by Ransom Riggs
“When you were seven, you badly wanted an Arabian horse,” Horace continued. “Your parents couldn’t afford such an extravagant animal, so they bought a donkey instead. You named him Habib, which means beloved. And loved him you did.”
The girl’s mouth fell open.
Horace went on.
“You were thirteen when you realized you could manipulate objects using only your mind. You started with small things, paper clips and coins, then larger and larger ones. But you could never pick up Habib with your mind, because your ability did not extend to living creatures. When your family moved houses, you thought it had gone away entirely, because you couldn’t move anything at all anymore. But it was simply that you hadn’t gotten to know the new house yet. Once you became familiar with it, mapped it in your mind, you could move objects within its walls.”
“How could you possibly know all this?” Melina said, gaping at him.
“Because I dreamed about you,” said Horace. “That’s what I can do.”
“My God,” said the girl, “you are peculiar.”
And the dresser drifted gently to the floor.
* * *
I wobbled to my feet, head throbbing where the dresser had hit me.
“You’re bleeding!” Emma said, jumping up to inspect my cut.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, dodging her. The Feeling was shifting inside me, and being touched while it was happening made it harder to interpret; interrupted its development somehow.
“Sorry about your head,” Melina Manon said. “I thought I was the only peculiar left!”
“There’s a whole gang of us down your well, in the catacomb tunnel,” Emma said.
“Really?” Melina’s face lit up. “Then there’s still hope!”
“There was,” said Horace. “But it just flew out the hole in your roof.”
“What—you mean Winnifred?” Melina put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. A moment later, the pigeon appeared, flying down through the hole to land on her shoulder.
“Marvelous!” said Horace, clapping his hands. “How’d you do that?”
“Winnie’s my chum,” Melina said. “Tame as a house cat.”
I wiped some blood from my forehead with the back of my hand, then chose to ignore the pain. There wasn’t time to be hurt. I said to the girl, “You mentioned that wights have been here, chasing pigeons.”
Melina nodded. “Them and their shadow beasts came three nights ago. Surrounded the place, took Miss Thrush and half our wards here, then set fire to the house. I hid on the roof. Since then, wights have come back every day, in little groups, hunting for Winnifred and her friends.”
“And you killed them?” Emma asked.
Melina looked down. “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”
She was too proud to admit she’d lied. It didn’t matter.
“Then we’re not the only ones hunting for Miss Wren,” Emma said.
“That means she’s still free,” I said.
“Maybe,” said Emma. “Maybe.”
“We think the pigeon can help us,” I said. “We need to find Miss Wren, and we think the bird knows how.”
“I never heard of any Miss Wren,” said Melina. “I just feed Winnie when she comes into our courtyard. We’re friends, she and I. Ain’t we, Winnie?”
The bird chirped happily on her shoulder.
Emma moved close to Melina and addressed the pigeon. “Do you know Miss Wren?” she said, enunciating loudly. “Can you help us find her? Miss Wren?”
The pigeon leapt off Melina’s shoulder and flapped across the room to the door. She warbled and fluttered her wings, then flew back.
This way, it seemed to say.
That was proof enough for me. “We need to take the bird with us,” I said.
“Not without me,” said Melina. “If Winnie knows how to find this ymbryne, then I’m coming, too.”
“Not a good idea,” said Horace. “We’re on a dangerous mission, you see—”
Emma cut him off. “Give us the bird. We’ll come back for you, I promise.”
A sudden jolt of pain made me gasp and double over.
Emma rushed to my side. “Jacob! Are you all right?”
I couldn’t speak. Instead I hobbled to the window, forced myself upright, and projected my Feeling out toward the cathedral dome, visible over the rooftops just a few blocks away—then down at the street, where horse-drawn wagons rattled past.
Yes, there. I could feel them approaching from a side street, not far away.
Them. Not one hollow, but two.
“We have to go,” I said. “Now.”
“Please,” Horace begged the girl. “We must have the pigeon!”
Melina snapped her fingers, and the dresser that had nearly killed me raised up off the floor again. “I can’t allow that,” she said, narrowing her eyes and flicking them toward the dresser just to make sure we understood one another. “But take me along and you get Winnie in the bargain. Otherwise …”
The dresser pirouetted on one wooden leg, then tipped and crashed onto its side.
“Fine then,” Emma said through her teeth. “But if you slow us down, we take the bird and leave you behind.”
Melina grinned, and with a flick of her hand the door banged open.
“Whatever you say.”
* * *
We flew down the stairs so fast that our feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. In twenty seconds we were back in the courtyard, leaping over dead Mr. Crumbley, diving down the dry well. I went first, kicking in the mirrored door at the bottom rather than wasting time sliding it open. It broke from its hinges and fell in pieces. “Look out below!” I called, then lost my grip on the wet stone steps and fell flailing and tumbling into the dark.
A pair of strong arms caught me—Bronwyn’s—and set my feet on the floor. I thanked her, my heart pounding.
“What happened up there?” asked Bronwyn. “Did you catch the pigeon?”
“We got it,” I said as Emma and Horace reached the bottom, and a cheer went up among our friends. “That’s Melina,” I said, pointing up at her, and that was all the time for introductions we had. Melina was still at the top of the steps, fooling with something. “Come on!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”
“Buying us time!” she shouted back, and then she pulled shut and locked a wooden lid that capped the well, closing out the last rays of light. As she climbed down in darkness, I explained about the hollows that were chasing us. In my panicked state, this came out as “GO NOW RUN HOLLOWS NOW,” which was effective if not terribly articulate, and threw everyone into hysterics.
“How can we run if we can’t see?!” Enoch shouted. “Light a flame, Emma!”
She’d been holding off because of my warning back in the attic.
Now seemed like a good time to reinforce that, so I grabbed her arm and said, “Don’t! They’ll be able to pinpoint us too easily!” Our best hope, I thought, was to lose them in this forking maze of tunnels.
“But we can’t just run blindly in the dark!” said Emma.
“Of course,” said the younger echolocator.
“We can,” said the older.
Melina stumbled toward their voices. “Boys! You’re alive! It’s me—it’s Melina!”
Joel-and-Peter said:
“We thought you were—”
“Dead every last—”
“One of you.”
“Everyone link hands!” Melina said. “Let the boys lead the way!”
So I took Melina’s hand in the dark and Emma took mine, then she felt for Bronwyn’s, and so on until we’d formed a human chain with the blind brothers in the lead. Then Emma gave the word and the boys took off at an easy run, plunging us into the black.
We forked left. Splashed through puddles of standing water. Then from the tunnel behind us came an echoing crash that could only have meant one thing: the hollows had smashed through the well door.
“They’re in!” I shouted.
I could almost feel them narrowing their bodies, wriggling down into the shaft. Once they made it to level ground and could run, they’d overtake us in no time. We’d only passed one split in the tunnels—not enough to lose them. Not nearly enough.
Which is why what Millard said next struck me as patently insane: “Stop! Everyone stop!”
The blind boys listened to him. We piled up behind them, tripping and skidding to a halt.
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I shouted. “Run!”
“So sorry,” Millard said, “but this just occurred to me—one of us will have to pass through the loop exit before the echolocators or the girl do, or they will cross into the present and we into 1940, and we’ll be separated. For them to travel to 1940 with us, one of us has to go first and open the way.”
“You didn’t come from the present?” Melina said, confused.
“From 1940, like he said,” Emma replied. “It’s raining bombs out there, though. You might want to stay behind.”
“Nice try,” said Melina, “you ain’t getting rid of me that easy. It’s got to be worse in the present—wights everywhere! That’s why I never left Miss Thrush’s loop.”
Emma stepped forward and pulled me with her. “Fine! We’ll go first!”
I stuck out my free arm, feeling blindly in the dark. “But I can’t see a thing!”
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.
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.