by Ransom Riggs
“Okay,” I said.
It was a lie. I would never have left her behind.
She offered up the clicker. I hit the button. The garage door motor kicked on, complaining as it began to roll upward. My grandfather had backed the Caprice in, so we were facing the street, and the door opening was like the curtain’s rise at the start of a play.
My grandfather’s house was burning. The side yard was blackened. A hole smoked in the grass; another had been punched through a wall of the house, exposing the bathroom’s pink tiles.
I’m pretty sure I muttered, “Oh, shit,” and Noor said something about starting the engine, but a sudden, sharp pain in my gut demanded all my attention. It also told my eyes where to look: at the hole in the yard, where a black tongue was reaching up into the rain from a shifting pile of pink-tiled rubble.
Noor was staring, too, had followed my eyes to the pile.
“Jacob?” she said quietly. “I think it survived.”
The hollowgast rose from the rubble. It was enormously tall despite its hunched back, and it stretched and cricked its neck as if just waking from a nap rather than unburying itself from a house. Pulverized concrete had dusted it ghostly white—making it visible to Noor.
“Start the engine.” Noor was reaching over, shaking me. “The engine, Jacob!”
I twisted the key, then racked the shifter down to D and punched the gas. We lurched into the driveway, bottomed out in the gutter with an attention-grabbing scrape, and swerved into the street.
“I see it, I can see it, GO,” Noor shouted, body angled back toward my grandfather’s house.
I floored the gas pedal. The car’s engine howled with a fury that old, boatlike Chevy Caprices were never meant to have. It was too much power; the back wheels spun on the wet pavement as the rear end swung sideways.
The hollow was loping across the yard, nearly to the street now. It was even taller than the one I’d fought at the deadrisers’ loop in Gravehill, and spattered with impressionistic puffs of concrete dust and black blood.
“GO, GO, GO, GO!” Noor shouted. “Forward, not sideways!”
I let off the gas until the back tires stopped spinning, cut the wheel the other way, and eased down the pedal again.
“Right behind you—RIGHT behind you—”
We took off just as the hollowgast’s tongue tried to lasso our bumper, but it bounced off with a loud metal thwang. A moment later another of its tongues punched out the back window. It shattered, raining glass into the rear seat. We were tearing down the street now, and it was running after us, limping and injured but still fast.
Noor opened the glove box and rifled through it. She was looking for a weapon, or maybe a secret panel of James Bond–style buttons. But there were only registration papers and a pair of old reading glasses. We were going as fast as I dared, given the wet streets and fallen branches and uprooted yard ornaments that had made an obstacle course of the neighborhood—that and the endless circles of Circle Village, which was nothing but curves and curlicues and cul-de-sacs that kept trying to throw our fast-but-heavy car into retention ponds and the sides of houses, and I had to keep braking and turning and braking when I was dying, dying just to floor it. We were beginning to lose the hollow despite all that, but only because it was hurt, forced to use one tongue as a crutch.
But then I felt the compass needle jerk away, and in the rearview I saw the hollow skitter off the road and disappear behind a house.
“It’s trying to cut us off,” I said, and we both leaned right as I swerved to avoid a tipped-over golf cart in the road.
“Then go a different way,” Noor shouted.
“I can’t! There’s only one way out of this labyrinth . . .”
For the next couple of turns we didn’t see it, but I knew it was close, tracking us, running as fast as its injured body could carry it. Then, up ahead, the guard gate. The exit. Beyond that a main road, a straightaway where I could finally reach an uncatchable speed.
I felt the hollow before I saw it, streaking out along our right side to block the way. We were heading straight for it, down the little alley that ran between a low curb and the unmanned guard gate.
“Hang on!” I shouted, and I stamped down the gas and swerved sharply right.
We hit the curb. My unbelted body lurched forward, slamming the wheel as we launched over. One of the hollow’s tongues grazed the side of the car. The other managed to punch through my driver’s side window, and as we sailed onto the putting green that fronted the neighborhood, we swept the hollow off its feet and pulled it with us.
We spun across the clipped grass, turning a wide half circle before I cut the wheel and straightened us out, and thank God, thank Abe this was no ordinary old car but one he’d clearly modified, because the engine had enough grunt and its back wheels enough grip to keep us skidding across the soggy putting green, enough momentum that instead of diving nose-first into the ditch we jumped it, the back tires slamming its outer edge before finding traction again, then sending us off like a shot down Piney Woods Road.
All good, all fine, but for one thing, which Noor couldn’t see because the hollow had now been washed clean by the storm: Its tongue was inside my window, had wrapped itself around my door’s inner handle. We were pulling it behind us, dragging it down the road at forty, fifty miles an hour, and still I did not feel it dying, could only feel its rage.
That tongue was tensed hard as steel. It was not only hanging on, but slowly reeling the hollow in, up off the road that was surely skinning it alive.
Because I could think of nothing else to do, I punched the gas all the way down.
“Have you got anything sharp?” I shouted.
Noor looked at me in horror, realizing at once why I had asked. I prayed for an oncoming car, something I could use to peel the monster off, but Englewood was a ghost town now and the roads were empty. No one but us was stupid enough to be driving in the middle of a hurricane.
“Just this,” she said, and once again offered me the bronze-handled letter opener: the ever-useful, Swiss-Army-knife, totemic thing that wouldn’t leave me alone.
The hollow was howling with pain and from the effort of pulling itself to my door. I didn’t dare take my foot off the gas, even as chunks of debris forced me to swerve all over the road.
I grabbed the letter opener. Asked Noor to take the wheel, which she did. I stabbed the hollow’s tongue. Once, twice, three times. Hollow blood spattered me, black and hot. The creature screamed but wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let go, and then, when it finally seemed about to—
“Jacob, brake!”
My foot had been planted on the gas but my eyes had been on the hollow. I turned to see an abandoned pickup truck and a downed tree blocking most of the road and stomped the brake. The Caprice did a dopey back-ended swerve that almost missed the pickup but not quite, our tail connecting with a jolting smash. We kept going, the branches of the downed tree raking us, cracking our windshield and tearing off the side mirrors before we finally cleared it and skidded to a stop.
We had ceased to move but the world still spun. Noor was shaking me, touching my face—she was okay, had been wearing her seat belt. The letter opener was gone, torn from my hand, and the hollow’s tongue was gone, too.
“Is it dead?” Noor asked, but then she frowned as if embarrassed by her optimism.
I turned to look out the shattered rear window. I could feel the hollow still, steady but weakened, but couldn’t see it. It was far behind us, knocked loose in the crash.
“It’s hurt,” I said. “Bad, I think.”
On both sides of the road were darkened strip malls. Up ahead a snapped traffic light twisted dangerously in the air. On a different day I would’ve turned the car around and gone back to finish off the hollow. But today I couldn’t afford the time or the risk. One hollowgast running loose was the least of our worries.
&nb
sp; I touched the gas. The car wobbled forward, the Caprice’s nose angled slightly downward and to the left.
We’d popped a tire but could still roll.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
I didn’t dare push the damaged Caprice too hard, lest I risk popping a second tire and stranding us completely. We limped along at what my grandfather used to call “after church speed,” wobbling through a town I hardly recognized. It looked like the end of the world: shuttered stores, abandoned parking lots, streets littered with wet trash. Traffic lights blinked, heeded by no one. The small boats people docked in creeks and canals had snapped their moorings, and in the heavy chop their masts tick-tocked like wagging fingers.
Under different circumstances, I would’ve been narrating the drive for Noor, would have enjoyed playing tour guide in the town where I’d grown up, relished the chance to measure the extraordinary turns my life had taken against the straight and stultifying path I’d once seemed destined for. But now I had no words to spare. And the hope and wonder such musings had once made me feel had been extinguished under a suffocating blanket of dread.
What was waiting for us on the other side? What if the Acre was already gone, and my friends with it? What if Caul had simply . . . wiped it all away?
Thankfully, the bridge to Needle Key was undamaged. Thankfully, too, the storm had begun to let up, so that as we climbed the wide, frowning arc of the bridge there were no sudden gusts, nothing to push us over the flimsy guardrail and into Lemon Bay, that stripe of whitecapped gray below. Key Road was still passable, if strewn with downed branches, and with some effort we were able to navigate past the shuttered bait shops and old condos to reach my house.
I had assumed it would be empty. Even if my parents were back from their Asia trip, they would probably have evacuated to Atlanta, where my grandma on my mom’s side lived. Needle Key was a barrier island, practically below sea level, and only the crazies stuck around during hurricanes. But my house was not empty. There was a police cruiser in the driveway, its rollers flashing silently, and next to it a van with ANIMAL CONTROL emblazoned on it. A cop in rain gear stood beside the cars, turning as soon as he heard our tires crunch the gravel.
“Oh, great,” I muttered, “what the hell is this?”
Noor sunk down into her seat. “Let’s hope it’s not more wights.”
We could only hope, since there was no way the hobbled Caprice could outrun a police cruiser. The cop signaled for me to stop. I parked, and he walked toward us while sipping from a thermos.
“The loop entrance is in the potting shed in the backyard,” I whispered. “If you have to, make a run for it.”
If it’s still there, I thought. If the shed didn’t blow away in the storm.
“Names.”
The officer had a trim black mustache, a square jaw, and pupils in his eyes. Pupils could be faked, of course, but there was something about his manner, so bored and irritable, that struck me as distinctly non-wightish. The patch on his official police rain jacket said RAFFERTY.
“Jacob Portman,” I said.
Noor gave her name as “Nina . . . Parker,” and luckily the cop didn’t ask for ID.
“I live here,” I said. “What’s going on?”
Officer Rafferty’s eyes darted from Noor back to me. “Can you prove this is your residence?”
“I know the code to the alarm system. And there’s a photo of me and my parents in the front hall.”
He sipped from his thermos, which had a Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department logo on it. “Were you involved in an accident?”
“We got caught in the storm,” said Noor. “Skidded off the road.”
“Anyone injured?”
I glanced at the black hollowgast blood that had run down my door and my arm, and realized with some relief that he couldn’t see it.
“No, sir,” I said. “Did something happen here?”
“A neighbor reported seeing prowlers in the yard.”
“Prowlers?” I said, exchanging a glance with Noor.
“It’s not uncommon during evacuations. You get thieves, looters, individuals of that nature lurking around, looking to burglarize abandoned properties. They most likely noticed your alarm signs and moved on to greener pastures. We didn’t find anyone . . . but we were attacked by a canine.” He indicated the animal control van. “Some folks stake their animals outside during storms. It’s damn cruel. They get scared, break their leashes, run off. The animal’s being collared now. Until it’s secure, you should remain in your vehicle.”
There was a sudden burst of loud barking from behind my house. Two more officers rounded the corner, one young and one gray, each grappling the end of a long pole. At the other end of the poles was a collar, and inside that collar was a furious dog. It was giving them hell, snarling and trying to shake them loose while they dragged it toward the animal control van.
“Give us a damn hand here, Rafferty!” the older officer shouted. “Get that door open for us!”
“Stay in your vehicle,” Rafferty growled. He jogged to the animal control van and started trying to open its rear door.
“Let’s go,” I said as soon as his back was turned.
We got out. Noor rounded the car to join me.
“Back in your car!” Rafferty shouted, but he was too busy struggling with the door to come after us.
“Quick now—before we get bit again!” the gray-haired cop yelled.
I led Noor toward the backyard. We heard a bloodcurdling snarl and then the younger cop shouted, “I’m gonna tase it!”
The dog’s barks took on a new, louder urgency. I fought an urge to intervene, and then I heard someone say, in a crystal clear British accent: “It’s me!”
I stopped cold and turned. So did Noor.
I knew that voice.
It belonged to a tan boxer dog with a spiked collar, his muscular legs dug into the gravel. In the chaos the officers hadn’t seemed to hear him.
Rafferty finally got the van open. The older animal control officer held on to his pole while the younger one brandished a taser.
Then I heard the dog say—saw his lips form the words—“Jacob, it’s Addison!”
The cops heard that—and then they were all gaping, openmouthed. So was Noor.
“That’s my dog!” I shouted, running toward him. “Down, boy.”
“Did he just . . . ?” said the younger officer, shaking his head.
“Stay back!” Rafferty called, but I ignored him and knelt down a few yards from Addison, who was looking a bit ragged and very glad to see me, his docked tail wagging so hard it shook his whole rear end.
“It’s okay, he’s trained,” I said. “He does all sorts of tricks.”
“He’s yours?” Rafferty said doubtfully. “Why the hell didn’t you say that before?”
“I swear to God he said something,” said the gray-haired cop.
Addison snarled at him.
“Put that away!” I said. “He won’t bite if you don’t threaten him.”
“He already bit me!” complained the younger cop.
“The kid’s lying,” Rafferty said.
“I’ll prove he’s mine. Addison, sit.”
Addison sat. The cops looked impressed.
“Speak.”
Addison barked.
“Not like that.” The young cop frowned. “He said words.”
I looked at him like he was crazy.
“Beg,” I said to Addison.
He glowered at me. That was going too far.
“We’re going to have to take him in,” said the older cop. “He bit a police officer.”
“He was just scared,” I said. “He won’t hurt anyone now.”
“We’ll take him to doggie training school,” Noor said. “He’s a total sweetheart, really. I’v
e never seen him even growl at someone before.”
“Make him talk again,” said the younger cop.
I gave him a concerned look. “Officer, I don’t know what you thought you heard, but—”
“I heard him say something. Now make him apologize for biting me.”
“It’s just a dog, Kinsey,” the older cop said. “Hell, I seen a Doberman on YouTube once that sings the national anthem . . .”
And then Addison, who’d had quite enough of being insulted, drew up on his hind legs and said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, you provincial boob, I can speak better English than you can.”
The young cop let out a single sharp laugh—“Ha!”—but the other two were speechless. Before their brains could unfreeze, there was a loud, shattering crash behind us. We spun around to look, and there was Bronwyn standing at the edge of the driveway. She’d thrown a potted palm tree through the animal control van’s windshield.
“Come get me!” she taunted them, and I had not even a second to appreciate the joyous fact of her being alive, or to wonder what she was doing here, because she took off running behind the house, and Rafferty shouted at her to stop and chased after her. The other two cops dropped their poles and did the same.
“To the pocket loop, friends!” Addison cried, and he shook the poles off his collar and started to run.
We chased him into the backyard. I looked for the potting shed by the oleander hedge, but the storm had carried it into Lemon Bay, and where it had been there was now just a rim of splintered boards.
Bronwyn barreled into view around the opposite corner of the house. “Jump in! Jump in where you see the shiny place!”
Addison led us to the spot where the shed had been. In the middle of it, in the dark heart where the pocket loop entrance was, a strange and shimmering distortion hung in midair. “It’s a loop in its most elemental form,” Addison said. “Don’t be afraid—just go.”
The cops were twenty steps behind Bronwyn, and I had no doubt that if they reached us, there would be nightsticks and tasers and Bronwyn would have to seriously injure them, so without stopping to warn her, I shoved Noor into the mirrored air. In a flash of light, she disappeared.