Текст книги "Hollow City"
Автор книги: Ransom Riggs
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
Miss Wren moaned and fanned herself with her hand.
“You idiots, you cretins, you morons!” the clown shouted.
“You led them right to us!”
“And as a nice bonus,” said Caul, “we paid a visit to your menagerie, as well! My men came by not long after we left; the stuffed heads of that emu-raffe and boxer dog will look magnificent above my mantelpiece.”
“You monster!” Miss Wren screeched, and she fell back against the table, legs failing her.
“Oh, my bird!” exclaimed Bronwyn, her eyes wide. “Fiona and Claire!”
“You’ll see them again soon,” Caul said. “I’ve got them in safekeeping.”
It all began to make a terrible kind of sense. Caul knew he’d be welcomed into Miss Wren’s menagerie disguised as Miss Peregrine, and when she wasn’t at home to be kidnapped, he’d nudged us after her, toward London. In so many ways, we’d been manipulated from the very beginning—from the moment we chose to leave the island and I chose to go along. Even the tale he’d chosen for Bronwyn to read that first night in the forest, about the stone giant, had been a manipulation. He wanted us to find Miss Wren’s loop, and think that it was we who’d cracked its secret.
Those of us who weren’t reeling in horror frothed with anger. Several people were shouting that Caul should be killed, and were busily hunting for sharp objects to do the job with, while the few who’d kept their heads were trying to hold them back. All the while, Caul stood calmly, waiting for the furor to die down.
“If I may?” he said. “I wouldn’t entertain any ideas about killing me. You could, of course; no one can stop you. But it will go much easier for you if I am unharmed when my men arrive.” He pretended to check a nonexistent watch on his wrist. “Ah, yes,” he said, “they should be here now—yes, just about now—surrounding the building, covering every conceivable point of exit, including the roof. And might I add, there are fifty-six of them and they are armed positively to the teeth. Beyond the teeth. Have you ever seen what a mini-gun can do to a child-sized human body?” He looked directly at Olive and said, “It would turn you to cat’s meat, darling.”
“You’re bluffing!” said Enoch. “There’s no one out there!”
“I assure you, there is. They’ve been watching me closely since we left your depressing little island, and I gave my signal to them the moment Balenciaga revealed herself to us. That was over twelve hours ago—more than ample time to muster a fighting force.”
“Allow me to verify this,” said Miss Wren, and she left to go to the ymbryne meeting room, where the windows were obstructed from ice mostly from the outside, and a few had small telescope tunnels melted through them with mirror attachments that let us look down at the street below.
While we waited for her to return, the clown and the snake girl debated the best ways to torture Caul.
“I say we pull out his toenails first,” said the clown. “Then stick hot pokers in his eyes.”
“Where I come from,” the snake girl said, “the punishment for treason is being covered in honey, bound to an open boat, and floated out into a stagnant pond. The flies eat you alive.”
Caul stood cricking his neck from side to side and stretching his arms boredly. “Apologies,” he said. “Remaining a bird for so long tends to cramp the muscles.”
“You think we’re kidding?” said the clown.
“I think you’re amateurs,” said Caul. “If you found a few young bamboo shoots, I could show you something really wicked. As delightful as that would be, though, I do recommend you melt this ice, because it’ll save us all a world of trouble. I say this for your sake, out of genuine concern for your well-being.”
“Yeah, right,” said Emma. “Where was your concern when you were stealing those peculiars’ souls?”
“Ah, yes. Our three pioneers. Their sacrifice was necessary—all for the sake of progress, my dears. What we’re trying to do is advance the peculiar species, you see.”
“What a joke,” she said. “You’re nothing but power-hungry sadists!”
“I know you’re all quite sheltered and uneducated,” said Caul, “but did your ymbrynes not teach you about our people’s history? We peculiars used to be like gods roaming the earth! Giants—kings—the world’s rightful rulers! But over the centuries and millennia, we’ve suffered a terrible decline. We mixed with normals to such an extent that the purity of our peculiar blood has been diluted almost to nothing. And now look at us, how degraded we’ve become! We hide in these temporal backwaters, afraid of the very people we should be ruling, arrested in a state of perpetual childhood by this confederacy of busybodies—these women! Don’t you see how they’ve reduced us? Are you not ashamed? Do you have any idea of the power that’s rightfully ours? Don’t you feel the blood of giants in your veins?” He was losing his cool now, going red in the face. “We aren’t trying to eradicate peculiardom—we’re trying to save it!”
“Is that right?” said the clown, and then walked over to Caul and spat right in his face. “Well, you’ve got a twisted way of going at it.”
Caul wiped the spit away with the back of his hand. “I knew it would be pointless to reason with you. The ymbrynes have been feeding you lies and propaganda for a hundred years. Better, I think, to take your souls and start again fresh.”
Miss Wren returned. “He speaks the truth,” she said. “There must be fifty soldiers out there. All of them armed.”
“Oh, oh, oh,” moaned Bronwyn, “what are we to do?”
“Give up,” said Caul. “Go quietly.”
“It doesn’t matter how many of them there are,” Althea said.
“They’ll never be able to get through all my ice.”
The ice! I’d nearly forgotten. We were inside a fortress of ice!
“That’s right!” Caul said brightly. “She’s absolutely right, they can’t get in. So there’s a quick and painless way to do this, where you melt the ice voluntarily right now, or there’s the long, stubborn, slow, boring, sad way, which is called a siege, where for weeks and months my men stand guard outside while we stay in here, quietly starving to death. Maybe you’ll give up when you’re desperate and hungry enough. Or maybe you’ll start cannibalizing one another. Either way, if my men have to wait that long, they’ll torture every last one of you to death when they get in, which inevitably they will. And if we must go the slow, boring, sad route, then please, for the sake of the children, bring me some trousers.”
“Althea, fetch the man some damned trousers!” said Miss Wren. “But do not, under any circumstances, melt this ice!”
“Yes, ma’am,” replied Althea, and she went out.
“Now,” said Miss Wren, turning to Caul. “Here’s what we’ll do. You tell your men to allow us safe passage out of here, or we’ll kill you. If we have to do it, I assure you we will, and we’ll dump your stinking corpse out a hole in the ice a piece at a time. While I’m sure your men won’t like that much, we’ll have a very long time to devise our next move.”
Caul shrugged and said, “Oh, all right.”
“Really?” Miss Wren said.
“I thought I could scare you,” he said, “but you’re right, I’d rather not be killed. So take me to one of these holes in the ice and I’ll do as you’ve asked and shout down to my men.”
Althea came back in with some pants and threw them at Caul, and he put them on. Miss Wren appointed Bronwyn, the clown, and the folding man to be Caul’s guards, arming them with broken icicles. With their points aimed at his back, we proceeded into the hall. But as we were bottlenecking through the small, dark office that led to the ymbryne meeting room, everything went wrong. Someone tripped over a mattress and went down, and then I heard a scuffle break out in the dark. Emma lit a flame just in time to see Caul dragging Althea away from us by the hair. She kicked and flailed while Caul held a sharpened icicle to her throat and shouted, “Stay back or I drive this through her jugular!”
We followed Caul at a careful distance. He dragged Althea thrashing and kicking into the meeting hall, and then up onto the oval table, where he put her in a choke hold, the icicle held an inch from her eye, and shouted, “These are my demands!”
Before he could get any further, though, Althea slapped the icicle from his hand. It flew and landed point-down in the pages of the Map of Days. While his mouth was still forming an O of surprise, Althea’s hand latched onto the front of Caul’s pants, and the O broadened into a grimace of shock.
“Now!” Emma bellowed, and then she and I and Bronwyn rushed toward them through the wooden doors. But as we ran, the distance across that big room seemed to yawn, and in seconds the fight between Althea and Caul had taken another turn: Caul let go of Althea and fell to the table, his arms stretched and grasping for the icicle. Althea fell with him but did not let go—now had both hands wrapped around his thigh—and a coating of ice was spreading quickly across Caul’s lower half, paralyzing him from the waist down and freezing Althea’s hands to his leg. He got one finger around the icicle, and then his whole hand, and groaning with effort and pain, he wrenched it free from the Map and twisted his upper body until he had the point of it poised above Althea’s back. He screamed at her to stop and let him go and melt the ice or he’d plunge it into her.
We were just yards from them now, but Bronwyn caught Emma and me and held us back.
Caul screamed, “Stop! Stop this!” as his face contorted in pain, the ice racing up his chest and over his shoulders. In a few seconds, his arms and hands would be encased, too.
Althea didn’t stop.
And then Caul did it—he stabbed the icicle into her back. She tensed in shock, then groaned. Miss Wren ran toward them, screaming Althea’s name while the ice that had spread across most of Caul’s body began, very quickly, to recede. By the time Miss Wren reached them, he was nearly free of it. But then the ice everywhere was melting, too—fading and retracting just as quickly as Althea’s life was—the ice in the attic dripping and raining down through the ceiling just as Althea’s own blood ran down her body. She was in Miss Wren’s arms now, slack, going.
Bronwyn was on the table, Caul’s throat in one hand, his weapon crushed to snow in her other. We could hear the ice in floors below us melting, too, and then it was gone from the windows. We rushed to look out, and could see water flooding from lower windows into the street, where soldiers in gray urban camo were clinging to lampposts and fire hydrants to keep from being washed away by the icy waves.
Then we heard their boots stomping on the stairs below and coming down from the roof above, and moments later they burst in with their guns, shouting. Some of the men wore night-vision headsets and all of them bristled with weapons—compact machine guns, laser-sighted pistols, combat knives. It took three of them to pry Bronwyn away from Caul, who wheezed through his half-crushed windpipe, “Take them away, and don’t be gentle!”
Miss Wren was shouting, begging us to comply—“Do as they say or they’ll hurt you!”—but she wouldn’t let go of Althea’s body, so they made an example of her; they tore Althea away and kicked Miss Wren to the ground, and one of the soldiers fired his machine pistol into the ceiling just to scare us. When I saw Emma about to make a fireball with her hands, I grabbed her by the arm and begged her not to—“Don’t, please don’t, they’ll kill you!”—and then a rifle butt slammed into my chest and I fell gasping to the floor. One of the soldiers noosed my hands together behind me.
I heard them counting us, Caul listing our names, making sure even Millard was accounted for—because of course by now, having spent the last three days with us, he knew all of us, knew everything about us.
I was pulled to my feet and we were all pushed out through the doors into the hallway. Stumbling along next to me was Emma, blood in her hair, and I whispered, “Please, just do what they say,” and though she didn’t acknowledge it, I knew she’d heard me. The look on her face was all rage and fear and shock—and I think pity, too, for all I’d just had snatched away from me.
In the stairwell, the floors and stairs below were a white-water river, a vortex of cascading waves. Up was the only way out. We were shoved up the stairs, through a door and into strong daylight, onto the roof. Everyone wet, frozen, frightened into silence.
All but Emma. “Where are you taking us?” she demanded.
Caul came right to her and grinned in her face while a soldier held her cuffed hands behind her. “A very special place,” Caul said, “where not a drop of your peculiar souls will go to waste.”
She flinched, and he laughed and turned away, stretching his arms above his head and yawning. From his shoulder blades jutted a weird pair of knobby protrusions, like the stems of aborted wings: the only outward clue that this twisted man bore any relation to an ymbryne.
Voices shouted from the top of another building. More soldiers. They were laying down a collapsible bridge between rooftops.
“What about the dead girl?” one of the soldiers asked.
“Such a pity, such a waste,” Caul said, clucking his tongue. “I should have liked to dine on her soul. It’s got no taste on its own, the peculiar soul,” he said, addressing us. “Its natural consistency is a bit gelatinous and pasty, really, but whipped together with a soupçon of remoulade and spread upon white meat, it’s quite palatable.”
Then he laughed, very loudly, for a long time.
As they led us away, one by one, over the wide collapsible bridge, I felt a familiar twinge in my gut—faint but strengthening, slow but quickening—the hollowgast, unfrozen now, coming slowly back to life.
* * *
Ten soldiers marched us out of the loop at gunpoint, past the carnival tents and sideshows and gaping carnival-goers, down the rats’ warren of alleys with their stalls and vendors and ragamuffin kids staring after us, into the disguising room, past the piles of cast-off clothes we’d left behind, and down into the underground. The soldiers prodded us along, barking at us to keep quiet (though no one had said a word in minutes), to keep our heads down and stay in line or be pistol-whipped.
Caul was no longer with us—he had stayed behind with the larger contingent of soldiers to “mop up,” which I think meant scouring the loop for hiders and stragglers. The last time we saw him, he was pulling on a pair of modern boots and an army jacket and told us he was absolutely sick of our faces but would see us “on the other side,” whatever that meant.
We passed through the changeover, and forward in time again—but not to a version of the tunnels I recognized. The tracks and ties were all metal now, and the lights in the tunnels were different, not red incandescents but flickering fluorescent tubes that glowed a sickly green. Then we came out of the tunnel and onto the platform, and I understood why: we were no longer in the nineteenth century, nor even the twentieth. The crowd of sheltering refugees was gone now; the station nearly deserted. The circular staircase we’d come down was gone, too, replaced by an escalator. A scrolling LED screen hung above the platform: TIME TO NEXT TRAIN: 2 MINUTES. On the wall was a poster for a movie I’d seen earlier in the summer, just before my grandfather died.
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.
