Hollow City

by Ransom Riggs

  And the creature stops moving, merely swaying where it stands, seemingly hypnotized. Still speaking his frightening gibberish, my grandfather lowers his knife and creeps toward it. The closer he gets, the more docile the creature becomes, finally sinking down to the mat, on its knees. I think it’s about to close its eyes and go to sleep when suddenly the hollow breaks free of whatever spell my grandfather has cast over it, and it lashes out with all its tongues and impales my grandfather. As he falls, I leap over the ropes and run toward him, and the hollow slips away. My grandfather is on his back on the mat and I am kneeling by his side, my hand on his face, and he is whispering something to me, blood bubbling on his lips, so I bend closer to hear him. You are more than me, Yakob, he says. You are more than I ever was.

  I can feel his heart slow. Hear it, somehow, until whole seconds elapse between beats. Then tens of seconds. And then …

  Jacob where are you

  I jolted awake again. Now there was light in the room. It was morning, just the blue beginning of it. I was kneeling on the ice in the half-filled room, and my hand wasn’t on my grandfather’s face but resting atop the trapped hollow’s skull, its slow, reptilian brain. Its eyes were open and looking at me, and I was looking right back. I see you.

  “Jacob! What are you doing? I’ve been looking for you everywhere!”

  It was Emma, frantic, out in the hall. “What are you doing?” she said again. She couldn’t see the hollow. Didn’t know it was there.

  I took my hand away from its head, slid back from it. “I don’t know,” I said. “I think I was sleepwalking.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Come quick—Miss Peregrine’s about to change!”

  * * *

  Crowded into the little room were all the children and all the freaks from the sideshow, pale and nervous, pressed against the walls and crouched on the floor in a wide berth around the two ymbrynes, like gamblers in a backroom cockfight. Emma and I slipped in among them and huddled in a corner, eyes glued to the unfolding spectacle. The room was a mess: the rocking chair where Miss Wren had sat all night with Miss Peregrine was toppled on its side, the table of vials and beakers pushed roughly against the wall. Althea stood on top of it clutching a net on a pole, ready to wield it.

  In the middle of the floor were Miss Wren and Miss Peregrine. Miss Wren was on her knees, and she had Miss Peregrine pinned to the floorboards, her hands in thick falconing gloves, sweating and chanting in Old Peculiar, while Miss Peregrine squawked and flailed with her talons. But no matter how hard Miss Peregrine thrashed, Miss Wren wouldn’t let go.

  At some point in the night, Miss Wren’s gentle massage had turned into something resembling an interspecies pro-wrestling match crossed with an exorcism. The bird half of Miss Peregrine had so thoroughly dominated her nature that it was refusing to be driven away without a fight. Both ymbrynes had sustained minor injuries: Miss Peregrine’s feathers were everywhere, and Miss Wren had a long, bloody scratch running down one side of her face. It was a disturbing sight, and many of the children looked on with openmouthed shock. Wild-eyed and savage, the bird Miss Wren was grinding into the floor was one we hardly recognized. It seemed incredible that a fully restored Miss Peregrine of old might result from this violent display, but Althea kept smiling at us and giving us encouraging nods as if to say, Almost there, just a little more floor-grinding!

  For such a frail old lady, Miss Wren was giving Miss Peregrine a pretty good clobbering. But then the bird jabbed at Miss Wren with her beak and Miss Wren’s grasp slipped, and with a big flap of her wings Miss Peregrine nearly escaped from her hands. The children reacted with shouts and gasps. But Miss Wren was quick, and she leapt up and managed to catch Miss Peregrine by her hind leg and thump her down against the floorboards again, which made the children gasp even louder. We weren’t used to seeing our ymbryne treated like this, and Bronwyn actually had to stop Hugh from rushing into the fight to protect her.

  Both ymbrynes seemed profoundly exhausted now, but Miss Peregrine more so; I could see her strength failing. Her human nature seemed to be winning out over her bird nature.

  “Come on, Miss Wren!” Bronwyn cried.

  “You can do it, Miss Wren!” called Horace. “Bring her back to us!”

  “Please!” said Althea. “We require absolute silence.”

  After a long time, Miss Peregrine quit struggling and lay on the ground with her wings splayed, gasping for air, feathered chest heaving. Miss Wren took her hands off the bird and sat back on her haunches.

  “It’s about to happen,” she said, “and when it does, I don’t want any of you to rush over here grabbing at her. Your ymbryne will likely be very confused, and I want the first face she sees and voice she hears to be mine. I’ll need to explain to her what’s happened.” And then she clasped her hands to her chest and murmured, “Come back to us, Alma. Come on, sister. Come back to us.”

  Althea stepped down from the table and picked up a sheet, which she unfolded and held up in front of Miss Peregrine to shield her from view. When ymbrynes turned from birds into humans, they were naked; this would give her some privacy.

  We waited in breathless suspense while a succession of strange noises came from behind the sheet: an expulsion of air, a sound like someone clapping their hands once, sharply—and then Miss Wren jumped up and took a shaky step backward.

  She looked frightened—her mouth was open, and so was Althea’s. And then Miss Wren said, “No, this can’t be,” and Althea stumbled, faint, letting the sheet drop. And there on the floor we saw a human form, but not a woman’s.

  He was naked, curled into a ball, his back to us. He began to stir, and uncurl, and finally to stand.

  “Is that Miss Peregrine?” said Olive. “She came out funny.”

  Clearly, it was not. The person before us bore no resemblance whatsoever to Miss Peregrine. He was a stunted little man with knobby knees and a balding head and a nose like a used pencil eraser, and he was stark naked and slimed head to toe with sticky, translucent gel. While Miss Wren gaped at him and grasped for something to steady herself against, in shock and anger the others all began to shout, “Who are you? Who are you? What have you done with Miss Peregrine!”

  Slowly, slowly, the man raised his hands to his face and rubbed his eyes. Then, for the first time, he opened them.

  The pupils were blank and white.

  I heard someone scream.

  Then, very calmly, the man said, “My name is Caul. And you are all my prisoners now.”

  * * *

  “Prisoners!” said the folding man with a laugh. “What he mean, we are prisoners?”

  Emma shouted at Miss Wren. “Where’s Miss Peregrine? Who’s this man, and what have you done with Miss Peregrine?”

  Miss Wren seemed to have lost the ability to speak.

  As our confusion turned to shock and anger, we barraged the little man with questions. He endured them with a slightly bored expression, standing at the center of the room with his hands folded demurely over his privates.

  “If you’d actually permit me to speak, I’ll explain everything,” he said.

  “Where is Miss Peregrine?!” Emma shouted again, trembling with rage.

  “Don’t worry,” Caul said, “she’s safely in our custody. We kidnapped her days ago, on your island.”

  “Then the bird we rescued from the submarine,” I said, “that was …”

  “That was me,” Caul said.

  “Impossible!” said Miss Wren, finally finding her voice.

  “Wights can’t turn into birds!”

  “That is true, as a general rule. But Alma is my sister, you see, and though I wasn’t fortunate enough to inherit any of her talents for manipulating time, I do share her most useless trait—the ability to turn into a vicious little bird of prey. I did a rather excellent job impersonating her, don’t you think?” And he took a little bow. “Now, may I trouble you for some pants? You have me at a disadvantage.”

  His request was igno
red. Meanwhile, my head was spinning. I remembered Miss Peregrine once mentioning that she’d had two brothers—I’d seen their photo, actually, when they were all in the care of Miss Avocet together. Then I flashed back to the days we’d spent with the bird we had believed was Miss Peregrine; all we’d gone though, everything we’d seen. The caged Miss Peregrine that Golan had thrown into the ocean—that had been the real one, while the one we “rescued” had been her brother. The cruel things Miss Peregrine had done recently made more sense now—that hadn’t been Miss Peregrine at all—but I was still left with a million questions.

  “All that time,” I said. “Why did you stay a bird? Just to watch us?”

  “While my lengthy observations of your childish bickering were incontrovertibly fascinating, I was quite hoping you could help me with a piece of unfinished business. When you killed my men in the countryside, I was impressed. You proved yourselves to be quite resourceful. Naturally, my men could’ve swept in and taken you at any point after that, but I thought it better to let you twist in the wind awhile and see if your ingenuity might not lead us to the one ymbryne who’s consistently managed to evade us.” With that, he turned to Miss Wren and grinned broadly. “Hello, Balenciaga. So good to see you again.”

  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 sa
fe 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.