Hollow City

by Ransom Riggs

  “Miss P, what are you up to?” said Emma.

  “I think she wants something from your bird,” I said to Melina.

  “If the pigeon knows the way,” said Millard, “perhaps it knows the combination, too.”

  Miss Peregrine turned toward him and squawked, then looked back at the pigeon and squawked louder. The pigeon tried to hide behind Melina’s neck.

  “Perhaps the pigeon knows the combination but doesn’t know how to tell us,” said Bronwyn, “but it could tell Miss Peregrine, because both of them speak bird language, and then Miss Peregrine could tell us.”

  “Make your pigeon talk to our bird,” said Enoch.

  “Your bird’s twice Winnie’s size and sharp on three ends,” Melina said, backing away a step. “She’s scared and I don’t blame her.”

  “There’s nothing to be scared of,” said Emma. “Miss P would never hurt another bird. It’s against the ymbryne code.”

  Melina’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “That bird is an ymbryne?”

  “She’s our headmistress!” said Bronwyn. “Alma LeFay Peregrine.”

  “Full of surprises, ain’t you?” Melina said, then laughed in a way that wasn’t exactly friendly. “If you’ve got an ymbryne right there, what d’you need to find another one for?”

  “It’s a long story,” said Millard. “Suffice to say, our ymbryne needs help that only another ymbryne can give.”

  “Just put the blasted pigeon on the ground so Miss P can talk to it!” said Enoch.

  Finally, reluctantly, Melina agreed. “Come on, Winnie, there’s a good girl.” She lifted the pigeon from her shoulder and placed it gently at her feet, then pinned its leash under her shoe so it couldn’t fly away.

  Everyone circled around to watch as Miss Peregrine advanced on the pigeon. It tried to run but was caught short by the leash. Miss Peregrine got right in its face, warbling and clucking. It was like watching an interrogation. The pigeon tucked its head under its wing and began to tremble.

  Then Miss Peregrine pecked it on the head.

  “Hey!” said Melina. “Stop that!”

  The pigeon kept its head tucked and didn’t respond, so Miss Peregrine pecked it again, harder.

  “That’s enough!” Melina said, and lifting her shoe from the leash, she reached down for the pigeon. Before she could get her fingers around it, though, Miss Peregrine severed the leash with a quick slash of her talons, clamped down with her beak on one of the pigeon’s twiggy legs, and bounded away, the pigeon screeching and flailing.

  Melina freaked out. “Come back here!” she shouted, furious, about to run after the birds when Bronwyn caught her by the arms.

  “Wait!” said Bronwyn. “I’m sure Miss P knows what she’s doing …”

  Miss Peregrine stopped a little way down the track, well out of anyone’s reach. The pigeon struggled in her beak, and Melina struggled against Bronwyn, both in vain. Miss Peregrine seemed to be waiting for the pigeon to tire out and give up, but then she got impatient and began swinging the pigeon around in the air by its leg.

  “Please, Miss P!” Olive shouted. “You’ll kill it!”

  I was close to rushing over and breaking it up myself, but the birds were a blur of talons and beaks, and no one could get close enough to separate them. We yelled and begged Miss Peregrine to stop.

  Finally, she did. The pigeon dropped from her mouth and wobbled on its feet, too stunned to flee. Miss Peregrine warbled at it the way she had earlier, and this time the pigeon chirped in response. Then Miss Peregrine tapped the ground with her beak three times, then ten times, then five.

  Three–ten–five. Olive tried the combination. The lock popped open, the door swung inward, and a rope ladder unrolled down the wall to meet the floor.

  Miss Peregrine’s interrogation had worked. She’d done what she needed to do to help us all, and given that, we might’ve overlooked her behavior—if not for what happened next. She took the dazed pigeon by its leg again and, seemingly out of spite, flung it hard against the wall.

  We reacted with a great collective gasp of horror. I was shocked beyond speaking.

  Melina broke away from Bronwyn and ran to pick up the pigeon. It hung limply from her hand, its neck broken.

  “Oh my bird, she’s killed it!” cried Bronwyn.

  “All we went through to catch that thing,” said Hugh, “and now look.”

  “I’m going to stomp your ymbryne’s head!” Melina shrieked, crazed with rage.

  Bronwyn caught her arms again. “No, you’re not! Stop it!”

  “Your ymbryne’s a savage! If that’s how she conducts herself, we’re better off with the wights!”

  “You take that back!” shouted Hugh.

  “I won’t!” Melina said.

  More harsh words were exchanged. A fistfight was narrowly avoided. Bronwyn held Melina, and Emma and I held Hugh, until the fight went out of them, if not the bitterness.

  No one could quite believe what Miss Peregrine had done.

  “What’s the big fuss?” said Enoch. “It was just a stupid pigeon.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Emma, scolding Miss Peregrine directly.

  “That bird was a personal friend of Miss Wren’s. It was hundreds of years old. It was written about in the Tales. And now it’s dead.”

  “Murdered,” said Melina, and she spat on the ground. “That’s what it’s called when you kill something for no reason.”

  Miss Peregrine nibbled casually at a mite under her wing, as if she hadn’t heard any of this.

  “Something wicked’s gotten into her,” said Olive. “This isn’t like Miss Peregrine at all.”

  “She’s changing,” said Hugh. “Becoming more animal.”

  “I hope there’s still something human left in her to rescue,” Millard said darkly.

  So did we all.

  We climbed out of the tunnel, each of us lost in our own anxious thoughts.

  * * *

  Beyond the door was a passage that led to a flight of steps that led to another passage and another door, which opened onto a room filled with daylight and packed to the rafters with clothes: racks and closets and wardrobes stuffed with them. There were also two wooden privacy screens to change behind, some freestanding mirrors, and a worktable laid out with sewing machines and bolts of raw fabric. It was half boutique, half workshop—and a paradise to Horace, who practically cartwheeled inside, crying, “I’m in Heaven!”

  Melina lurked sullenly at the rear, not speaking to anyone.

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “It’s a disguising room,” Millard answered, “designed to help visiting peculiars blend in with this loop’s normals.” He pointed out a framed illustration demonstrating how clothes of the period were worn.

  “When in Rome!” said Horace, bounding toward a rack of clothes.

  Emma asked everyone to change. In addition to helping us blend in, new clothes might also throw off any wights who’d been tracking us. “But keep your sweaters on underneath, in case more trouble finds us.”

  Bronwyn and Olive took some plain-looking dresses behind a screen. I traded my ash-coated, sweat-stained pants and jacket for a mismatched but relatively clean suit. Instantly uncomfortable, I wondered how, for so many centuries, people wore such stiff, formal clothes all the time.

  Millard put on a sharp-looking outfit and sat down in front of a mirror. “How do I look?” he said.

  “Like an invisible boy wearing clothes,” replied Horace.

  Millard sighed, lingered in front of the mirror a bit longer, then stripped and disappeared again.

  Horace’s initial excitement had already waned. “The selection here is atrocious,” he complained. “If the clothes aren’t moth-eaten, they’re patched with clashing fabric! I am so weary of looking like a street urchin.”

  “Street urchins blend,” Emma said from behind her changing screen. “Little gents in top hats do not.” She emerged wearing shiny red flats and a short-sleeved blue dress that fe
ll just below the knee.

  “What do you think?” she said, twirling to make the dress billow.

  She looked like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, only cuter. I didn’t know how to tell her this in front of everybody, though, so instead I gave her an awkward grin and a thumbs-up.

  She laughed. “Like it? Well, that’s too bad,” she said with a coy smile. “I’d stick out like a sore thumb.” Then a pained expression crossed her face, as if she felt guilty for laughing—for having had even a moment of fun, given all that had happened to us and everything yet to be resolved—and she ducked behind the screen again.

  I felt it, too: the dread, the weight of the horrors we’d seen, which replayed themselves in an endless, lurid loop in my mind. But you can’t feel bad every second, I wanted to tell her. Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you’ve forgotten. It just means you’re human. But I didn’t know how to say this, either.

  When she came out again, she had on a sacklike blouse with ripped sleeves and a broomstick skirt that brushed the top of her feet. (Much more urchin like.) She’d kept the red shoes, though. Emma could never resist a touch of glitter, however small.

  “And this?” said Horace, waving a poofy orange wig he’d found.

  “How’s this going to help anyone ‘blend in with the normals’?”

  “Because it seems we’re going to a carnival,” said Hugh, looking up at a poster on the wall that advertised one.

  “Just a moment!” Horace said, joining Hugh beneath the poster. “I’ve heard of this place! It’s an old tourist loop.”

  “What’s a tourist loop?” I asked.

  “Used to be you could find them all across peculiardom,” Millard explained, “placed strategically at times and locations of historical import. They made up a sort of Grand Tour that was once considered an essential part of any well-bred peculiar’s education. This was many years ago, of course, when it was still relatively safe to travel abroad. I didn’t realize there were any left.”

  Then he got quiet, lost in memories of a better time.

  When we’d all finished changing, we left our twentieth-century clothes in a heap and followed Emma through another door, out into an alleyway stacked with trash and empty crates. I recognized the sounds of a carnival in the distance: the arrhythmic wheeze of pipe organs, the dull roar of a crowd. Even through my nerves and exhaustion, I felt a jangle of excitement. Once, this was something peculiars had come from far and wide to see. My parents had never even taken me to Disney World.

  Emma gave the usual instructions: “Stay together. Watch Jacob and me for signals. Don’t talk to anyone, and look no one in the eye.”

  “How will we know where to go?” asked Olive.

  “We’ll have to think like ymbrynes,” Emma said. “If you were Miss Wren, where would you be hiding?”

  “Anywhere but London?” said Enoch.

  “If only someone hadn’t murdered the pigeon,” Bronwyn said, staring bitterly at Miss Peregrine.

  The headmistress stood on the cobblestones looking up at us, but no one wanted to touch her. We had to keep her out of sight, though, so Horace went back into the disguising room and fetched a denim sack. Miss Peregrine wasn’t enthusiastic about this arrangement, but when it became clear that no one was going to pick her up—least of all Bronwyn, who seemed entirely disgusted with her—she climbed inside and let Horace knot the top closed with a strip of leather.

  * * *

  We followed the drunken sound of the carnival through a snarl of cramped lanes, where from wooden carts vendors hawked vegetables and dusty sacks of grain and freshly killed rabbits; where children and thin cats skulked and prowled with hungry eyes, and women with proud, dirty faces squatted in the gutter peeling potatoes, building little mountains with the tossed-away skins. Though we tried very hard to slink by unnoticed, every one of them seemed to turn and stare as we passed: the vendors, the children, the women, the cats, the dead, milk-eyed rabbits swinging by their legs.

  Even in my new, period-appropriate clothes, I felt transparently out of place. Blending in was as much about performance as about costume, I realized, and my friends and I carried ourselves with none of the slump-shouldered, shifty-eyed attitude that these people did. In the future, if I wanted to disguise myself as effectively as the wights, I’d have to sharpen my acting skills.

  The carnival grew louder as we went, and the smells stronger—overcooked meats, roasting nuts, horse manure, human manure, and the smoke from coal fires all mixing together into something so sickly sweet that it thickened the very air. Finally, we reached a wide square where the carnival was in full, rollicking swing, packed with masses of people and brightly colored tents and more activity than my eyes could take in at once. The whole scene was an assault on my senses. There were acrobats and ropedancers and knife-throwers and fire-eaters and street performers of every type. A quack doctor pitched patent medicines from the back of a wagon: “A rare cordial to fortify the innards against infective parasites, unwholesome damps, and malignant effluvia!” Competing for attention on an adjacent stage was a loudmouthed showman in coattails and a large, prehistoric-looking creature whose gray skin hung from its frame in cascading wrinkles. It took me ten full seconds, as we threaded the crowd past the stage, to recognize it as a bear. It had been shaved and tied to a chair and made to wear a woman’s dress, and as its eyes bulged in its head, the showman grinned and pretended to serve it tea, shouting, “Ladies and gentlemen! Presenting the most beautiful lady in all of Wales!”—which earned him a big laugh from the crowd. I half hoped it would break its chains and eat him, right there in front of everyone.

  To combat the dizzying effect of all this dreamlike madness, I reached into my pocket to palm the smooth glass of my phone, eyes closed for a moment, and whispered to myself, “I am a time traveler. This is real. I, Jacob Portman, am traveling in time.”

  This was astonishing enough. More astonishing, perhaps, was the fact that time travel hadn’t broken my brain; that by some miracle, I had not yet devolved into a gibbering crazy person ranting on a street corner. The human psyche was much more flexible than I’d imagined, capable of expanding to contain all sorts of contradictions and seeming impossibilities. Lucky for me.

  “Olive!” Bronwyn shouted. “Get away from there!” I looked up to see her yank Olive away from a clown who had bent down to talk to her. “I’ve told you time and again, never talk to normals!”

  Our group was large enough that keeping it together could be a challenge, especially in a place like this, full of distractions tailor-made to fascinate children. Bronwyn acted as den mother, rounding us up every time one of us strayed to get a closer look at a stall of brightly colored pinwheels or steaming boiled candy. Olive was the most easily distractible, and often seemed to forget that we were in serious danger. It was only possible to keep so many kids in line because they were not actually kids—because there was some older nature inside them, warring against and balancing their childish impulses. With actual children, I’m sure it would’ve been hopeless.

  For a while we wandered aimlessly, looking for anyone who resembled Miss Wren, or anywhere it seemed peculiars were likely to hide. But everything here seemed peculiar—this entire loop, with all its chaotic strangeness, was perfect camouflage for peculiars. And yet, even here, people noticed us, their heads turning subtly as we passed. I started to get paranoid. How many of the people around us were spies for the wights—or wights themselves? I was especially wary of the clown, the one Bronwyn had pulled Olive away from. He kept turning up. We must’ve passed him five times in as many minutes: loitering at the mouth of an alley, staring down from a window, watching us from a tented photo booth, his mussed hair and horrific makeup clashing bizarrely with a backdrop painting of bucolic countryside. He seemed to be everywhere at once.

  “It’s not good being out in the open like this,” I said to Emma.

  “We can’t j
ust circle around forever. People are noticing us. Clowns.”

  “Clowns?” she said. “Anyway, I agree with you—but it’s difficult to know where to start in all this madness.”

  “We should start at what is always the most peculiar part of any carnival,” said Enoch, butting between us. “The sideshow.” He pointed at a tall, gaudy facade at the edge of the square. “Sideshows and peculiars go together like milk and cookies. Or hollows and wights.”

  “Usually they do,” said Emma, “but the wights know that as well. I’m sure Miss Wren hasn’t kept her freedom this long by hiding in such obvious places.”

  “Have you got a better idea?” said Enoch.

  We didn’t, and so we shifted direction toward the sideshow. I looked back for the leering clown, but he had melted into the crowd.

  At the sideshow, a scruffy carnival barker was shouting through a megaphone, promising glimpses of “the most shocking errors of nature allowed on view by law” for a trivial fee. It was called the Congress of Human Oddities.

  “Sounds like dinner parties I’ve attended,” said Horace.

  “Some of these ‘oddities’ might be peculiar,” said Millard, “in which case they might know something about Miss Wren. I say it’s worth the price of admission.”

  “We don’t have the price of admission,” said Horace, pulling a single, lint-flecked coin from his pocket.

  “Since when have we ever paid to get into a sideshow?” said Enoch.

  We followed Enoch around to the back of the sideshow, where its wall-like facade gave way to a big, flimsy tent. We were scouting for openings to slip through when a flap pulled back and a well-dressed man and woman burst out, the man holding the lady, the lady fanning herself.

  “Move aside!” the man barked. “This woman needs air!”

  A sign above the flap read: PERFORMERS ONLY.

  We slipped inside and were immediately stopped. A plain-looking boy sat on a tufted stool near the entrance, apparently in some official capacity. “You performers?” he said. “Can’t come in ’less you’re performers.”