Текст книги "Hollow City"

Автор книги: Ransom Riggs

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“The pigeons like to hide,” said the larger.

“In the attic,” said the smaller.

“What attic?” said Emma. “Where?”

“In our house,” they said together, and raising their arms they pointed down the dark passage. They seemed to speak cooperatively, and if a sentence was more than a few words long, one would start and the other finish, with no detectable pause between. I also noticed that whenever one was speaking and the other wasn’t, the quiet one would mouth the other’s words in perfect synchronicity—as if they shared one mind.

“Could you please show us the way to your house?” asked Emma. “Take us to your attic?”

Joel-and-Peter shook their heads and shrank back into the dark.

“What’s the matter?” Bronwyn said. “Why don’t you want to go?”

“Death and blood!” cried one boy.

“Blood and screaming!” cried the other.

“Screaming and blood and shadows that bite!” they cried together.

“Cheerio!” said Horace, turning on his heels. “I’ll see you all back in the crypt. Hope I don’t get squashed by a bomb!”

Emma caught Horace by his sleeve. “Oh, no you don’t! You’re the only one of us who’s managed to catch any of those blasted pigeons.”

“Didn’t you hear them?” Horace said. “That loop is full of shadows that bite—which could only mean one thing. Hollows!”

“It was full of them,” I said. “But that might have been days ago.”

“When was the last time you were inside your house?” Emma asked the boys.

Their loop had been raided, they explained in their strange and broken way, but they’d managed to escape into the catacombs and hide among the bones. How long ago that was, they couldn’t say. Two days? Three? They’d lost all track of time down here in the dark.

“Oh, you poor dears!” said Bronwyn. “What terrors you must’ve endured!”

“You can’t stay here forever,” said Emma. “You’ll age forward if you don’t reach another loop soon. We can help you—but first we have to catch a pigeon.”

The boys gazed into one another’s spinning eyes and seemed to speak without uttering a word. They said in unison, “Follow us.”

They slid down from their bone pile and started down the passage.

We followed. I couldn’t take my eyes off them; they were fascinatingly odd. They kept their arms linked at all times, and every few steps, they made loud clicking sounds with their tongues.

“What are they doing?” I whispered.

“I believe that’s how they see,” said Millard. “It’s the same way bats see in the dark. The sounds they make reflect off things and then back to them, which forms a picture in their minds.”

“We are echolocators,” Joel-and-Peter said.

They were also, apparently, very sharp of hearing.

The passage forked, then forked again. At one point I felt a sudden pressure in my ears and had to wiggle them to release it. That’s when I knew we’d left 1940 and entered a loop. Finally we came to a dead-end wall with vertical steps cut into it. Joel-and-Peter stood at the base of the wall and pointed to a pinpoint of daylight overhead.

“Our house—” said the elder.

“Is up there,” said the younger.

And with that, they retreated into the shadows.

*   *   *

The steps were slimed with moss and difficult to climb, and I had to go slowly or risk falling. They ascended the wall to meet a circular, person-sized door in the ceiling, through which shone a single gleam of light. I wedged my fingers into the crack and pushed sideways, and the doors slid open like a camera shutter, revealing a tubular conduit of bricks that rose twenty or thirty feet to a circle of sky. I was at the false bottom of a fake well.

I pulled myself into the well and climbed. Halfway up I had to stop and rest, pushing my back against the opposite side of the shaft. When the burn in my biceps subsided, I climbed the rest of the way, scrambling over the lip of the well to land in some grass.

I was in the courtyard of a shabby-looking house. The sky was an infected shade of yellow, but there was no smoke in it and no sound of engines. We were in some older time, before the war—before cars, even. There was a chill in the air, and errant flakes of snow drifted down and melted on the ground.

Emma came up the well next, then Horace. Emma had decided that only the three of us should explore the house. We didn’t know what we would find up here, and if we needed to leave in a hurry, it was better to have a small group that could move fast. None who stayed below argued; Joel-and-Peter’s warning of blood and shadows had scared them. Only Horace was unhappy, and kept muttering to himself that he wished he’d never caught that pigeon in the square.

Bronwyn waved to us from below and then pulled closed the circular door at the bottom of the well. The top side was painted to look like the surface of water—dark, dirty water you’d never want to drop a drinking bucket into. Very clever.

The three of us huddled together and looked around. The courtyard and the house were suffering from serious neglect. The grass around the well was tamped down, but everywhere else it grew up in weedy thickets that reached higher than some of the ground-floor windows. A doghouse sat rotting and half collapsed in one corner, and near it a toppled laundry line was gradually being swallowed by brush.

We stood and waited, listening for pigeons. From beyond the house’s walls, I could hear the tap of horses’ hooves on pavement. No, this definitely wasn’t London circa 1940.

Then, in one of the upper-floor windows, I saw a curtain shift.

“Up there!” I hissed, pointing at it.

I didn’t know if a bird or a person had done it, but it was worth checking out. I started toward a door that led into the house, beckoning the others after me—then tripped over something. It was a body lying on the ground, covered head to ankle with a black tarp. A pair of worn shoes poked from one end, pointing at the sky. Tucked into one cracked sole was a white card, on which had been written in neat script:

Mr. A. F. Crumbley

Lately of the Outer Provinces

Aged forward rather than be taken alive

Kindly requests his remains be deposited in the Thames

“Unlucky bastard,” Horace whispered. “He came here from the country, probably after his own loop was raided—only to have the one he’d escaped to raided, as well.”

“But why would they leave poor Mr. Crumbley out in the open this way?” whispered Emma.

“Because they had to leave in a hurry,” I said.

Emma bent down and reached for the edge of Mr. Crumbley’s tarp. I didn’t want to look but couldn’t help myself, and I half turned away but peeked back through split fingers. I had expected a withered corpse, but Mr. Crumbley looked perfectly intact and surprisingly young, perhaps only forty or fifty years old, his black hair graying just around the temples. His eyes were closed and peaceful, as if he might’ve just been sleeping. Could he really have aged forward, like the leathery apple I took from Miss Peregrine’s loop?

“Hullo, are you dead or asleep?” Emma said. She nudged the man’s ear with her boot, and the side of his head caved and crumbled to dust.

Emma gasped and let the tarp fall back. Crumbley had become a desiccated cast of himself, so fragile that a strong wind could blow him apart.

We left poor, crumbling Mr. Crumbley behind and went to the door. I grasped the knob and turned it. The door opened and we stepped through it into a laundry room. There were fresh-looking clothes in a hamper, a washboard hung neatly above a sink. This place had not been abandoned long.

The Feeling was stronger here, but was still only residue. We opened another door and came into a sitting room. My chest tightened. Here was clear evidence of a fight: furniture scattered and overturned, pictures knocked off the mantel, stripes of wallpaper shredded to ribbons.

Then Horace muttered, “Oh, no,” and I followed his gaze upward, to a dark stain discoloring a roughly circular patch of ceiling. Something awful had happened upstairs.

Emma squeezed her eyes closed. “Just listen,” she said. “Listen for the birds and don’t think about anything else.”

We closed our eyes and listened. A minute passed. Then, finally, the fluttering coo of a pigeon. I opened my eyes to see where it had come from.

The staircase.

We mounted the stairs gently, trying not to creak them under our feet. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat, in my temple. I could handle old, brittle corpses. I wasn’t sure if I could take a murder scene.

The second-floor hallway was littered with debris. A door, torn from its hinges, lay splintered. Through the broken doorway was a fallen tower of trunks and dressers; a failed blockade.

In the next room, the white carpet was soaked with blood—the stain that had leaked through the floor to the ceiling below. But whomever it had leaked from was long gone.

The last door in the hall showed no signs of forced entry. I pushed it open warily. My eyes scanned the room: there was a wardrobe, a dresser topped with carefully arranged figurines, lace curtains fluttering in a window. The carpet was clean. Everything undisturbed.

Then my eyes went to the bed, and what was in it, and I stumbled back against the doorjamb. Nestled under clean white covers were two men, seemingly asleep—and between them, two skeletons.

“Aged forward,” said Horace, his hands trembling at his throat. “Two of them considerably more than the others.”

The men who looked asleep were as dead as Mr. Crumbley downstairs, Horace said, and if we touched them, they would disintegrate in just the same way.

“They gave up,” Emma whispered. “They got tired of running and they gave up.” She looked at them with a mix of pity and disgust.

She thought they were weak and cowardly—that they’d taken the easy way out. I couldn’t help wondering, though, if these peculiars simply knew more than we did about what the wights did with their captives. Maybe we would choose death, too, if we knew.

We drifted into the hall. I felt dizzy and sick, and I wanted out of this house—but we couldn’t leave yet. There was one last staircase to climb.

At the top, we found a smoke-damaged landing. I imagined peculiars who’d withstood the initial attack on this house gathering here for a last stand. Maybe they’d tried to fight the corrupted with fire—or maybe the corrupted had tried to smoke them out. Either way, it looked like the house had come close to burning down.

Ducking through a low doorway, we entered a narrow, slope-walled attic. Everything here was burned black. Flames had made gaping holes in the roof.

Emma prodded Horace. “It’s here somewhere,” she said quietly. “Work your magic, bird-catcher.”

Horace tiptoed into the middle of the room and sing-songed, “Heeeeere, pigeon, pigeon, pigeon …”

Then, from behind us, we heard a wingbeat and a strangled chirp. We turned to see not a pigeon but a girl in a black dress, half hidden in the shadows.

“Is this what you’re after?” the girl said, raising one arm into a shaft of sunlight. The pigeon squirmed in her hand, struggling to free itself.

“Yes!” Emma said. “Thank heaven you caught it!” She moved toward the girl with her hands out to take the pigeon, but the girl shouted, “Stop right there!” and snapped her fingers. A charred throw rug flew out from beneath Emma and took her feet with it, sending her crashing to the floor.

I rushed to Emma. “Are you okay?”

“On your knees!” the girl barked at me. “Put your hands on your head!”

“I’m fine,” Emma said. “Do as she says. She’s telekinetic and clearly unstable.”

I knelt down by Emma and laced my fingers behind my head.

Emma did the same. Horace, trembling and silent, sat heavily and placed his palms on the floor.

“We don’t mean you any harm,” Emma said. “We’re only after the pigeon.”

“Oh, I know perfectly well what you’re after,” the girl said with a sneer. “Your kind never gives up, do you?”

“Our kind?” I said.

“Lay down your weapons and slide them over!” barked the girl.

“We don’t have any,” Emma said calmly, trying her best not to upset the girl any further.

“This will go easier for you if you don’t assume I’m stupid!” the girl shouted. “You’re weak and have no powers of your own, so you rely on guns and things. Now lay them on the floor!”

Emma turned her head and whispered, “She thinks we’re wights!”

I almost laughed out loud. “We aren’t wights. We’re peculiar!”

“You aren’t the first blank-eyes to come here pigeon-hunting,” she said, “nor the first to try impersonating peculiar children. And you wouldn’t be the first I’ve killed, neither! Now put your weapons on the floor before I snap this pigeon’s neck—and then yours!”

“But we aren’t wights!” I insisted. “Look at our pupils if you don’t believe us!”

“Your eyes don’t mean nothing!” the girl said. “False lenses are the oldest trick in the book—and trust me, I know ’em all.”

The girl took a step toward us, into the light. Hate smoldered in her eyes. She was tomboyish, except for the dress, with short hair and a muscular jaw. She had the glassy look of someone who hadn’t slept in days; who was running now on instinct and adrenaline. Someone in that condition wouldn’t be kind to us, nor patient.

“We are peculiar, I swear!” Emma said. “Watch—I’ll show you!” She lifted one hand from her head and was about to make a flame when a sudden intuition made me grab her wrist.

“If there are hollows close by, they’ll sense it,” I said. “I think they can feel us kind of like I feel them—but it’s much easier for them when we use our powers. It’s like setting off an alarm.”

“But you’re using your power,” she said, irritated. “And she’s using hers!”

“Mine is passive,” I said. “I can’t turn it off, so it doesn’t leave much of a trail. As for her—maybe they already know she’s here. Maybe it’s not her they want.”

“How convenient!” the girl said to me. “And that’s supposed to be your power? Sensing shadow creatures?”

“He can see them, too,” said Emma. “And kill them.”

“You need to invent better lies,” the girl said. “No one with half a brain would buy that.”

Just as we were talking about it, a new Feeling blossomed painfully inside me. I was no longer sensing the left-behind residue of a hollow, but the active presence of one.

“There’s one nearby,” I said to Emma. “We need to get out of here.”

“Not without the bird,” she muttered.

The girl started across the room toward us. “Time to get on with it,” she said. “I’ve given you more than enough chances to prove yourselves. Anyway, I’m beginning to enjoy killing you things. After what you did to my friends, I just can’t seem to get enough of it!”

She stopped a few feet from us and raised her free hand—about to bring what was left of the roof down on our heads, maybe. If we were going to make a move, it had to be now.

I sprang from my crouched position, threw my arms in front of me, and collided with the girl, knocking her to the floor. She cried out in angry surprise. I rammed my fist into the palm of her free hand so she couldn’t snap her fingers again. She let the bird go, and Emma grabbed it.

Then Emma and I were up, rushing toward the open door. Horace was still on the floor in a daze. “Get up and run!” Emma shouted at him.

I was pulling Horace up by his arms when the door slammed in my face and a burned dresser lifted out of the corner and flew across the room. The edge of it connected with my head and I went sprawling, taking Emma down with me.

The girl was in a rage, screaming. I was certain we had only seconds to live. Then Horace stood up and shouted at the top of his lungs:

“Melina Manon!”

The girl froze. “What did you say?”

“Your name is Melina Manon,” he said. “You were born in Luxembourg in 1899. You came to live with Miss Thrush when you were sixteen years old, and have been here ever since.”

Horace had caught her off guard. She frowned, then made an arcing motion with her hand. The dresser that had nearly knocked me unconscious sailed through the air and then stopped, hovering, directly above Horace. If she let it drop, it would crush him. “You’ve done your homework,” said the girl, “but any wight could know my name and birthplace. Unfortunately for you, I no longer find your deceptions interesting.”

And yet, she didn’t quite seem ready to kill him.

“Your father was a bank clerk,” Horace said, speaking quickly.

“Your mother was very beautiful but smelled strongly of onions, a lifelong condition she could do nothing to cure.”

The dresser wobbled above Horace. The girl stared at him, her brows knit together, hand in the air.

“When you were seven, you badly wanted an Arabian horse,” Horace continued. “Your parents couldn’t afford such an extravagant animal, so they bought a donkey instead. You named him Habib, which means beloved. And loved him you did.”

The girl’s mouth fell open.

Horace went on.

“You were thirteen when you realized you could manipulate objects using only your mind. You started with small things, paper clips and coins, then larger and larger ones. But you could never pick up Habib with your mind, because your ability did not extend to living creatures. When your family moved houses, you thought it had gone away entirely, because you couldn’t move anything at all anymore. But it was simply that you hadn’t gotten to know the new house yet. Once you became familiar with it, mapped it in your mind, you could move objects within its walls.”

“How could you possibly know all this?” Melina said, gaping at him.

“Because I dreamed about you,” said Horace. “That’s what I can do.”

“My God,” said the girl, “you are peculiar.”

And the dresser drifted gently to the floor.

*   *   *

I wobbled to my feet, head throbbing where the dresser had hit me.

“You’re bleeding!” Emma said, jumping up to inspect my cut.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I said, dodging her. The Feeling was shifting inside me, and being touched while it was happening made it harder to interpret; interrupted its development somehow.

“Sorry about your head,” Melina Manon said. “I thought I was the only peculiar left!”

“There’s a whole gang of us down your well, in the catacomb tunnel,” Emma said.

“Really?” Melina’s face lit up. “Then there’s still hope!”

“There was,” said Horace. “But it just flew out the hole in your roof.”

“What—you mean Winnifred?” Melina put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. A moment later, the pigeon appeared, flying down through the hole to land on her shoulder.

“Marvelous!” said Horace, clapping his hands. “How’d you do that?”

“Winnie’s my chum,” Melina said. “Tame as a house cat.”

I wiped some blood from my forehead with the back of my hand, then chose to ignore the pain. There wasn’t time to be hurt. I said to the girl, “You mentioned that wights have been here, chasing pigeons.”

Melina nodded. “Them and their shadow beasts came three nights ago. Surrounded the place, took Miss Thrush and half our wards here, then set fire to the house. I hid on the roof. Since then, wights have come back every day, in little groups, hunting for Winnifred and her friends.”

“And you killed them?” Emma asked.

Melina looked down. “That’s what I said, ain’t it?”

She was too proud to admit she’d lied. It didn’t matter.

“Then we’re not the only ones hunting for Miss Wren,” Emma said.

“That means she’s still free,” I said.

“Maybe,” said Emma. “Maybe.”

“We think the pigeon can help us,” I said. “We need to find Miss Wren, and we think the bird knows how.”

“I never heard of any Miss Wren,” said Melina. “I just feed Winnie when she comes into our courtyard. We’re friends, she and I. Ain’t we, Winnie?”

The bird chirped happily on her shoulder.

Emma moved close to Melina and addressed the pigeon. “Do you know Miss Wren?” she said, enunciating loudly. “Can you help us find her? Miss Wren?”

The pigeon leapt off Melina’s shoulder and flapped across the room to the door. She warbled and fluttered her wings, then flew back.

This way, it seemed to say.

That was proof enough for me. “We need to take the bird with us,” I said.

“Not without me,” said Melina. “If Winnie knows how to find this ymbryne, then I’m coming, too.”

“Not a good idea,” said Horace. “We’re on a dangerous mission, you see—”

Emma cut him off. “Give us the bird. We’ll come back for you, I promise.”

A sudden jolt of pain made me gasp and double over.

Emma rushed to my side. “Jacob! Are you all right?”

I couldn’t speak. Instead I hobbled to the window, forced myself upright, and projected my Feeling out toward the cathedral dome, visible over the rooftops just a few blocks away—then down at the street, where horse-drawn wagons rattled past.

Yes, there. I could feel them approaching from a side street, not far away.

Them. Not one hollow, but two.

“We have to go,” I said. “Now.”

“Please,” Horace begged the girl. “We must have the pigeon!”

Melina snapped her fingers, and the dresser that had nearly killed me raised up off the floor again. “I can’t allow that,” she said, narrowing her eyes and flicking them toward the dresser just to make sure we understood one another. “But take me along and you get Winnie in the bargain. Otherwise …”

The dresser pirouetted on one wooden leg, then tipped and crashed onto its side.

“Fine then,” Emma said through her teeth. “But if you slow us down, we take the bird and leave you behind.”

Melina grinned, and with a flick of her hand the door banged open.

“Whatever you say.”

*   *   *

We flew down the stairs so fast that our feet hardly seemed to touch the ground. In twenty seconds we were back in the courtyard, leaping over dead Mr. Crumbley, diving down the dry well. I went first, kicking in the mirrored door at the bottom rather than wasting time sliding it open. It broke from its hinges and fell in pieces. “Look out below!” I called, then lost my grip on the wet stone steps and fell flailing and tumbling into the dark.

A pair of strong arms caught me—Bronwyn’s—and set my feet on the floor. I thanked her, my heart pounding.

“What happened up there?” asked Bronwyn. “Did you catch the pigeon?”

“We got it,” I said as Emma and Horace reached the bottom, and a cheer went up among our friends. “That’s Melina,” I said, pointing up at her, and that was all the time for introductions we had. Melina was still at the top of the steps, fooling with something. “Come on!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

“Buying us time!” she shouted back, and then she pulled shut and locked a wooden lid that capped the well, closing out the last rays of light. As she climbed down in darkness, I explained about the hollows that were chasing us. In my panicked state, this came out as “GO NOW RUN HOLLOWS NOW,” which was effective if not terribly articulate, and threw everyone into hysterics.

“How can we run if we can’t see?!” Enoch shouted. “Light a flame, Emma!”

She’d been holding off because of my warning back in the attic.

Now seemed like a good time to reinforce that, so I grabbed her arm and said, “Don’t! They’ll be able to pinpoint us too easily!” Our best hope, I thought, was to lose them in this forking maze of tunnels.

“But we can’t just run blindly in the dark!” said Emma.

“Of course,” said the younger echolocator.

“We can,” said the older.

Melina stumbled toward their voices. “Boys! You’re alive! It’s me—it’s Melina!”

Joel-and-Peter said:

“We thought you were—”

“Dead every last—”

“One of you.”

“Everyone link hands!” Melina said. “Let the boys lead the way!”

So I took Melina’s hand in the dark and Emma took mine, then she felt for Bronwyn’s, and so on until we’d formed a human chain with the blind brothers in the lead. Then Emma gave the word and the boys took off at an easy run, plunging us into the black.

We forked left. Splashed through puddles of standing water. Then from the tunnel behind us came an echoing crash that could only have meant one thing: the hollows had smashed through the well door.

“They’re in!” I shouted.

I could almost feel them narrowing their bodies, wriggling down into the shaft. Once they made it to level ground and could run, they’d overtake us in no time. We’d only passed one split in the tunnels—not enough to lose them. Not nearly enough.

Which is why what Millard said next struck me as patently insane: “Stop! Everyone stop!”

The blind boys listened to him. We piled up behind them, tripping and skidding to a halt.

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” I shouted. “Run!”

“So sorry,” Millard said, “but this just occurred to me—one of us will have to pass through the loop exit before the echolocators or the girl do, or they will cross into the present and we into 1940, and we’ll be separated. For them to travel to 1940 with us, one of us has to go first and open the way.”

“You didn’t come from the present?” Melina said, confused.

“From 1940, like he said,” Emma replied. “It’s raining bombs out there, though. You might want to stay behind.”

“Nice try,” said Melina, “you ain’t getting rid of me that easy. It’s got to be worse in the present—wights everywhere! That’s why I never left Miss Thrush’s loop.”

Emma stepped forward and pulled me with her. “Fine! We’ll go first!”

I stuck out my free arm, feeling blindly in the dark. “But I can’t see a thing!”

The elder echolocator said, “It’s just twenty paces ahead there, you—”

“Can’t miss it,” said the younger.

So we plodded ahead, waving our hands in front of us. I kicked something with my foot and stumbled. My left shoulder scraped the wall.

“Keep it straight!” Emma said, pulling me to the right.

My stomach lurched. I could feel it: the hollows had made it down the well shaft. Now, even if they couldn’t sense us, there was a fifty-fifty chance they’d choose the right spur of the tunnel and find us anyway.

The time for sneaking around was over. We had to run.

“Screw it,” I said. “Emma, give me a light!”

“Gladly!” She let my hand go and made a flame so large I felt the hair on the right side of my head singe.

I saw the transition point right away. It was just ahead of us, marked by a vertical line painted on the tunnel wall. We took off running for it in a mob.

The moment we passed it, I felt a pressure in my ears. We were back in 1940.

We bolted through the catacombs, Emma’s fire casting manic shadows across the walls, the blind boys clicking loudly with their tongues and shouting out “Left!” or “Right!” when we came to splits in the tunnel.

We passed the stack of coffins, the landslide of bones. Finally we returned to the dead end and the ladder to the crypt. I shoved Horace up ahead of me, then Enoch, and then Olive took off her shoes and floated up.

“We’re taking too long!” I shouted.

Down the passage I could feel them coming. Could hear their tongues pounding the stone floor, propelling them forward. Could picture their jaws beginning to drip black goo in anticipation of a kill.

Then I saw them. A blur of dark motion in the distance.

I screamed, “Go!” and leapt onto the ladder, the last one to climb it. When I was near the top, Bronwyn reached down her arm and yanked me up the last few rungs, and then I was in the crypt with everyone else.

Groaning loudly, Bronwyn picked up the stone slab that topped Christopher Wren’s tomb and dropped it back in place. Not two seconds later, something slammed violently against the underside of it, making the heavy slab leap. It wouldn’t hold the hollows for long—not two of them.

They were so close. Alarms blared inside me, my stomach aching like I’d drunk acid. We dashed up the spiral staircase and into the nave. The cathedral was dark now, the only illumination a weird orange glow eking through the stained-glass windows. I thought for a moment it was the last strains of sunset, but then, as we dashed toward the exit, I caught a glimpse of the sky through the broken roof.

Night had fallen. The bombs were falling still, thudding like an irregular heartbeat.

We ran outside.