Hollow Chest

by Brita Sandstrom

  Biscuits screamed. So did everyone else. The room was instantly divided into people trying to catch Biscuits before she could land on another victim and those who were trying to flee to safety, and all those people seemed to be running into each other. Someone’s elbow knocked into Charlie and he careened into Matron, who promptly toppled over and—because of her considerable roundness—rolled under the dining table, where she became quite stuck, her thick legs kicking into space, sensible white underwear bared to God and everyone in the dining hall.

  Charlie, dazed, saw Pudge toddling across the floor, oblivious to the chaos going on around him. Charlie scrabbled to his feet, trying to reach the pigeon before someone could crush him, but he was too far away to stop the foot that was blindly coming down to stomp Pudge flat.

  The foot was intercepted in midair by a tiny, feathery missile. Bertie zoomed around Pudge at top speed, creating a tiny crater of still space amidst the screaming frenzy. Charlie ducked under a grabbing arm and scooped up Pudge, who chirped happily. He almost squashed Biscuits as she ran between his legs, but managed to keep his feet as he chased after her streaking form down the length of the dining hall and out into the hallway. There was a loud crash like several pounds of crockery being broken all at once, and a second blur swooped in front of Charlie as Bertie took the lead through the door, past the alley, and out into the snowy night.

  18

  THEY DIDN’T STOP RUNNING UNTIL CHARLIE’S lungs burned and wheezed with each gasping breath and even Biscuits’s sides were heaving up and down with exertion. Bertie crash-landed into a snowbank, and Charlie flopped onto the ground next to him. Pudge hopped out of Charlie’s hands and onto the sidewalk, where he began looking for crumbs. Even Bertie looked exasperated.

  “This is,” Charlie gasped out in between heaving breaths, “without question—the stupidest—thing I—have ever done.”

  Biscuits meowed.

  “And you’re not helping!”

  She turned her back on him and began washing her face.

  “Where are we, anyway?” Charlie squinted around in the darkness, looking for a street sign or a familiar building. But there were no familiar buildings, he realized as his eyes fully adjusted to the darkness, because there were hardly any buildings left on this street. Heaped on either side of the street were enormous mounds of rubble, broken concrete and stone with bits of metal and glass poking out at gruesome angles.

  Charlie knew now why he was lost. He avoided coming to this part of London whenever he could. It was one of the neighborhoods hit heaviest by the Blitz, the months when all the German bombs had fallen on London, blowing apart buildings and whole streets. Some parts of the city had been cleared of debris, but not this one. Beams still stuck out of the surviving buildings like broken bones. It hurt just to look at them.

  Charlie rubbed his hands together, trying to clap warmth into them. He wished he’d thought to bring mittens, or a hat. He wished he’d thought at all before he’d chased after a couple of pigeons in the middle of the night.

  A soft, furry warmth ingratiated itself against his leg, and he looked down to see Biscuits staring back up at him, ears drooped in apology. He ignored her, his side still hitching from their sprint across town. “If you really want to say you’re sorry, you could find a stupid rat, like Reggie said.” Even as Charlie said it, he knew how silly it sounded. He had no idea how they were supposed to find a rat that would know where to find war wolves. But then, it wasn’t as if he had any better ideas about how to continue their search. He kicked in frustration at a chunk of cement, succeeding only in stubbing his toe. If they couldn’t find a rat, then there was no point being out here in the cold amongst all these ruins and cinders. They should just go home, maybe try again tomorrow. Charlie thought of his warm bed, which only made him feel colder.

  “Bertie, do you know how to get back from here? Bertie?” Charlie turned in a slow circle, looking for the pigeons. “Bertie? Pudge? Where are you?”

  An answering chirp echoed through the air, and Charlie carefully picked his way over the rubble, following the sound. Bertie was pecking at the ground, and a soft, tinny sound echoed back to Charlie.

  “What’re you doing over here? It’s time to go. Do you know how to get us home?”

  Bertie cooed and pecked at the ground again. The metallic ringing was louder this time, and Charlie approached, his breath hanging in front of him in wet ribbons. The pigeons were standing on a long metal beam, which gleamed dull silver in the moonlight. Charlie went closer to inspect it and tripped over an identical beam about a yard away.

  “Trolley tracks.” Brushing off the heavy coating of dust and ashes with his foot, Charlie followed the glint of the tracks as far down the unlit street as he could see before they disappeared into the quiet darkness. There was an odd, soft little clicking sound coming from somewhere just past where his eye could make out.

  “No. Absolutely not,” he said, scooping up Pudge and reaching for Biscuits one-handed. “We’re going home. We can come back tomorrow.” But the odd little noise came again, and this time Biscuits scrambled out of his grasp with a yelp and took off at a sprint towards the noise, racing farther away from him with every beat of his heart.

  “Biscuits!” His throat went tight and sore. She couldn’t leave him here, she couldn’t. He was even colder and more exhausted than he’d been a moment ago, but some sense of urgency deep in the pit of his stomach drove him onwards, as fast as he could go, along the tracks. He ran too fast for the tears to dry on his face.

  He couldn’t hear the other pigeon following after him, but he was unsurprised when Bertie alighted on his shoulder a couple of minutes later when he finally stopped just outside the abandoned trolleybus. It was tipped at an angle off to the side of the road, lit by what moonlight penetrated the clouds and shadows. It had clearly taken some damage from a long-ago bomb, and nobody had had the time or energy to clear it away. Most of its windows were blown out, and mold and old plants seemed to be growing in the corners. It looks dead, he thought, and immediately regretted having done so.

  There was a scraping sound from inside. Biscuits, Charlie thought, and he picked his way through the surrounding rubble and up to the door. It felt wrong, somehow, to climb in through the gaping ruin of the front door, a last insult to a bus that had served so long and so well. Charlie shuddered as he pulled himself inside—the shadows gathering in the corners and under the seats seemed to be moving.

  No, they were moving.

  One of the shadows detached itself from the others and ran, heading for the lopped-off end of the train, but another shadow intercepted it halfway there. There was an earsplitting screech and the bigger shadow resolved itself into Biscuits, dragging something fat, heavy, and wriggling in her jaws.

  A rat. It was the biggest rat Charlie had ever seen, nearly half the size of Biscuits herself and black as pitch.

  Charlie got down on his hands and knees; there was no sense in mincing words, not at so late an hour and after everything he had seen in the last twenty-four hours. “Are you are a—a war rat?”

  The rat continued to screech, but Charlie was too frantic to feel ridiculous interrogating a rodent. “Do you know the war wolves? Do you know where they go?”

  “Wolfs,” said the rat, and Charlie reeled back in surprise at its small, high-pitched voice. “Tongues and teeth, big claws, yes? Yes, yes. Wolf mouths. Bite and eat, eat and bite. Scraps sometimes. Morsels. Little sips, little gulps, yes, yes, yes.”

  Biscuits braced a paw on the rat’s body, getting a better grip with her teeth. The rat squeaked, paddling his grimy feet in the air. “Cat teeth, no, no, no! Bad cat, stop!”

  “Do you know where the war wolves are? Do you know where they meet? I need to talk to them.”

  “No talk, scurry, scuttle, run, run, run. Scraps sometimes. Eat and nibble. No talk.”

  “I need to talk to them. Do you know where they are?”

  “Not know. Follow after, sniff out.”

 
; “You follow them? How? How do you know where they’ve been?”

  “Bad smells, sad smells. Big puddles of it. Follow, chase.”

  “You can smell them? You can smell where they’ve been?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, sniff them out. Follow. But guess sometimes, too. Get first and hide, wait. Scraps. Bite and eat, eat and bite.”

  “What do you mean, ‘guess’? How do you guess where they’ll be? What do they smell like? How do you find them?”

  Charlie had gotten down on his hands and knees, inching closer and closer to the rat, trying to hear its chittering little voice. Its horrible naked tail lashed in that moment, sliding over Charlie’s hand like a soft, furred worm. Charlie yelped, jumping back at the sensation, and Biscuits dropped the rat in surprise. Squealing with fear, the rat dashed for the door, but Charlie leaped on it, squashing it into the floor with both hands. The rat squeaked and cheeped piteously and Charlie loosened his grip, just a bit.

  “How do you know where to look for them?”

  “Bad, sad places,” the rat wailed. “Dead places, death places, big gulps of fear. Wolfs go where the sadness goes, where the badness goes. Wolfs sniff it out and rats sniff out wolfs. Rubble, rubble, rubble. Rubble rumbles, yes, they can hear them. Big ground-shakes of sad. Deep earth-rumbles of bad. Bad hearts, sad hearts, eat, eat, eat.”

  “They go where . . .” Charlie gulped, his throat dry, his hands greasy with rat fur and sweat. “Where bad things have happened? Or where there’s lot of people that bad things have . . . happened to?”

  “Yes, yes, yes, that, that, that. Righto, righto!”

  “Do you know where the War Room is?”

  “Don’t know! Don’t know! Rats only follow. Rats don’t know!”

  “This place would be special, different to any other place you’ve followed them. The place where there’ve been the most wolves.” Charlie did not completely know if this was true, but it seemed logical, if it was a meeting place.

  The rat had begun to shriek, but then stopped mid-squeak. “The fear place. Yes, the wolf place. Yes. The biggest bites are there, the tenderest bits are there. Rats remember. But wolfs are there. Too many! Too many! Run, run, run!”

  “You’re going to take me there or, or . . . or I’ll let my cat eat you.” Charlie had absolutely no intention of letting Biscuits eat a war rat, or any kind of rat, ever, and Biscuits almost certainly knew this. But she let out a bloodthirsty little growl all the same.

  “Noooo!” the rat squealed, squirming in his grip. “No eats, no eats! Bad cat!” Its little paws scrabbled in place at high speed.

  “So you’ll take us there? To the, the wolf place?”

  “Rats take! No eats, no teeth.” It nodded its snout up and down.

  “I’m warning you, though, my cat is fast, and if you try to trick us and run away, she’ll catch you.”

  Biscuits lashed her tail around for emphasis. The rat quaked and whimpered piteously.

  Slowly, Charlie let go of the rat. It ran around in a tight circle on the broken floor of the trolley before skittering away. Biscuits gathered herself for a flying leap, but the rat turned to gesture at them with a paw.

  “You come, yes? Onwards, yes? Wolf place.”

  Feeling equal parts hopeful and grim, Charlie hurried after it, Biscuits running ahead, her bright eyes trained on the war rat.

  The creature took them down alley after alley, street after street, and Charlie was about to call the whole thing off, since the rat was clearly leading them a merry dance, when the rat took a sudden hard turn and scurried down a set of stairs.

  “Oh no,” Charlie whispered. “Oh no, no, no, no.”

  Anywhere but there.

  The Goodge Street Station shelter had been built before Theo had left, before the war got really bad, before the German planes came to London, and the two of them had watched its progress with fascination, great piles of earth erupting like the spines of a sleeping dragon (or so Theo had insisted, back when Theo insisted on things like that). He’d only been little when the air raids began, and he remembered the earliest ones more like a sort of slumber party, with bunk beds and ladies singing, food in special tins. He didn’t remember being afraid, not the first few times, but probably he’d been too small to know how scared he should have been.

  He had learned to be scared, though, by the time he and Theo and Mum and Grandpa Fitz had had to evacuate down into the Goodge Street shelter during the worst of the bombing, four years ago now. It had felt to him like they were walking into the mouth of an enormous monster. They were supposed to stay calm and orderly while waiting for it to swallow them.

  He felt much the same now, walking down the shelter’s maw again after so long, except this time he knew for a fact that monsters were waiting and that they were always hungry for more.

  He was so afraid. His body didn’t feel right, as if his bones had gone too hollow and loose to hold him upright anymore. He shook with it. And in that moment, he remembered something from the last time he’d been here, something that must have been pushed down to the very bottom corner of his mind, underneath all the piles of rubble:

  The horrible silence, before the shells hit. The scream of a missile plummeting through space and then—nothing.

  It swallowed him up now, rising over his head and blocking out all the light and air. It was as if the silence before the explosion had always been there, waiting. As if he’d never really left it. This was the place where his nightmares lived. The screams of the sirens, the screams of the bombs, the screams of people running from the bombs. Charlie remembered exactly where they had huddled, Grandpa Fitz holding him in an iron grip while Charlie cried, trying to get back outside. And he remembered when they had come home, their house was still there, and Biscuits on the front step, looking very put out. He had never cried so hard in his life. He remembered everything about that night.

  But he did not remember the door he was staring at now.

  It wasn’t metal and stone and tile, like the rest of the walls in the station. It was wooden and almost black, with strange, patternless lines laid into its surface in something off-white and hard. Porcelain, maybe. Or bone.

  On its right-hand side, standing out against the faint design, were three mismatched locks. A small silvery-looking one in the center; above it a fat, rusted one that looked like it hadn’t been used in ages; and below, a lock with an impossibly narrow keyhole, the whole thing dented and covered with verdigris like lichen. There didn’t seem to be any kind of handle or doorknob.

  Charlie pushed at it, first with one hand, and then both, and then he shoved at it with his shoulder. It was only on this attempt that it occurred to Charlie that perhaps he did not want the door to open, that in fact he would prefer maybe anything but that door swinging open beneath his hands to reveal monsters that fed only on hearts.

  When the door did not so much as shake, the relief of it took his knees out. He sat down gracelessly on the cold floor. Biscuits meowed and sat down as well, and the rat took that as its signal.

  It tried to take off, but Charlie lunged at it blindly and found its tail and then its fat little body. Though he doubted the rat had any idea how to open to door, it was the only lead he had.

  “Let go, run, run, run, go!” it squealed. The rat pushed its feet against Charlie’s hand, squeezing his beady eyes shut, straining with effort. It was sad, really. The rat was sad. It was a miserable little parasite of a thing, and it would never know light or happiness or kindness. It would never know joy, whether it tasted better than misery.

  Charlie let it go.

  When Biscuits yowled and started to leap after it, Charlie scooped her up, reassuring his frightened hands with the downy softness of her fur, the warm-toast smell of her body, the worn-smooth gentleness of her little paws. “No, Biscuits,” he said into her fur, and her dear little ears twitched and pricked at his voice. “Let it go. Just let it go. It’s too sad. It’s all just too sad.”

  Biscuits let him hold her, trem
bling and cold, for a long time.

  19

  A WAR WOLF WAS WAITING FOR HIM WHEN HE came outside.

  The sight of it was like hitting an extra step on the stairs in the dark, the unquestioning expectation of open space and instead: something that should not be there. And, behind it, the sudden possibility of falling.

  It was white, and perfectly clean. Dishonor had been dirty and matted and mangled. This one was pristine and pretty and immaculate as a dusting of snow over a bomb site. There it sat, perfect as a statue, so tall even on its back haunches that its head was even with Charlie’s, maybe even a little taller.

  Blood rushed in his ears. Well, he had wanted war wolves, hadn’t he? This was why he had chased the rat, this was why he was out here in the darkness without anyone knowing where he was or how to find him should he not come home. This was what he had been chasing after. And now that he had found it, he wanted to run away.

  “Hello, sweet boy,” she said. He was quite sure it was a she.

  “Hello.” Charlie’s voice was a hoarse whisper, squeezing past the chunk of ice that had formed in his throat. He couldn’t breathe right. His face stung with cold.

  “Aren’t the stars lovely tonight?” she said, moving for the first time, her body seeming to ripple as she inclined her head towards the sky. “All that dead light falling down on us like ashes. Would that I could eat them whole.”

  Charlie opened his mouth but no sound came out.

  The white wolf’s paw flashed fast as lightning, coming down on something in the snow. “For me?” she said, looking down at the ground. “You shouldn’t have.”

  Pudge. Charlie’s breath came out in a soft wail.