Hollow City

  “Please don’t scream,” I said, thinking not about her probably fictitious father but about what other things might come running.

  Then a small voice piped up behind her, through the doorway she’d been conspicuously blocking. “Who’s there, Sam?”

  The girl’s face pinched in frustration. “Only some children,” she said. “I asked you to keep quiet, Esme.”

  “Are they nice? I want to meet them!”

  “They were just leaving.”

  “There are lots of us and two of you,” Emma said matter-of-factly. “We’re staying here for a bit, and that’s that. You’re not going to scream, either, and we’re not going to steal anything.”

  The girl’s eyes flashed with anger, then dulled. She knew she’d lost. “All right,” she said, “but try anything and I’ll scream and bury this in your belly.” She brandished the letter opener weakly, then lowered it to her waist.

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  “Sam?” said the little voice. “What’s happening now?”

  The girl—Sam—stepped reluctantly aside, revealing a bathroom that danced with the flickering light of candles. There was a sink and a toilet and a bathtub, and in the bathtub a little girl of perhaps five. She peeped curiously at us over the rim. “This is my sister, Esme,” Sam said.

  “Hullo!” said Esme, waggling a rubber duck at us. “Bombs can’t get you when you’re in the bath, did you know that?”

  “I didn’t,” Emma replied.

  “It’s her safe place,” Sam whispered. “We spend every raid in here.”

  “Wouldn’t you be safer in a shelter?” I said.

  “Those are awful places,” Sam said.

  The others had tired of waiting and began coming down the hall. Bronwyn leaned through the doorway and waved hello.

  “Come in!” Esme said, delighted.

  “You’re too trusting,” Sam scolded her. “One day you’re going to meet a bad person and then you’ll be sorry.”

  “They aren’t bad,” said Esme.

  “You can’t tell just by looking.”

  Then Hugh and Horace pressed their faces through the doorway, curious to see whom we’d met, and Olive scooted between their legs and sat in the middle of the floor, and pretty soon all of us were squeezed into the bathroom together, even Melina and the blind brothers, who stood creepily facing the corner. Seeing so many people, Sam’s legs shook and she sat down heavily on the toilet, overwhelmed—but her sister was thrilled, asking everyone’s name as they came in.

  “Where are your parents?” Bronwyn asked.

  “Father’s shooting bad people in the war,” Esme said proudly. She mimed holding a rifle and shouted, “Bang!”

  Emma looked at Sam. “You said your father was upstairs,” she said flatly.

  “You broke into our house,” Sam replied.

  “True.”

  “And your mother?” said Bronwyn. “Where is she?”

  “A long time dead,” Sam said with no apparent feeling. “So when Father went to war they tried shipping us off to family elsewhere—and because Father’s sister in Devon is terribly mean and would only take one of us, they tried shipping Esme and me off to different places. But we jumped off the train and came back.”

  “We won’t be split up,” Esme declared. “We’re sisters.”

  “And you’re afraid if you go to a shelter they’ll find you?” Emma said. “Send you away?”

  Sam nodded. “I won’t let that happen.”

  “It’s safe in the tub,” said Esme. “Maybe you should get in, too. That way we’d all be safe.”

  Bronwyn touched her hand to her heart. “Thank you, love, but we’d never fit!”

  While the others talked, I turned my focus inward, trying to sense the hollows. They weren’t running anymore. The Feeling had stabilized, which meant they weren’t getting closer or farther away, but were probably sniffing around nearby. I took this as a good sign; if they knew where we were, they’d be coming straight for us. Our trail had gone cold. All we had to do was keep our heads down for a while, and then we could follow the pigeon to Miss Wren.

  We huddled on the bathroom floor listening to bombs fall in other parts of the city. Emma found some rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet and insisted on cleaning and bandaging the cut on my head. Then Sam began to hum some tune I knew but couldn’t quite name, and Esme played with her duck in the tub, and ever so slowly, the Feeling began to diminish. For a scant few minutes, that twinkling bathroom became a world unto itself; a cocoon far away from trouble and war.

  But the war outside refused to be ignored for long. Antiaircraft guns rattled. Shrapnel skittered like claws across the roof. The bombs drew closer until their reports were followed by lower, more ominous sounds—the dull thud of walls collapsing. Olive hugged herself. Horace put his fingers in his ears. The blind boys moaned and rocked on their feet. Miss Peregrine wriggled deep into the folds of Bronwyn’s coat and the pigeon trembled in Melina’s lap.

  “What sort of madness have you led us into?” Melina said.

  “I warned you,” Emma replied.

  The water in Esme’s tub rippled with each blast. The little girl clutched her rubber duck and began to cry. Her sobs filled the little room. Sam hummed louder, pausing to whisper, “You’re safe, Esme, you’re safe in here,” between melody lines, but Esme only cried harder. Horace took his fingers out of his ears and tried to distract Esme by making shadow animals on the wall—a crocodile snapping its jaws, a bird flying—but she hardly noticed. Then, the last person I’d expect to care about making a little girl feel better scooted over to the tub.

  “Look here,” Enoch said, “I have a little man who’d like to ride on your duck, and he’d just about fit, too.” From his pocket he took a clay homunculus figure, three inches tall, the last of those he’d made on Cairnholm. Esme’s sobs abated as she watched him bend the clay man’s legs and sit him on the edge of the tub. Then, with a press of Enoch’s thumb against the clay man’s tiny chest, he came to life. Esme’s face glowed with delight as the clay man sprang to his feet and strolled along the lip of the tub.

  “Go on,” said Enoch. “Show her what you can do.”

  The clay man jumped up and clicked his heels, then took an exaggerated bow. Esme laughed and clapped her hands, and when a bomb fell close by a moment later, causing the clay man to lose his balance and fall into the tub, she only laughed harder.

  A sudden chill rolled up the back of my neck and prickled my scalp, and then the Feeling came over me so swiftly and sharply that I groaned and doubled over where I sat. The others saw me and knew instantly what it meant.

  They were coming. They were coming very quickly.

  Of course they were: Enoch had used his power, and I hadn’t even thought to stop him. We might as well have sent up a signal flare.

  I staggered to my feet, the pain attacking me in debilitating waves. I tried to shout—Go, run! Run out the back!—but couldn’t force the words. Emma put her hands on my shoulders. “Collect yourself, love, we need you!”

  Then something was beating at the front door, each impact echoing through the house. “They’re here!” I finally managed to say, but the sound of the door shaking on its hinges had said it for me.

  Everyone scrambled to their feet and squeezed into the hall in a panicked knot. Only Sam and Esme stayed put, baffled and cowering. Emma and I had to pry Bronwyn away from the tub. “We can’t just leave them!” she cried as we dragged her toward the door.

  “Yes, we can!” said Emma. “They’ll be all right—they aren’t the ones the hollows are after!”

  I knew that was true, but I also knew the hollows would tear apart anything in their path, including a couple of normal girls.

  Bronwyn struck the wall in anger, leaving a fist-shaped hole.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to the girls, then let Emma push her into the hall.

  I hobbled after them, my stomach writhing. “Lock this door and don’t open it for anyone
!” I shouted, then looked back to catch a last glimpse of Sam’s face, framed in the closing door, her eyes big and scared.

  I heard a window smash in the front hall. Some suicidal curiosity made me peek around the corner. Squirming through the blackout curtains was a mass of tentacles.

  Then Emma took my arm and yanked me away—down another hall—into a kitchen—out the back door—into an ash-dusted garden—down an alley where the others were running in a loose group. Then someone said “Look, look!” and, still running, I swiveled to see a great white bird fluttering high above the street. Enoch said, “Mine—it’s a mine!” and what had seemed like gossamer wings resolved suddenly and clearly into a parachute, the fat silver body hanging below it packed with explosives; an angel of death floating serenely toward earth.

  The hollows burst outside. I could see them distantly, loping through the garden, tongues waving in the air.

  The mine landed by the house with a gentle clink.

  “Get down!” I screamed.

  We never had a chance to run for cover. I’d only just hit the ground when there was a blinding flash and a sound like the earth ripping open and a shock wave of searing hot wind that knocked the air from my lungs. Then a black hail of debris whipped hard against my back and I hugged my knees to my chest, making myself as compact as I could.

  After that, there was only wind and sirens and a ringing in my ears. I gasped for air and choked on the swirling dust. Pulling the collar of my sweater up over my nose and mouth to filter it, I slowly caught my breath.

  I counted my limbs: two arms, two legs.

  Good.

  I sat up slowly and looked around. I couldn’t see much through the dust, but I heard my friends calling out for one another. There was Horace’s voice, and Bronwyn’s. Hugh’s. Millard’s.

  Where was Emma?

  I shouted her name. Tried to get up and fell back again. My legs were intact but shaking; they wouldn’t take my weight.

  I shouted again. “Emma!”

  “I’m here!”

  My head snapped toward her voice. She materialized through the smoke.

  “Jacob! Oh, God. Thank God.”

  Both of us were shaking. I put my arms around her, running my hands over her body to make sure she was all there.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  My ears hurt and my lungs ached and my back stung where I’d been pelted by debris, but the pain in my stomach was gone. The moment the blast went off, it was as if someone had flipped a switch inside me, and just like that, the Feeling had vanished.

  The hollows had been vaporized.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  Aside from scrapes and cuts, so were the rest of us. We staggered together in a cluster and compared injuries. All were minor. “It’s some kind of miracle,” Emma said, shaking her head in disbelief.

  It seemed even more so when we realized that everywhere around us were nails and bits of concrete and knifelike splinters of wood, many of them driven inches into the ground by the blast.

  Enoch wobbled to a car parked nearby, its windows smashed, its frame so pocked with shrapnel that it looked like it had been sprayed by a machine gun. “We should be dead,” he marveled, poking his finger into one of the holes. “Why aren’t we full of holes?”

  Hugh said, “Your shirt, mate,” then went to Enoch and plucked a crumpled nail from the back of his grit-encrusted sweater.

  “And yours,” said Enoch, pulling a jagged spike of metal from

  Hugh’s.

  Then we all checked our sweaters. Embedded in each were long shards of glass and pieces of metal that should have passed right through our bodies—but hadn’t. Our itchy, ill-fitting, peculiar sweaters weren’t fireproof or waterproof, as the emu-raffe had guessed. They were bulletproof. And they had saved our lives.

  “I never dreamed I’d owe my life to such an appalling article of clothing,” said Horace, testing the sweater’s wool between his fingers. “I wonder if I could make a tuxedo jacket out of it instead.”

  Then Melina appeared, pigeon on her shoulder, blind brothers at her side. With their sonarlike senses, the brothers had discovered a low wall of reinforced concrete—it had sounded hard—and pulled Melina behind it just as the bomb exploded. That left only the two normal girls unaccounted for. But as the dust settled and their house came into view—or what was left of it—any hope of finding them alive seemed to fade. The upper floor had collapsed, pancaking down onto the lower. What remained was a skeletal wreck of exposed beams and smoking rubble.

  Bronwyn took off running toward it anyway, shouting the sisters’ names. Numbly, I watched her go.

  “We could’ve helped them and we didn’t,” Emma said miserably. “We left them to die.”

  “It wouldn’t have made the least bit of difference,” Millard said. “Their deaths had been written into history. Even if we’d saved their lives today, something else would’ve taken them tomorrow. Another bomb. A bus crash. They were of the past, and the past always mends itself, no matter how we interfere.”

  “Which is why you can’t go back and kill baby Hitler to stop the war from happening,” said Enoch. “History heals itself. Isn’t that interesting?”

  “No,” Emma snapped, “and you’re a heartless bastard for talking about killing babies at a time like this. Or ever.”

  “Baby Hitler,” said Enoch. “And talking loop theory is better than going into pointless hysterics.” He was looking at Bronwyn, who was climbing the rubble, digging in the wreckage, flinging debris this way and that.

  She turned and waved her arms at us. “Over here!” she cried.

  Enoch shook his head. “Someone please retrieve her. We’ve got an ymbryne to find.”

  “Over here!” Bronwyn shouted, louder this time. “I can hear one of them!”

  Emma looked at me. “Wait. What did she say?”

  And then we were all running to meet her.

  * * *

  We found the little girl beneath a slab of broken ceiling. It had fallen across the bathtub, which was wrecked but had not entirely collapsed. Cowering inside was Esme—wet, filthy, and traumatized—but alive. The tub had protected her, just like her sister promised it would.

  Bronwyn lifted the slab enough for Emma to reach in and pull Esme out. She clung to Emma, trembling and weeping. “Where’s my sister?” she said. “Where’s Sam?”

  “Hush, baby, hush,” Emma said, rocking her back and forth.

  “We’re going to get you to a hospital. Sam will be along later.” That was a lie, of course, and I could see Emma’s heart breaking as she told it. That we had survived and the little girl had also were two miracles in one night. To expect a third seemed greedy.

  But then a third miracle did happen, or something like one: her sister answered.

  “I’m here, Esme!” came a voice from above.

  “Sam!” the little girl shouted, and we all looked up.

  Sam was dangling from a wooden beam in the rafters. The beam was broken and hung down at a forty-five-degree angle. Sam was near the low end, but still too high for any of us to reach.

  “Let go!” Emma said. “We’ll catch you!”

  “I can’t!”

  Then I looked more closely and saw why she couldn’t, and I nearly fainted.

  Sam’s arms and legs were dangling free. She wasn’t hanging onto the beam, but from it. She’d been impaled through the center of her body. And yet her eyes were open, and she was blinking alertly in our direction.

  “I appear to be stuck,” she said calmly.

  I was sure Sam would die at any moment. She was in shock, so she felt no pain, but pretty soon the adrenaline pumping through her system would dissipate, and she’d fade, and be gone.

  “Someone get my sister down!” Esme cried.

  Bronwyn went after her. She climbed a crumbling staircase to the ruined ceiling, then reached out to grab onto the beam. She pulled and pulled, and w
ith her great strength was able to angle the beam downward until the broken end was nearly touching the rubble below. This allowed Enoch and Hugh to reach Sam’s dangling legs and, very gently, slide her forward until she came free with a soft ploop! and landed on her feet.

  Sam regarded the hole in her chest dully. It was nearly six inches in diameter and perfectly round, like the beam she’d been impaled on, and yet it didn’t seem to concern her much.

  Esme broke away from Emma and ran to her sister. “Sam!” she cried, throwing her arms around the injured girl’s waist. “Thank Heaven you’re all right!”

  “I don’t think she is!” Olive said. “I don’t think she is at all!”

  But Sam worried only for Esme, not for herself. Once she’d hugged the stuffing out of her, Sam knelt down and held the little girl at arm’s length, scanning for cuts and bruises. “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.

  “My ears are ringy. I scraped my knees. And I got some dirt in my eye …”

  Then Esme began to tremble and cry, the shock of what had happened overcoming her again. Sam hugged her close, saying, “There, there …”

  It made no sense that Sam’s body was functioning in any capacity. Stranger still, her wound wasn’t even bleeding, and there was no gore or little bits of entrails hanging out of it, like I knew to expect from horror movies. Instead, Sam looked like a paper doll that had been attacked with a giant hole-punch.

  Though everyone was dying for an explanation, we had elected to give the girls a moment to themselves, and stared in amazement from a respectful distance.

  Enoch, however, paid them no such courtesy. “Excuse me,” he said, crowding into their personal space, “but could you please explain how it is that you’re alive?”

  “It’s nothing serious,” Sam said. “Although my dress may not survive.”

  “Nothing serious?!” said Enoch. “I can see clear through you!”

  “It does smart a little,” she admitted, “but it’ll fill in in a day or so. Things like this always do.”

  Enoch laughed dementedly. “Things like this?”

  “In the name of all that’s peculiar,” Millard said quietly. “You know what this means, don’t you?”