by Ransom Riggs
“I’m sure they’re quaking in their boots,” I said.
“I’m going to find Caul,” Emma went on. “I’m going to find him and make him weep for his mother. I’m going to make him beg for his worthless life, and then I’m going to put both hands around his neck and squeeze until his head melts off …”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “I’m sure there’s a lot standing between us and him. There’ll be wights everywhere. And armed guards probably.”
“Maybe even hollows,” Addison said.
“Definitely hollows,” said Emma. She sounded vaguely excited by the idea.
“Point being,” I said, “I don’t think we should storm the gates without knowing more about what’s waiting for us on the other side. We may only have one chance at this, and I don’t want to throw it away.”
“Okay,” said Emma. “What do you suggest?”
“That we find a way to sneak Addison inside. He’s the least likely to be noticed, small enough to hide almost anywhere, and he’s got the best nose. He could do recon, then sneak out again and tell us what he found. That is, if he’s up for it.”
“And if I don’t return?” said Addison.
“Then we’ll come after you,” I said.
The dog took a moment to consider—but only a moment. “I accept, on one condition.”
“Name it,” I said.
“In the tales that are told about us after our victory, I should like to be known as Addison the Intrepid.”
“And so you shall,” said Emma.
“Make that Extremely Intrepid,” Addison said. “And handsome.”
“Done,” I said.
“Excellent,” said Addison. “Time to have at it, then. Nearly everyone we care about in the world is on the other side of that bridge. Every minute I spend on this side is a minute wasted.”
We would accompany Addison as far as the bridge, then wait nearby for his return. We began to jog downhill, the going easy, the shantytown around us growing denser as we advanced. The gaps between shacks closed until none remained, the whole of it blurring past in an unbroken patchwork of rust-eaten metal. Then abruptly the shacks and lean-tos came to an end, and for a hundred yards Smoking Street returned to a wilderness of caved walls and blackened timbers—a buffer zone of sorts, perhaps enforced by the wights. At last we came to the bridge, the mouth of it bearded by a scrum of people, a few dozen in all. While we were still too far away to register the state of their clothes, Addison said, “Look, an encamped army laying siege to the fortress! I knew we wouldn’t be the only ones to take up the fight …”
Upon closer inspection, however, these were anything but soldiers. With a disappointed humph Addison’s bright little hope winked out.
“They’re not laying siege,” I said. “They’re just … laying.”
The wretchedest shantytowners we’d seen yet, they were slumped in the ashes, arranged in postures of such listless torpor that for a moment I mistook even the ones who were sitting upright for dead. Their hair and bodies were blacked with ash and grease, and their faces so afflicted with pits and scars that I wondered if they were lepers. As we picked our way between them a few looked up weakly, but if they were waiting for something, it wasn’t us, and their heads slumped down again. The only one standing was a boy in a flap-eared hunting cap who prowled between the sleepers, rifling their pockets. Those he woke swatted at him but didn’t bother giving chase. They had nothing worth stealing anyway.
We were nearly past when one called out: “You’ll die!”
Emma stopped and turned, defiant. “What was that?”
“You’ll die.”
The man who spoke lounged on a sheet of cardboard, his yellow eyes peeping through a burrow of black hair. “No one crosses their bridge without permission.”
“We mean to cross it anyway. So if you know something we should beware of, speak now!”
The lounger stifled a laugh. The rest were silent.
Emma looked them over. “None of you will help us?”
One man started to say, “Be careful to—” but as soon as he’d begun, another man hushed him.
“Let them go, and in a few days we’ll have their drippings!”
A moan of agonized desire went up among the shantytowners.
“Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a vial of that,” said a woman by my feet.
“For just a drop, a drop!” sang a man, bouncing on his haunches. “A drop o’ their drippings!”
“Stop, it’s torture!” another whimpered. “Don’t even mention it!”
“To hell with all of you!” Emma shouted. “Let’s get you across, Addison the Intrepid.”
And we turned away in disgust.
* * *
The bridge was narrow, arched in the middle, and built from marble so clean that even ash from the street seemed wary of trespassing on it. Addison stopped us just shy of the edge. “Wait, there’s something here,” he said, and we stood by nervously while he closed his eyes and sniffed the air like a clairvoyant reading a crystal ball.
“We need to cross now—we’re exposed out here,” Emma muttered, but Addison was elsewhere; besides, it really didn’t seem like we were in much danger. No one was on the bridge, nor was anyone guarding the barred gate on the other side. The top of the long white wall, where you might expect to see men posted with rifles and binoculars, was similarly empty. Other than its walls, the fortress’s sole defense seemed to be the chasm that curved around it like a moat, at the bottom of which churned a boiling river that released the sulfurous green steam which hung all around us. The bridge was the only way across that I could see.
“Still disappointed?” I asked Emma.
“Downright insulted,” she replied. “It’s like they’re not even trying to keep us out.”
“Yeah, that’s what worries me.”
Addison gasped and his eyes sprang open. They shone, electric.
“What is it?” Emma said, breathless.
“It’s only the faintest of traces, but I’d know Balenciaga Wren’s scent anywhere.”
“And the others?”
Addison sniffed again. “There were more of our kind with her. I can’t say who, precisely, or how many. The trail goes quite muddy. Many peculiars have come this way recently—and I don’t mean them,” he said, looking banefully at the squatters behind us. “Their peculiar essence is weak, almost nonexistent.”
“Then that woman we interrogated was telling the truth,” I said. “This is where the wights bring their captives. Our friends were here.”
Ever since they’d been taken, an awful suffocating hopelessness had been tightening around my heart, but its grip loosened now, slightly. For the first time in hours, we were running on more than just hope and guesswork. We had tracked our friends across hostile territory all the way to the wights’ doorstep. That in itself was a small victory, and it made me feel, if only for a moment, like anything was possible.
“Then it’s even stranger that no one’s guarding this place,” Emma said darkly. “I don’t like this at all.”
“I don’t either,” I said. “But I don’t see any other way across.”
“I might as well get it over with,” said Addison.
“We’ll come with you as far as we can,” said Emma.
“I appreciate that,” Addison replied, sounding somewhat less than extremely intrepid.
The bridge could be sprinted across in under a minute, I guessed, but why run? Because, I thought, a line from Tolkien materializing in my head, one does not simply walk into Mordor.
We started across at a brisk pace, murmurs and muted laughs following us. I glanced back at the squatters. Certain we were about to meet some grisly end, they were shifting around, angling for good views. All they needed was popcorn. I wanted to go back and pitch every last one into the boiling river.
In a few days we’ll have their drippings. I didn’t know what that meant and hoped I never would.
The bridge ste
epened. An encroaching paranoia was making my heart beat double time. I felt sure something was about to swoop down and we’d have nowhere to run. I felt like a mouse scurrying toward a trap.
In whispers we reviewed our plan: get Addison through the gate, then fall back to the shantytown and find somewhere unobtrusive to wait. If he hadn’t returned within three hours, Emma and I would find a way in.
We were coming to the crest of the bridge, beyond which I’d be able to see a small section of the downslope that till now had been hidden. And then the lampposts shouted:
“Stop!”
“Who goes there!”
“None shall pass!”
We stopped and gaped at them, stunned to realize they weren’t lampposts at all but desiccated heads impaled on long pikes. They were horrible, skin drawn and gray, tongues lolling—and yet, despite not being attached to throats, three of the heads had spoken to us. There were eight altogether, mounted in pairs on either side of the bridge.
Only Addison seemed unsurprised. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a bridge head,” he said.
“Go no further!” said the head on our left. “Almost certain death awaits those who cross without permission!”
“Perhaps you should say certain death,” said the head on our right. “Almost sounds wishy-washy.”
“We have permission,” I said, improvising a lie. “I’m a wight, and I’m delivering these two captured peculiars to Caul.”
“No one told us,” the head on the left said irritably.
“Do they look captured to you, Richard?” said the one on the right.
“I couldn’t tell you,” said the left. “Ravens pecked out my eyes weeks ago.”
“Yours, too?” said the right. “Pity.”
“He don’t sound like any wight I know,” said the left. “What’s your name, sirrah?”
“Smith,” I said.
“Ha! We don’t have a Smith!” said the right.
“I just joined up.”
“Nice try. No, I don’t think we’ll let you through.”
“And who’s going to stop us?” I said.
“Obviously not us,” said the left. “We’re just here to forebode.”
“And to inform,” said the right. “Did you know I took a degree in museum studies? I never wanted to be a bridge head …”
“No one wants to be a bridge head,” snapped the left. “No child grows up dreaming of becoming a bloody bridge head, foreboding at people all day and having your eyes pecked out by ravens. But life doesn’t always scatter roses at your feet, does it?”
“Let’s go,” muttered Emma. “All they can do is natter at us.”
We ignored them and continued up the bridge, each head warning us in turn as we passed.
“Step no further!” shouted the fourth.
“Continue at your peril!” wailed the fifth.
“I don’t think they’re listening,” said the sixth.
“Oh, well,” said the seventh airily. “Don’t say we didn’t warn you.”
The eighth only stuck out his fat green tongue at us. Then we were beyond them and cresting the bridge, and there it came to a sudden end—a yawning, twenty-foot gap in the place where stone should’ve been, and I nearly stepped into it. Emma caught me as I reeled backward, arms pinwheeling.
“They didn’t finish the damned bridge!” I said, my cheeks flushing with adrenaline and embarrassment. I could hear the heads laughing at me, and behind them, the road squatters.
If we’d been going at a run, we wouldn’t have stopped in time and would’ve pitched right over the edge.
“Are you all right?” Emma asked me.
“I’m fine,” I said, “but we’re not. How are we supposed to get Addison across now?”
“This is vexing,” said Addison, pacing along the edge. “I don’t suppose we could jump?”
“No chance,” I said. “It’d be way too far, even at a full run. Even with a pole vault.”
“Huh,” said Emma. She looked behind us. “You just gave me an idea. I’ll be right back.”
Addison and I watched as she marched down the bridge. At the first head she came to, she stopped, wrapped her hands around the pike it was impaled on, and pulled.
The pike came out with ease. As the head protested loudly, she laid it on the ground, planted her foot on its face, and gave a mighty yank. The pike slid free of the head, which went rolling off down the bridge, howling with rage. Emma returned triumphant, stood the pike at the edge of the gap, and let it fall across with a loud metallic clang.
Emma looked at it and frowned. “Well, it isn’t London Bridge.” Twenty feet long by one inch wide and slightly bowed in the middle, it looked like something a circus acrobat might balance on.
“Let’s get a few more,” I suggested.
We ran back and forth, prying up pikes and laying them across the gap. The heads spat and swore and issued empty threats. When the last of them had been pried off and rolled away, we’d made a small metal bridge, roughly a foot wide, slippery with head goo and rattling in the ashy breeze.
“For England!” Addison said, and he shimmied haltingly onto the pikes.
“For Miss Peregrine,” I said, following him.
“For the love of birds, just go,” said Emma, and she stepped on behind me.
Addison slowed us down badly. His little legs kept slipping between the pikes, which made the pikes roll like axles and gave me awful stomach flutters. I tried focusing on where to place my feet without seeing past them into the chasm, but it was impossible; the boiling river attracted my eyes like a magnet, and I found myself wondering whether we were high enough for the fall alone to kill me or whether I’d survive long enough to feel myself cooking to death. Addison, meanwhile, had given up trying to walk altogether and instead laid down, whereupon he began to push himself along the pikes like a slug. In this way we proceeded, inch by undignified inch, to just beyond the halfway point—and then my flutters sharpened and gave way to something else: a knot in my stomach that I’d come to know all too well.
Hollow. I tried to say it aloud but my mouth had gone dry; by the time I’d swallowed and got the word out, the feeling had multiplied tenfold.
“What dreadful luck,” Addison said. “Is it ahead of us or behind?”
I couldn’t tell right away and had to poke around the feeling for a moment before I could pin it down.
“Jacob! Ahead or behind?” Emma shouted in my ear.
Ahead. My gut-compass was certain, but it made no sense: the downward slope of the bridge was now visible all the way to the gate, and the whole length was deserted. There was nothing there.
“I don’t know!” I said.
“Then keep going!” Emma replied.
We were closer to the far side of the gap than the near; we’d be off the pikes faster if we continued forward. I shoved down my fear, bent and scooped up Addison, and started to run, slipping and wobbling on the unsteady pikes. The hollow felt close enough to touch, and I could hear it now, grunting toward us from some unseen place ahead. My eyes followed the sound to a spot in front of us but below our feet—on the cut-away face of the bridge, where several tall, narrow apertures had been carved into the stone.
There. The bridge was hollow, and a hollow was inside the bridge. Though its body would never fit through the openings in the stone, its tongues easily could.
I’d made it across the pikes and onto solid bridge when I heard Emma cry out. I dropped Addison and spun to see her behind me, one of the hollow’s tongues wrapped around her waist and whisking her into the air.
She screamed my name and I screamed hers. The tongue flipped her upside down and shook her. She screamed again. There was no worse sound.
Another of its tongues slapped the underside of the pikes and our makeshift bridge went flying, clattering apart and plunging like matchsticks into the chasm below. Then the second tongue went for Addison, and the third punched me in the chest.
I fell to the ground, the
wind knocked out of me. While I struggled for a breath, the tongue slithered around my waist and scooped me into the air. The other had Addison by his hind legs. In a moment, all three of us were dangling upside down.
Blood rushed to my head, darkening my vision. I could hear Addison barking and nipping at the tongue.
“Don’t, it’ll drop you!” I shouted, but he kept on.
Emma was helpless, too; if she burned the tongue around her waist, the hollow would drop her.
“Talk to it, Jacob!” she shouted. “Make it stop!”
I twisted to see the narrow openings through which its tongues had squeezed. Its teeth gnawed at the stone slats. Its black eyes bulged hungrily. We hung like fruit on thick black vines, the chasm yawning below.
I tried to speak its language. “SET US DOWN!” I shouted—but what came out was English.
“Again!” Addison said.
I shut my eyes and imagined the hollow doing as I asked, then tried again.
“Put us down on the bridge!”
More English. This wasn’t the hollow I’d come to know, the one I’d communed with for hours while it was frozen in ice. This was a new one, a stranger, and my connection with it was thin and weak. It seemed to sense that I was fumbling for a key to its brain, and it hauled us suddenly upward, as if winding up to fling us into the chasm. I had to connect, somehow, now—
“STOP!” I screamed, my throat raw—and this time, out came the guttural scratch of hollowspeak.
We jolted to a stop in midair. For a moment we just hung there, swinging like laundry in a breeze. My words had done something but not enough. I’d merely confused it.
“Can’t breathe,” Emma croaked. The tongue around her was squeezing too hard, and her face was turning purple.
“Put us down on the bridge,” I said—in Hollow again!—the words clawing at my throat as they came. Every burst of hollowspeak felt like I was coughing up staples.
The hollow made an uncertain rattle. For an optimistic moment I thought it might actually do as I’d asked. Then it snapped me up and down as fast and hard as you’d shake out a towel.