A Map of Days

by Ransom Riggs

  I slid across the floor on my back, through the curtains, out into the larger cold-storage room. The hollow had flung itself backward against the door to escape the fire, and it was pulling me toward its open mouth. I stuck out my hand as I slid, raking it along the shelves until I managed to hook my fingers into something. But it didn’t stop me—it was just a wooden crate, and it yanked away from the shelf with me as I slid by.

  I heard Emma shouting my name. Acting purely on reflex, I grabbed the crate with my other hand and held it out in front of me. When I reached the hollow, I jammed it right between the creature’s jaws.

  It let my ankle go for a moment, giving me enough time to scramble away into a corner. I’d heard it utter a few sounds now and I tried them in my own throat, summoning the strange guttural language of hollows from wherever it had been slumbering inside me.

  Emma ran to where I was kneeling. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But we have to get out of this room. Never fight hollows in a confined space.”

  With her eyes she followed the crate in the air to the door. “It’s blocking the exit,” she said.

  The hollow gave up trying to dislodge the crate using its tongues and clamped its jaws shut instead, crunching the wood to splinters like it was a mouthful of potato chips.

  Move, I said, testing out a word of hollowspeak.

  It took a step toward us, but it was still blocking our escape. I tried a slight modification. Move aside.

  It took another step forward. Its tongues danced in the air like rattlesnakes ready to strike.

  “It’s not working,” Emma said. Her flames were starting to melt everything around us, and drips of water from the ceiling were forming a puddle on the floor.

  “Make it ever hotter,” I said. “I have an idea.”

  Emma took a deep breath, tensed, and her flames burned a little higher.

  “When I say the word,” I whispered, “you run that way and I’ll run this way.”

  The hollow let out a sharp cry and ran at us. I shouted, “NOW!” and Emma jumped right and I leapt left. The hollow’s tongues shot over our heads, and I kept running to the corner. The hollow tried to spin and follow me, but it slipped in the puddle and fell, then cried out and sent its tongues after me, but one of them tangled in the rungs of a metal shelf against the wall. Trying to yank free, the hollow brought the heavy shelf, and all its crates of frozen food, down on top of itself.

  I shouted, “GO!” met Emma at the door and pulled it open, and in a moment we were out in the hall and pulling the door closed behind us.

  “Lock it!” Emma said. “Where’s that key?”

  But this door had a different handle and no lock at all, so we turned and ran down the hall and back into the restaurant’s dining room. It was filled with morning sun and diners in crisp vintage clothes, all turning now to stare at the strangers in their midst, soggy and out of breath. Emma remembered the fire in her hand too late, then tucked it behind her back while three waiters, the only people in the room who hadn’t yet noticed us, went on harmonizing:

  “Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gaaaaaa—”

  A huge crashing sound came from down the hall, and the waiters stopped mid-gal. The people who had been staring leapt up from their tables.

  “Get out!” I shouted. “Everyone get out of here right now.”

  Emma brought the flames out in front of her again. “That’s right! Get out, get out!”

  It was the next crash that did it—the sound of the metal door flying from its hinges—and now almost everyone was on their feet, panicked and streaming toward the exits.

  We spun to look behind us. The hollowgast stomped into the hallway, turned toward us, and howled, its three horrible tongues reeling down the hall like hard-cast fishing lines before snapping taut and vibrating with its scream.

  The soda jerk shoved past me and ran for the nearest door. The sound alone was enough to terrify everyone. The nightmarish sight was mine alone to bear.

  “Tell me you’re close,” Emma said.

  “I’ve almost got him.”

  The hollow started toward us down the hall. I shouted at him—

  Stop! Lie down! Shut your mouth!

  He slowed a bit, as if my words had penetrated his skull but not quite entered his brain, then came at us twice as fast. I wished we could run outside and face him in the parking lot, but the exits were jammed with fleeing diners. We clambered behind the long counter and ran to the far end, by the cash register. I kept shouting at him, trying different variations of the same phrases. Be still! Sleep! Sit down! Don’t move! But I could hear the hollow wrecking the place as it got closer to us. Tables and chairs were flying, people screaming bloody murder. I risked a peek over the counter and saw the hollow lasso a waiter around the waist and throw him through a plate-glass window.

  Emma stood up quickly and grabbed a heavy bottle full of green liquid. She unscrewed the top, then began to tear her dress.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “Making a Molotov cocktail,” she said, stuffing the torn cloth into the bottle.

  The bottle said Bubble Up! “It won’t work—that’s soda!”

  She swore, then lit the cloth and lobbed it over the counter anyway.

  My compass needle shifted. The hollow was drawing near.

  “This way,” I hissed. We scrambled on hands and knees toward the other end of the counter. A moment later the hollow’s tongues raked the wall above where we’d been crouched, and fifty glass bottles came crashing down at once.

  I heard a woman scream. People were being hurt, maybe even killed. Looped people, who would never know what had happened to them and had no tomorrows to miss out on—but still. There was no escape, no better way. I had to face the beast, now or never.

  I stood up from behind the counter and shouted at the thing. It had a lady in pink hair curlers by the neck, and she was screaming so hard the curlers were shaking loose. When it saw me it let her go. She fell on her side, then scurried off to hide under a booth. And then it came at me, muttering and gibbering. I stood my ground and began to imitate it, noise for noise, repeating what it said, though I didn’t know what it meant.

  It paused to knock a table out of its path. My tongue, which was beginning to pick up the tonalities of this hollow’s speech, seemed to start on its own . . .

  STOP! LIE DOWN!

  It hesitated, then dropped to the ground.

  SHUT YOUR MOUTH.

  It reeled its three tongues back into its mouth. I picked up a steak knife from a pile of silverware on the floor. Emma approached with her flame high and hot.

  DON’T MOVE.

  I could see the thing squirming, trying to break free from my commands, but it was frozen now and all we had to do was—

  “That’s quite enough!”

  The voice was loud and familiar. I spun around to see who it belonged to. It was an older man in a tan suit, seated calmly at a booth in the corner—Abe’s booth—his body angled toward me, one elbow propped casually on the table. He was the only other person left in the restaurant, and he didn’t seem the least bit afraid.

  “My goodness,” the man said. “You really do have your grandfather’s gift.”

  He slid to the edge of the booth and stood. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind letting go of Horatio . . .” He muttered under his breath in hollowspeak, and I felt my control over the beast vanish. “I promised him a hot meal if he was good today. Didn’t I, fella?”

  The hollow reeled in its tongues, scampered over to him, and sat down by his feet like a big puppy.

  * * *

  • • •

  The man plucked a steak off his table and tossed it to the hollow, who caught it in its jaws and swallowed it in a single gulp. The man began to slide out of the booth and stand up, but Emma took
a step toward him with her flame high and shouted, “Stay where you are!”

  He stayed seated. “I’m a friend, not a wight.”

  “Then why do you travel with a hollowgast?”

  “I don’t go anywhere without Horatio anymore. I’d rather not end up like this boy’s grandfather, if I can help it.”

  I said, “You’re H, aren’t you?”

  “The very same.” He gestured to the empty seat across from him. “Would you join me?”

  “You’re completely mad!” said Emma. “Your hollowgast nearly killed us!”

  “You were never in real danger, I assure you.” He gestured again. “Please. We have five minutes until the police arrive and a lot of ground to cover before then.”

  I glanced at Emma. She looked annoyed, but closed her hand, extinguishing her flame, and let her arm fall. We crossed the dining room, picking our way through a tide of broken dishes and toppled furniture, to the booth where H sat. The hollow had finished its steak and curled itself on the floor by H’s side, where it appeared to be napping. The compass-needle pain in my gut had dulled, but not disappeared, and I realized that its intensity changed depending on the mood of the hollowgast. Aggressive, hungry hollows were more painful than calm, sated ones.

  We slid into the booth, Emma first so I would be closest to the hollow. H leaned forward on his elbows, sipping from a tall glass through a straw. He was calm and collected.

  “I’m ready for the interview,” I said.

  H held up a finger, still drinking. I studied him while we waited. His face was crookedly handsome and deeply lined, his eyes deep-set and piercing, and he had a scraggly beard and a sweater vest that gave him a vaguely professorial air. I had seen a photo of him in Abe’s logbook, I realized, in which he’d been wearing almost the exact same outfit.

  When he’d drained the glass, he pushed it away and leaned back against his seat. “Root beer float,” he said, and let out a satisfied sigh. “Food’s got no taste anymore. That’s why I try not to pass up a meal anytime I’m in a loop.” He nodded at several plates of food on the table. “Got you a country-fried steak and a slice of key lime pie. I would’ve ordered for you, too, Miss Bloom”—he shot me a peevish look—“but I asked Jacob to come alone.”

  “You know who I am?” said Emma.

  “Of course. Abe spoke of you often.”

  Emma looked down, but couldn’t hide her smile.

  “She and I are a team,” I said. “We work together.”

  “I can see that,” said H. “You passed, by the way.”

  “Passed what?” I said.

  “Your job interview.”

  I laughed the way you do when something’s more surprising than funny. “That was the interview? Being attacked?”

  “First part, anyway. Had to see if you were the real deal.”

  “And?”

  “Your command of the language could be better. You need to establish control faster—some of these casualties could’ve been avoided.” He pointed to the broken window, the waiter outside, crumpled and groaning on the hood of a Chevrolet. “But you’re the real deal. No doubt.”

  I felt a blush of pride.

  “Don’t get happy yet. There are some things you need to know.”

  I stifled my smile. “I want to know everything.”

  “What did your grandfather tell you about his work?”

  “Nothing.”

  He looked surprised. “Nothing at all?”

  “He said he used to be a traveling salesman. My dad told me Abe used to go on these weeks-long business trips, and once or twice he came back with a broken leg or a bandage on his face. The family thought he’d gotten mixed up with some bad people, or he had a gambling problem.”

  H ran a hand over his bearded chin. “Then we’ll only have time for the basics. Abe came to America after the war. He wanted to live as normal a life as he could, because he felt that his diminished powers were more of a danger than a help to his fellow peculiars—Miss Bloom and her loop-mates, specifically. At that time, America was a relatively peaceful place. Normals had persecuted us plenty over the years and sown a lot of mistrust between the different peculiar clans, but we’d never had the problems with hollows and wights that Europe did. Until the late fifties, that is. They came in hard, they went after the ymbrynes, and they did a lot of damage. That’s when Abe decided he had to come out of his early retirement, and he started the organization.”

  I realized I was holding my breath. I had been waiting so long for someone to tell me about my grandfather’s early years in America, I almost couldn’t believe it was happening.

  H went on, twisting the end of his short beard between his fingers as he spoke. “There were twelve of us. We led normal lives, to all appearances. None of us lived in loops—that was a rule. A few of us had families, regular jobs. We met in secret and communicated in code. At first we just went after hollows, but when the ymbrynes had to go underground because the wights were picking off so many of them, we started doing the jobs they couldn’t do anymore.”

  “Reaching uncontacted peculiar children,” said Emma. “Delivering them to safety.”

  “You read the logbook.”

  I nodded.

  “It wasn’t easy. And we weren’t always successful. Now and then you get it wrong. One slips through the cracks.” He glanced out the window, feeling some old pain. “I carry those failures with me still.”

  “Where are the others?” I asked. “The other ten members?”

  “Some were killed in the line of duty. Some walked away. Couldn’t live the life anymore. The eighties were rough on all of us.”

  “And Abe never replaced them?”

  “It was hard to find people we could trust. The enemy was always trying to infiltrate us, crack open our secrets. We were a real thorn in their side, I’m proud to say. And the threat started to die down as the wights turned their focus back to Europe. They’d gotten pretty much what they wanted here, though thanks to us it cost them more than they’d bargained.” He looked down for a moment. “But maybe now there’s a new era dawning. I always hoped my phone would ring one day and it would be you.”

  “You could’ve called me,” I said.

  “I promised Abe I wouldn’t make first contact. Your grandpa, he didn’t want to push you into all this. He wanted it to be your choice. But I always had a feeling you’d come around, eventually.”

  I looked at him. “You talk like we’ve met before.”

  He winked at me. “Remember Mr. Anderson?”

  “Oh my God. Yes! You gave me a big bag of saltwater taffy.”

  “I think you were about eight, nine years old.” He grinned and shook his head. “Oh, that was a day. Abe never wanted any of us coming to his house—he was always so careful—but I wanted to meet this grandson he was so proud of. So I just showed up one afternoon, and you happened to be there. He was so mad you could’ve fried an egg on his forehead! It was worth it, though. And I could tell the minute I met you that you had the gift, too.”

  “I always thought my grandfather and I were the only ones.”

  “In our group, four of us could see hollows. It was only Abe and I who could control them to any degree. And you’re the only one I’ve ever heard of who’s been able to control more than one at a time.”

  In the faraway distance I could hear sirens.

  “So, have you got a job for us?” I said.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” He reached down beside him and placed two small packages on the table. They were each about the size of a paperback book, wrapped in plain brown paper. “I need you to deliver these. Unopened.”

  I almost laughed. “That’s it?”

  “Consider it part two of your job interview. Prove to me you can handle this, and I’ll give you a real mission.”

  “We can handle it,”
Emma said. “Have you any idea of the things we’ve done?”

  “That was Europe, little lady. America’s a whole other kettle of fish.”

  “I am many years your elder. And what an odd saying.”

  “This is the way it’s got to be.”

  “Fine,” I said. “So where do we take them?”

  “Says right on the packages.”

  Handwritten on one package were the words Flaming Man.

  The other read Portal.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Here’s a little clue to get you started.” He lifted his glass and slid the paper place mat that was under it across the table. For as long as I’d been going there, the Mel-O-Dee’s place mats were printed with a cartoony map of Florida that had tourist attractions marked on them—but little else. No roads or highways, no small or medium-sized towns. The state’s capital was obscured completely by a drawing of an alligator sipping a cocktail. But the seriousness on H’s face as he slid this across the table made it seem like he’d just given us a map to buried treasure. He tapped the center of it, where his glass had left a wet ring around a place called Mermaid Fantasyland.

  “When the packages have been delivered, I’ll be in touch. You have seventy-two hours.”

  Emma was peering at the place mat in disbelief. “This is absurd. Give us a real map.”

  “Nope,” he said. “If it fell into enemy hands, the whole jig would be up. And part of the job is finding things that aren’t easily found.” He tapped the water ring on the cartoon map again. The sirens were getting close now, and looky-loos were starting to congregate around the edges of the parking lot. “You didn’t touch your food.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “When a hollow’s this close, my stomach goes into knots.”

  “Waste not, want not.” He cut a bite from my uneaten pie with his fork, popped it into his mouth, and stood up. “Come on, I’ll walk you out.”