by Ransom Riggs
Two figures banged down the last few escalator steps and then stood at the bottom, rimmed by pale daylight and peering into the new dark. Emma pointed at the floor and we sank quietly to our knees, hoping they’d miss us—hoping they were just civilians come to catch a train—but then I heard the squelch of a walkie-talkie and they each fired up a flashlight, the beams shining against their bright reflective jackets.
They might’ve been emergency responders, or wights disguised as such. I wasn’t sure until, in synchrony, they peeled off wraparound sunglasses.
Of course.
Our options had just narrowed by half. Now there were only the tracks, the tunnels. We could never outrun them, damaged as we were, but escape was still possible if they didn’t see us—and they hadn’t yet, amidst the chaos of the ruined station. Their searchlights dueled across the floor. Emma and I backed toward the tracks. If we could just slip into the tunnels unnoticed … but Addison, damn him, wasn’t moving.
“Come on,” I hissed.
“They are ambulance drivers and this man needs help,” he said too loudly, and right away the beams of light bounced up from the floor and whipped toward us.
“Stay where you are!” one of the men boomed, unholstering a gun while the other fumbled for his walkie-talkie.
Then two unexpected things happened in quick succession. The first was that, just as I was about to drop the folding man onto the tracks and dive after him with Emma, a thunderous horn blew from inside the tunnel and a single brilliant headlight flashed into view. The rush of stale wind belonged, of course, to a train—running again, somehow, despite the blast. The second thing, announced by a painful twinge in my gut, was that the hollow had come unstuck and was loping in our direction. The instant after I felt it, I saw it, too, plowing at us through a billow of steam, black lips peeled wide, tongues thrashing the air.
We were trapped. If we ran for the stairs we’d be shot and mauled. If we jumped onto the tracks we’d be crushed by the train. And we couldn’t escape onto the train because it would be ten seconds at least before it stopped and twelve before the doors opened and ten more before they shut again, and by then we’d be dead three ways. And so I did as I often do when I’m out of ideas—I looked to Emma. I could read in the desperation on her face that she understood the hopelessness of our situation and in the stony set of her jaw that she meant to act anyway. I remembered only as she began to stagger forward, palms out, that she couldn’t see the hollow, and I tried to tell her, reach for her, stop her, but I couldn’t get the words out and couldn’t grab her without dropping the folding man, and then Addison was alongside her, barking at the wight while Emma tried uselessly to make a flame—spark, spark, nothing, like a lighter low on juice.
The wight broke out laughing, pulled back the hammer of his gun, and aimed it at her. The hollowgast ran at me, howling in counterpoint to the squeal of train brakes behind me. That’s when I knew the end had come and there was nothing I could do to stop it. At that moment something inside me relaxed, and as it did, the pain I felt whenever a hollow was near faded, too. That pain was like a high-pitched whine, and as it hushed, I discovered hidden beneath it another sound, a murmur at the edge of consciousness.
A word.
I dove for it. Wrapped both arms around it. Wound up and shouted it with all the force of a major league pitcher. Him, I said, in a language not my own. It was only one syllable but held volumes of meaning, and the moment it rattled from my throat, the result was instant. The hollow stopped running at me—stopped dead, skidding on its feet—then turned sharply to one side and lashed out a tongue that whipped across the platform and wrapped three times around the wight’s leg. Knocked off balance, he fired a shot that caromed off the ceiling, and then he was flipped upside down and hauled thrashing and screaming into the air.
It took my friends a moment to realize what had happened. While they stood gaping and the other wight shouted into his walkie-talkie, I heard train doors whoosh open behind me.
Here was our moment.
“COME ON!” I shouted, and they did, Emma stumble-running and Addison tangling her feet and me trying to wedge the gangly and blood-slick folding man through the narrow doors until we all crashed together across the threshold into the train car.
More gunshots rang out, the wight firing blindly at the hollow.
The doors closed halfway, then popped back open. “Clear the doors, please,” came a cheerful prerecorded announcement.
“His feet!” Emma said, pointing at the shoes at the end of the folding man’s long legs, the toes of which were poking through the doors. I scrambled to kick his feet clear, and in the interminable seconds before the doors closed again, the dangling wight fired more wild shots until the hollow grew tired of him and flung him against the wall, where he slid to the floor in an unmoving heap.
The other wight scurried for the exit. Him, too, I tried to say, but it was too little too late. The doors were closing, and with an awkward jolt the train began to move.
I looked around, grateful that the car we’d tumbled into was empty. What would regular people make of us?
“Are you okay?” I asked Emma. She was sitting up, breathing hard, studying me intensely.
“Thanks to you,” she said. “Did you really make the hollow do all that?”
“I think so,” I said, not quite believing it myself.
“That’s amazing,” she said quietly. I couldn’t tell if she was frightened or impressed, or both.
“We owe you our lives,” said Addison, nuzzling his head sweetly against my arm. “You’re a very special boy.”
The folding man laughed, and I looked down to see him grinning at me through a mask of pain. “You see?” he said. “I told you. Is miracle.” Then his face turned serious. He grabbed my hand and pressed a small square of paper into it. A photograph. “My wife, my child,” he said. “Taken by our enemy long ago. If you find others, perhaps …”
I glanced at the photo and got a shock. It was a wallet-sized portrait of a woman holding a baby. Sergei had clearly been carrying it with him a long time. Though the people in the photo were pleasant enough, the photo itself—or the negative—had been seriously damaged, perhaps narrowly survived a fire, exposed to such heat that the faces were warped and fragmented. Sergei had never mentioned his family before now; all he’d talked about since we met him was raising an army of peculiars—going loop to loop to recruit able-bodied survivors of the raids and purges. He never told us what he wanted an army for: to get them back.
“We’ll find them, too,” I said.
We both knew this was far-fetched, but it was what he needed to hear.
“Thank you,” he said, and relaxed into a spreading pool of blood.
“He doesn’t have long,” Addison said, moving to lick Sergei’s face.
“I might have enough heat to cauterize the wound,” said Emma. Scooting toward him, she began rubbing her hands together.
Addison nosed the folding man’s shirt near his abdomen. “Here. He’s hurt here.” Emma put her hands on either side of the spot, and at the sizzle of flesh I stood up, feeling faint.
I looked out the window. We were still pulling out of the station, slowed perhaps by debris on the tracks. The emergency lights’ SOS flicker picked details from the dark at random. The body of a dead wight half buried in glass. The crumpled phone booth, scene of my breakthrough. The hollow—I registered its form with a shock—trotting on the platform alongside us, a few cars back, casual as a jogger.
Stop. Stay away, I spat at the window, in English. My head wasn’t clear, the hurt and the whine getting in the way again.
We picked up speed and passed into the tunnel. I pressed my face to the glass, angling backward for another glimpse. It was dark, dark—and then, in a burst of light like a camera flash, I saw the hollow as a momentary still image—flying, its feet lifting from the platform, tongues lassoing the rail of the last car.
Miracle. Curse. I hadn’t quite worked out the d
ifference.
* * *
I took his legs and Emma his arms and gently we lifted Sergei onto a long bench seat, where beneath an advertisement for bake-at-home pizza he lay blacked out and rocking with the motion of the train. If he was going to die, it seemed wrong that he should have to do so on the floor.
Emma pulled up his thin shirt. “The bleeding’s stopped,” she reported, “but he’ll die if he doesn’t see the inside of a hospital soon.”
“He may die anyway,” said Addison. “Especially in a hospital here in the present. Imagine: he wakes up in three days’ time, side healed but everything else failing, aged two hundred and bird-knows-what.”
“That may be,” Emma replied. “Then again, I’ll be surprised if in three days’ time any of us are alive, in any condition whatsoever. I’m not sure what more we can do for him.”
I’d heard them mention this deadline before: two or three days was the longest any peculiar who’d lived in a loop could stay in the present without aging forward. It was long enough for them to visit the present but never to stay; long enough to travel between loops but short enough that they were never tempted to linger. Only daredevils and ymbrynes made excursions into the present longer than a few hours; the consequences of a delay were too grave.
Emma rose, looking sickly in the pale yellow light, then tottered on her feet and grabbed for one of the train’s stanchions. I took her hand and made her sit next to me, and she slumped against my side, exhausted beyond measure. We both were. I hadn’t slept properly in days. Hadn’t eaten properly, either, aside from the few opportunities we’d had to gorge ourselves like pigs. I’d been running and terrified and wearing these damned blister-making shoes since I couldn’t remember when, but more than that, every time I spoke Hollow it seemed to carve something out of me that I didn’t know how to put back. It made me feel tired to a degree that was wholly new, absolutely subterranean. I’d discovered a fresh vein inside me, a new source of power to mine, but it was depletable and finite, and I wondered if by using it up I was using myself up, too.
I’d worry about that another time. For now I tried to savor a rare moment of peace, my arm around Emma and her head on my shoulder, just breathing. Selfishly, perhaps, I didn’t mention the hollow that had chased our train. What could any of us do about it? It would either catch us or not. Kill us or not. The next time it found us—and I was sure there would be a next time—I would either find the words to stay its tongues or I wouldn’t.
I watched Addison hop onto the seat across from us, unlock a window with his paw, and crack it open. The angry sound of the train and a warm funk of tunnel air came rushing in, and he sat reading it with his nose, eyes bright and snout twitching. The air smelled like stale sweat and dry rot to me, but he seemed to catch something subtler, something that required careful interpretation.
“Can you smell them?” I asked.
The dog heard me but took a long moment to reply, his eyes aimed at the ceiling as if finishing a thought. “I can,” he said. “Their trail is nice and crisp, too.”
Even at this high speed, he could pick up the minutes-old traces of peculiars who’d been enclosed in an earlier train car. I was impressed, and told him so.
“Thank you, but I can’t take all the credit,” he said. “Someone must’ve pushed open a window in their car, too, otherwise the trail would be much fainter. Perhaps Miss Wren did it, knowing I would try to follow.”
“She knew you were here?” I asked.
“How did you find us?” Emma said.
“Just a moment,” Addison said sharply. The train was slowing into a station, the windows flashing from tunnel black to tile white. He stuck his nose out the window and closed his eyes, lost in concentration. “I don’t think they got off here, but be ready in any case.”
Emma and I stood, doing our best to shield the folding man from view. I saw with some relief that there weren’t many people waiting on the platform. Funny there were any at all, or that trains were still running. It was as if nothing had happened. The wights had made sure of it, I suspected, in hopes we’d take the bait, jump onto a train, and make it simple for them to round us up. We certainly wouldn’t be hard to spot amongst modern London’s workday commuters.
“Look casual,” I said. “Like you belong here.”
This seemed to strike Emma as funny, and she stifled a laugh. It was funny, I guess, inasmuch as we belonged nowhere in particular, least of all here.
The train stopped and the doors slid open. Addison sniffed the air deeply as a bookish woman in a pea coat stepped into our car. Seeing us, her mouth fell open, and then she turned smartly and walked out again. Nope. No thanks. I couldn’t blame her. We were filthy, freakish-looking in bizarre old clothes, and splashed with blood. We probably looked like we’d just killed the poor man beside us.
“Look casual,” Emma said, and snorted.
Addison withdrew his nose from the window. “We’re on the right track,” he said. “Miss Wren and the others definitely passed this way.”
“They didn’t get off here?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. But if I don’t smell them in the next station, we’ll know we’ve gone too far.”
The doors smacked closed and with an electric whine we were off again. I was about to suggest we find a change of clothes when Emma jolted beside me, as if she’d just remembered something.
“Addison?” she said. “What happened to Fiona and Claire?”
At the mention of their names, a nauseating new wave of worry shot through me. We’d last seen them at Miss Wren’s menagerie, where the elder girl had stayed behind with Claire, who was too ill to travel. Caul told us he’d raided the menagerie and captured the girls, but he also told us Addison was dead, so clearly his information couldn’t be trusted.
“Ah,” said Addison, nodding gravely. “It’s bad news, I’m afraid. Part of me, I admit, was hoping you wouldn’t ask.”
Emma’s face drained of color. “Tell us.”
“Of course,” he said. “Shortly after your party left, we were raided by a gang of wights. We threw armageddon eggs at them, then scattered and hid. The larger girl, with the unkempt hair—”
“Fiona,” I said, heart thudding.
“She used her facility with plants to hide us—in trees and under new-grown brush. We were so well camouflaged that it would’ve taken days for the wights to root us all out, but they gassed us and drove us into the open.”
“Gas!” Emma cried. “The bastards swore they’d never use it again!”
“It appears they lied,” said Addison.
I had seen a photo once, in one of Miss Peregrine’s albums, of such an attack: wights in ghostly masks with breathing canisters, standing around casually as they launched clouds of poison gas into the air. Although the stuff wasn’t fatal, it made your lungs and throat burn, caused terrible pain, and was rumored to trap ymbrynes in their bird form.
“When they’d rounded us up,” Addison went on, “we were interrogated as to the whereabouts of Miss Wren. They turned her tower inside out—searching for maps, diaries, I don’t know what—and when poor Deirdre tried to stop them, they shot her.”
The emu-raffe’s long face flashed before me, gawky, gap-toothed, and sweet, and my stomach lurched. What kind of person could kill such a creature? “God, that’s awful,” I said.
“Awful,” Emma agreed perfunctorily. “And the girls?”
“The small one was captured by the wights,” Addison said. “And the other … well, there was a scuffle with some of the soldiers, and they were near the cliff’s edge, and she fell.”
I blinked at him. “What?” For a moment the world blurred, then snapped back into focus.
Emma stiffened but her face betrayed nothing. “What do you mean, fell? Fell how far?”
“It was a sheer drop. A thousand feet at least.” His fleshy jowls drooped. “I’m so sorry.”
I sat down heavily. Emma kept standing, her hands white-knuckling the rail. “No
,” she said firmly. “No, that can’t be. Perhaps she grabbed onto something on the way down. A branch or a ledge …”
Addison studied the gum-spackled floor. “It’s possible.”
“Or the trees below cushioned her fall and caught her like a net! She can speak to them, you know.”
“Yes,” he said. “One can always hope.”
I tried to imagine being cushioned by a spiky pine tree after such a fall. It didn’t seem possible. I saw the small hope Emma had kindled wink out, and then her legs began to tremble and she let go of the rail and thumped down onto the seat beside me.
She looked at Addison with wet eyes. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
He nodded. “Same to you.”
“None of this ever would’ve happened if Miss Peregrine were here,” she whispered. And then, quietly, she bowed her head and began to cry.
I wanted to put my arms around her, but somehow it felt like I’d be intruding on a private moment, claiming it for myself when really it was hers alone, so instead I sat and looked at my hands and let her mourn her lost friend. Addison turned away, out of respect, I think, and because the train was slowing into another station.
The doors opened. Addison stuck his head out the window, sniffed the air on the platform, growled at someone who tried to enter our car, then came back inside. By the time the doors closed again, Emma had lifted her head and wiped away her tears.
I squeezed her hand. “Are you all right?” I said, wishing I could think of something more or better to say than that.
“I have to be, don’t I?” she said. “For the ones who are still alive.”
To some it might’ve seemed callous, the way she boxed up her pain and set it aside, but I knew her well enough now to understand. She had a heart the size of France, and the lucky few whom she loved with it were loved with every square inch—but its size made it dangerous, too. If she let it feel everything, she’d be wrecked. So she had to tame it, shush it, shut it up. Float the worst pains off to an island that was quickly filling with them, where she would go to live one day.