Hollow City

  Then I’m at my own funeral, looking up from my grave at a rectangle of gray sky.

  My three uncles peer down, their fat necks bulging from starched white collars.

  Uncle Les: What a pity. Right?

  Uncle Jack: You really gotta feel for Frank and Maryann right now.

  Uncle Les: Yeah. What’re people gonna think? Uncle Bobby: They’ll think the kid had a screw loose. Which he did.

  Uncle Jack: I knew it, though. That he’d pull something like this one day. He had that look, you know? Just a little …

  Uncle Bobby: Screwy.

  Uncle Les: That comes from his dad’s side of the family, not ours.

  Uncle Jack: Still. Terrible.

  Uncle Bobby: Yeah.

  Uncle Jack: …

  Uncle Les: …

  Uncle Bobby: Buffet?

  My uncles shuffle away. Ricky comes along, his green hair extra spiked for the occasion.

  Bro. Now that you’re dead, can I have your bike?

  I try to shout: I’m not dead!

  I am just far away I’m sorry

  But the words echo back at me, trapped inside my head.

  The minister peers down. It’s Golan, holding a Bible, dressed in robes. He grins.

  We’re waiting for you, Jacob.

  A shovelful of dirt rains down on me.

  We’re waiting.

  * * *

  I bolted upright, suddenly awake, my mouth dry as paper. Emma was next to me, hands on my shoulders. “Jacob! Thank God—you gave us a scare!”

  “I did?”

  “You were having a nightmare,” said Millard. He was seated across from us, looking like an empty suit of clothes starched into position. “Talking in your sleep, too.”

  “I was?”

  Emma dabbed sweat from my forehead with one of the first-class napkins. (Real cloth!) “You were,” she said. “But it sounded like gobbledygook. I couldn’t understand a word.”

  I looked around self-consciously, but no else seemed to have noticed. The other children were spread throughout the car, catnapping, daydreaming out the window, or playing cards.

  I sincerely hoped I was not starting to lose it.

  “Do you often have nightmares?” asked Millard. “You should describe them to Horace. He’s good at sussing hidden meanings from dreams.”

  Emma rubbed my arm. “You sure you’re all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, and because I don’t like being fussed over, I changed the subject. Seeing that Millard had the Tales of the Peculiar open in his lap, I said, “Doing some light reading?”

  “Studying,” he replied. “And to think I once dismissed these as just stories for children. They are, in fact, extraordinarily complex—cunning, even—in the way they conceal secret information about peculiardom. It would take me years, probably, to decode them all.”

  “But what good is that to us now?” Emma said. “What good are loops if they can be breached by hollowgast? Even the secret ones in that book will be found out eventually.”

  “Maybe it was just the one loop that was breached,” I said hopefully. “Maybe the hollow in Miss Wren’s loop was a freak, somehow.”

  “A peculiar hollow!” said Millard. “That’s amusing—but no. He was no accident. I’m certain these ‘enhanced’ hollows were an integral part of the assault on our loops.”

  “But how?” said Emma. “What’s changed about hollows that they can get into loops now?”

  “That’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal,” said Millard. “We don’t know a lot about hollows, having never had the chance to examine one in a controlled setting. But it’s thought that, like normals, they lack something which you and I and everyone in this train car possesses—some essential peculiarness—which is what allows us to interact with loops; to bind with and be absorbed into them.”

  “Like a key,” I said.

  “Something like that,” said Millard. “Some believe that, like blood or spinal fluid, our peculiarness has physical substance. Others think it’s inside us but insubstantial. A second soul.”

  “Huh,” I said. I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn’t a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn’t we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.

  “I hate all that crackpot stuff,” said Emma. “The idea that you could capture the second soul in a jar? Gives me the quivers.”

  “And yet, over the years, some attempts have been made to do just this,” said Millard. “What did that wight soldier say to you, Emma? ‘I wish I could bottle what you have,’ or something to that effect?”

  Emma shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”

  “The theory goes that if somehow our peculiar essence could be distilled and captured—in a bottle, as he said, or more likely a petri dish—then perhaps that essence could also be transferred from one being to another. If this were possible, imagine the black market in peculiar souls that might spring up among the wealthy and unscrupulous. Peculiarities like your spark or Bronwyn’s great strength sold to the highest bidder!”

  “That’s disgusting,” I said.

  “Most peculiars agree with you,” said Millard, “which is why such research was outlawed many years ago.”

  “As if the wights cared about our laws,” said Emma.

  “But the whole idea seems crazy,” I said. “It couldn’t really work, could it?”

  “I didn’t think so,” said Millard. “At least, not until yesterday. Now I’m not so sure.”

  “Because of the hollow in the menagerie loop?”

  “Right. Before yesterday I wasn’t even certain I believed in a ‘second soul.’ To my mind, there was only one compelling argument for its existence: that when a hollowgast consumes enough of us, it transforms into a different sort of creature—one that can travel through time loops.”

  “It becomes a wight,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “But only if it consumes peculiars. It can eat as many normals as it likes and it will never turn into a wight. Therefore, we must have something normals lack.”

  “But that hollow at the menagerie didn’t become a wight,” said Emma. “It became a hollow that could enter loops.”

  “Which makes me wonder if the wights have been tinkering with nature,” said Millard, “vis-à-vis the transference of peculiar souls.”

  “I don’t even want to think about it,” said Emma. “Can we please, please talk about something else?”

  “But where would they even get the souls?” I asked. “And how?”

  “That’s it, I’m sitting somewhere else,” Emma said, and she got up to find another seat.

  Millard and I rode in silence for a while. I couldn’t stop imagining being strapped to a table while a cabal of evil doctors removed my soul. How would they do it? With a needle? A knife?

  To derail this morbid train of thought, I tried changing the subject again. “How did we all get to be peculiar in the first place?” I asked.

  “No one’s certain,” Millard answered. “There are legends, though.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some people believe we’re descended from a handful of peculiars who lived a long, long time ago,” he said. “They were very powerful—and enormous, like the stone giant we found.”

  I said, “Why are we so small, then, if we used to be giants?”

  “The story goes that over the years, as we multiplied, our power diluted. As we became less powerful, we got smaller, too.”

  “That’s all pretty hard to swallow,” I said. “I feel about as powerful as an ant.”

  “Ants are quite powerful, actually, relative to their size.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “The thing I really don’t get is, why me? I never asked to be this way. Who decided?”

  It was a rhetorical question; I wasn’t really expecting an answer, but Millard gave me one anyway. “To quote a famous peculiar: ‘At the heart of nature’s mystery lies another
mystery.’ ”

  “Who said that?”

  “We know him as Perplexus Anomalous. An invented name, probably, for a great thinker and philosopher. Perplexus was a cartographer, too. He drew the very first edition of the Map of Days, a thousand-something years ago.”

  I chuckled. “You talk like a teacher sometimes. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “All the time,” Millard said. “I would’ve liked to try my hand at teaching. If I hadn’t been born like this.”

  “You would’ve been great at it.”

  “Thank you,” he said. Then he went quiet, and in the silence I could feel him dreaming it: scenes from a life that might’ve been. After a while he said, “I don’t want you to think that I don’t like being invisible. I do. I love being peculiar, Jacob—it’s the very core of who I am. But there are days I wish I could turn it off.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. But of course I didn’t. My peculiarity had its challenges, but at least I could participate in society.

  The door to our compartment slid open. Millard quickly flipped up the hood of his jacket to hide his face—or rather, his apparent lack of one.

  A young woman stood in the door. She wore a uniform and held a box of goods for sale. “Cigarettes?” she asked. “Chocolate?”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  She looked at me. “You’re an American.”

  “Afraid so.”

  She gave me a pitying smile. “Hope you’re having a nice trip.

  You picked an awkward time to visit Britain.”

  I laughed. “So I’ve been told.”

  She went out. Millard shifted his body to watch her go. “Pretty,” he said distantly.

  It occurred to me that it had probably been a lot of years since he’d seen a girl outside of those few who lived on Cairnholm. But what chance would someone like him have with a normal girl, anyway?

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he said.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d been looking at him any particular way. “Like what?”

  “Like you feel bad for me.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  But I did.

  Then Millard stood up from his seat, took off his coat, and disappeared. I didn’t see him again for a while.

  * * *

  The hours rolled on, and the children passed them by telling stories. They told stories about famous peculiars and about Miss Peregrine in the strange, exciting, early days of her loop, and eventually they came around to telling their own stories. Some I had heard before—like how Enoch had raised the dead in his father’s funeral parlor, or the way Bronwyn, at the tender age of ten, had snapped her abusive stepfather’s neck without quite meaning to—but others were new to me. For as old as they were, the kids didn’t often lapse into bouts of nostalgia.

  Horace’s dreams had started when he was just six, but he didn’t realize they were predictive of anything until two years later, when one night he dreamed about the sinking of the Lusitania and the next day heard about it on the radio. Hugh, from a young age, had loved honey more than any other food, and at five he’d started eating honeycomb along with it—so ravenously that the first time he accidentally swallowed a bee, he didn’t notice until he felt it buzzing around in his stomach. “The bee didn’t seem to mind a bit,” Hugh said, “so I shrugged and went on eating. Pretty soon I had a whole hive down there.” When the bees needed to pollinate, he’d gone to find a field of blooming flowers, and that’s where he met Fiona, who was sleeping among them.

  Hugh told her story, too. Fiona was a refugee from Ireland, he said, where she’d been growing food for the people in her village during the famine of the 1840s—until she was accused of being a witch and chased out. This is something Hugh had gleaned only after years of subtle, nonverbal communication with Fiona, who didn’t speak not because she couldn’t, Hugh said, but “because the things she’d witnessed in the famine were so horrific they stole her voice away.”

  Then it was Emma’s turn, but she had no interest in telling her story.

  “Why not?” whined Olive. “Come on, tell about when you found out you were peculiar!”

  “It’s ancient history,” Emma muttered, “relevant to nothing. And hadn’t we better be thinking about the future instead of the past?”

  “Someone’s being a grumplepuss,” said Olive.

  Emma got up and left, heading to the back of the car where no one would bother her. I let a minute or two pass so that she wouldn’t feel hounded, then went and sat next to her. She saw me coming and hid behind a newspaper, pretending to read.

  “Because I don’t care to discuss it,” she said from behind the paper. “That’s why!”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yes, but you were going to ask, so I saved you the trouble.”

  “Just to make it fair,” I said, “I’ll tell you something about me first.”

  She peeked over the top of the paper, slightly intrigued. “But don’t I know everything about you already?”

  “Ha,” I said. “Not hardly.”

  “All right, then tell me three things about you I don’t know. Dark secrets only, please. Quickly, now!”

  I racked my brain for interesting factoids about myself, but I could only think of embarrassing ones. “Okay, one. When I was little, I was really sensitive to seeing violence on TV. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t real. Even if it was just a cartoon mouse punching a cartoon cat, I would freak out and start crying.”

  Her newspaper came down some. “Bless your tender soul!” she said. “And now look at you—impaling monstrous creatures right through their leaky eyeballs.”

  “Two,” I said. “I was born on Halloween, and until I was eight years old my parents had me convinced that the candy people gave out when I knocked on their doors was birthday presents.”

  “Hmm,” she said, lowering the paper a little more. “That one was only middlingly dark. You may continue nevertheless.”

  “Three. When we first met, I was convinced you were about to cut my throat. But scared as I was, there was this tiny voice in my head saying: If this is the last face you ever see, at least it’s a beautiful one.”

  The paper fell to her lap. “Jacob, that’s …” She looked at the floor, then out the window, then back at me. “What a sweet thing to say.”

  “It’s true,” I said, and slid my hand across the seat to hers.

  “Okay, your turn.”

  “I’m not trying to hide anything, you know. It’s just that those musty stories make me feel ten years old again, and unwanted. That never goes away, no matter how many magical summer days have come between.”

  That hurt was still with her, raw even all these years later.

  “I want to know you,” I said. “Who you are, where you come from. That’s all.”

  She shifted uncomfortably. “I never told you about my parents?”

  “All I know I heard from Golan, that night in the icehouse. He said they gave you away to a traveling circus?”

  “No, not quite.” She slid down in her seat, her voice falling to a whisper. “I suppose it’s better for you to know the truth than rumors and speculation. So, here goes.

  “I started manifesting when I was just ten. Kept setting my bed on fire in my sleep, until my parents took away all my sheets and made me lie on a bare metal cot in a bare room with nothing flammable at all in it. They thought I was a pyromaniac and a liar, and the fact that I myself never seemed to get burned was as good as proof. But I couldn’t be burned, something even I didn’t know at first. I was ten: I didn’t know fig about anything! It’s a very scary thing, manifesting without understanding what’s happening to you, though it’s a fright nearly all peculiar children experience because so few of us are born to peculiar parents.”

  “I can imagine,” I said.

  “One day, as far as anyone knew, I was as common as rice pudding, and the next I felt a curious itch in the palms of my hands. They grew red and sw
ollen, then hot—so hot that I ran to the grocer’s and buried them in a case of frozen cod! When the fish began to thaw and stink, the grocer chased me home again, where he demanded that my mother pay for all I’d ruined. My hands were burning up by this time; the ice had only made it worse! Finally, they caught fire, and I was sure I’d gone stark raving mad.”

  “What did your parents think?” I asked.

  “My mother, who was a deeply superstitious person, ran out of the house and never came back. She thought I was a demon, arrived straight from Hell via her womb. The old man took a different approach. He beat me and locked me in my room, and when I tried to burn through the door he tied me down with asbestos sheets. Kept me like that for days, feeding me once in a while by hand, since he didn’t trust me enough to untie me. Which was a good thing for him, ’cause the minute he did I would’ve burned him black.”

  “I wish you had,” I said.

  “That’s sweet of you. But it wouldn’t have done any good. My parents were horrible people—but if they hadn’t been, and if I’d stayed with them much longer, there’s no question the hollows would’ve found me. I owe my life to two people: my younger sister, Julia, who freed me late one night so that I could finally run away; and Miss Peregrine, who discovered me a month later, working as a fire-eater at a traveling circus.” Emma smiled wistfully. “The day I met her, that’s what I call my birthday. The day I met my true mum.”

  My heart melted a little. “Thank you for telling me,” I said. Hearing Emma’s story made me feel closer to her, and less alone in my own confusion. Every peculiar had struggled through a period of painful uncertainty. Every peculiar had been tried. The glaring difference between us was that my parents still loved me—and despite the problems I’d had with them, I loved them, too, in my own quiet way. The thought that I was hurting them now was a constant ache.

  What did I owe them? How could it be reckoned against the debt I owed Miss Peregrine, or my obligation to my grandfather—or the sweet, heavy thing I felt for Emma, which seemed to grow stronger every time I looked at her?

  The scales tipped always toward the latter. But eventually, if I lived through this, I would have to face up to the decision I had made and the pain I had caused.