by Ransom Riggs
“Well, we can’t go up there,” I replied. “That hollow will turn us inside out.”
“Not if we find something to kill it with.” She went to the supply locker and opened the door, revealing shelves of neatly stacked survival gear. Food and medical supplies. Nothing deadly.
“There aren’t any weapons down here. I’ve looked.”
She was excavating the locker anyway, raking a shelf of tinned food onto the floor with a clatter. “There was an NRA convention’s worth of guns in the garage. How can there be none in your grandpa’s survival bunker?”
“I don’t know, but there aren’t.”
I went to help her, though I knew it was pointless. I shoved aside a stack of mission logs, procedural manuals, and other books to look behind them.
“What the hell.” Having searched every corner of the locker, she turned her back on it and threw a can of beans across the floor. “Whatever. We still can’t stay down here.” She had remained remarkably composed ever since we’d come in from the yard, but now panic was creeping back into her voice.
“Just give me a minute,” I said. “I need to think.”
I plopped down in the swivel chair. There was another way out, of course: through the second tunnel, up into the dummy house on the other side of the cul-de-sac, where my grandfather’s white Chevrolet Caprice sat waiting in the garage. Then again, maybe the hollow would run outside the moment it heard the Caprice’s motor and murder us before we could even back out of the driveway. More to the point, maybe I was not yet ready for the blind rush and perfect execution such an escape would require.
It sounded like someone was jackhammering in the house.
“Maybe he’ll get bored and leave,” I said, half joking.
“He’s not going anywhere, except to get reinforcements.” She started pacing the narrow floor. “He’s probably calling for backup right now.”
“I don’t think hollows carry phones. Or need reinforcements.”
“What’s it doing here? Why are a wight and a hollowgast at your grandfather’s house?”
“Clearly, they were expecting us,” I said. “Or expecting someone.”
She leaned against the bunk bed, frowning and frustrated. “I thought Murnau was the last uncaptured wight. And almost all the hollows were dead.”
“The ymbrynes said there were still some in hiding. Maybe there were more than they thought.”
“Well, they’re not in hiding anymore. At least, these two weren’t. Which means someone called them into service. Which means—”
“We don’t know that,” I said, reluctant to follow that line of reasoning. “We don’t know anything.”
She squared her shoulders to me. “Caul’s back, isn’t he? Murnau succeeded. Brought him back from . . . wherever he was.”
I shook my head. Couldn’t meet her eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Her back slid down the bed post until she was sitting on the floor, knees hugged to her chest. “I felt him,” she said. “Right before I blacked out. It was like . . . like a blanket of ice covering me.”
And I saw him. Saw his face in the heart of the storm. But still I said, “We just don’t know,” because I couldn’t be certain, and because I didn’t want to admit that such an awful thing was true until the truth of it was inescapable.
She tipped her head to one side, like something had just occurred to her, then jumped up and dug in her pocket. “I found this in V’s hand when I was wrapping her. She must have been holding it when she died.”
I stood up and she extended her hand. She held what appeared to be a damaged stopwatch. It had no hands and no numbers. Around the dial were strange symbols and what might have been runic letters, and the glass face was cracked and partially smoked over, as if it had been dropped into a fire. I took it from her and was surprised by its weight. On the back, in English, was stamped:
SINGLE USE ONLY. 5 MIN COUNTDOWN.
MADE IN EAST GERMANY.
“An eject button,” I said quietly, awe stealing over me.
“She must have had it in her pocket when we showed up,” said Noor. “Maybe she knew something was coming for her.”
I was nodding. “Or maybe she always carried it with her. So she could be ready to escape at a moment’s notice.”
Like a fugitive, I thought sadly.
“But it didn’t work quickly enough. It says right here, five minute countdown. So even if she’d hit the button the second Murnau came in . . .”
Noor looked past me, at the wall, at nothing.
“Fast enough to save us,” I said. “But too slow to save herself.” I handed back the stopwatch. “I’m sorry.”
She drew a shuddering breath, steadied herself, then shook her head. “It doesn’t make sense. She was a preparer. A planner. And she’d had years to plan for an invasion. She had that ejector watch. A house full of weapons. Yeah, she got taken by surprise—thanks to me—but I bet she had a plan for that, too.”
“Noor, Murnau shot her in the chest. How do you plan for that?”
“She let it happen. I’m telling you. If she’d managed to dive out a window or something, his next move would have been to kill one of us, then use the other as a hostage. So instead she let him shoot her.”
“But her own heart was on Bentham’s list of resurrection ingredients. She must have known that. I think it’s the whole reason she locked herself in that loop—to keep the wights from stealing her heart. Letting Murnau kill her in order to save us would’ve endangered everyone.”
“We were supposed to stop him.” She wiped a smudge from the stopwatch with her thumb. “But we failed.”
I started to object, but she cut me off. “Look, this is pointless. There’s nothing to do but warn the others. We’ve got to get back to Devil’s Acre and tell them what’s happened. And soon.”
Finally. Something we could agree on.
“I think I know how,” I said. “There’s a pocket loop in the backyard of my parents’ house. It connects directly to the Panloopticon, inside the Acre. It’s on the other side of town.”
“Then we’ve got to go. Now.”
“If it’s still operational,” I added.
“I guess we’ll find out.”
There was a loud metal creak from the periscope. It spun suddenly on its tube, then raced upward and smashed against the ceiling. We dove out of the way as broken glass sprayed across the floor.
“So much for our surveillance system,” Noor said.
“He’s pissed. And he’s not going anywhere.”
“We’ll just have to take our chances.”
“We can afford to take chances with my life,” I said. “But if Caul really is back, we can’t take any chances with yours.”
“Oh, come on—”
“No, hear me out. If there’s any truth to that prophecy—and by now I think we’ve got to believe there is—then you’re the best hope we’ve got. Maybe the only hope.”
“You mean the seven thing.” She frowned. “Me and six others. Which, who knows if they’re even—”
“You’re safe now, and I’ve got to keep you safe. V didn’t sacrifice herself just so you could end up in a hollowgast’s stomach. I don’t know how long we were unconscious. Hours, at least—maybe longer. So please, just wait another couple of minutes, and let’s see whether this asshole gets bored of chewing on sod. Then we’ll make our move.”
She crossed her arms. “Fine. But there’s got to be some way to warn the others while we’re waiting. Is there a phone? A radio?” She scanned the room. “What’s that thing behind you?”
She was talking about the teleprinter. “It’s obsolete,” I said. “Belongs in a museum.”
“Can it talk to the outside world?”
“Not anymore, I don’t think. They used to use them to talk to other loops, but the
y weren’t secure enough—”
“It’s worth a shot.” Noor sat in the swivel chair and bellied up to the keyboard, which looked like it had been sawed off an old fax machine. “How do I turn it on?”
“No idea.”
She blew on the keyboard, puffing dust into the air, then punched a random key. The monitor stayed dark. She reached around the back of it, groped blindly, and flipped a switch. The monitor made a staticky pop, and a moment later an amber cursor blinked to life.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “It works.”
A word appeared. A single word on a single line at the top of an otherwise black screen.
Command: ___
Noor whistled. “This thing is old.”
“Told you.”
“Where’s the mouse?”
“I don’t think they were invented yet. It wants you to type something.”
Noor typed Warn.
The machine bleeped unhappily.
Command not recognized.
Noor scowled. She typed Mail.
Command not recognized.
“Try ‘directory,’” I said.
She did. “Nothing.” And then she tried message, root, help, and loop. None of those worked, either.
Noor sat back in the chair. “I don’t suppose your grandpa kept the instructions.”
I went to the supply locker and poked through the books. Most were spiral-bound, softcover, homemade-looking. A few were old mission logs belonging to my grandfather, and I promised myself to one day read them all. Between a worn-looking pamphlet titled So You Want to Build a Hollowgast Shelter and a couple of the spy novels my grandfather liked to read was a laminated volume with a little bird insignia on the cover and four letters in red: FPEO.
I had seen the same letters inside certain editions of the Tales. For peculiar eyes only.
I flipped it open. The inner title page read:
Syndrisoft pneumatic teleprinter OS 1.5 operating instructions
“Noor! I got it!” I shouted so loudly that I startled her, though with half a second’s reflection I didn’t know what I’d gotten so excited about. The thing was almost certainly disconnected from whatever network it had once been a part of.
We pushed back the heavy keyboard to make room on the desk and opened the manual. From over our heads came a roar and another crash, the sound muted only slightly by twenty feet of dirt and reinforced concrete. I wondered how much of the house would be left standing after the hollow had finished with it.
We attempted to ignore the apocalyptic noises and thumbed through the manual. In the table of contents was a chapter labeled “Communications and Connectivity.” I flipped pages and read aloud while Noor typed.
“Try typing this,” I said. “Outgoing CC.”
She did. The cursor typed a reply: Outgoing communications unavailable.
I read more commands to Noor. She tried Query outgoing CC. The cursor blinked fast for a few seconds, then came back with CC lines cut.
“Dammit,” she said.
“It was a long shot, anyway,” I said. “This thing probably hasn’t been used in decades.”
She slapped the desk and got up from the chair. “We can’t wait down here much longer. That hollow isn’t going to just leave voluntarily.”
I was starting to think she was right: that the beast would never leave; that eventually whoever had sent the yellow-jacketed man would notice he hadn’t returned and come to check on him; that every minute we hid down here was a minute stolen from our allies in the Acre, who could’ve been making plans for escape from, or defense against, whatever onslaught Caul was no doubt preparing. If I protected Noor only to let my friends be slaughtered in a surprise attack, was that any victory at all?
Maybe. Maybe it was, in the coldest possible calculus, because Caul was a threat not just to the peculiars I loved, but all peculiarkind. And really, to the world.
Then again, my friends were my world.
I was about to say screw it, let’s go when I heard Noor mutter, “Holy shit.”
She had returned to the desk and was bent over the ancient monitor. The cursor had typed something of its own volition. Two lines of amber text.
Threat detected.
Activate home defense: Y/N ___
Noor did not wait, did not ask my opinion. Her index finger stabbed the Y button.
The screen blanked. I thought for a moment it had shut down—had just been teasing us—but then the cursor reappeared and drew a new screen.
It was a map of the house crudely drawn in keyboard characters. The map was divided into twelve zones, marked F1–F12, eight zones for the house and four for the yard. There were twelve function keys on the keyboard. A cursor blinked, waiting, at the bottom of the screen.
“What do you think they do?” Noor said. “Shoot fireballs? Open trapdoors?”
“In a suburban retirement community?”
She shrugged. “Let’s find out.” Her finger hovered over the function keys. “Think it’s still above us?”
I felt the hollow’s proximity, but couldn’t sense exactly where he was. I went to the periscope—what was left of it—and pulled it down again. Through the viewer’s cracked glass I saw a distorted rendering of the yard. The hollow had stomped down the grass enough for me to glimpse the house and the street beyond, but there was no sign of him. I rotated in a circle. My view raked the yard, past a fallen tree and a downed power line sparking on the sidewalk, to the neighbor’s roofless house. And then I felt my inner compass needle flicker and heard the beast howl, sharp and loud, as the periscope yanked violently upward, knocking me to the ground before it smashed against the ceiling again.
Noor leapt out of the chair and rushed to me. “Oh my God, are you okay?”
“It’s right above us!” I shouted.
She helped me up and we stumbled to the computer together.
“What part of the yard is that?” she said, peering at the monitor.
I tapped the screen. “I think . . . it’s that side.”
Noor rested her finger on the corresponding key. F10. “Mind if I do the honors?”
“Yes! I mean, no! Just push it!”
She pushed it.
At first nothing happened. Then the walls around us began to rattle, and there was a sound like the creak of some giant old radiator, and a moment later there was a deafening boom and the room shook. The bunk bed fell over and everything we hadn’t taken out of the supply cabinet went flying onto the floor.
The compass needle inside me spun. I couldn’t tell how hurt the hollowgast was, but I was sure it had been thrown some distance by whatever had just happened aboveground. Which meant—
“We got it!” I shouted.
Noor cautiously uncovered her head. “Is it dead?”
“It’s hurt, I think, not dead. But let’s not stick around to find out.”
I ran to the wall and started prying open the door that was partially hidden beside the supply cabinet. “Another exit,” I explained. “This leads to a different house, and a car we can use.”
“What about V?” Noor said.
I tried to imagine dragging her body down tunnels and up ladders while an injured and furious hollowgast chased us. But then Noor seemed to read my mind without me having to explain, and she shook her head and muttered, “Never mind.”
“We’ll come back,” I assured her.
She didn’t say anything, just dug her fingers into the doorjamb and started to pull.
We sprinted through the low-ceilinged tunnel that ran below my grandfather’s suburban street, then climbed another ladder and up through a hatch into the bedroom of the dummy house. There was no time to look out the window to check the damage to my grandfather’s house, no time for anything but the motion of our legs and my hand pulling Noor’s, and thank God the house
was a mirror of Abe’s so I could find my way quickly down the hallway and into the living room with no unnecessary expenditure of thought. The living room was howling and wet, gauzy curtains flapping at the shattered bay window, a fallen oak branch reaching into the room like a monster’s hand.
A glimpse, barely registered, of flames across the street.
No sign of the hollowgast. Despite myself, I felt a surge of hope that it was dead.
We burst into the garage. The boatlike Caprice was just where it had been, the spot beside it vacant. (The Aston had been abandoned weeks ago in Brooklyn and was now surely in the wights’ hands or had been stolen and stripped for parts.) We threw open the Caprice’s long doors and sank into its seats. The keys were in the cup holder, the garage opener clipped to the visor. I reached up to touch the button, but Noor snatched it before I could.
“One thing,” she said. It was the first time my eyes had come to rest on anything since we’d started running. Even in the unflattering glare of the Caprice’s dome light, even soaked to the skin, hair tangled, breathing hard, she was a vision. A vision.
She said, “You don’t stop. Whatever happens, you have to get back to the Acre. Even if I’m in trouble.”
It took me a second to process what she was saying. “I’m not leaving you behind.”
“Listen. Listen.” Her body was coiled with tension. She took my hands, twined our fingers together without unlocking her eyes from mine. “Someone has to warn the others, and there’s nobody but us to do it. Nobody else knows what’s happened.”
My whole mind rejected the idea, cringed at the thought of abandoning Noor for any reason. But I could conjure no more articulate an argument against it than “No.”
Her hand stole onto my leg. “I already cost V her life.” Her fingers dug in. “Don’t let me be the reason our friends die, too.”
My heart was beating in my throat. “You have to promise the same thing,” I said. “No stopping.”
Her eyes flicked downward and she nodded, an almost indiscernible movement. “Okay.”