Hollow City

  Bekhir stopped the horses just shy of the town gates. “This is as far as we go,” he said. “We’re not much welcome in towns. You don’t want the sort of attention we’d draw.”

  It was hard to imagine anyone objecting to these kindly people. Then again, similar prejudices were among the reasons peculiars had withdrawn from society. Such was the way the sad world turned.

  The children and I dismounted. I stood behind the others, hoping no one would notice my trembling legs. Just as we were about to go, Bekhir’s boy sprang down from his father’s horse and cried, “Wait! Take me with you!”

  “I thought you were going to talk to him,” Emma said to Millard.

  “I did,” Millard replied.

  The boy pulled a knapsack from the saddlebag and slung it over his shoulder. He was packed and ready to go. “I can cook,” he said, “and chop wood, and ride a horse, and tie all sorts of knots!”

  “Someone give him a merit badge,” said Enoch.

  “I’m afraid it’s impossible,” Emma said to him gently.

  “But I’m like you—and becoming more so all the time!” The boy began to unbuckle his pants. “Look what’s happening to me!”

  Before anyone could stop him, he’d sent his pants to his ankles. The girls gasped and looked away. Hugh shouted, “Keep your trousers on, you depraved lunatic!”

  But there was nothing to see—he was invisible from the mid-section down. Morbid curiosity compelled me to peek at the underside of his visible half, which earned me a crystal-clear view of the inner workings of his bowels.

  “Look how much I’ve disappeared since yesterday,” Radi said, his voice panicky. “Soon I’ll be gone altogether!”

  The Gypsy men gawked and murmured. Even their horses seemed disturbed, shying away from what seemed to be a disembodied child.

  “I’ll be winged!” said Enoch. “He’s only half there.”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” said Bronwyn. “Can’t we keep him?”

  “We aren’t some traveling circus you can join whenever the notion takes you,” said Enoch. “We’re on a dangerous mission to save our ymbryne, and in no position to play babysitter to a clueless new peculiar!”

  The boy’s eyes grew wide and began to water, and he let his knapsack slide off his shoulder and fall to the road.

  Emma took Enoch aside. “That was too harsh,” she said. “Now tell him you’re sorry.”

  “I won’t. This is a ridiculous waste of our precious and dwindling time.”

  “These people saved our lives!”

  “Our lives wouldn’t have needed saving if they hadn’t stuck us in that blessed cage!”

  Emma gave up on Enoch and turned to the boy. “If circumstances were different, we’d welcome you with open arms. But as it stands, our entire civilization and way of life are in danger of being snuffed out. So it’s rather bad timing, you see.”

  “It isn’t fair,” the boy moped. “Why couldn’t I have started disappearing ages ago? Why did it have to happen now?”

  “Every peculiar’s ability manifests in its own time,” said Millard. “Some in infancy; others not until they’re quite old. I once heard of a man who didn’t realize he could levitate objects with his mind until he was ninety-two years of age.”

  “I was lighter than air from the minute I was born,” Olive said proudly. “I popped out of me mum and floated straight up to the hospital ceiling! Only thing that stopped me from rolling out the window and into the clouds was the umbilical cord. They say the doctor fainted from the shock!”

  “You’re still quite shocking, love,” Bronwyn said, giving her a reassuring pat on the back.

  Millard, visible thanks to the coat and boots he wore, went to the boy. “What does your father think about all of this?” he said.

  “Naturally, we don’t want him to go,” Bekhir said, “but how can we properly care for our son if we can’t even see him? He wants to leave—and I wonder if perhaps he’d be better off among his own kind.”

  “Do you love him?” Millard asked bluntly. “Does he love you?”

  Bekhir’s brow furrowed. He was a man of traditional sensibilities, and the question made him uncomfortable. But after some hemming and hawing, he growled, “Of course. He’s my child.”

  “Then you are his kind,” said Millard. “The boy belongs with you, not us.”

  Bekhir was loath to show emotion in front of his men, but at this I saw his eyes flicker and his jaw tighten. He nodded, looked down at his son, and said, “Come on, then. Pick up your bag and let’s go. Your mother’ll have tea waiting.”

  “All right, Papa,” the boy said, seeming at once disappointed and relieved.

  “You’ll be fine,” Millard assured the boy. “Better than fine. And when this is all over, I’ll look for you. There are more like us out there, and we’ll find them one day, together.”

  “Promise?” the boy said, his eyes full of hope.

  “I do,” said Millard.

  And with that the boy climbed back onto his father’s horse, and we turned and walked through the gates into town.

  The town was named Coal. Not Coaltown or Coalville. Just Coal. The stuff was everywhere, piled in gritty drifts by the side doors of houses, wafting up from the chimneys as oily smoke, smeared on the overalls of men walking to work. We hurried past them toward the depot in a tight pack.

  “Quickly now,” Emma said. “No talking. Eyes down.”

  It was a well-established rule that we were to avoid unnecessary eye contact with normals, because looks could lead to conversations, and conversations to questions, and peculiar children found questions posed by normal adults difficult to answer in a way that didn’t invite still more questions. Of course, if anything was going to invite questions, it was a group of bedraggled-looking children traveling alone during wartime—especially with a big, sharp-taloned bird of prey perched on one of the girls’ shoulders—but the townspeople hardly seemed to notice us. They haunted the laundry lines and pub doorways of Coal’s twisting lanes, drooping like wilted flowers, eyes flicking toward us and away again. They had other worries.

  The train depot was so small I wondered if trains ever bothered stopping there. The only covered portion was the ticket counter, a little hut in the middle of an open-air platform. Inside the hut was a man asleep in a chair, bottle-thick bifocals slipping down his nose.

  Emma rapped sharply on the window, startling the clerk awake. “Eight tickets to London!” she said. “We must be there this very afternoon.”

  The clerk peered at us through the glass. Took off his bifocals and wiped them clean and put them on again, just to make sure he was seeing properly. I’m sure we were a shocking sight: our clothes were mud-splotched, our hair greasy and sticking up at odd angles. We probably stank, too.

  “So sorry,” the clerk said. “The train is full.”

  I looked around. Aside from a few people dozing on benches, the depot was empty.

  “That’s absurd!” said Emma. “Sell us the tickets at once or I shall report you to the rail authority for child discrimination!”

  I might’ve handled the clerk with a softer touch, but Emma had no patience for the self-important authority of petty bureaucrats.

  “If there were any such statute,” the clerk replied, his nose rising disdainfully, “it would certainly not apply to you. There’s a war on, you know, and more important things to be hauled about her majesty’s countryside than children and animals!” He gave Miss Peregrine a hard look. “Which aren’t allowed in any case!”

  A train hissed into the station and squealed to a stop. The conductor stuck his head out of one of its windows and shouted, “Eight-thirty to London! All aboard!” The bench-sleepers in the depot roused themselves and began to shuffle across the platform.

  A man in a gray suit shoved past us to the window. He pushed money at the clerk, received a ticket in exchange, and hurried off toward the train.

  “You said it was full!” Emma said, rapping hard on the glass. ??
?You can’t do that!”

  “That gentleman bought a first-class ticket,” the clerk said.

  “Now be gone with you, pestilent little beggars! Go find pockets to pick somewhere else!”

  Horace stepped to the ticket window and said, “Beggars, by definition, do not carry large sums of money,” and then he reached into his coat pocket and slapped a fat wad of bills down on the counter. “If it’s first-class tickets you’re selling, then that’s what we’ll have!”

  The clerk sat up straight, gaping at the pile of money. The rest of us gaped too, baffled as to where Horace had gotten it. Riffling through the bills, the clerk said, “Why, this is enough to buy seats to an entire first-class car!”

  “Then give us an entire car!” said Horace. “That way you can be sure we’ll pick no one’s pocket.”

  The clerk turned red and stammered, “Y-yes sir—sorry, sir—and I hope you won’t take my previous comments as anything other than jest …”

  “Just give us the blasted tickets so we can get on the train!”

  “Right away, sir!”

  The clerk slid a stack of first-class tickets toward us. “Enjoy your trip!” he said. “And please don’t tell anyone I said so, sirs and madams, but if I were you, I’d hide that bird out of sight. The conductors won’t like it, first-class tickets or not.”

  As we strode away from the counter with tickets in hand, Horace’s chest puffed out like a peacock’s.

  “Where on earth did you get all that money?” said Emma.

  “I rescued it from Miss Peregrine’s dresser drawer before the house burned,” Horace replied. “Tailored a special pocket in my coat to keep it safe.”

  “Horace, you’re a genius!” said Bronwyn.

  “Would a real genius have given away every cent of our money like that?” said Enoch. “Did we really need an entire first-class car?”

  “No,” said Horace, “but making that man look stupid felt good, didn’t it?”

  “I suppose it did,” Enoch said.

  “That’s because the true purpose of money is to manipulate others and make them feel lesser than you.”

  “I’m not entirely sure about that,” Emma said.

  “Only kidding!” said Horace. “It’s to buy clothes, of course.”

  We were about to board the train when the conductor stopped us. “Let’s see your tickets!” he said, and he was reaching for the stack in Horace’s hand when he noticed Bronwyn stuffing something into her coat. “What’s that you’ve got there?” the conductor said, rounding on her suspiciously.

  “What’s what I’ve got where?” Bronwyn replied, trying to seem casual while holding her coat closed over a wriggling lump.

  “In your coat there!” the conductor said. “Don’t toy with me, girl.”

  “It’s, ahhh …” Bronwyn tried to think fast and failed. “A bird?”

  Emma’s head fell. Enoch put a hand over his eyes and groaned.

  “No pets on the train!” the conductor barked.

  “But you don’t understand,” said Bronwyn. “I’ve had her ever since I was a child … and we must get on this train … and we paid so much for our tickets!”

  “Rules are rules!” the conductor said, his patience fraying.

  “Do not toy with me!”

  Emma’s head bopped up, her face brightening. “A toy!” she said.

  “Excuse me?” said the conductor.

  “It isn’t a real bird, conductor sir. We’d never dream of breaking the rules like that. It’s my sister’s favorite toy, you see, and she thinks you mean to take it away from her.” She clasped her hands pitifully, imploring. “You wouldn’t take away a child’s favorite toy, would you?”

  The conductor studied Bronwyn doubtfully. “She looks too old for toys, wouldn’t you say?”

  Emma leaned in and whispered, “She’s a bit delayed, you see …”

  Bronwyn frowned at this but had no choice but to play along. The conductor stepped toward her. “Let’s see this toy, then.”

  Moment of truth. We held our breath as Bronwyn opened her coat, reached inside, and slowly withdrew Miss Peregrine. When I saw the bird, I thought for one terrible moment that she had died. Miss Peregrine had gone completely stiff, and lay in Bronwyn’s hand with her eyes closed and legs sticking out rigidly. Then I realized she was just playing along.

  “See?” Bronwyn said. “Birdy ain’t real. She’s stuffed.”

  “I saw it moving earlier!” the conductor said.

  “It’s a—ehm—a wind-up model,” said Bronwyn. “Watch.”

  Bronwyn knelt down and set Miss Peregrine on the ground on her side, then reached under her wing and pretended to wind something. A moment later Miss Peregrine’s eyes flew open and she began to toddle around, her head swiveling mechanically and legs kicking out as if spring-loaded. Finally she jerked to a stop and toppled over, stiff as a board. Truly an Oscar-worthy performance.

  The conductor seemed almost—but not quite—convinced.

  “Well,” he hemmed, “if it’s a toy, you won’t mind putting it away in your toy chest.” He nodded at the trunk, which Bronwyn had set down on the platform.

  Bronwyn hesitated. “It isn’t a—”

  “Yes, fine, that’s no bother,” said Emma, flipping open the trunk’s latches. “Put it away now, sister!”

  “But what if there’s no air in there?” Bronwyn hissed at Emma.

  “Then we’ll poke some blessed holes in the side of it!” Emma hissed back.

  Bronwyn picked up Miss Peregrine and set her gently inside the trunk. “Ever so sorry, ma’am,” she whispered, lowering and then latching the lid.

  The conductor finally took our tickets. “First class!” he said, surprised. “Your car’s all the way down front.” He pointed to the far end of the platform. “You’d best hurry!”

  “Now he tells us!” said Emma, and we took off down the platform at a jog.

  With a chug of steam and a metallic groan, the train began to move beside us. For now it was just inching along, but with each turn of its wheels it sped up a little more.

  We came even with the first-class car. Bronwyn was first to jump through the open door. She set her trunk down in the aisle and reached out a hand to help Olive on board.

  Then, from behind us, a voice shouted, “Stop! Get away from there!”

  It wasn’t the conductor’s voice. This one was deeper, more authoritative.

  “I swear,” Enoch said, “if one more person tries to stop us getting on this train …”

  A gunshot rang out, and the sudden shock of it made my feet tangle. I stumbled out the doorway and back onto the platform.

  “I said stop!” the voice bellowed again, and looking over my shoulder I saw a uniformed soldier standing on the platform, his knees bent in firing stance, rifle aimed at us. With a pair of loud cracks he volleyed two more bullets over our heads, just to drive his point home. “Off the train and on your knees!” he said, striding toward us.

  I thought of making a run for it, but then I caught a glimpse of the soldier’s eyes, and their bulging, pupil-less whites convinced me not to. He was a wight, and I knew he wouldn’t think twice about shooting any one of us. Better not to give him an excuse.

  Bronwyn and Olive must’ve been thinking along the same lines, because they got off the train and dropped to their knees alongside the rest of us.

  So close, I thought. We were so close.

  The train pulled out of the station without us, our best hope for saving Miss Peregrine steaming away into the distance.

  And Miss Peregrine with it, I realized with a queasy jolt. Bronwyn had left her trunk on board the train! Something automatic took hold of me and I leapt up to chase down the train—but then the barrel of a rifle appeared just inches from my face, and I felt all the power drain from my muscles in an instant.

  “Not. Another. Step,” the soldier said.

  I sank back to the ground.

  * * *

  We were on our knees, h
ands up, hearts hammering. The soldier circled us, tense, his rifle aimed and his finger on its trigger. It was the closest, longest look I’d gotten at a wight since Dr. Golan. He had on a standard-issue British army uniform—khaki shirt tucked into wool pants, black boots, helmet—but he wore them awkwardly, the pants crooked and the helmet seated too far back on his head, like a costume he wasn’t used to wearing yet. He seemed nervous, too, his head cocking this way and that as he sized us up. He was outnumbered, and though we were just a bunch of unarmed children, we’d been responsible for the death of one wight and two hollowgast in the last three days. He was scared of us, and that, more than anything else, made me scared of him. His fear made him unpredictable.

  He pulled a radio from his belt and chattered into it. There was a burst of static, and then a moment later an answer came back. It was all in code; I couldn’t understand a word.

  He ordered us to our feet. We stood.

  “Where are we going?” Olive asked timidly.

  “For a walk,” he said. “A nice, orderly walk.” He had a clipped, vowel-flattened way of speaking that told me he was from somewhere else but faking a British accent, though not particularly well. Wights were supposed to be masters of disguise, but this one was clearly not a star pupil.

  “You will not fall out of line,” he said, staring down each of us in turn. “You will not run. I have fifteen rounds in my clip—enough to put two holes in each of you. And don’t think I don’t see your jacket, invisible boy. Make me chase you and I’ll slice off your invisible thumbs for souvenirs.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Millard.

  “No talking!” the soldier boomed. “Now march!”

  We marched past the ticket booth, the clerk now gone, then down off the platform, out of the depot, and into the streets. Though the denizens of Coal hadn’t given us a second glance when we’d come through town earlier, now their heads swiveled like owls as we trudged by in single file, at gunpoint. The soldier kept us in tight formation, barking at us when anyone strayed too far. I was at the rear, him behind me, and I could hear his ammunition belt clinking as we walked. We were heading back the way we’d come, straight out of town.