Hollow City

Page 8

“I don’t think so,” I said; the Feeling still fading in me.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” said Horace, backing away.
But we didn’t have a choice; it wanted to meet us. The growl came again, prickling the hairs on my arms, and a moment later a furry face appeared between two of the lower railroad ties. It snarled at us like a rabid dog, reels of saliva dripping from its fang-toothed mouth.
“What in the name of the Elderfolk is that?” muttered Emma.
“Capital idea, coming into this loop,” said Enoch. “Really working out well for us so far.”
The whatever-it-was crawled out from between the ties and into the sun, where it crouched on its haunches and leered at us with an unbalanced smile, as if imagining how our brains might taste. I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal; dressed in rags, it had the body of a man but carried itself like an ape, its hunched form like some long-lost ancestor of ours whose evolution had been arrested millions of years ago. Its eyes and teeth were a dull yellow, its skin pale and blotched with dark spots, its hair a long, matted nest.
“Someone make it die!” Horace said. “Or at least make it quit looking at me!”
Bronwyn set Claire down and assumed a fighting stance, while Emma held out her hands to make a flame—but she was too stunned, apparently, to summon more than a sputter of smoke. The man-thing tensed, snarled, and then took off like an Olympic sprinter—not toward us but around us, diving behind a pile of rocks and popping up again with a fang-bearing grin. It was toying with us, like a cat toys with its prey just before the kill.
It seemed about to make another run—at us this time—when a voice from behind commanded it to “Sit down and behave!” And the thing did, relaxing onto its hindquarters, tongue lolling from its mouth in a dopey grin.
We turned to see a dog trotting calmly in our direction. I looked past it to see who had spoken, but there was no one—and then the dog itself opened its mouth and said, “Don’t mind Grunt, he’s got no manners at all! That’s just his way of saying thank you. That hollowgast was most bothersome.”
The dog seemed to be talking to me, but I was too surprised to respond. Not only was it speaking in an almost-human voice—and a refined British one at that—but it held in its jowly mouth a pipe and on its face wore a pair of round, green-tinted glasses. “Oh dear, I hope you’re not too offended,” the dog continued, misinterpreting my silence. “Grunt means well, but you’ll have to excuse him. He was, quite literally, raised in a barn. I, on the other hand, was educated on a grand estate, the seventh pup of the seventh pup in an illustrious line of hunting dogs.” He bowed as well as a dog could, dipping his nose to the ground. “Addison MacHenry, at your humble service.”
“That’s a fancy name for a dog,” said Enoch, apparently unimpressed to meet a talking animal.
Addison peered over his glasses at Enoch and said, “And by what appellation, dare I ask, are you denominated?”
“Enoch O’Connor,” Enoch said proudly, sticking his chest out a little.
“That’s a fancy name for a grimy, pudge-faced boy,” Addison said, and then he stood up on his hind legs, rising nearly to Enoch’s height. “I am a dog, yes, but a peculiar one. Why, then, should I be saddled with a common dog’s name? My former master called me ‘Boxie’ and I despised it—an assault on my dignity!—so I bit him on the face and took his name. Addison: much more befitting an animal of my intellectual prowess, I think. That was just before Miss Wren discovered me and brought me here.”
Faces brightened at the mention of an ymbryne’s name, a pulse of hope firing through us.
“Miss Wren brought you?” said Olive. “But what about Cuthbert the giant?”
“Who?” Addison said, and then he shook his head. “Ah, right, the story. It’s just that, I’m afraid—a story, inspired long ago by that curious rock down below and Miss Wren’s peculiar menagerie.”
“Told you,” muttered Enoch.
“Where’s Miss Wren now?” Emma said. “We’ve got to speak to her!”
Addison looked up at the house atop the tower and said, “That’s her residence, but she isn’t home at the moment. She winged off some days ago to help her ymbryne sisters in London. There’s a war on, you see … I assume you’ve heard all about it? Which explains why you’re traveling in the degraded style of refugees?”
“Our loop was raided,” said Emma. “And then we lost our things at sea.”
“And nearly ourselves,” Millard added.
At the sound of Millard’s voice, the dog startled. “An invisible! What a rare surprise. And an American, too,” he said, nodding at me. “What a peculiar lot you are, even for peculiars.” He fell back onto all fours and turned toward the tower. “Come, I’ll introduce you to the others. They’ll be absolutely fascinated to meet you. And you must be famished from your journey, poor creatures. Nutrifying provender shall be forthcoming!”
“We need medicine, too,” said Bronwyn, kneeling to pick up Claire. “This little one is very ill!”
“We’ll do all we can for her,” the dog said. “We owe you that and more for solving our little hollowgast problem. Most bothersome, as I was saying.”
“Nutrifying what did he say?” said Olive.
“Sustenance, comestibles, rations!” the dog replied. “You’ll eat like royalty here.”
“But I don’t like dog food,” said Olive.
Addison laughed, the timbre surprisingly human. “Neither do I, miss.”
4
Addison walked on all fours with his snub nose in the air while the man-thing called Grunt scampered around us like a psychotic puppy. From behind tufts of grass and the shacks scattered here and there, I could see faces peeking out at us—furry, most of them, and of all different shapes and sizes. When we came to the middle of the plateau, Addison reared up on his hind legs and called out, “Don’t be afraid, fellows! Come and meet the children who dispatched our unwelcome visitor!”
One by one, a parade of bizarre animals ventured out into the open. Addison introduced them as they came. The first creature looked like the top half of a miniature giraffe sutured onto the bottom half of a donkey. It walked awkwardly on two hind legs—its only limbs. “This is Deirdre,” said Addison. “She’s an emu-raffe, which is a bit like a donkey and a giraffe put together, only with fewer legs and a peevish temper. She’s a terrible sore loser at cards,” he added in a whisper. “Never play an emu-raffe at cards. Say hello, Deirdre!”
“Goodbye!” Deirdre said, her big horse lips pulling back into a bucktoothed grin. “Terrible day! Very displeased to meet you!” Then she laughed—a braying, high-pitched whinny—and said, “Only teasing!”
“Deirdre thinks she’s quite funny,” Addison explained.
“If you’re like a donkey and a giraffe,” said Olive, “then why aren’t you called a donkey-raffe?”
Deirdre frowned and answered, “Because what kind of an awful name is that? Emu-raffe rolls off the tongue, don’t you think?” And then she stuck out her tongue—fat, pink, and three feet long—and pushed Olive’s tiara back on her head with its tip. Olive squealed and ran behind Bronwyn, giggling.
“Do all the animals here talk?” I asked.
“Just Deirdre and I,” Addison said, “and a good thing, too. The chickens won’t shut up as it is, and they can’t say a word!” Right on cue, a flock of clucking chickens bobbled toward us from a burned and blackened coop. “Ah!” said Addison. “Here come the girls now.”
“What happened to their coop?” Emma asked.
“Every time we repair it, they burn it down again,” he said. “Such a bother.” Addison turned and nodded in the other direction. “You might want to back away a bit. When they get excited …”
BANG!—a sound like a quarter-stick of dynamite going off made us all jump, and the coop’s last few undamaged boards splintered and flew into the air.
“… their eggs go off,” he finished.
When the smoke cleared, we saw the chickens still coming toward us, unhurt and seemingly unsurprised by the blast, a little cloud of feathers wafting around them like fat snowflakes.
Enoch’s jaw fell open. “Are you telling me these chickens lay exploding eggs?!” he said.
“Only when they get excited,” said Addison. “Most of their eggs are quite safe—and delicious! But it was the exploding ones that earned them their rather unkind name: Armageddon chickens.”
“Keep away from us!” Emma shouted as the chickens closed in. “You’ll blow us all up!”
Addison laughed. “They’re sweet and harmless, I assure you, and they don’t lay anywhere but inside their coop.” The chickens clucked happily around our feet. “You see?” the dog said. “They like you!”
“This is a madhouse!” said Horace.
Deirdre laughed. “No, doveling. It’s a menagerie.”
Then Addison introduced us to a few animals whose peculiarities were subtler, including an owl who watched us from a branch, silent and intense, and a cadre of mice who seemed to fade subtly in and out of view, as if they spent half their time on some other plane of reality. There was a goat, too, with very long horns and deep black eyes; an orphan from a herd of peculiar goats who once roamed the forest below.
When all the animals were assembled, Addison cried, “Three cheers for the hollow-killers!” Deirdre brayed and the goat stamped the ground and the owl hooted and the chickens clucked and Grunt grunted his appreciation. And while all this was going on, Bronwyn and Emma kept trading looks—Bronwyn glancing down at her coat, where Miss Peregrine was hiding, and then raising her eyebrows at Emma to ask, Now? and Emma shaking her head in reply: Not quite yet.
Bronwyn laid Claire in a patch of grass beneath a shade tree. She was sweating and shivering, fading in and out of consciousness.
“There’s a special elixir I’ve seen Miss Wren prepare for treating fever,” Addison said. “Foul-tasting but effective.”
“My mom used to make me chicken soup,” I offered.
The chickens squawked with alarm, and Addison shot me a nasty look. “He was joking!” he said. “Only joking, such an absurd joke, ha-ha! There’s no such thing as chicken soup!”
With the help of Grunt and his opposable thumbs, Addison and the emu-raffe went to prepare the elixir. In a little while they returned with a bowl of what looked like dirty dishwater. Once Claire had drunk every drop and fallen back asleep, the animals laid out a modest feast for us: baskets of fresh bread and stewed apples and hard-boiled eggs—of the nonexploding variety—all served straight into our hands, as they had no plates or silverware. I didn’t realize how hungry I’d been until I wolfed down three eggs and a loaf of bread in under five minutes.
When I was done I belched and wiped my mouth and looked up to see all the animals looking back, watching us eagerly, their faces so alive with intelligence that I went a little numb and had to fight an overwhelming sensation that I was dreaming.
Millard was eating next to me, and I turned to him and asked, “Before this, had you ever heard of peculiar animals?”
“Only in children’s stories,” he said through a mouthful of bread. “How strange, then, that it was one such story that led us to them.”
Only Olive seemed unfazed by it all, perhaps because she was still so young—or part of her was, anyway—and the distance between stories and real life did not yet seem so great. “Where are the other animals?” she asked Addison. “In Cuthbert’s tale there were stilt-legged grimbears and two-headed lynxes.”
And just like that, the animals’ jubilant mood wilted. Grunt hid his face in his big hands and Deirdre let out a neighing groan. “Don’t ask, don’t ask,” she said, hanging her long head. But it was too late.
“These children helped us,” Addison said. “They deserve to hear our sad story, if they wish.”
“If you don’t mind telling us,” said Emma.
“I love sad stories,” said Enoch. “Especially ones where princesses get eaten by dragons and everyone dies in the end.”
Addison cleared his throat. “In our case, it’s more that the dragon got eaten by the princess,” he said. “It’s been a rough few years for the likes of us, and it was a rough few centuries prior to that.” The dog paced back and forth, his voice taking on a preacherly kind of grandness. “Once upon a time, this world was full of peculiar animals. In the Aldinn days, there were more peculiar animals on Earth than there were peculiar folk. We came in every shape and size you could imagine: whales that could fly like birds, worms as big as houses, dogs twice as intelligent as I am, if you can believe it. Some had kingdoms all their own, ruled over by animal leaders.” A spark moved behind the dog’s eyes, barely detectable—as if he were old enough to remember the world in such a state—and then he sighed deeply, the spark snuffed, and continued. “But our numbers are not a fraction of what they were. We have fallen into near extinction. Do any of you know what became of the peculiar animals that once roamed the world?”
We chewed silently, ashamed that we didn’t.
“Right, then,” he said. “Come with me and I’ll show you.” And he trotted out into the sun and looked back, waiting for us to follow.