Hollow City
Page 35
“And I don’t like being hunted by invisible corpse beasts,” said the clown, and he began to pry the older brother from the younger. The boys locked arms and moaned loudly, their tongues clicking and eyes rolling wildly in their heads. I was about to intervene when the brothers came apart and let out a doubled scream so loud and piercing I feared my head would break. The dishes on the table shattered, everyone ducked and clapped their hands over their ears, and I thought I could hear, from the frozen floors below, cracks spidering through the ice.
As the echo faded, Joel-and-Peter clutched each other on the floor, shaking.
“See what you did!” Melina shouted at the clown.
“Good God, that’s impressive!” the clown said.
With one hand Bronwyn picked the clown up by his neck.
“If you continue to harass us,” she said calmly, “I’ll put your head through the wall.”
“Sorry … about … that,” the clown wheezed through his closing windpipe. “Put … me … down?”
“Go on, Wyn,” said Olive. “He said he’s sorry.”
Reluctantly, Bronwyn set him down. The clown coughed and straightened his costume. “Looks like I misjudged you,” he said.
“You’ll make fine additions to our army.”
“I told you, we’re not joining your stupid army,” I said.
“What’s the point of fighting, anyway?” Emma said. “You don’t even know where the ymbrynes are.”
The folding man unfolded from his chair to tower above us.
“Point is,” he said, “if corrupted get rest of ymbrynes, they become unstoppable.”
“It seems like they’re pretty unstoppable already,” I said.
“If you think that’s unstoppable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said the clown. “And if you think that while your ymbryne is free they’ll ever stop hunting you, you’re stupider than you look.”
Horace stood up and cleared his throat. “You’ve just laid out the worst-case scenario,” he said. “Of late, I’ve heard a great many worst-case scenarios presented. But I haven’t heard a single argument laid for the best-case scenario.”
“Oh, this should be rich,” said the clown. “Go ahead, fancy boy, let’s hear it.”
Horace took a deep breath, working up his courage. “The wights wanted the ymbrynes, and now they have them—or most of them, anyway. Say, for the sake of argument, that’s all the wights need, and now they can follow through with their devilish plans. And they do: they become superwights, or demigods, or whatever it is they’re after. And then they have no more use for ymbrynes, and no more use for peculiar children, and no more use for time loops, so they go away to be demigods elsewhere and leave us alone. And then things not only go back to normal, they’re better than they were before, because no longer is anyone attempting to eat us or kidnap our ymbrynes. And then maybe, once in a great while, we could take a vacation abroad, like we used to, and see the world a bit, and put our toes in the sand somewhere that isn’t cold and gray three hundred days of the year. In which case, what’s the use in staying here and fighting? We’d be throwing ourselves onto their swords when everything might turn out just rosy without our intervention.”
For a moment no one said anything. Then the clown began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, his cackles bouncing off the walls, until finally he fell out of his chair.
Then Enoch said, “I simply have no words. Wait—no—I do! Horace, that is the most stunningly naive and cowardly bit of wishful thinking that I’ve ever heard.”
“But it is possible,” Horace insisted.
“Yes. It’s also possible that the moon is made of cheese. It’s just not bloody likely.”
“I can end argument right now,” said the folding man. “You want to know what wights will do with us once free to do anything? Come—I show you.”
“Strong stomachs only,” said the clown, glancing at Olive.
“If they can handle it, I can, too,” she said.
“Fair warning,” the clown shrugged. “Follow us.”
“I wouldn’t follow you off a sinking ship,” said Melina, who was just getting the shaking blind brothers to their feet again.
“Stay, then,” said the clown. “Anyone who’d rather not go down with the ship, follow us.”
* * *
The injured lay in mismatched beds in a makeshift hospital room, watched over by a nurse with a bulging glass eye. There were three patients, if you could call them that—a man and two women. The man lay on his side, half catatonic, whispering and drooling. One of the women stared blankly at the ceiling, while the other writhed under her sheets, moaning softly, in the grip of some nightmare. Some of the children watched from outside the door, keeping their distance in case whatever these people suffered from was contagious.
“How are they today?” the folding man asked the nurse.
“Getting worse,” she replied, buzzing from bed to bed. “I keep them sedated all the time now. Otherwise they just bawl.”
They had no obvious wounds. There were no bloody bandages, no limbs wrapped in casts, no bowls brimming with reddish liquid. The room looked more like overflow from a psychiatric ward than a hospital.
“What’s the matter with them?” I asked. “They were hurt in the raid?”
“No, brought here by Miss Wren,” answered the nurse. “She found them abandoned inside a hospital, which the wights had converted into some sort of medical laboratory. These pitiful creatures were used as guinea pigs in their unspeakable experiments. What you see is the result.”
“We found their old records,” the clown said. “They were kidnapped years ago by the wights. Long assumed dead.”
The nurse took a clipboard from the wall by the whispering man’s bed. “This fellow, Benteret, he’s supposed to be fluent in a hundred languages, but now he’ll only say one word—over and over again.”
I crept closer, watching his lips. Call, call, call, he was mouthing. Call, call, call.
Gibberish. His mind was gone.
“That one there,” the nurse said, pointing her clipboard at the moaning girl. “Her chart says she can fly, but I’ve never seen her so much as lift an inch out of that bed. As for the other one, she’s meant to be invisible. But she’s plain as day.”
“Were they tortured?” Emma asked.
“Obviously—they were tortured out of their minds!” said the clown. “Tortured until they forgot how to be peculiar!”
“You could torture me all day long,” said Millard. “I’d never forget how to be invisible.”
“Show them the scars,” said the clown to the nurse.
The nurse crossed to the motionless woman and pulled back her sheets. There were thin red scars across her stomach, along the side of her neck, and beneath her chin, each about the length of a cigarette.
“I’d hardly call this evidence of torture,” said Millard.
“Then what would you call it?” the nurse said angrily.
Ignoring her question, Millard said, “Are there more scars, or is this all she has?”
“Not by a long shot,” said the nurse, and she whisked the sheets off to expose the woman’s legs, pointing out scars on the back of the woman’s knee, her inner thigh, and the bottom of her foot.
Millard bent to examine the foot. “That’s odd placement, wouldn’t you say?”
“What are you getting at, Mill?” said Emma.
“Hush,” said Enoch. “Let him play Sherlock if he wants. I’m rather enjoying this.”
“Why don’t we cut him in ten places?” said the clown. “Then we’ll see if he thinks it’s torture!”
Millard crossed the room to the whispering man’s bed. “May I examine him?”
“I’m sure he won’t object,” said the nurse.
Millard lifted the man’s sheets from his legs. On the bottom of one of his bare feet was a scar identical to the motionless woman’s.
The nurse gestured toward the writhing woman. “She’s got one too, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“Enough of this,” said the folding man. “If that is not torture, then what?”
“Exploration,” said Millard. “These incisions are precise and surgical. Not meant to inflict pain—probably done under anesthetic, even. The wights were looking for something.”
“And what was that?” Emma asked, though she seemed to dread the answer.
“There’s an old saying about a peculiar’s foot,” said Millard.
“Do any of you remember it?”
Horace recited it. “A peculiar’s sole is the door to his soul,” he said. “It’s just something they tell kids, though, to get them to wear shoes when they play outside.”
“Maybe it is and maybe it’s not,” said Millard.
“Don’t be ridiculous! You think they were looking for—”
“Their souls. And they found them.”
The clown laughed out loud. “What a pile of baloney. Just because they lost their abilities, you think their second souls were removed?”
“Partly. We know the wights have been interested in the second soul for years now.”
Then I remembered the conversation Millard and I had had on the train, and I said, “But you told me yourself that the peculiar soul is what allows us to enter loops. So if these people don’t have their souls, how are they here?”
“Well, they’re not really here, are they?” said Millard. “By which I mean, their minds are certainly elsewhere.”
“Now you’re grasping at straws,” said Emma. “I think you’ve taken this far enough, Millard.”
“Bear with me for just a moment longer,” Millard said. He was pacing now, getting excited. “I don’t suppose you heard about the time a normal actually did enter a loop?”
“No, because everyone knows that’s impossible,” said Enoch.
“It nearly is,” said Millard. “It isn’t easy and it isn’t pretty, but it has been done—once. An illegal experiment conducted by Miss Peregrine’s own brother, I believe, in the years before he went mad and formed the splinter group that would become the wights.”
“Then why haven’t I ever heard about this?” said Enoch.
“Because it was extremely controversial and the results were immediately covered up, so no one would attempt to replicate them. In any event, it turns out that you can bring a normal into a loop, but they have to be forced through, and only someone with an ymbryne’s power can do it. But because normals do not have a second soul, they cannot handle a time loop’s inherent paradoxes, and their brains turn to mush. They become drooling, catatonic vegetables from the moment they enter. Not unlike these poor people before us.”
There was a moment of quiet while Millard’s words registered. Then Emma’s hands went to her mouth and she said quietly, “Oh, hell. He’s right.”
“Well, then,” said the clown. “In that case, things are even worse than we thought.”
I felt the air go out of the room.
“I’m not sure I follow,” said Horace.
“He said the monsters stole their souls!” Olive shouted, and then she ran crying to Bronwyn and buried her face in her coat.
“These peculiars didn’t lose their abilities,” said Millard. “They were stolen from them—extracted, along with their souls, which were then fed to hollowgast. This allowed the hollows to evolve sufficiently to enter loops, a development which enabled their recent assault on peculiardom—and netted the wights even more kidnapped peculiars whose souls they could extract, with which they evolved still more hollows, and so on, in a vicious cycle.”
“Then it isn’t just the ymbrynes they want,” said Emma. “It’s us, too—and our souls.”
Hugh stood at the foot of the whispering man’s bed, his last bee buzzing angrily around him. “All the peculiar children they kidnapped over the years … this is what they were doing to them? I figured they just became hollowgast food. But this … this is leagues more evil.”
“Who’s to say they don’t mean to extract the ymbrynes’ souls, too?” said Enoch.
That sent a special chill through us. The clown turned to Horace and said, “How’s your best-case scenario looking now, fella?”
“Don’t tease me,” Horace replied. “I bite.”
“Everyone out!” ordered the nurse. “Souls or no souls, these people are ill. This is no place to bicker.”
We filed sullenly into the hall.
“All right, you’ve given us the horror show,” Emma said to the clown and the folding man, “and we are duly horrified. Now tell us what you want.”
“Simple,” said the folding man. “We want you to stay and fight with us.”
“We just figured we’d show you how much it’s in your own best interest to do so,” said the clown. He clapped Millard on the back. “But your friend here did a better job of that than we ever could’ve.”
“Stay here and fight for what?” Enoch said. “The ymbrynes aren’t even in London—Miss Wren said as much.”
“Forget London! London’s finished!” the clown said. “The battle’s over here. We lost. As soon as Wren has saved every last peculiar she can from these ruined loops, we’ll posse up and travel—to other lands, other loops. There must be more survivors out there, peculiars like us, with the fight still burning in them.”
As the echo faded, Joel-and-Peter clutched each other on the floor, shaking.
“See what you did!” Melina shouted at the clown.
“Good God, that’s impressive!” the clown said.
With one hand Bronwyn picked the clown up by his neck.
“If you continue to harass us,” she said calmly, “I’ll put your head through the wall.”
“Sorry … about … that,” the clown wheezed through his closing windpipe. “Put … me … down?”
“Go on, Wyn,” said Olive. “He said he’s sorry.”
Reluctantly, Bronwyn set him down. The clown coughed and straightened his costume. “Looks like I misjudged you,” he said.
“You’ll make fine additions to our army.”
“I told you, we’re not joining your stupid army,” I said.
“What’s the point of fighting, anyway?” Emma said. “You don’t even know where the ymbrynes are.”
The folding man unfolded from his chair to tower above us.
“Point is,” he said, “if corrupted get rest of ymbrynes, they become unstoppable.”
“It seems like they’re pretty unstoppable already,” I said.
“If you think that’s unstoppable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said the clown. “And if you think that while your ymbryne is free they’ll ever stop hunting you, you’re stupider than you look.”
Horace stood up and cleared his throat. “You’ve just laid out the worst-case scenario,” he said. “Of late, I’ve heard a great many worst-case scenarios presented. But I haven’t heard a single argument laid for the best-case scenario.”
“Oh, this should be rich,” said the clown. “Go ahead, fancy boy, let’s hear it.”
Horace took a deep breath, working up his courage. “The wights wanted the ymbrynes, and now they have them—or most of them, anyway. Say, for the sake of argument, that’s all the wights need, and now they can follow through with their devilish plans. And they do: they become superwights, or demigods, or whatever it is they’re after. And then they have no more use for ymbrynes, and no more use for peculiar children, and no more use for time loops, so they go away to be demigods elsewhere and leave us alone. And then things not only go back to normal, they’re better than they were before, because no longer is anyone attempting to eat us or kidnap our ymbrynes. And then maybe, once in a great while, we could take a vacation abroad, like we used to, and see the world a bit, and put our toes in the sand somewhere that isn’t cold and gray three hundred days of the year. In which case, what’s the use in staying here and fighting? We’d be throwing ourselves onto their swords when everything might turn out just rosy without our intervention.”
For a moment no one said anything. Then the clown began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, his cackles bouncing off the walls, until finally he fell out of his chair.
Then Enoch said, “I simply have no words. Wait—no—I do! Horace, that is the most stunningly naive and cowardly bit of wishful thinking that I’ve ever heard.”
“But it is possible,” Horace insisted.
“Yes. It’s also possible that the moon is made of cheese. It’s just not bloody likely.”
“I can end argument right now,” said the folding man. “You want to know what wights will do with us once free to do anything? Come—I show you.”
“Strong stomachs only,” said the clown, glancing at Olive.
“If they can handle it, I can, too,” she said.
“Fair warning,” the clown shrugged. “Follow us.”
“I wouldn’t follow you off a sinking ship,” said Melina, who was just getting the shaking blind brothers to their feet again.
“Stay, then,” said the clown. “Anyone who’d rather not go down with the ship, follow us.”
* * *
The injured lay in mismatched beds in a makeshift hospital room, watched over by a nurse with a bulging glass eye. There were three patients, if you could call them that—a man and two women. The man lay on his side, half catatonic, whispering and drooling. One of the women stared blankly at the ceiling, while the other writhed under her sheets, moaning softly, in the grip of some nightmare. Some of the children watched from outside the door, keeping their distance in case whatever these people suffered from was contagious.
“How are they today?” the folding man asked the nurse.
“Getting worse,” she replied, buzzing from bed to bed. “I keep them sedated all the time now. Otherwise they just bawl.”
They had no obvious wounds. There were no bloody bandages, no limbs wrapped in casts, no bowls brimming with reddish liquid. The room looked more like overflow from a psychiatric ward than a hospital.
“What’s the matter with them?” I asked. “They were hurt in the raid?”
“No, brought here by Miss Wren,” answered the nurse. “She found them abandoned inside a hospital, which the wights had converted into some sort of medical laboratory. These pitiful creatures were used as guinea pigs in their unspeakable experiments. What you see is the result.”
“We found their old records,” the clown said. “They were kidnapped years ago by the wights. Long assumed dead.”
The nurse took a clipboard from the wall by the whispering man’s bed. “This fellow, Benteret, he’s supposed to be fluent in a hundred languages, but now he’ll only say one word—over and over again.”
I crept closer, watching his lips. Call, call, call, he was mouthing. Call, call, call.
Gibberish. His mind was gone.
“That one there,” the nurse said, pointing her clipboard at the moaning girl. “Her chart says she can fly, but I’ve never seen her so much as lift an inch out of that bed. As for the other one, she’s meant to be invisible. But she’s plain as day.”
“Were they tortured?” Emma asked.
“Obviously—they were tortured out of their minds!” said the clown. “Tortured until they forgot how to be peculiar!”
“You could torture me all day long,” said Millard. “I’d never forget how to be invisible.”
“Show them the scars,” said the clown to the nurse.
The nurse crossed to the motionless woman and pulled back her sheets. There were thin red scars across her stomach, along the side of her neck, and beneath her chin, each about the length of a cigarette.
“I’d hardly call this evidence of torture,” said Millard.
“Then what would you call it?” the nurse said angrily.
Ignoring her question, Millard said, “Are there more scars, or is this all she has?”
“Not by a long shot,” said the nurse, and she whisked the sheets off to expose the woman’s legs, pointing out scars on the back of the woman’s knee, her inner thigh, and the bottom of her foot.
Millard bent to examine the foot. “That’s odd placement, wouldn’t you say?”
“What are you getting at, Mill?” said Emma.
“Hush,” said Enoch. “Let him play Sherlock if he wants. I’m rather enjoying this.”
“Why don’t we cut him in ten places?” said the clown. “Then we’ll see if he thinks it’s torture!”
Millard crossed the room to the whispering man’s bed. “May I examine him?”
“I’m sure he won’t object,” said the nurse.
Millard lifted the man’s sheets from his legs. On the bottom of one of his bare feet was a scar identical to the motionless woman’s.
The nurse gestured toward the writhing woman. “She’s got one too, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“Enough of this,” said the folding man. “If that is not torture, then what?”
“Exploration,” said Millard. “These incisions are precise and surgical. Not meant to inflict pain—probably done under anesthetic, even. The wights were looking for something.”
“And what was that?” Emma asked, though she seemed to dread the answer.
“There’s an old saying about a peculiar’s foot,” said Millard.
“Do any of you remember it?”
Horace recited it. “A peculiar’s sole is the door to his soul,” he said. “It’s just something they tell kids, though, to get them to wear shoes when they play outside.”
“Maybe it is and maybe it’s not,” said Millard.
“Don’t be ridiculous! You think they were looking for—”
“Their souls. And they found them.”
The clown laughed out loud. “What a pile of baloney. Just because they lost their abilities, you think their second souls were removed?”
“Partly. We know the wights have been interested in the second soul for years now.”
Then I remembered the conversation Millard and I had had on the train, and I said, “But you told me yourself that the peculiar soul is what allows us to enter loops. So if these people don’t have their souls, how are they here?”
“Well, they’re not really here, are they?” said Millard. “By which I mean, their minds are certainly elsewhere.”
“Now you’re grasping at straws,” said Emma. “I think you’ve taken this far enough, Millard.”
“Bear with me for just a moment longer,” Millard said. He was pacing now, getting excited. “I don’t suppose you heard about the time a normal actually did enter a loop?”
“No, because everyone knows that’s impossible,” said Enoch.
“It nearly is,” said Millard. “It isn’t easy and it isn’t pretty, but it has been done—once. An illegal experiment conducted by Miss Peregrine’s own brother, I believe, in the years before he went mad and formed the splinter group that would become the wights.”
“Then why haven’t I ever heard about this?” said Enoch.
“Because it was extremely controversial and the results were immediately covered up, so no one would attempt to replicate them. In any event, it turns out that you can bring a normal into a loop, but they have to be forced through, and only someone with an ymbryne’s power can do it. But because normals do not have a second soul, they cannot handle a time loop’s inherent paradoxes, and their brains turn to mush. They become drooling, catatonic vegetables from the moment they enter. Not unlike these poor people before us.”
There was a moment of quiet while Millard’s words registered. Then Emma’s hands went to her mouth and she said quietly, “Oh, hell. He’s right.”
“Well, then,” said the clown. “In that case, things are even worse than we thought.”
I felt the air go out of the room.
“I’m not sure I follow,” said Horace.
“He said the monsters stole their souls!” Olive shouted, and then she ran crying to Bronwyn and buried her face in her coat.
“These peculiars didn’t lose their abilities,” said Millard. “They were stolen from them—extracted, along with their souls, which were then fed to hollowgast. This allowed the hollows to evolve sufficiently to enter loops, a development which enabled their recent assault on peculiardom—and netted the wights even more kidnapped peculiars whose souls they could extract, with which they evolved still more hollows, and so on, in a vicious cycle.”
“Then it isn’t just the ymbrynes they want,” said Emma. “It’s us, too—and our souls.”
Hugh stood at the foot of the whispering man’s bed, his last bee buzzing angrily around him. “All the peculiar children they kidnapped over the years … this is what they were doing to them? I figured they just became hollowgast food. But this … this is leagues more evil.”
“Who’s to say they don’t mean to extract the ymbrynes’ souls, too?” said Enoch.
That sent a special chill through us. The clown turned to Horace and said, “How’s your best-case scenario looking now, fella?”
“Don’t tease me,” Horace replied. “I bite.”
“Everyone out!” ordered the nurse. “Souls or no souls, these people are ill. This is no place to bicker.”
We filed sullenly into the hall.
“All right, you’ve given us the horror show,” Emma said to the clown and the folding man, “and we are duly horrified. Now tell us what you want.”
“Simple,” said the folding man. “We want you to stay and fight with us.”
“We just figured we’d show you how much it’s in your own best interest to do so,” said the clown. He clapped Millard on the back. “But your friend here did a better job of that than we ever could’ve.”
“Stay here and fight for what?” Enoch said. “The ymbrynes aren’t even in London—Miss Wren said as much.”
“Forget London! London’s finished!” the clown said. “The battle’s over here. We lost. As soon as Wren has saved every last peculiar she can from these ruined loops, we’ll posse up and travel—to other lands, other loops. There must be more survivors out there, peculiars like us, with the fight still burning in them.”
