by Ransom Riggs
“We’d better make a move,” I said. “Is there a back way out of here?”
“I’ll show you, but first I need to text Noor,” said Lilly. “Which means talking loudly into my phone’s speech-to-text app. Considering the subject matter, I think I’d better do it in private.”
“May I be of help?” asked Millard, scooting his chair back.
Someone at another table looked over sharply.
“Millard, cool it,” I whispered. “People are noticing.”
Lilly stood up. “Thanks, but I’m good.” She began walking, a bit slowly but with confidence, toward the restrooms at the back of the café.
When she was out of earshot, Millard let out a long, wistful sigh.
“Fellows,” he announced, “I think I’m in love.”
When Lilly emerged from the restroom after a few minutes, Millard ran to offer her his arm. She took it—subtly, so it wouldn’t look strange to the other patrons—and when they’d made it back to the table, she said, “Okay. She’s agreed to meet you.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Where?”
“I’ll have to show you the way. Where she is, I’m the only one who can reach her.”
I couldn’t imagine what she meant, but I was intrigued nonetheless. We followed Lilly out a back door into an alley behind the café. As stealthily as I could, I walked around front to our parked car—there were no black SUVs in sight—then drove to the alley to pick everyone up. They piled in. Millard insisted Lilly ride up front. She gave us an address that wasn’t far away.
As we drove, the character of the neighborhood changed. The houses got older, uglier, then disappeared altogether, replaced by warehouses and industrial buildings, old and rusted. I noticed in my mirror that a certain gray sedan had been following us for a while. I took a sudden right turn, then three more in quick succession. After that, it was gone.
The address Lilly had given us led to a row of brick warehouses. At the end of the block was a building, five or six stories tall, that was still under construction. The bottom story was ringed by chain-link fences, the top half windowless and skeletal. I drove past it and parked down a side street.
Before we left the car, I grabbed my duffel bag and tossed in a few essentials. A flashlight. Abe’s operations log—heavy, but I was paranoid about leaving it. And a certain pear-shaped fast-food combo item from the glove box. (One never knew when such a thing could come in handy on a mission.) I slung the duffel crosswise over my back, shut the trunk, and turned to face the group.
“Ready.”
“How do we get in?” Emma said.
“There’s a hidden entrance,” Lilly said. “Follow me.”
And then we were off, actually struggling to keep up with Lilly at times as she strode down the street, tapping her cane before her.
“You really seem to know where you’re going,” Millard said.
“Yeah,” Lilly replied. “We’ve hung out here a few times, Noor and me. When we need to get away from people?”
“Like who?” I said.
“You know. Parents. Noor’s foster parents, especially.” She muttered something about them under her breath that I didn’t quite catch, and then she turned and tap-walked down an alley that ran between a warehouse and the under-construction building. Halfway down the alley she slowed and started feeling along the wooden fence with her hand. When she reached a particular board, she stopped.
“Here.” She pushed the board and it tipped upward, revealing an entrance to the site. “After you.”
“You guys hang out here?” said Bronwyn.
“It’s pretty safe,” said Lilly. “Not even the bums know how to get in.”
The place looked like a project some shady developer had started a decade ago, then abandoned when the money had run out. It had been left in a state of unfinished decay, both old and new at once.
Lilly got out her phone, pushed a button, and said, “Coming up,” into it, which was translated into a text message and sent.
A moment later the reply came, which her phone read out for us all to hear in an automated voice.
“Stop at the atrium and wait. I want to get a look at them.”
It was Noor. Our peculiar. We were close now.
We were following Lilly through the scaffolding when my phone began buzzing in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked.
Unknown number. Normally I would’ve ignored it, but something told me not to.
“Just a minute,” I said to the group.
I turned back, ducked out into the construction yard, and answered it.
“It’s H.”
My whole body tensed.
“Where have you been? I thought we were going to see you after Portal.”
“No time to explain. Look, I need you to abort the mission.”
I thought I’d misheard. “You what?”
“Abort. Cancel. You heard me.”
“Why? Everything’s going according to—”
“Circumstances have changed. It’s not important that you know the details. Just go home, now. All of you.”
I could feel my temper starting to rise. After all we’d done. I couldn’t believe it.
“Was it something we did? Did we screw something up?”
“No, no. Look, son, it’s getting too dangerous. Just do what I say. Abort. Go home.”
I was gripping the phone so tight my hand was starting to shake. We’d come too far to quit now.
“You’re breaking up,” I said. “I can’t hear you.”
“I said GO HOME.”
“Sorry, Boss. Bad connection.”
“Who’s that?” I heard Emma say, and I turned to see her coming out to retrieve me.
I ended the call, then tucked the phone into the duffel bag on my back, where I wouldn’t feel it vibrating.
“Wrong number.”
* * *
• • •
We followed Lilly into the building through a doorway with no door, then down a hallway from which the copper wiring had been torn, long gashes striping the walls like black veins. Grit and plaster crunched beneath our feet. Ripped insulation lay everywhere like puffs of pink cotton candy. When Lilly moved she put her feet in almost the exact spots where there were already prints, as if she’d memorized the route step by step. Every so often, I noticed, there was an object that didn’t belong—an old coffee can or a cardboard box turned upside down—that her cane would knock against, and I realized they had been put there as way markers, so she would know how much of the hall she’d walked down, and how much was left to go.
Turning a corner, we entered a stairwell.
“I can do this on my own, but it’s safer if you help me,” she said, and we all knew that you meant Millard.
He was more than happy to give her his arm. We climbed six flights of stairs, then were all a bit winded.
“Now it’s going to get a little weird,” Lilly warned.
We left the stairwell and walked into a hallway that was absolutely pitch-black. By which I mean there was no light at all, not even a minor glow from the stairwell. Rather than soft, gradual falloff of illumination, there was a hard line, like the light had hit some unseen barrier, and once we crossed it we could see the stairwell behind us but absolutely nothing in the other direction.
“Like the auditorium door,” I said, and I heard Emma say, “Mm-hmm.”
I took out my flashlight and shone it into the dark, but the beam was swallowed up. Emma lit a flame in her upturned hand. The glow petered out after only a few inches.
“Noor took the light,” Lilly explained. “So no one can find her but me.”
“Brilliant,” said Enoch.
“Link arms and form a human chain behind me,” said Lilly. “I’ll guide us.”
We followed her down the hall, slow and s
tumbling in the dark. Two times we passed rooms lit by windows, but the light from outside didn’t pass even an inch beyond the rooms’ doorways. It felt a bit like we were underwater, or in outer space. We made a few turns, and though I tried to make a mental map of our progress, I was soon confused, unsure I’d be able to get out again without Lilly’s help.
The sound of our footsteps changed. The hallway had ended at a large room.
“We’re here!” Lilly called out.
A searing beam of light shone down from above. We shielded our eyes, blinded now by light rather than dark.
“Let me see your faces!” a girl’s voice called down. “And tell me your names!”
I moved my hand away and blinked up into the light, then shouted my name. The others did the same.
“Who are you?” the girl called. “What do you want?”
“Can we talk face-to-face?” I said.
“Not yet,” came the echoing reply.
I wondered how often my grandfather had been in situations like this, and I wished I’d had a little of his vast experience to lean on. All that we’d been through came down to this. If this girl didn’t like what I said next, or if she didn’t believe me, all our efforts would have been for nothing.
“We traveled a long way to find you,” I said. “We came to tell you you’re not alone, that there are others like you. We’re like you.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me,” the girl called back.
“We know you’re not like most people,” Emma said.
“And there are people who are after you,” I said.
“And you’re scared,” said Bronwyn. “I was scared, too, when I first realized how different I was from most people.”
“Yeah?” said the girl. “Different how?”
We decided the best thing would be to show her. Since there wasn’t much I could do that was visibly peculiar, Emma lit a flame in her hands, Bronwyn lifted a heavy block of concrete above her head, and Millard picked up some random objects to demonstrate that he was there, but invisible.
“He’s the one I was telling you about,” Lilly said, and I could practically hear Millard beaming.
“So, can we talk?” I said.
“Wait there,” the girl said, and then the light she had made winked out.
* * *
• • •
We waited in the dark while the sound of her footsteps approached. I heard them above us, then coming down stairs, and then I saw her. I drew a sharp, involuntary breath. She was, quite literally, glowing. At first, she looked like a moving ball of light, but as she got closer, and my eyes adjusted, I could see she was a teenager—a tall Indian girl with sharp features, jet-black hair that framed her face, and wide-set eyes flashing with intensity. Every pore of her brown skin was emanating light. Even the hooded windbreaker and jeans she wore glowed slightly from the light that shone beneath.
She went to Lilly and hugged her, hard. The top of Lilly’s head only reached Noor’s cheek, and with Noor’s arms encircling her, it looked for a moment like Lilly was wrapped in light.
“Are you okay?” Lilly asked.
“Bored, mostly,” Noor said, and Lilly laughed a little and turned to introduce her friend.
“This is Noor.”
“Hi,” Noor said evenly, still assessing us.
“Noor, this is . . . uh, what do you call yourselves?”
Lilly happened to be looking at Emma.
“I’m Emma,” she said.
“I mean, what are you, again?” said Lilly.
Emma frowned. “Emma’s good enough for now, I think.”
“I’m Jacob,” I said. I stepped toward Noor and offered my hand, but she just looked at it. I lowered it, feeling awkward. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
“Sure,” said Noor. “Let me show you to the grand salon.”
Taking Lilly’s arm, she turned and began to walk down a hall. She didn’t seem to mind having her back to us, so it seemed she’d decided we weren’t a threat. I noticed that the light emanating from her had gradually begun to dim, shrinking down into her core so that soon only her torso was glowing, and I caught glimpses of her shine only through her unzipped windbreaker and a rip in her jeans. She had been on guard when we first met but was starting to relax, and the light inside her corresponded somehow to her emotions.
We followed her from a large room with bare concrete walls into a smaller, windowless room with bare concrete walls. A couple of chairs and an old couch had been dragged in and draped with blankets, and there were some paperback books and comics and empty pizza boxes scattered around, evidence of long days and nights spent here. There were no lamps that I could see, but light shone from the room’s four corners, an apparently sourceless glow that was warm and yellow and breathed like firelight.
We sat. We talked. Actually, I did most of the talking—since it was only a few months ago that I was making these same life-altering discoveries myself—while Noor listened, watchful and guarded. I told her how I had grown up knowing nothing about my true nature. How my grandfather’s death had sparked this quest for truth that had led to me finding a time loop and meeting the peculiar children.
She put up a hand to stop me. “I was with you until time loop.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “I’m so used to this stuff now, I forget how bizarre it must sound.”
“It’s a day that repeats over and over again, every twenty-four hours,” Emma explained. “They have sheltered our kind from danger for centuries.”
“Normal people can’t enter them,” Millard said. “Nor could the monsters who used to hunt us.”
“What monsters?” Noor asked.
We explained, as best we could, what a hollowgast looked like, smelled like, sounded like. When we’d finished, Noor seemed puzzled.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Have you been attacked by one?”
“I’m trying to figure you out,” she said. “You talk like crazy people. Time loops. Monsters nobody can see. Shape-shifting.” She went to the couch, picked up a dog-eared comic book, and waved it in the air. “You talk like you’ve read too many of these. And I would one hundred percent have kicked your asses out of here already if not for Lilly, who really seems to like you, and that—well—”
“This.” Emma lit a ball of fire in her hand, then poured it from her right palm into her left, the flames dancing hypnotically.
“Yeah.” Noor dropped the comic book. “That.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the arm of the couch. “And it’s not monsters who’ve been chasing me. At least, I don’t think they are.”
“Why don’t you tell them about it?” said Lilly. “They want to help.”
“You know how many times I’ve heard that in my life? ‘They only want to help. Trust them. What could it hurt?’ Always the same lines.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out sharply. “But I guess, in this case, I’m out of options.”
“You’re hiding in an abandoned building,” Enoch said. “Relying on a blind girl to bring you food.”
Noor leveled a withering stare at him. “So what makes you peculiar, little man?”
“Oh, nothing too interesting,” Emma said quickly, stepping in front of Enoch.
“Excuse me?” Enoch peeked around her. “What, are you embarrassed?”
“Of course not,” Emma said, “I just thought it might be a little . . . soon.”
“If anything, it’s late,” Noor said. “It’s cards-on-the-table time. No secrets.”
Enoch shoved Emma aside. “You heard the lady. No secrets.”
“Fine,” Emma said. “Just don’t go overboard.”
Enoch stood and fished a plastic bag out of his pocket. It swung with the weight of something wet and dark. “Luckily, I saved a cat heart from the school.” He began to search around the room. “Has a
nyone got a doll or a stuffed animal? Or . . . a dead animal?”
Noor recoiled slightly, but seemed intrigued. “There’s a room full of mummified pigeons down the hall.”
She went out and showed him where it was. A minute later she came running back into the room, laughing and swatting at the air, and then a pigeon missing one wing and both its eyes flew into the room and fluttered around madly. The rest of us covered our heads and dove out of the way. The pigeon flung itself against the wall, dropped to the floor in a cloud of feathers, and stopped moving.
Enoch ran in. “I’ve never controlled a bird before! Wicked!”
“That was nuts,” Noor said, smiling while she caught her breath. “What the hell?!”
“What can I say?” said Enoch. “I’m extremely talented.”
“You’re a freak!” she said, laughing again. “But I think it’s cool. Really.”
Enoch beamed.
“Now you know everything,” said Emma, picking herself up from the floor.
“Your turn,” I said.
“Okay, okay.” Noor went to the couch and sat. “It’ll be a relief to tell you, actually. The only person who knows any of this is Lilly.”
We sat around her in a loose circle. The lights dimmed a bit. In a soft but unhesitating voice, Noor began to tell her story.
“The first time I noticed something weird was last spring.” She sighed, then looked around at us. “It’s so strange to be saying any of this out loud.”
“Take your time,” Emma said. “We’re not in a rush.”
Noor nodded appreciatively, and began again. “June second, a Tuesday, early afternoon. I had just gotten home from school, and Fartface—that’s my not-father—had been waiting around for me all day.”
The actual name she called her foster dad didn’t begin with Fart, but it did start with an F.
“We had a super-long talk about how I was wasting my time with clubs after school and instead I should get a crappy minimum-wage job at Ices Queen down the street. I told him my after-school things were for college applications and I didn’t need extra money, and anyway the state was paying him and Teena to take care of me. He didn’t like that. He started yelling. And I did what I always do when he yells, which is to run into the kids’ room, where my two not-siblings and I live, and which has a door with a lock. Greg and Amber weren’t home, so I was the only one in there, and Fartface wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept yelling through the door, and I was getting more and more upset, and I didn’t know what to do, and finally I opened my mouth to scream back at him, but instead of my voice coming out? All the lights in the room got brighter for a second—like much brighter—and then broke.”