A Map of Days

by Ransom Riggs

  Curled on a sofa in the corner was Noor. Her body filled the room with a soft orange glow. She wasn’t moving.

  I ran to her. Her hair was covering her face. I rolled her gently onto her back, squinting against the light that shone from inside her. I pressed two fingers to her neck. Her skin was hot to the touch. After a moment, I found an artery—and a pulse—and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  A strange, keening wail sounded from across the room. I spun to look. H lay splayed on his back on an old Persian rug. His hollowgast sat astride him, one muscled tongue lashed around H’s waist and the other two around his wrists. The thing looked like it was about to crack open his skull and eat his brain.

  “Get away!” I shouted, and the wailing stopped as the hollow hissed at me.

  It was not about to kill him, I realized. Its friend was dying.

  It was crying.

  I summoned a few words of hollowspeak to shoo the creature away. It hissed at me again, unwound its tongues reluctantly from H’s wrists, and scuttled into the kitchen.

  I crouched beside the old man. Blood had soaked through his shirt, his pants, and the carpet beneath him.

  “H. It’s Jacob Portman. Can you hear me?”

  He sharpened. His eyes fixed on me.

  “Damn it, son,” he said, scowling, “you really don’t follow orders for shit.”

  “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

  I began to slide my arms underneath him. He groaned in pain, and the hollowgast let out a howl from the kitchen.

  “Forget it. I’ve lost too much blood already.”

  “You can make it. We just have to—”

  He wrenched away from me. “No!” His voice and his arms were so strong that it shocked me, but then he collapsed back to the floor. “Don’t make me sic Horatio on you. The whole neighborhood is crawling with Leo’s guys. If I go out there again, it’ll rain bullets.”

  Noor moaned from the corner. I looked over to see her shift on the couch, eyes still closed.

  “She’ll be okay,” said H. “She got sleep-dusted pretty good, but she’ll come out of it.”

  He winced, and his eyes went a little glassy.

  “Water.”

  I sprang up to run to the kitchen, but before I could take three steps, a hollowgast tongue was already sliding through the air past me, wrapped around a sloshing glass. I helped H sit up while the hollow’s tongue tipped the glass to his lips, marveling at the strange tenderness of it.

  H finished drinking, and the hollow’s tongue ferried the glass away and set it down on the coffee table. On a coaster.

  “You’ve got him trained pretty good,” I said.

  “Should have by now,” H replied. “Been together forty years. We’re like an old married couple.” He tipped his head to look down at himself. “God, they made Swiss cheese out of me.” He coughed a mist of blood into the air.

  The hollow groaned and bounced on its haunches. It had crept out of the kitchen and was crouched nearby, and its black eyes wept oily tears down its cheeks and onto a stained handkerchief tied around its neck.

  I looked at H, and suddenly I wanted to cry, too. It’s happening again, I thought, a sob forming in my chest. I’m losing another one.

  I swallowed back the sob and managed to say, “What happened?”

  “Should’ve been a piece of cake,” he croaked. “A simple extraction. If it weren’t for Horatio, who carried us both out of there, we’d all be Leo’s prisoners now.” He sighed. “Guess I got old.”

  “Why didn’t you let me help you?”

  “Couldn’t risk you getting hurt,” he said. He looked past me at the ceiling, picturing something. “Abe’s special boy. Baby Moses in the reeds.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  His head turned to Noor. “You can help Miss Pradesh now. I’m dying, so there’s nobody else.”

  “What do I do? Where do we go?”

  “Out of New York, for starters.”

  “We could go to Devil’s Acre.”

  “No. The ymbrynes would only send her back to Leo. They don’t know how important she is.” He was fading, starting to mumble. “Neither does she.”

  “Why is she important?”

  “You know, before she got dusted, she saved my ass about three times today? Thought I was supposed to be saving hers.” He laughed weakly. “Too bad her lightbulb trick can’t stop bullets.”

  His thoughts were running away from him. His eyes beginning to close.

  I put my hand on his cheek, his rough beard, and forced him look at me. “H, why is she important?”

  “I made a vow to your grandfather. Not to involve you.”

  “We’re way past that now.”

  He nodded sadly. “I guess we are.” He drew a shaky breath. “She’s one of the seven whose coming was foretold.”

  Of all the things I thought he might say to me, that was not among them.

  “One of the seven. Seven what?”

  “They will be the emancipators of peculiardom. So says the Apocryphon.”

  “What is that? Some kind of prophecy?”

  “Writings from long ago. Her birth signals the arrival of a new age. A very dangerous one.” He grimaced in pain and shut his eyes. “That’s why those people are hunting her.”

  “The ones with the helicopter and the black cars.”

  “The same,” he said.

  “They’re one of the clans?”

  “No. Much worse. A very old, very secret society of normals. Who want to subvert and”—he winced, sucking air through his teeth—“control us.” He was losing his breath now, gasping between words. “No time for history lessons. Take the girl to V. She’s the last of us. The last of the hunters.”

  “V,” I said, my mind starting to reel. “From Abe’s mission log. The one he trained himself.”

  “Yes. She lives in the big wind. Doesn’t want to be found, so be careful. Horatio, the map is in the safe . . .”

  The hollowgast grunted, loped over to the wall, and moved a picture aside to reveal a small safe. While Horatio spun the number wheel, I focused on H. I could feel him slackening.

  I squeezed his hand. “H, I have to know something.” He was slipping away, and the idea that this last, best link to my grandfather’s secrets was about to be severed shook something loose in me. Something I’d been trying to bury since I heard it.

  “Why would someone call my grandfather a murderer?”

  H looked at me with new intensity. “Who said that to you?”

  I leaned in close. He was shaking. I told him, quickly, about the insane things Leo had accused Abe of. Stealing his goddaughter. Killing people. Not just people—kids.

  H might have said, The wights made it all up. He might have said, simply, It’s a lie. But he didn’t say either of those things.

  He said, “So you know.”

  My vision blurred for a moment. And doubt, like a virus, began to spread through me. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

  I had H by the shoulders. I was shaking him. The hollowgast screamed, whipped a tongue around my waist, and pulled me away from H. I was flung halfway across the room, skidding across the floor into the leg of a table.

  A terrible fear had invaded me—that there had been truth to Leo’s accusations. That this was my grandfather’s secret: He had not been trying to protect me from a loss of normalcy, or from the hollows, or from some mysterious band of enemies in black cars. He had been protecting me from himself.

  I picked myself up off the floor. The hollow was hissing at me, bent over H, blocking him from view. I commanded it in hollowspeak to move, but it was fighting me. Or maybe H and the hollow were both fighting me now.

  I ran toward the hollowgast, yelling, Go, go, let him go—and it did, leaping away from H and up to
the ceiling, where it clung to a light fixture with its tongues. I fixed, for a split second, on an odd detail: A forest of tree-shaped air fresheners suspended from the ceiling. To combat the smell, of course. Because the hollow lived here.

  I knelt down over H. “I’m sorry.” This time I didn’t touch him. “Please. Tell me what he did.”

  “They fooled us. Seven times, they fooled us.”

  “Who? What?”

  “The Society.”

  I was half listening. I only wanted to know one thing. “Did my grandfather kill children?”

  “No. No.”

  “Did he kidnap them?”

  “No.” His face swam with pain—and what seemed like regret. “We thought”—he gasped for breath—“that we were saving them.”

  I sank back on my heels, suddenly light-headed. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t a bad man. I hadn’t realized how much it had been weighing on me. The very notion.

  “We did a lot of good,” he said. “We also made some mistakes. But Abe’s heart was always in the right place. And he loved you very, very much.” His voice had diminished to a whisper.

  A rush of tears stung my eyes.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t. Don’t be.” With the last of his strength, he touched my arm. “The torch is yours now. I’m just sorry there aren’t more people to help you carry it.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try to do you both proud.”

  “I know you will.” He smiled. “Now, it’s time.” He looked up to the ceiling. “Horatio, come down here.”

  The hollow strained against my control.

  “Let him come down,” said H. “A long time ago I made this poor creature a promise, and it’s got to be done before I die. Let him come.”

  I stood up, backed away, and let go. The hollowgast dropped to the floor.

  “Come here, Horatio. I can feel myself going. Come here.”

  The hollow crept toward H. The old man tried to turn away from me.

  “Don’t look. I don’t want this to be your last memory of me.”

  The hollowgast straddled H and sat on his chest. When I realized what was about to happen I tried to command the hollowgast to move—I shouted at the thing—but H was blocking me.

  I could hear him whispering to the creature.

  “You’ve been a real good boy, Horatio. Remember what I taught you. Now, go on.”

  The hollowgast whimpered, trembling.

  “It’s okay,” H said gently, stroking the creature’s clawlike hand. “I’ll be okay.”

  I looked away as it happened, though I’ll never forget the sound it made. When I looked back, his eyes were gone. The sockets looked like ripe plums with bites taken out of them. The hollowgast was chewing, and its shoulders were shaking, and it was making a noise that seemed caught between agony and ecstasy. After a minute it stood and turned slowly away, as if filled with shame.

  “I forgive you,” H said. “I forgive you, brother.”

  He seemed not to be speaking to the hollow, but to the air. To a ghost.

  And then he was gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  The hollowgast and I stared at each other across H’s body. I tried to gain control of it.

  Sit down.

  I had thought, if anything, it would be easier to control now that its master was dead. But my command had no effect.

  I tried a second time, and then a third, with no results. I started planning ways to kill the thing, before it got a mind to come after my eyeballs next, and then Noor’s.

  The hollowgast ratcheted its jaws open all the way, reeled out its three tongues, and made a terrifying sound—a squeal so high-pitched I thought the windows might crack. I grabbed a brass paperweight from a nearby table and steeled myself for a nasty fight.

  But the hollowgast wasn’t coming for me. It was stumbling backward, and after a few steps its back hit the wall and came to a stop. And then the dull, directional pain that told me where the hollow was at all times began, very rapidly, to fade. At the same time, the creature’s tongues began to shrink. They shriveled and curled up and turned a deathly brown, and then they fell off, having withered like dead flowers.

  The hollow was leaning against the wall with its head bowed and chest rising and falling as if it had just run a marathon. Then it collapsed to the floor, and its body began to shiver in the grip of a violent seizure.

  I began to cross the room slowly, approaching it with careful, measured steps in case this was a trick. Then, as suddenly as they’d begun, the seizures stopped. At that same instant, the pain in my gut vanished.

  The hollow began to stir. It turned its head and looked up at me. Its eyes were no longer black, weeping pools; now they were gray and lightening more by the second, gradually turning a pupilless blank.

  The creature was transforming into something else: It was becoming a wight. I watched it for a minute, queasy but fascinated, ready to bash its head in with the paperweight if I needed to.

  Its body began to squirm. The movement seemed involuntary, like its organs were metamorphosing inside its chest cavity. Its breathing, which had been wet and ragged like a hollowgast’s, quieted and became regular. It was almost like witnessing a birth.

  It sat up and looked at me.

  I took a step backward, gripped by a sudden idea. This creature had been H’s constant companion for years. It had seen and overheard all sorts of things. And now it was almost human. What might it remember, if it could remember anything at all? How much of its past life as a hollowgast did a wight retain? How quickly did its memories fade?

  “Say something,” I commanded it. “Speak.”

  It just stared at me. Didn’t even grunt. Maybe wights were born like livestock animals, able to stand and even to run, but mute, knowing nothing.

  It reached out its arm, steadied itself against the wall, and rose slowly to its feet. It shuffled a short distance to an end table and ripped the tablecloth away. I thought for a moment it was going to tie the cloth around its waist—as if the creature had suddenly realized it was naked, and felt shame—but instead it hobbled to H, knelt beside him, and settled the cloth over his face.

  That meant it remembered something: H had been its master.

  “Can you speak?” I said. “I want to hear your voice.”

  It turned to look at me, its face slack, swaying slightly on its feet. Its mouth fell open. A sound came out.

  “Ehhhhhhhhh.”

  A moan, not a word. But it was better than nothing.

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  It rocked its head from side to side. It was trying mightily to form words, but there seemed to be a great fog clouding its brain.

  It opened its mouth again. Sucked in a breath.

  A scream shattered the silence. Noor was sitting up now and terrified, her eyes going from the wight to me to H, dead under his shroud.

  “It’s all right!” I shouted. “Everything’s fine!”

  But my strained tone and everything before her contradicted that. Now that the hollow was transforming, it could be seen by anyone. She had woken suddenly into a terrifying scene and the light inside her, which had been pulsing gently while she was asleep, was now a sharp and brightening star rising up the column of her throat. I moved toward her, repeating that she wasn’t in danger, but she was shaking her head and couldn’t seem to speak. She looked afraid. Not of me or the wight or the dead man—but of the thing inside her she didn’t know how to stop. She was a brand-new peculiar and couldn’t fully control her ability yet.

  I flung myself to the floor and covered my head with my arms. Through split fingers I saw Noor grip the sofa and turn away from me. Like a sneeze made of light, an explosion came out of her nose and mouth: a cone-shaped jet-engine exhalation that roared through th
e air and blasted into the kitchen. The walls, the floor, the whole apartment shook. A hot pressure wave blew over me, singeing the fine hairs on the back of my neck. There was an all-encompassing din of tile cracking and dishes breaking and metal warping, and the sudden, dazzling glare of the blast forced my eyes shut.

  When it had dimmed again, I raised my head. There was a new light in the room—not the reddish-orange glow that had emanated from Noor, but daylight streaming through an open window. Smoke was pouring out of the kitchen. The half hollow was nowhere to be seen. The blast’s recoil had sent Noor flying over the couch and onto the floor, where I could hear her groaning.

  “Noor?” I sat up slowly. “Are you hurt?”

  “My head’s killing me,” I heard her say, and then her face appeared from behind the couch. “Otherwise . . .” She glanced down at herself. “No holes.” Smoke wafted from her lips as she spoke. “You?”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, but—”

  “Jacob.” She stayed behind the couch, watching me. “What are you doing here?”

  I sat up a little straighter. “I came to help you.”

  “That hasn’t been working out so well.” She looked at H and winced. “For anyone.” She let her face fall onto the couch. “I keep telling myself none of this is happening,” she said into the cushions. “But I can’t seem to wake up from the nightmare.” She looked up at me. “Damn. You’re still here.”

  “It’s not a dream,” I said. “I went through the same thing just a few months ago. I know exactly what you’re feeling.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” she said. “Just tell me what the hell is happening.”

  “That would take hours, but the CliffsNotes version is: Bad people want to get their hands you; I’m one of the good guys; and we need to get you out of New York as quickly as possible.”

  “You don’t even know me. Why are you helping me?”

  “It’s a little hard to explain, but it’s kind of the family business.” I glanced behind me at H. “Also, I made a promise.”

  “Does anything you say ever make sense?”