Hollow City

by Ransom Riggs

  “That’s awful,” said Bronwyn. “I’m so sorry for you.”

  “One day we take revenge,” he said, his face darkening.

  “You mentioned that,” said Enoch. “How many are in your army, then?”

  “Right now six,” he said, gesturing to the room we’d just left.

  “Six people?!” said Emma. “You mean … them?”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “With you, makes seventeen. We growing quick.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “We didn’t come here to join any army.”

  He gave me a look that could freeze Hell, then turned and threw open the double doors.

  We followed him into a large room dominated by a massive oval table, its wood polished to a mirror shine. “This is Ymbryne Council meeting place,” the folding man said.

  All around us were portraits of famous old peculiars, not framed but drawn directly onto the walls in oil and charcoal and grease pencil. The one closest to me was a face with wide, staring eyes and an open mouth, inside of which was a real, functioning water fountain. Around its mouth was a motto written in Dutch, which Millard, standing next to me, translated: “From the mouths of our elders comes a fountain of wisdom.”

  Nearby was another, this one in Latin. “Ardet nec consomitur,” Melina said. “Burned but not destroyed.”

  “How fitting,” said Enoch.

  “I can’t believe I’m really here,” said Melina. “I’ve studied this place and dreamed about it for so many years.”

  “It’s just a room,” said Enoch.

  “Maybe to you. To me, it’s the heart of the whole peculiar world.”

  “A heart that’s been ripped out,” said someone new, and I looked to see a clown striding toward us—the same one who’d been stalking us at the carnival. “Miss Jackdaw was standing right where you are when she was taken. We found a whole pile of her feathers on the floor.” His accent was American. He stopped a few feet from us and stood, chewing, one hand on his hip. “This them?” he asked the folding man, pointing at us with a turkey leg. “We need soldiers, not little kids.”

  “I’m a hundred and twelve!” said Melina.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before,” said the clown. “I could tell you people were peculiar from across the fairgrounds, by the way. You’re the most obviously peculiar bunch of peculiars I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

  “I told them same thing,” said the folding man.

  “How they made it all the way here from Wales without being captured is beyond me,” said the clown. “In fact, it’s suspicious. Sure one of you ain’t a wight?”

  “How dare you!” said Emma.

  “We were captured,” Hugh said proudly, “but the wights who took us didn’t live to tell about it.”

  “Uh-huh, and I’m the king of Bolivia,” the clown said.

  “It’s true!” Hugh thundered, going red in the face.

  The clown tossed up his hands. “Okay, okay, calm down, kid! I’m sure Wren wouldn’t have let you in if you weren’t legitimate. Come on, let’s be friends, have a turkey leg.”

  He didn’t have to offer twice. We were too hungry to stay offended for long.

  The clown showed us to a table stacked with food—the same boiled nuts and roasted meats that had tempted us at the carnival. We crowded around the table and stuffed our faces shamelessly. The folding man ate five cherries and a small hunk of bread and then announced he’d never been so full in his life. Bronwyn paced along the wall, chewing her fingers, too consumed by worry to eat.

  When we were done, and the table was a battlefield of gnawed bones and grease stains, the clown leaned back in his chair and said, “So, peculiar children, what’s your story? Why’d you come here all the way from Wales?”

  Emma wiped her mouth and said, “To help our ymbryne.”

  “And when she’s helped?” the clown asked. “What then?”

  I’d been busy sopping up turkey gravy with the last of the bread, but now I looked up. The question was so straightforward, so simply put—so obvious—that I couldn’t believe none of us had asked it before.

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Horace. “You’ll jinx us.”

  “Wren’s a miracle worker,” the clown said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Emma.

  “Of course I am. So what’s your plan? You’ll stay and help us fight, obviously, but where will you sleep? Not with me, my room’s a single. Exceptions rarely made.” He looked at Emma and raised an eyebrow. “Note I said rarely.”

  All of a sudden everyone was looking off at the paintings on the walls or adjusting their collars—except for Emma, whose face was turning a certain shade of green. Maybe we were naturally pessimistic, and our chances of success had seemed so tiny that we’d never bothered to wonder what we’d do if we actually fixed Miss Peregrine—or maybe the crises of the past few days had been so constant and pressing that we’d never had a chance to wonder. Either way, the clown’s question had caught us off guard.

  What if we really pulled this off? What would we do if Miss Peregrine walked into the room, right now, restored to her old self?

  It was Millard who finally gave an answer. “I suppose we would head west again, back where we come from. Miss Peregrine could make another loop for us. One where we’d never be found.”

  “That’s it?” the clown said. “You’ll hide? What about all the other ymbrynes—the ones who weren’t so lucky? What about mine?”

  “It isn’t our job to save the whole world,” Horace said.

  “We’re not trying to save the whole world. Just all of peculiardom.”

  “Well, that’s not our job, either.” Horace sounded weak and defensive, ashamed to have been cornered into saying this.

  The clown leaned forward in his chair and glared at us. “Then whose job is it?”

  “There’s got to be someone else,” said Enoch. “People who are better equipped, who’ve trained for this sort of thing …”

  “The first thing the corrupted did three weeks ago was attack the Peculiar Home Guard. In less than a day, they were scattered to the four winds. With them gone, and now our ymbrynes, who does the defense of peculiardom fall to, eh? People like you and me, that’s who.” The clown threw down his turkey leg. “You cowards disgust me. I just lost my appetite.”

  “They are tired, had long journey,” said the folding man. “Give them break.”

  The clown waved his finger in the air like a schoolmarm. “Uh-uh. Nobody rides for free. I don’t care if you’re here for an hour or a month, as long as you’re here, you’ve got to be willing to fight. Now, you’re a scrawny-looking bunch, but you’re peculiar, so I know you’ve all got hidden talents. Show me what you can do!”

  He got up and moved toward Enoch, one arm extended like he was going to search Enoch’s pockets for his peculiar ability. “You there,” he said. “Do your thing!”

  “I’ll need a dead person in order to demonstrate,” Enoch said.

  “That could be you, if you so much as lay one finger on me.”

  The clown rerouted himself toward Emma. “Then how about you, sweetheart,” he said, and Emma held a particular finger up and made a flame dance atop it like a birthday candle. The clown laughed and said, “Sense of humor! I like that,” and moved on to the blind brothers.

  “They’re connected in the head,” said Melina, putting herself between the clown and the brothers. “They can see with their ears, and always know what the other’s thinking.”

  The clown clapped his hands. “Finally, something useful! They’ll be our lookouts—put one in the carnival and keep the other here. If anything goes wrong out there, we’ll know right away!”

  He pushed past Melina. The brothers shied away from him.

  “You can’t separate them!” said Melina. “Joel-and-Peter don’t like being apart.”

  “And I don’t like being hunted by invisible corpse beasts,” sai
d the clown, and he began to pry the older brother from the younger. The boys locked arms and moaned loudly, their tongues clicking and eyes rolling wildly in their heads. I was about to intervene when the brothers came apart and let out a doubled scream so loud and piercing I feared my head would break. The dishes on the table shattered, everyone ducked and clapped their hands over their ears, and I thought I could hear, from the frozen floors below, cracks spidering through the ice.

  As the echo faded, Joel-and-Peter clutched each other on the floor, shaking.

  “See what you did!” Melina shouted at the clown.

  “Good God, that’s impressive!” the clown said.

  With one hand Bronwyn picked the clown up by his neck.

  “If you continue to harass us,” she said calmly, “I’ll put your head through the wall.”

  “Sorry … about … that,” the clown wheezed through his closing windpipe. “Put … me … down?”

  “Go on, Wyn,” said Olive. “He said he’s sorry.”

  Reluctantly, Bronwyn set him down. The clown coughed and straightened his costume. “Looks like I misjudged you,” he said.

  “You’ll make fine additions to our army.”

  “I told you, we’re not joining your stupid army,” I said.

  “What’s the point of fighting, anyway?” Emma said. “You don’t even know where the ymbrynes are.”

  The folding man unfolded from his chair to tower above us.

  “Point is,” he said, “if corrupted get rest of ymbrynes, they become unstoppable.”

  “It seems like they’re pretty unstoppable already,” I said.

  “If you think that’s unstoppable, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” said the clown. “And if you think that while your ymbryne is free they’ll ever stop hunting you, you’re stupider than you look.”

  Horace stood up and cleared his throat. “You’ve just laid out the worst-case scenario,” he said. “Of late, I’ve heard a great many worst-case scenarios presented. But I haven’t heard a single argument laid for the best-case scenario.”

  “Oh, this should be rich,” said the clown. “Go ahead, fancy boy, let’s hear it.”

  Horace took a deep breath, working up his courage. “The wights wanted the ymbrynes, and now they have them—or most of them, anyway. Say, for the sake of argument, that’s all the wights need, and now they can follow through with their devilish plans. And they do: they become superwights, or demigods, or whatever it is they’re after. And then they have no more use for ymbrynes, and no more use for peculiar children, and no more use for time loops, so they go away to be demigods elsewhere and leave us alone. And then things not only go back to normal, they’re better than they were before, because no longer is anyone attempting to eat us or kidnap our ymbrynes. And then maybe, once in a great while, we could take a vacation abroad, like we used to, and see the world a bit, and put our toes in the sand somewhere that isn’t cold and gray three hundred days of the year. In which case, what’s the use in staying here and fighting? We’d be throwing ourselves onto their swords when everything might turn out just rosy without our intervention.”

  For a moment no one said anything. Then the clown began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, his cackles bouncing off the walls, until finally he fell out of his chair.

  Then Enoch said, “I simply have no words. Wait—no—I do! Horace, that is the most stunningly naive and cowardly bit of wishful thinking that I’ve ever heard.”

  “But it is possible,” Horace insisted.

  “Yes. It’s also possible that the moon is made of cheese. It’s just not bloody likely.”

  “I can end argument right now,” said the folding man. “You want to know what wights will do with us once free to do anything? Come—I show you.”

  “Strong stomachs only,” said the clown, glancing at Olive.

  “If they can handle it, I can, too,” she said.

  “Fair warning,” the clown shrugged. “Follow us.”

  “I wouldn’t follow you off a sinking ship,” said Melina, who was just getting the shaking blind brothers to their feet again.

  “Stay, then,” said the clown. “Anyone who’d rather not go down with the ship, follow us.”

  * * *

  The injured lay in mismatched beds in a makeshift hospital room, watched over by a nurse with a bulging glass eye. There were three patients, if you could call them that—a man and two women. The man lay on his side, half catatonic, whispering and drooling. One of the women stared blankly at the ceiling, while the other writhed under her sheets, moaning softly, in the grip of some nightmare. Some of the children watched from outside the door, keeping their distance in case whatever these people suffered from was contagious.

  “How are they today?” the folding man asked the nurse.

  “Getting worse,” she replied, buzzing from bed to bed. “I keep them sedated all the time now. Otherwise they just bawl.”

  They had no obvious wounds. There were no bloody bandages, no limbs wrapped in casts, no bowls brimming with reddish liquid. The room looked more like overflow from a psychiatric ward than a hospital.

  “What’s the matter with them?” I asked. “They were hurt in the raid?”

  “No, brought here by Miss Wren,” answered the nurse. “She found them abandoned inside a hospital, which the wights had converted into some sort of medical laboratory. These pitiful creatures were used as guinea pigs in their unspeakable experiments. What you see is the result.”

  “We found their old records,” the clown said. “They were kidnapped years ago by the wights. Long assumed dead.”

  The nurse took a clipboard from the wall by the whispering man’s bed. “This fellow, Benteret, he’s supposed to be fluent in a hundred languages, but now he’ll only say one word—over and over again.”

  I crept closer, watching his lips. Call, call, call, he was mouthing. Call, call, call.

  Gibberish. His mind was gone.

  “That one there,” the nurse said, pointing her clipboard at the moaning girl. “Her chart says she can fly, but I’ve never seen her so much as lift an inch out of that bed. As for the other one, she’s meant to be invisible. But she’s plain as day.”

  “Were they tortured?” Emma asked.

  “Obviously—they were tortured out of their minds!” said the clown. “Tortured until they forgot how to be peculiar!”

  “You could torture me all day long,” said Millard. “I’d never forget how to be invisible.”

  “Show them the scars,” said the clown to the nurse.

  The nurse crossed to the motionless woman and pulled back her sheets. There were thin red scars across her stomach, along the side of her neck, and beneath her chin, each about the length of a cigarette.

  “I’d hardly call this evidence of torture,” said Millard.

  “Then what would you call it?” the nurse said angrily.

  Ignoring her question, Millard said, “Are there more scars, or is this all she has?”

  “Not by a long shot,” said the nurse, and she whisked the sheets off to expose the woman’s legs, pointing out scars on the back of the woman’s knee, her inner thigh, and the bottom of her foot.

  Millard bent to examine the foot. “That’s odd placement, wouldn’t you say?”

  “What are you getting at, Mill?” said Emma.

  “Hush,” said Enoch. “Let him play Sherlock if he wants. I’m rather enjoying this.”

  “Why don’t we cut him in ten places?” said the clown. “Then we’ll see if he thinks it’s torture!”

  Millard crossed the room to the whispering man’s bed. “May I examine him?”

  “I’m sure he won’t object,” said the nurse.

  Millard lifted the man’s sheets from his legs. On the bottom of one of his bare feet was a scar identical to the motionless woman’s.

  The nurse gestured toward the writhing woman. “She’s got one too, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “Enough of this,” said the fold
ing man. “If that is not torture, then what?”

  “Exploration,” said Millard. “These incisions are precise and surgical. Not meant to inflict pain—probably done under anesthetic, even. The wights were looking for something.”

  “And what was that?” Emma asked, though she seemed to dread the answer.

  “There’s an old saying about a peculiar’s foot,” said Millard.

  “Do any of you remember it?”

  Horace recited it. “A peculiar’s sole is the door to his soul,” he said. “It’s just something they tell kids, though, to get them to wear shoes when they play outside.”

  “Maybe it is and maybe it’s not,” said Millard.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! You think they were looking for—”

  “Their souls. And they found them.”

  The clown laughed out loud. “What a pile of baloney. Just because they lost their abilities, you think their second souls were removed?”

  “Partly. We know the wights have been interested in the second soul for years now.”

  Then I remembered the conversation Millard and I had had on the train, and I said, “But you told me yourself that the peculiar soul is what allows us to enter loops. So if these people don’t have their souls, how are they here?”

  “Well, they’re not really here, are they?” said Millard. “By which I mean, their minds are certainly elsewhere.”

  “Now you’re grasping at straws,” said Emma. “I think you’ve taken this far enough, Millard.”

  “Bear with me for just a moment longer,” Millard said. He was pacing now, getting excited. “I don’t suppose you heard about the time a normal actually did enter a loop?”

  “No, because everyone knows that’s impossible,” said Enoch.

  “It nearly is,” said Millard. “It isn’t easy and it isn’t pretty, but it has been done—once. An illegal experiment conducted by Miss Peregrine’s own brother, I believe, in the years before he went mad and formed the splinter group that would become the wights.”

  “Then why haven’t I ever heard about this?” said Enoch.

  “Because it was extremely controversial and the results were immediately covered up, so no one would attempt to replicate them. In any event, it turns out that you can bring a normal into a loop, but they have to be forced through, and only someone with an ymbryne’s power can do it. But because normals do not have a second soul, they cannot handle a time loop’s inherent paradoxes, and their brains turn to mush. They become drooling, catatonic vegetables from the moment they enter. Not unlike these poor people before us.”