Hollow City (44 page)

We’d left 1940 behind. I was back in the present.

A few of the kids took note of this with looks of surprise and fear, as if afraid they would age forward in a matter of minutes, but for most of them I think the shock of our sudden captivity was not about to be trumped by an unexpected trip to the present; they were worried about having their souls extracted, not about developing gray hair and liver spots.

The soldiers corralled us in the middle of the platform to wait for the train. Hard shoes clicked toward us. I risked a look over my shoulder and saw a policeman coming. Behind him, stepping off the escalator, were three more.

“Hey!” Enoch shouted. “Policeman, over here!”

A soldier punched Enoch in the gut, and he doubled over.

“Everything good here?” said the closest policeman.

“They’ve taken us prisoner!” said Bronwyn. “They aren’t really soldiers, they’re—”

And then she got a punch to the gut, too, though it didn’t seem to hurt her. What stopped her from saying more was the policeman himself, who took off his mirrored sunglasses to reveal stark white eyes. Bronwyn shrank back.

“A bit of advice,” the policeman said. “No help is coming to you. We are everywhere. Accept that, and this will all be easier.”

Normals were starting to fill the station. The soldiers pressed in on us from all sides, keeping their weapons hidden.

A train hissed into the station, filled with people. Its electric doors whooshed open and a glut of passengers spilled out. The soldiers began pushing us toward the nearest car, the policemen going ahead to scatter what few passengers remained inside. “Find another car!” they barked. “Get out!” The passengers grumbled but complied. But there were more people behind us on the platform, trying to push into the car, and a few of the soldiers who’d been ringing us had to break away to stop them. And then there was just enough confusion—the doors trying to close but the police holding them open until a warning alarm began to sound; the soldiers shoving us forward so hard that Enoch tripped, sending other children tripping over him in a chain reaction—that the folding man, whose wrists were so skinny he’d been able to slip his cuffs, decided to make a break for it, and ran.

A shot rang out, then a second, and the folding man tumbled and splayed onto the ground. The crowd swarmed away in a panic, people screaming and scrambling to escape the gunshots, and what had been merely confusion deteriorated into total chaos.

Then they were shoving us and kicking us onto the train. Beside me, Emma was resisting, making the soldier who was pushing her get close. Then I saw her cuffed hands flare orange, and she reached behind her and grabbed him. The soldier crumpled to the ground, shrieking, a hand-shaped hole melted through his camo. Then the soldier who was pushing
me
raised the butt of his gun and was about to bring it down on Emma’s neck when some instinct triggered in me and I drove my shoulder into his back.

He stumbled.

Emma melted through her metal cuffs, which fell away from her hands in a deformed mass of red-hot metal. My soldier turned his gun on me now, howling with rage, but before he could fire, Emma came at him from behind and clapped her hands around his face, her fingers so hot they melted through his cheeks like warm butter. He dropped the gun and collapsed, screaming.

All this happened very quickly, in a matter of seconds.

Then two more soldiers were coming at us. Nearly everyone else was on the train now—all but Bronwyn and the blind brothers, who had never been cuffed and were merely standing by with arms linked. Seeing that we were about to be shot to death, Bronwyn did something I could never have imagined her doing under any other circumstances: she slapped the older brother hard across the face, then took the younger one and wrenched him roughly away from the older.

The moment their connection was severed, they let out a scream so powerful it generated its own wind. It tore through the station like a tornado of pure energy—blowing Emma and me backwards, shattering the soldiers’ glasses, eclipsing most of the frequencies my ears could detect so that all I heard was a squeaking, high-pitched
Eeeeeeeeee …

I saw all the windows of the train break and the LED screens shiver to knife shards and the glass light tubes along the roof explode, so that we were plunged for a moment into pure blackness, then the hysterical red flashing of emergency lights.

I had fallen onto my back, the wind knocked out of me, my ears ringing. Something was pulling me backwards by the collar, away from the train, and I couldn’t quite remember how to work my arms and legs well enough to resist. Beneath the ringing in my ears I could make out frantic voices shouting, “
Go, just go!
”

I felt something cold and wet against the back of my neck, and was dragged into a phone booth. Emma was there, too, folded into a ball in the corner, semiconscious.

“Pull your legs up,” I heard a familiar voice say, and from around back of me came trotting a short, furry thing with a pushedin snout and a jowly mouth.

The dog. Addison.

I pulled my legs into the booth, my wits returning enough to move but not speak.

The last thing I saw, in the hellish red flashing, was Miss Wren being shoved into the train car and the doors snapping closed, and all my friends inside with her, cowering at gunpoint, framed by the shattered windows of the train, surrounded by men with white eyes.

Then the train roared away into the darkness, and was gone.

*   *   *

I startled awake to a tongue licking my face.

The dog.

The door of the phone booth had been pulled closed, and the three of us were crammed inside on the floor.

“You passed out,” said the dog.

“They’re gone,” I said.

“Yes, but we can’t stay here. They’ll come back for you. We have to go.”

“I don’t think I can stand up just yet.”

The dog had a cut on his nose, and a hunk of one ear was missing. Whatever he’d done to get here, he’d been through hell, too.

I felt a tickle against my leg, but was too tired to look and see what it was. My head was heavy as a boulder.

“Don’t go to sleep again,” said the dog, and then he turned to Emma and began to lick her face.

The tickle again. This time I shifted my weight and reached for it.

It was my phone. My phone was vibrating. I couldn’t believe it. I dug it out of my pocket. The battery was nearly dead, the signal almost nonexistent. The screen read:
DAD
(177
MISSED CALLS
).

If I hadn’t been so groggy, I probably wouldn’t have answered. At any moment a man with a gun might arrive to finish us off. Not a good time for a conversation with my father. But I wasn’t thinking straight, and anytime my phone rang, my old Pavlovian impulse was to pick it up.

I pressed
ANSWER
. “Hello?”

A choked cry on the other end. Then: “Jacob? Is that you?”

“It’s me.”

I must’ve sounded awful. My voice a faint rasp.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” my father said. He hadn’t expected me to answer, maybe had given me up for dead already and was calling now out of some reflexive grief instinct that he couldn’t switch off. “I don’t—where did you—what happened—where
are
you, son?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m alive. In London.”

I don’t know why I told him that last part. I guess I felt like I owed him some truth.

Then it sounded like he aimed his head away from the receiver to shout to someone else, “It’s Jacob! He’s in London!” Then back to me: “We thought you were
dead
.”

“I know. I mean, I’m not surprised. I’m sorry about leaving the way I did. I hope I didn’t scare you too much.”

“You scared us to
death
, Jacob.” My father sighed, a long, shivering sound that was relief and disbelief and exasperation all at once. “Your mother and I are in London, too. After the police couldn’t find you on the island … anyway, it doesn’t matter, just tell us where you are and we’ll come get you!”

Emma began to stir. Her eyes opened and she looked at me, bleary, like she was somewhere deep inside herself and peering out at me through miles of brain and body. Addison said, “Good, very good, now stay with us,” and began licking her hand instead.

I said into the phone, “I can’t come, Dad. I can’t drag you into this.”

“Oh, God, I knew it. You’re on drugs, aren’t you? Look, whoever you’ve gotten mixed up with, we can help. We don’t have to bring the police into it. We just want you back.”

Then everything went dark for a second in my head, and when I came to again, I felt such a gut-punch of pain in my belly that I
dropped the phone.

Addison jerked his head up to look at me. “What is it?”

That’s when I saw a long, black tongue pressing against the outside of the booth’s glass. It was quickly joined by a second, then a third.

The hollow. The unfrozen hollowgast. It had followed us.

The dog couldn’t see it, but he could read the look on my face easily enough. “It’s one of them, isn’t it?”

I mouthed,
Yes
, and Addison shrank into a corner.

“Jacob?” My dad’s tinny voice from the phone. “Jacob, are you there?”

The tongues began to wrap around the booth, encircling us. I didn’t know what to do, only that I had to do
something
, so I shifted my feet under me, planted my hands on the walls, and struggled to my feet.

Then I was face to face with it. Tongues fanned from its gaping, bladed mouth. Its eyes were black and weeping more black and they stared into mine, inches away through the glass. The hollow let out a low, guttural snarl that turned my insides to jelly, and I half wished the beast would just kill me and be done with it so all this pain and terror could end.

The dog barked in Emma’s face. “Wake up! We need you, girl! Make your fire!”

But Emma could neither speak nor stand, and we were alone in the underground station but for two women in raincoats who were backing away, holding their noses against the hollow’s fetid stench.

And then the booth, the whole booth with all of us in it, swayed one way and then the other, and I heard whatever bolts anchored it to the floor groan and snap. Slowly, the hollow lifted us off the ground—six inches, then a foot, then two—only to slam us back down again, shattering the booth windows, raining glass on us.

Then there was nothing at all between the hollow and me. Not an inch, not a pane of glass. Its tongues wriggled into the booth,
snaking around my arm, my waist, then around my neck, squeezing tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe.

That’s when I knew I was dead. And because I was dead, and there was nothing I could do, I stopped fighting. I relaxed every muscle, closed my eyes, and gave in to the hurt bursting inside my belly like fireworks.

Then a strange thing happened: the hurt stopped hurting. The pain shifted and became something else. I entered into it, and it enveloped me, and beneath its roiling surface I discovered something quiet and gentle.

A whisper.

I opened my eyes again. The hollow seemed frozen now, staring at me. I stared back, unafraid. My vision was spotting black from lack of oxygen, but I felt no pain.

The hollow’s grip on my neck relaxed. I took my first breath in minutes, calm and deep. And then the whisper I’d found inside me traveled up from my belly and out of my throat and past my lips, making a noise that didn’t sound like language, but whose meaning I knew innately.

Back
.

Off
.

The hollow retracted its tongues. Drew them all back into its bulging mouth and shut its jaws. Bowed its head slightly—a gesture, almost, of submission.

And then it sat down.

Emma and Addison looked up at me from the floor, surprised by the sudden calm. “What just happened?” said the dog.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said.

“Is it gone?”

“No, but it won’t hurt us now.”

He didn’t ask how I knew this; just nodded, assured by the tone of my voice.

I opened the booth door and helped Emma to her feet. “Can
you walk?” I asked her. She put an arm around my waist, leaned her weight against mine, and together we took a step. “I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Whether you like it or not.”

Into my ear she whispered, “I love you, Jacob.”

“I love you, too,” I whispered back.

I stooped to pick up the phone. “Dad?”

“What was that noise? Who are you with?”

“I’m here. I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not. Just stay where you are.”

“Dad, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

“Wait. Don’t hang up,” he said. “You’re confused, Jake.”

“No. I’m like Grandpa. I have what Grandpa had.”

A pause on the other end. Then: “Please come home.”

I took a breath. There was too much to say and no time to say it. This would have to do:

“I hope I’ll be able to come home, someday. But there are things I need to do first. I just want you to know I love you and Mom, and I’m not doing any of this to hurt you.”

“We love you, too, Jake, and if it’s drugs, or whatever it is, we don’t care. We’ll get you right again. Like I said, you’re confused.”

“No, Dad. I’m peculiar.”

Then I hung up the phone, and speaking a language I didn’t know I knew, I ordered the hollow to stand.

Obedient as a shadow, it did.

About the Photography

Like those in the first book,
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
, all the pictures in
Hollow City
are authentic, vintage, found photographs, and with the exception of a handful that have undergone digital postprocessing, they are unaltered. They were painstakingly collected over several years: discovered at flea markets, vintage paper shows, and, more often than not, in the archives of photo collectors much more accomplished than I, who were kind enough to part with some of their most peculiar treasures to help create this book.

The following photos were graciously lent for use by their owners: