read by. The square where we’d chased pigeons was a smoking hole in the cobblestones. The sirens droned on, a soprano counterpoint to the bombs’ relentless bass, their pitch so eerily human it sounded like every soul in London had taken to their rooftops to cry out collective despair. Then awe gave way to fear and the urgency of self-preservation, and we rushed down the debris-strewn steps into the street—past the ruined square, around a double-decker bus that looked like it had been crushed in the fist of an angry giant—running I knew not where, nor cared, so long as it was away from the Feeling that grew stronger and sicker inside me with each passing moment.
I looked back at the telekinetic girl, pulling the blind brothers along by their hands while they clicked with their tongues. I thought of telling her to let the pigeon go so we could follow it—but what use would it be to find Miss Wren now, while hollows were chasing us? We’d reach her only to be slaughtered at her doorstep, and we’d put her life in danger, too. No, we had to lose the hollows first. Or better yet, kill them.
A man in a metal hat stuck his head out of a doorway and shouted, “You are advised to take cover!” then ducked back inside.
Sure, I thought, but where? Maybe we could hide in the debris and the chaos around us, and with so much noise and distraction everywhere, the hollows would pass us by. But we were still too close to them, our trail too fresh. I warned my friends not to use their abilities, no matter what, and Emma and I led them zigzagging through the streets, hoping this would make us harder to track.
Still, I could feel them coming. They were out in the open now, out of the cathedral, lurching after us, invisible to all but me. I wondered if even I would be able to see them here, in the dark: shadow creatures in a shadow city.
We ran until my lungs burned. Until Olive couldn’t keep up anymore and Bronwyn had to scoop her into her arms. Down long blocks of blacked-out windows staring like lidless eyes. Past a bombed library snowing ash and burning papers. Through a bombed cemetery, long-forgotten Londoners unearthed and flung into trees, grinning in rotted formal wear. A curlicued swing set in a cratered playground. The horrors piled up, incomprehensible, the bombers now and then dropping flares to light it all with the pure, shining white of a thousand camera flashes. As if to say: Look. Look what we made.
Nightmares come to life, all of it. Like the hollows themselves.
Don’t look don’t look don’t look …
I envied the blind brothers, navigating a mercifully detail-free topography; the world in wireframe. I wondered, briefly, what their dreams looked like—or if they dreamt at all.
Emma jogged alongside me, her wavy, powder-coated hair flowing behind her. “Everyone’s knackered,” she said. “We can’t keep going like this!”
She was right. Even the fittest of us were flagging now, and soon the hollows would catch up to us and we’d have to face them in the middle of the street. And that would be a bloodbath. We had to find cover.
I steered us toward a row of houses. Because bomber pilots were more likely to target a cheerfully lit house than another smudge in the dark, every house was blacked out—every porch light dark, every window opaque. An empty house would be safest for us, but blacked out like this, there was no way to tell which houses were occupied and which weren’t. We’d have to pick one at random.
I stopped us in the road.
“What are you doing?” Emma said, puffing to catch her breath.
“Are you mad?”
“Maybe,” I said, and then I grabbed Horace, swept my hand toward the row of houses, and said, “Choose.”
“What?” he said. “Why me?”
“Because I trust your random guesses more than my own.”
“But I never dreamed about this!” he protested.
“Maybe you did and don’t remember,” I said. “Choose.”
Realizing there was no way out of it, he swallowed hard, closed his eyes for a second, then turned and pointed to a house behind us. “That one.”
“Why that one?” I asked.
“Because you made me choose!” Horace said angrily.
That would have to do.
* * *
The front door was locked. No problem: Bronwyn wrenched off the knob and tossed it into the street, and the door creaked open on its own. We filed into a dark hallway lined with family photos, the faces impossible to make out. Bronwyn closed the door and blocked it with a table she found in the hall.
“Who’s there?” came a voice from further inside the house.
Damn. We weren’t alone. “You were supposed to pick an empty house,” I said to Horace.
“I’m going to hit you very hard,” Horace muttered.
There was no time to switch houses. We’d have to introduce ourselves to whoever was here and hope they were friendly.
“Who is there!” the voice demanded.
“We aren’t thieves or Germans or anything like that!” Emma said. “Just here to take cover!”
No response.
“Stay here,” Emma told the others, and then she pulled me after her down the hall. “We’re coming to say hello!” she called out, loud and friendly. “Don’t shoot us, please!”
We walked to the end of the hall and rounded a corner, and there, standing in a doorway, was a girl. She held a wicked-down lantern in one hand and a letter opener in the other, and her hard, black eyes flicked nervously between Emma and me. “There’s nothing of value here!” she said. “This house has been looted already.”
“I told you, we’re not thieves!” Emma said, offended.
“And I told you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll scream and … and my father will come running with his … guns and things!”
The girl looked at once childish and prematurely adult. She had her hair in a short bob and wore a little girl’s dress with big white buttons trailing down the front, but something in her stony expression made her seem older, world-weary at twelve or thirteen.
“Please don’t scream,” I said, thinking not about her probably fictitious father but about what other things might come running.
Then a small voice piped up behind her, through the doorway she’d been conspicuously blocking. “Who’s there, Sam?”
The girl’s face pinched in frustration. “Only some children,” she said. “I asked you to keep quiet, Esme.”
“Are they nice? I want to meet them!”
“They were just leaving.”
“There are lots of us and two of you,” Emma said matter-of-factly. “We’re staying here for a bit, and that’s that. You’re not going to scream, either, and we’re not going to steal anything.”
The girl’s eyes flashed with anger, then dulled. She knew she’d lost. “All right,” she said, “but try anything and I’ll scream and bury this in your belly.” She brandished the letter opener weakly, then lowered it to her waist.
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Sam?” said the little voice. “What’s happening now?”
The girl—Sam—stepped reluctantly aside, revealing a bathroom that danced with the flickering light of candles. There was a sink and a toilet and a bathtub, and in the bathtub a little girl of perhaps five. She peeped curiously at us over the rim. “This is my sister, Esme,” Sam said.
“Hullo!” said Esme, waggling a rubber duck at us. “Bombs can’t get you when you’re in the bath, did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” Emma replied.
“It’s her safe place,” Sam whispered. “We spend every raid in here.”
“Wouldn’t you be safer in a shelter?” I said.
“Those are awful places,” Sam said.
The others had tired of waiting and began coming down the hall. Bronwyn leaned through the doorway and waved hello.
“Come in!” Esme said, delighted.
“You’re too trusting,” Sam scolded her. “One day you’re going to meet a bad person and then you’ll be sorry.”
“They aren’t bad,” said Esme.
“You can’t tell just by looking.”
Then Hugh and Horace pressed their faces through the doorway, curious to see whom we’d met, and Olive scooted between their legs and sat in the middle of the floor, and pretty soon all of us were squeezed into the bathroom together, even Melina and the blind brothers, who stood creepily facing the corner. Seeing so many people, Sam’s legs shook and she sat down heavily on the toilet, overwhelmed—but her sister was thrilled, asking everyone’s name as they came in.
“Where are your parents?” Bronwyn asked.
“Father’s shooting bad people in the war,” Esme said proudly. She mimed holding a rifle and shouted, “Bang!”
Emma looked at Sam. “You said your father was upstairs,” she said flatly.
“You broke into our house,” Sam replied.
“True.”
“And your mother?” said Bronwyn. “Where is she?”
“A long time dead,” Sam said with no apparent feeling. “So when Father went to war they tried shipping us off to family elsewhere—and because Father’s sister in Devon is terribly mean and would only take one of us, they tried shipping Esme and me off to different places. But we jumped off the train and came back.”
“We won’t be split up,” Esme declared. “We’re sisters.”
“And you’re afraid if you go to a shelter they’ll find you?” Emma said. “Send you away?”
Sam nodded. “I won’t let that happen.”
“It’s safe in the tub,” said Esme. “Maybe you should get in, too. That way we’d all be safe.”
Bronwyn touched her hand to her heart. “Thank you, love, but we’d never fit!”
While the others talked, I turned my focus inward, trying to sense the hollows. They weren’t running anymore. The Feeling had stabilized, which meant they weren’t getting closer or farther away, but were probably sniffing around nearby. I took this as a good sign; if they knew where we were, they’d be coming straight for us. Our trail had gone cold. All we had to do was keep our heads down for a while, and then we could follow the pigeon to Miss Wren.
We huddled on the bathroom floor listening to bombs fall in other parts of the city. Emma found some rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet and insisted on cleaning and bandaging the cut on my head. Then Sam began to hum some tune I knew but couldn’t quite name, and Esme played with her duck in the tub, and ever so slowly, the Feeling began to diminish. For a scant few minutes, that twinkling bathroom became a world unto itself; a cocoon far away from trouble and war.
“Can’t miss it,” said the younger.
So we plodded ahead, waving our hands in front of us. I kicked something with my foot and stumbled. My left shoulder scraped the wall.
“Keep it straight!” Emma said, pulling me to the right.
My stomach lurched. I could feel it: the hollows had made it down the well shaft. Now, even if they couldn’t sense us, there was a fifty-fifty chance they’d choose the right spur of the tunnel and find us anyway.
The time for sneaking around was over. We had to run.
“Screw it,” I said. “Emma, give me a light!”
“Gladly!” She let my hand go and made a flame so large I felt the hair on the right side of my head singe.
I saw the transition point right away. It was just ahead of us, marked by a vertical line painted on the tunnel wall. We took off running for it in a mob.
The moment we passed it, I felt a pressure in my ears. We were back in 1940.
We bolted through the catacombs, Emma’s fire casting manic shadows across the walls, the blind boys clicking loudly with their tongues and shouting out “Left!” or “Right!” when we came to splits in the tunnel.
We passed the stack of coffins, the landslide of bones. Finally we returned to the dead end and the ladder to the crypt. I shoved Horace up ahead of me, then Enoch, and then Olive took off her shoes and floated up.
“We’re taking too long!” I shouted.
Down the passage I could feel them coming. Could hear their tongues pounding the stone floor, propelling them forward. Could picture their jaws beginning to drip black goo in anticipation of a kill.
Then I saw them. A blur of dark motion in the distance.
I screamed, “Go!” and leapt onto the ladder, the last one to climb it. When I was near the top, Bronwyn reached down her arm and yanked me up the last few rungs, and then I was in the crypt with everyone else.
Groaning loudly, Bronwyn picked up the stone slab that topped Christopher Wren’s tomb and dropped it back in place. Not two seconds later, something slammed violently against the underside of it, making the heavy slab leap. It wouldn’t hold the hollows for long—not two of them.
They were so close. Alarms blared inside me, my stomach aching like I’d drunk acid. We dashed up the spiral staircase and into the nave. The cathedral was dark now, the only illumination a weird orange glow eking through the stained-glass windows. I thought for a moment it was the last strains of sunset, but then, as we dashed toward the exit, I caught a glimpse of the sky through the broken roof.
Night had fallen. The bombs were falling still, thudding like an irregular heartbeat.
We ran outside.
10
From where we stood, arrested in awe on the cathedral steps, it looked as if the whole city had caught fire. The sky was a panorama of orange flame bright enough to read by. The square where we’d chased pigeons was a smoking hole in the cobblestones. The sirens droned on, a soprano counterpoint to the bombs’ relentless bass, their pitch so eerily human it sounded like every soul in London had taken to their rooftops to cry out collective despair. Then awe gave way to fear and the urgency of self-preservation, and we rushed down the debris-strewn steps into the street—past the ruined square, around a double-decker bus that looked like it had been crushed in the fist of an angry giant—running I knew not where, nor cared, so long as it was away from the Feeling that grew stronger and sicker inside me with each passing moment.
I looked back at the telekinetic girl, pulling the blind brothers along by their hands while they clicked with their tongues. I thought of telling her to let the pigeon go so we could follow it—but what use would it be to find Miss Wren now, while hollows were chasing us? We’d reach her only to be slaughtered at her doorstep, and we’d put her life in danger, too. No, we had to lose the hollows first. Or better yet, kill them.
A man in a metal hat stuck his head out of a doorway and shouted, “You are advised to take cover!” then ducked back inside.
Sure, I thought, but where? Maybe we could hide in the debris and the chaos around us, and with so much noise and distraction everywhere, the hollows would pass us by. But we were still too close to them, our trail too fresh. I warned my friends not to use their abilities, no matter what, and Emma and I led them zigzagging through the streets, hoping this would make us harder to track.
Still, I could feel them coming. They were out in the open now, out of the cathedral, lurching after us, invisible to all but me. I wondered if even I would be able to see them here, in the dark: shadow creatures in a shadow city.
We ran until my lungs burned. Until Olive couldn’t keep up anymore and Bronwyn had to scoop her into her arms. Down long blocks of blacked-out windows staring like lidless eyes. Past a bombed library snowing ash and burning papers. Through a bombed cemetery, long-forgotten Londoners unearthed and flung into trees, grinning in rotted formal wear. A curlicued swing set in a cratered playground. The horrors piled up, incomprehensible, the bombers now and then dropping flares to light it all with the pure, shining white of a thousand camera flashes. As if to say: Look. Look what we made.
Nightmares come to life, all of it. Like the hollows themselves.
Don’t look don’t look don’t look …
I envied the blind brothers, navigating a mercifully detail-free topography; the world in wireframe. I wondered, briefly, what their dreams looked like—or if they dreamt at all.
Emma jogged alongside me, her wavy, powder-coated hair flowing behind her. “Everyone’s knackered,” she said. “We can’t keep going like this!”
She was right. Even the fittest of us were flagging now, and soon the hollows would catch up to us and we’d have to face them in the middle of the street. And that would be a bloodbath. We had to find cover.
I steered us toward a row of houses. Because bomber pilots were more likely to target a cheerfully lit house than another smudge in the dark, every house was blacked out—every porch light dark, every window opaque. An empty house would be safest for us, but blacked out like this, there was no way to tell which houses were occupied and which weren’t. We’d have to pick one at random.
I stopped us in the road.
“What are you doing?” Emma said, puffing to catch her breath.
“Are you mad?”
“Maybe,” I said, and then I grabbed Horace, swept my hand toward the row of houses, and said, “Choose.”
“What?” he said. “Why me?”
“Because I trust your random guesses more than my own.”
“But I never dreamed about this!” he protested.
“Maybe you did and don’t remember,” I said. “Choose.”
Realizing there was no way out of it, he swallowed hard, closed his eyes for a second, then turned and pointed to a house behind us. “That one.”
“Why that one?” I asked.
“Because you made me choose!” Horace said angrily.
That would have to do.
* * *
The front door was locked. No problem: Bronwyn wrenched off the knob and tossed it into the street, and the door creaked open on its own. We filed into a dark hallway lined with family photos, the faces impossible to make out. Bronwyn closed the door and blocked it with a table she found in the hall.
“Who’s there?” came a voice from further inside the house.
Damn. We weren’t alone. “You were supposed to pick an empty house,” I said to Horace.
“I’m going to hit you very hard,” Horace muttered.
There was no time to switch houses. We’d have to introduce ourselves to whoever was here and hope they were friendly.
“Who is there!” the voice demanded.
“We aren’t thieves or Germans or anything like that!” Emma said. “Just here to take cover!”
No response.
“Stay here,” Emma told the others, and then she pulled me after her down the hall. “We’re coming to say hello!” she called out, loud and friendly. “Don’t shoot us, please!”
We walked to the end of the hall and rounded a corner, and there, standing in a doorway, was a girl. She held a wicked-down lantern in one hand and a letter opener in the other, and her hard, black eyes flicked nervously between Emma and me. “There’s nothing of value here!” she said. “This house has been looted already.”
“I told you, we’re not thieves!” Emma said, offended.
“And I told you to leave. If you don’t, I’ll scream and … and my father will come running with his … guns and things!”
The girl looked at once childish and prematurely adult. She had her hair in a short bob and wore a little girl’s dress with big white buttons trailing down the front, but something in her stony expression made her seem older, world-weary at twelve or thirteen.
“Please don’t scream,” I said, thinking not about her probably fictitious father but about what other things might come running.
Then a small voice piped up behind her, through the doorway she’d been conspicuously blocking. “Who’s there, Sam?”
The girl’s face pinched in frustration. “Only some children,” she said. “I asked you to keep quiet, Esme.”
“Are they nice? I want to meet them!”
“They were just leaving.”
“There are lots of us and two of you,” Emma said matter-of-factly. “We’re staying here for a bit, and that’s that. You’re not going to scream, either, and we’re not going to steal anything.”
The girl’s eyes flashed with anger, then dulled. She knew she’d lost. “All right,” she said, “but try anything and I’ll scream and bury this in your belly.” She brandished the letter opener weakly, then lowered it to her waist.
“Fair enough,” I said.
“Sam?” said the little voice. “What’s happening now?”
The girl—Sam—stepped reluctantly aside, revealing a bathroom that danced with the flickering light of candles. There was a sink and a toilet and a bathtub, and in the bathtub a little girl of perhaps five. She peeped curiously at us over the rim. “This is my sister, Esme,” Sam said.
“Hullo!” said Esme, waggling a rubber duck at us. “Bombs can’t get you when you’re in the bath, did you know that?”
“I didn’t,” Emma replied.
“It’s her safe place,” Sam whispered. “We spend every raid in here.”
“Wouldn’t you be safer in a shelter?” I said.
“Those are awful places,” Sam said.
The others had tired of waiting and began coming down the hall. Bronwyn leaned through the doorway and waved hello.
“Come in!” Esme said, delighted.
“You’re too trusting,” Sam scolded her. “One day you’re going to meet a bad person and then you’ll be sorry.”
“They aren’t bad,” said Esme.
“You can’t tell just by looking.”
Then Hugh and Horace pressed their faces through the doorway, curious to see whom we’d met, and Olive scooted between their legs and sat in the middle of the floor, and pretty soon all of us were squeezed into the bathroom together, even Melina and the blind brothers, who stood creepily facing the corner. Seeing so many people, Sam’s legs shook and she sat down heavily on the toilet, overwhelmed—but her sister was thrilled, asking everyone’s name as they came in.
“Where are your parents?” Bronwyn asked.
“Father’s shooting bad people in the war,” Esme said proudly. She mimed holding a rifle and shouted, “Bang!”
Emma looked at Sam. “You said your father was upstairs,” she said flatly.
“You broke into our house,” Sam replied.
“True.”
“And your mother?” said Bronwyn. “Where is she?”
“A long time dead,” Sam said with no apparent feeling. “So when Father went to war they tried shipping us off to family elsewhere—and because Father’s sister in Devon is terribly mean and would only take one of us, they tried shipping Esme and me off to different places. But we jumped off the train and came back.”
“We won’t be split up,” Esme declared. “We’re sisters.”
“And you’re afraid if you go to a shelter they’ll find you?” Emma said. “Send you away?”
Sam nodded. “I won’t let that happen.”
“It’s safe in the tub,” said Esme. “Maybe you should get in, too. That way we’d all be safe.”
Bronwyn touched her hand to her heart. “Thank you, love, but we’d never fit!”
While the others talked, I turned my focus inward, trying to sense the hollows. They weren’t running anymore. The Feeling had stabilized, which meant they weren’t getting closer or farther away, but were probably sniffing around nearby. I took this as a good sign; if they knew where we were, they’d be coming straight for us. Our trail had gone cold. All we had to do was keep our heads down for a while, and then we could follow the pigeon to Miss Wren.
We huddled on the bathroom floor listening to bombs fall in other parts of the city. Emma found some rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet and insisted on cleaning and bandaging the cut on my head. Then Sam began to hum some tune I knew but couldn’t quite name, and Esme played with her duck in the tub, and ever so slowly, the Feeling began to diminish. For a scant few minutes, that twinkling bathroom became a world unto itself; a cocoon far away from trouble and war.
