by Ransom Riggs
“It’s trying to climb the wall,” I said. “Good God, it’s like the freaking Terminator.”
“The what?” said Emma.
I almost started to explain, then shook my head. It was a stupid comparison, anyway—hollowgast were scarier, and probably deadlier, than any movie monster.
“We have to stop it!” said Olive.
“Or better yet, run!” said Horace.
“No more running!” said Enoch. “Can we please just kill the damn thing?”
“Sure,” Emma said. “But how?”
“Anyone got a vat of boiling oil?” said Enoch.
“Will this do instead?” I heard Bronwyn say, and turned to see her lifting a boulder above her head.
“It might,” I said. “How’s your aim? Can you drop it where I tell you?”
“I’ll certainly try,” Bronwyn said, tottering toward the ledge with the rock balanced precariously on her hands.
We stood looking over the ledge. “Farther this way,” I said, urging her a few steps to the left. Just as I was about to give the signal for her to drop the boulder, though, the hollow leapt from one hold to the next, and now she was standing in the wrong place.
The hollow was getting faster at making the holds; now it was a moving target. To make matters worse, Bronwyn’s boulder was the only one in sight. If she missed, we wouldn’t get a second shot.
I forced myself to stare at the hollow despite a nearly unbearable urge to look away. For a few strange, head-swimmy seconds, the voices of my friends faded away and I could hear my own blood pumping in my ears and my heart thumping in the cavity of my chest, and my thoughts drifted to the creature that killed my grandfather; that stood over his torn and dying body before fleeing, cowardly, into the woods.
My vision rippled and my hands shook. I tried to steady myself.
You were born for this, I thought to myself. You were built to kill monsters like this. I repeated it under my breath like a mantra.
“Hurry up, please, Jacob,” Bronwyn said.
The creature faked left, then jumped right. I didn’t want to guess, and throw away our best chance at killing it. I wanted to know. And somehow, for some reason, I felt that I could.
I knelt, so close to the cliff’s edge now that Emma hooked two fingers through the back of my belt to keep me from falling. Focusing on the hollow, I repeated the mantra to myself—built to kill you, built to kill—and though the hollow was for the moment stationary, hacking away at one spot on the wall, I felt the compass needle in my gut prick ever so slightly to the right of it.
It was like a premonition.
Bronwyn was beginning to tremble under the boulder’s weight.
“I can’t hold this much longer!” she said.
I decided to trust my instinct. Even though the spot my compass pointed to was empty, I shouted for Bronwyn to drop the boulder there. She angled toward it and, with a groan of relief, let go of the rock.
The moment after she let go, the hollow leapt to the right—into the very place my compass had pointed. The hollow looked up to see the rock sailing toward it and poised to jump again—but there wasn’t time. The boulder slammed into the creature’s head and swept its body off the wall. With a thunderous crash, hollow and boulder hit the ground together. Tentacle tongues shot out from beneath the rock, shivered, went limp. Black blood followed, fanning around the boulder in a great, viscous puddle.
“Direct hit!” I yelled.
The kids began to jump and cheer. “It’s dead, it’s dead,” Olive cried, “the horrible hollow is dead!”
Bronwyn threw her arms around me. Emma kissed the top of my head. Horace shook my hand and Hugh slapped me on the back. Even Enoch congratulated me. “Good work,” he said a bit reluctantly. “Now don’t go getting a big head over it.”
I should’ve been overjoyed, but I hardly felt anything, just a spreading numbness as the trembling pain of the Feeling receded. Emma could see I was drained. Very sweetly, and in a way no one else could quite detect, she took my arm and half supported me as we walked away from the ledge. “That wasn’t luck,” she whispered in my ear. “I was right about you, Jacob Portman.”
* * *
The path that had dead-ended at the bottom of the wall began again here at the top, following the spine of a ridge up and over a hill.
“The sign on the rope said Access to Menagerie,” said Horace. “Do you suppose that’s what’s ahead?”
“You’re the one who dreams about the future,” said Enoch. “Suppose you tell us.”
“What’s a menagerie?” asked Olive.
“A collection of animals,” Emma explained. “Like a zoo, sort of.”
Olive squeaked and clapped her hands. “It’s Cuthbert’s friends! From the story! Oh, I can’t wait to meet them. Do you suppose that’s where the ymbryne lives, too?”
“At this juncture,” Millard said, “it’s best not to suppose anything.”
We started walking. I was still reeling from my encounter with the hollow. My ability did seem to be developing, as Millard said it would, growing like a muscle the more I worked it. Once I’d seen a hollow I could track it, and if I focused on it in just the right way, I could anticipate its next move, in some felt-more-than-known, gut-instinctual way. I felt a certain satisfaction at having learned something new about my peculiarity, and with nothing to teach me but experience. But this wasn’t a safe, controlled environment I was learning in. There were no bumper lanes to keep my ball out of the gutter. Any mistake I made would have immediate and deadly consequences, for both myself and those around me. I worried the others would start believing the hype about me—or worse yet, I would. And I knew that the minute I got cocky—the minute I stopped being pants-wettingly terrified of hollowgast—something terrible would happen.
Maybe it was lucky, then, that my terror-to-confidence ratio was at an all-time low. Ten-to-one, easy. I stuck my hands in my pockets as we walked, afraid the others would see them shaking.
“Look!” said Bronwyn, stopping in the middle of the path. “A house in the clouds!”
We were halfway up the ridge. Up ahead of us, high in the distance, was a house that almost seemed to be balanced on a cloudbank. As we walked farther and crested the hill, the clouds parted and the house came into full view. It was very small, and perched not atop a cloud but on a very large tower constructed entirely from stacked-up railroad ties, the whole thing set smack in the middle of a grassy plateau. It was one of the strangest man-made structures I’d ever seen. Around it on the plateau were scattered a few shacks, and at the far end was a small patch of woods, but we paid no attention—our eyes were on the tower.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“A lookout tower?” guessed Emma.
“A place to launch airplanes from?” said Hugh.
But there were no airplanes anywhere, nor any evidence of a landing strip.
“Perhaps it’s a place to launch zeppelins from,” said Millard.
I remembered old footage of the ill-fated Hindenburg docking to the top of what looked like a radio tower—a structure not so different from this—and felt a cold wave of dread pass through me. What if the balloons that hunted us on the beach were based here, and we’d unwittingly stumbled into a nest of wights?
“Or maybe it’s the ymbryne’s house,” said Olive. “Why does everyone always leap to the awfullest conclusions right away?”
“I’m sure Olive’s right,” said Hugh. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”
He was answered right away by a loud, inhuman growl, which seemed to come from the shadows beneath the tower.
“What was that?” said Emma. “Another hollow?”
“I don’t think so,” I said; the Feeling still fading in me.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” said Horace, backing away.
But we didn’t have a choice; it wanted to meet us. The growl came again, prickling the hairs on my arms, and a moment later a furry face appeared betwee
n two of the lower railroad ties. It snarled at us like a rabid dog, reels of saliva dripping from its fang-toothed mouth.
“What in the name of the Elderfolk is that?” muttered Emma.
“Capital idea, coming into this loop,” said Enoch. “Really working out well for us so far.”
The whatever-it-was crawled out from between the ties and into the sun, where it crouched on its haunches and leered at us with an unbalanced smile, as if imagining how our brains might taste. I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal; dressed in rags, it had the body of a man but carried itself like an ape, its hunched form like some long-lost ancestor of ours whose evolution had been arrested millions of years ago. Its eyes and teeth were a dull yellow, its skin pale and blotched with dark spots, its hair a long, matted nest.
“Someone make it die!” Horace said. “Or at least make it quit looking at me!”
Bronwyn set Claire down and assumed a fighting stance, while Emma held out her hands to make a flame—but she was too stunned, apparently, to summon more than a sputter of smoke. The man-thing tensed, snarled, and then took off like an Olympic sprinter—not toward us but around us, diving behind a pile of rocks and popping up again with a fang-bearing grin. It was toying with us, like a cat toys with its prey just before the kill.
It seemed about to make another run—at us this time—when a voice from behind commanded it to “Sit down and behave!” And the thing did, relaxing onto its hindquarters, tongue lolling from its mouth in a dopey grin.
We turned to see a dog trotting calmly in our direction. I looked past it to see who had spoken, but there was no one—and then the dog itself opened its mouth and said, “Don’t mind Grunt, he’s got no manners at all! That’s just his way of saying thank you. That hollowgast was most bothersome.”
The dog seemed to be talking to me, but I was too surprised to respond. Not only was it speaking in an almost-human voice—and a refined British one at that—but it held in its jowly mouth a pipe and on its face wore a pair of round, green-tinted glasses. “Oh dear, I hope you’re not too offended,” the dog continued, misinterpreting my silence. “Grunt means well, but you’ll have to excuse him. He was, quite literally, raised in a barn. I, on the other hand, was educated on a grand estate, the seventh pup of the seventh pup in an illustrious line of hunting dogs.” He bowed as well as a dog could, dipping his nose to the ground. “Addison MacHenry, at your humble service.”
“That’s a fancy name for a dog,” said Enoch, apparently unimpressed to meet a talking animal.
Addison peered over his glasses at Enoch and said, “And by what appellation, dare I ask, are you denominated?”
“Enoch O’Connor,” Enoch said proudly, sticking his chest out a little.
“That’s a fancy name for a grimy, pudge-faced boy,” Addison said, and then he stood up on his hind legs, rising nearly to Enoch’s height. “I am a dog, yes, but a peculiar one. Why, then, should I be saddled with a common dog’s name? My former master called me ‘Boxie’ and I despised it—an assault on my dignity!—so I bit him on the face and took his name. Addison: much more befitting an animal of my intellectual prowess, I think. That was just before Miss Wren discovered me and brought me here.”
Faces brightened at the mention of an ymbryne’s name, a pulse of hope firing through us.
“Miss Wren brought you?” said Olive. “But what about Cuthbert the giant?”
“Who?” Addison said, and then he shook his head. “Ah, right, the story. It’s just that, I’m afraid—a story, inspired long ago by that curious rock down below and Miss Wren’s peculiar menagerie.”
“Told you,” muttered Enoch.
“Where’s Miss Wren now?” Emma said. “We’ve got to speak to her!”
Addison looked up at the house atop the tower and said, “That’s her residence, but she isn’t home at the moment. She winged off some days ago to help her ymbryne sisters in London. There’s a war on, you see … I assume you’ve heard all about it? Which explains why you’re traveling in the degraded style of refugees?”
“Our loop was raided,” said Emma. “And then we lost our things at sea.”
“And nearly ourselves,” Millard added.
At the sound of Millard’s voice, the dog startled. “An invisible! What a rare surprise. And an American, too,” he said, nodding at me. “What a peculiar lot you are, even for peculiars.” He fell back onto all fours and turned toward the tower. “Come, I’ll introduce you to the others. They’ll be absolutely fascinated to meet you. And you must be famished from your journey, poor creatures. Nutrifying provender shall be forthcoming!”
“We need medicine, too,” said Bronwyn, kneeling to pick up Claire. “This little one is very ill!”
“We’ll do all we can for her,” the dog said. “We owe you that and more for solving our little hollowgast problem. Most bothersome, as I was saying.”
“Nutrifying what did he say?” said Olive.
“Sustenance, comestibles, rations!” the dog replied. “You’ll eat like royalty here.”
“But I don’t like dog food,” said Olive.
Addison laughed, the timbre surprisingly human. “Neither do I, miss.”
Addison walked on all fours with his snub nose in the air while the man-thing called Grunt scampered around us like a psychotic puppy. From behind tufts of grass and the shacks scattered here and there, I could see faces peeking out at us—furry, most of them, and of all different shapes and sizes. When we came to the middle of the plateau, Addison reared up on his hind legs and called out, “Don’t be afraid, fellows! Come and meet the children who dispatched our unwelcome visitor!”
One by one, a parade of bizarre animals ventured out into the open. Addison introduced them as they came. The first creature looked like the top half of a miniature giraffe sutured onto the bottom half of a donkey. It walked awkwardly on two hind legs—its only limbs. “This is Deirdre,” said Addison. “She’s an emu-raffe, which is a bit like a donkey and a giraffe put together, only with fewer legs and a peevish temper. She’s a terrible sore loser at cards,” he added in a whisper. “Never play an emu-raffe at cards. Say hello, Deirdre!”
“Goodbye!” Deirdre said, her big horse lips pulling back into a bucktoothed grin. “Terrible day! Very displeased to meet you!” Then she laughed—a braying, high-pitched whinny—and said, “Only teasing!”
“Deirdre thinks she’s quite funny,” Addison explained.
“If you’re like a donkey and a giraffe,” said Olive, “then why aren’t you called a donkey-raffe?”
Deirdre frowned and answered, “Because what kind of an awful name is that? Emu-raffe rolls off the tongue, don’t you think?” And then she stuck out her tongue—fat, pink, and three feet long—and pushed Olive’s tiara back on her head with its tip. Olive squealed and ran behind Bronwyn, giggling.
“Do all the animals here talk?” I asked.
“Just Deirdre and I,” Addison said, “and a good thing, too. The chickens won’t shut up as it is, and they can’t say a word!” Right on cue, a flock of clucking chickens bobbled toward us from a burned and blackened coop. “Ah!” said Addison. “Here come the girls now.”
“What happened to their coop?” Emma asked.
“Every time we repair it, they burn it down again,” he said. “Such a bother.” Addison turned and nodded in the other direction. “You might want to back away a bit. When they get excited …”
BANG!—a sound like a quarter-stick of dynamite going off made us all jump, and the coop’s last few undamaged boards splintered and flew into the air.
“… their eggs go off,” he finished.
When the smoke cleared, we saw the chickens still coming toward us, unhurt and seemingly unsurprised by the blast, a little cloud of feathers wafting around them like fat snowflakes.
Enoch’s jaw fell open. “Are you telling me these chickens lay exploding eggs?!” he said.
“Only when they get excited,” said Addison. “Most of their eggs are quite safe—
and delicious! But it was the exploding ones that earned them their rather unkind name: Armageddon chickens.”
“Keep away from us!” Emma shouted as the chickens closed in. “You’ll blow us all up!”
Addison laughed. “They’re sweet and harmless, I assure you, and they don’t lay anywhere but inside their coop.” The chickens clucked happily around our feet. “You see?” the dog said. “They like you!”
“This is a madhouse!” said Horace.
Deirdre laughed. “No, doveling. It’s a menagerie.”
Then Addison introduced us to a few animals whose peculiarities were subtler, including an owl who watched us from a branch, silent and intense, and a cadre of mice who seemed to fade subtly in and out of view, as if they spent half their time on some other plane of reality. There was a goat, too, with very long horns and deep black eyes; an orphan from a herd of peculiar goats who once roamed the forest below.
When all the animals were assembled, Addison cried, “Three cheers for the hollow-killers!” Deirdre brayed and the goat stamped the ground and the owl hooted and the chickens clucked and Grunt grunted his appreciation. And while all this was going on, Bronwyn and Emma kept trading looks—Bronwyn glancing down at her coat, where Miss Peregrine was hiding, and then raising her eyebrows at Emma to ask, Now? and Emma shaking her head in reply: Not quite yet.
Bronwyn laid Claire in a patch of grass beneath a shade tree. She was sweating and shivering, fading in and out of consciousness.
“There’s a special elixir I’ve seen Miss Wren prepare for treating fever,” Addison said. “Foul-tasting but effective.”
“My mom used to make me chicken soup,” I offered.
The chickens squawked with alarm, and Addison shot me a nasty look. “He was joking!” he said. “Only joking, such an absurd joke, ha-ha! There’s no such thing as chicken soup!”
With the help of Grunt and his opposable thumbs, Addison and the emu-raffe went to prepare the elixir. In a little while they returned with a bowl of what looked like dirty dishwater. Once Claire had drunk every drop and fallen back asleep, the animals laid out a modest feast for us: baskets of fresh bread and stewed apples and hard-boiled eggs—of the nonexploding variety—all served straight into our hands, as they had no plates or silverware. I didn’t realize how hungry I’d been until I wolfed down three eggs and a loaf of bread in under five minutes.
