by Ransom Riggs
For one panicked moment, I thought: Are we dead?
Millard climbed over the fallen soldier and unscrewed the hatch. Horrified, I grabbed for his leg and missed, but by then he’d gotten it open and popped his head out.
The world outside was just as quiet as the inside of the tank.
A moment later he poked his head in. “It’s quite safe now!” he said excitedly.
We left the tank in the same order we’d come in, small ones first, Noor and me last. I slid out feet first. All around us was a churn of mud and wire and bits of blown-apart hollowgast.
The world was not as we’d left it. The tank’s engine had died and the shooting had stopped. But even that was not enough to explain this new silence, so profound that, if not for the awestruck murmurs of my friends, I’d have thought I’d gone deaf. Had the soldiers all been magicked into some alternate dimension?
I saw Noor examining an object suspended in the air—a bullet that had been frozen mid-flight. It was stretched slightly from end to end, blurred like an object moving too fast for a camera’s shutter. Swarms of them hung around us. In the distance, a mortar shell had been stopped mid-explosion, the geyser of earth it had sent up arrested in the shape of an umbrella.
Noor reached up her hand to touch the bullet.
I started to say, “Wait, Noor, I wouldn’t—” but then she brushed it and it dropped harmlessly into the mud.
“By the winged elders,” Sophie murmured, clutching Penny to her chest.
Enoch whistled through his teeth.
Addison hopped onto a blasted stump for a better view. “‘Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me,’” he recited.
“This is no time for poetry,” Emma said, and started to ford a path through the crumpled barbed wire. “Let’s get out of here before that old clock stops doing whatever it is it’s doing . . .”
“I strenuously agree,” said Horace.
Bronwyn had strapped the bone clock to her back. It was making a loud tick-tocking that sounded ominously like a countdown, and I wondered, if I lingered near any of the dead that composed half the mud surrounding us, whether I would be able to hear them whispering.
We followed Emma out of the crater and chose what seemed the most direct path out of no-man’s-land, toward the British side. Or was that the German side off in the distance before us? I was all turned around now, my brain addled from fumes and bomb-blasts, and every direction was an indistinguishable smudge of ruin and wire. I couldn’t be sure anymore.
I swatted away a cloud of bullets and thought, Where are the ymbrynes?
“Form a chain so no one gets left behind,” Bronwyn said, and she jogged up and down our line making sure our hands were linked. She picked up Sophie under one arm and tucked Addison beneath the other.
“Don’t jostle the clock!” Millard chastised her.
“Remember what Miss Hawksbill told us!” Emma shouted, her voice loud and clear with no other sounds to compete with. “Eyes forward and mind your business, or it’s nightmares for life!”
And then from behind us there was a tremendous bellowing roar, and we froze and turned to see what it was.
“Jesus, what is it now?” Noor said.
“That,” said Horatio, nodding as if he’d just remembered something, “could only be Percival Murnau.”
Then he came into view: Murnau, or some monstrous perversion of him, tall as two houses and made of two halves, the top nominally human, the bottom a high, churning pedestal made of the foul muck beneath us, black mud and debris and bodies, shredded bits of which flew from his too-wide mouth as he shouted my name.
The bone clock had had no effect on him. He was not of this loop.
Someone screamed. Run.
We did, scrambling as fast as we could manage over the ruined land, swatting away clouds of bullets as we went. Murnau traveled without legs and could move faster than us, the roiling mass beneath him sweeping over the ground like the funnel of a shrunken tornado.
After a moment the roaring behind us was joined by a screeching from above.
“Miss Petrel!” Julius cried.
“And Miss Hawksbill!” Bronwyn shouted.
Two of the ymbrynes had found us again and were circling overhead. Miss Tern was of this loop, and so, presumably, was frozen somewhere in mid-flight.
Miss Petrel and Miss Hawksbill began to harass Murnau, dive-bombing him, slowing him down long enough for us to get within sprinting distance of the trenches and the end of no-man’s-land.
Murnau stopped to swat at the birds and missed. We ducked through a broken section of barbed wire and arrived at the trench line. Miss Hawksbill dove low in front of us, guiding us to a footbridge that passed over the tops of the trenches. Here the bullet clouds were thick as rain, and the sound of them falling away from our bodies as we ran was like a slot machine paying out a million-dollar prize.
I looked down into the trench as we crossed the footbridge. Dozens of soldiers frozen like grim statues, faces smeared with earth and blood, guns spitting fire.
They were German, not British. This was the German line.
There was a great thudding behind us. Murnau was close, maybe fifty yards back, and gaining. The uneven ground wasn’t slowing him much, and the trenches wouldn’t, either.
There was a scream from the sky. Miss Petrel dove at Murnau and hit him beak-first in the face. He grunted and dodged away, then twisted and brought up his arm. He caught Miss Petrel in his hand, then crushed her and threw her away into the muck.
Julius screamed. Sebbie and Enoch scooped him off his knees and carried him.
She was dead. I had never seen an ymbryne killed, and the sight nearly froze me in my tracks—but I forced myself on, after my friends, over the outer trenches. We couldn’t afford to waste the gift she’d given us. Miss Petrel’s sacrifice had slowed Murnau down, and in a moment we were past the trenches while he was still struggling through the last wall of barbed wire in no-man’s-land.
Julius was shouting as if possessed, then wrenched free of Sebbie and Enoch and ran at Bronwyn. He was hollering something like break it, break it, but before any of us understood what he was after, he had ripped the bone clock from Bronwyn’s back, raised it above his head, and brought it down on a rock.
There was a sudden lurch in my stomach, a pressure change I felt between my ears, and the sounds of Millard screaming at Julius were drowned beneath a deafening roar as time began moving again.
A thousand guns resumed firing. The men in the trenches behind us snapped back into scurrying motion. And Murnau was caught in a hurricane of flying metal. I saw his body, or what had become of it, torn to shreds. He disintegrated before my eyes.
An ymbryne screamed—Miss Hawksbill, though I could barely hear her now—urging us forward. Sebbie and Noor gathered light as we ran to hide us. Julius had collapsed and had to be carried, this time by Bronwyn.
We sprinted through rear lines of equipment and medic tents until we came to a gauzy blur in the air—the loop membrane—and dove through it into a world of disorienting normalcy.
We were no longer in a battlefield, or any kind of field, but in a small, grassy park in a small French town. Miss Hawksbill did not follow us through the membrane. Maybe she couldn’t, or perhaps she needed to return to the trenches to retrieve what was left of Miss Petrel. But her voice echoed after us through a slit in the air: “I can’t come with you, children. Go now, go quickly, and let us mourn when this is over.”
Small shops and houses ringed the park. A church bell tolled pleasantly. We had not moved through the world at all—only through time—yet we had arrived in a different country. Horatio put on a pair of sunglasses to hide his blank pupils and, in what sounded like flawless French, asked a passerby where to catch the train.
“Come with me,” Horatio said to us. “Don’t think, don’t talk.
Just walk.”
We followed unquestioningly. He may have been a wight, but he had proven himself as loyal as any peculiar I knew. We hurried down a street lined with shops. It was hot, and we stripped off our heavy coats as we went, dropping them on the ground. People stared, but not for long. Maybe WWI reenactors were a common sight here. Normals didn’t concern me much anymore.
“Do you think he’s really dead?” asked Horace, glancing nervously behind us.
“He got shot ten billion times,” said Enoch. “The Germans turned him into pie filling.”
“If bullets can kill a hollowgast, it stands to reason they could kill him, too,” Emma said.
I’d seen Murnau eviscerated, but something nagged at the back of my mind. He wasn’t a hollowgast. I wasn’t even sure he was mortal anymore. But there was no reason to burden the others with my doubts; we had enough to worry about.
We came to a train station, bought tickets to London (Horatio had money), and waited in a mostly deserted hall for our train to arrive. Julius sat moaning to himself about his lost ymbryne, and Horace sat beside him with an arm on his knee, murmuring comforting words. Emma fetched napkins from a café and tended to a cut on Enoch’s arm while he winced and complained. Addison sniffed the air for trouble and tried to stay alert, but his little eyes kept falling closed.
“What happens if we fail at this?” Sebbie asked quietly.
Enoch sucked in his breath and said, “Nothing much. Caul takes over peculiardom, enslaves us all, then turns the world into a slaughterhouse.”
“If he’s in a good mood,” added Emma.
Horace patted her shoulder. “We won’t fail.”
“Why? Because you dreamed it?”
“Because we can’t, that’s all.”
We were unspeakably exhausted. The reality of what had happened was beginning to filter through. Though it had mostly been horror and trauma, I comforted myself with this: We were returning to London stronger than we’d left it. We had three of the seven, and that was all we needed. And we had Horatio. He sat ramrod straight on a wooden bench, jerking his head between the entry door and the train platform every few seconds. He was like a benevolent Terminator.
The train hummed into the station. We got on board and squeezed into a private compartment, collecting more odd looks from the passengers. Odd looks had become so common I almost didn’t notice them anymore. As we took our seats, Emma worried aloud about the ymbrynes and the Acre. Miss Avocet had looked weaker than ever the last time we saw her, and the shield depended on all twelve ymbrynes being okay and staying that way. Miss Petrel had said Caul’s forces were massing already.
“I wonder what they’re waiting for,” Bronwyn said.
“For Caul’s army of hollows to be born,” Horatio replied. “He’s making them in Abaton. Each hollowgast contains a soul stolen from the soul jars.”
“I thought he couldn’t manipulate those,” I said.
“Apparently he can, in his resurrected form. And to such a degree that he’s been able to tweak their natures.”
“Which is why we can see them?” asked Horace.
“Correct,” Horatio replied. “And why they’re armored and larger and”—his eyes flicked to me—“harder to control.”
I felt inadequate. Judged, even—though I knew he didn’t mean it that way.
“You were able to control one,” I said. “To talk to it.”
“After a long time, yes. I spent days in close proximity to that hollow, and gradually was able to learn its new language. But even so, they are more intractable than we used to be.”
We, meaning Horatio in his previous form.
Emma leaned forward and said in a low voice, “What’s it like, being a hollowgast?”
Horatio thought for a moment. “Torture,” he said after a while. “Everything feels half-formed. Your body, your mind, your thoughts. You’re so hungry your bones feel hollow. The only relief you ever feel is while you’re eating—preferably a human, and a peculiar one. And even then it’s a brief respite.”
“Then didn’t you hate H?” Noor asked. “For keeping you that way for so long?”
He answered immediately. “Yes.” He tipped his head. “And no. All hollows hate their masters. But he helped me develop my mind. Taught me to read and to understand English and to think about more than just my hunger. I understood why he kept me, why he needed me. And in time I came to love him as well as hate him.”
The train juddered and began slowly to move. The benches and ticket windows of the station began to slide away past our window.
“Can you teach me their new language?” I asked Horatio.
“I can attempt to. But it’s less an intellectual learning process than an intuitive one. A tapping in.”
“I’ll try anything,” I said.
“One more question before you start vocab lessons,” Noor said. “When you say army of hollows, how many are you talking?”
“Dozens, surely,” Horatio replied. “Perhaps more.” He lapsed into a brief, pensive silence. Out our window, the station gave way to an expanse of flowering fields. “They’ll be nearly all born now. The hour is close at hand.”
Enoch snorted. “The hour is close at hand,” he repeated in a gravelly voice. “Do all wights talk like villains in a horror film?”
Horatio raised an eyebrow at him. “If I still had my tongues,” he said, “I’d slap you with all of them.”
Enoch paled slightly and shrank back in his seat.
A moment later, Horace jumped to his feet. “Fellows?” he said in a high voice, his nose pressed to the glass. “What is that?”
We clustered beside him at the window. Out in the fields was a fast-moving man, naked from the waist up, who appeared to be riding on a pillar of spinning wheat and yellow flowers.
“It’s him,” Emma whispered.
“Oh, hell,” Bronwyn said.
Murnau was gliding across the fields toward us, and our train was only just starting to pick up speed.
“I thought this was a fast train!” Enoch cried. He banged on the glass. “Go on, hurry up!”
Murnau was drawing closer, and we were speeding up only incrementally. The train bumped over a road crossing and past a parking lot, and Murnau crossed it, too. His tornadic bottom half turned gray as he left behind a trail of torn-up asphalt, and then he barreled over a car and blendered that, too.
“I’m not staying here,” Enoch said, “I’m going to slap some sense into the train engineer . . .”
He ran out of the compartment. We pushed into the narrow aisle after him and ran down the length of the train in a vain attempt to get farther away from Murnau. We dashed between train cars, past baffled passengers, most of whom didn’t seem to notice the nightmarish thing growing larger and larger out their windows.
The train jolted and finally began to speed up.
“Thank God,” Horace cried.
We stopped running and pressed ourselves against a window of the snack car. Murnau was falling behind. In a last-ditch effort to reach us, he poured on a final burst of speed and lunged toward us. He disassembled in midair, pelting the train with flowers and dirt and small car parts. And then we were going fifty or sixty miles an hour, and whatever remained of Murnau was scattered behind.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
We collapsed back into our seats, slammed shut the door to our private compartment, and tried to calm down. Caul had nothing left to throw at us, I assured everyone, at least not until we got near the Acre. Enoch opened his shirt and out spilled a dozen sandwiches he’d stolen from the snack car. No one objected. We had jettisoned Miss Tern’s bread on the battlefield along with our heavy packs, and many of us were ravenous. Sustained terror had that effect on people.
Speaking of terror, I had stopped even attempting to process the things that had happened to
us. They just washed over me in a tidal wave of horrifying events. If we survived these ordeals I’d probably develop a twitch or resume the crippling nightmares that used to plague me. Maybe one day a therapist would help me unpack it all. And not some quack my parents had hired, or a wight in disguise. A peculiar one. I asked my friends if there was such a thing as a brain-mender, but they looked at me strangely, and I didn’t feel like explaining why I’d asked.
It would be a two-hour trip to London. Addison and Bronwyn slept. Others were too keyed up and had to talk, and there was a constant low buzz of chatter as people recounted all the insane things that had occurred in the past day. Sophie huddled with Pensevus against the window, soaking in the pastoral landscapes that whizzed past. Julius and Horace sat side by side with their knees hugged to their chests and their shoes off, heads touching now and then as they spoke in low voices.
Noor and I took the opportunity to talk more with Horatio. The last time either of us had seen him he was a deformed half hollow who could barely speak, and he’d leapt from the window of H’s sixth-floor apartment in New York—we had assumed to his death. How had he reached a collapsed loop in France and how had he managed to embed himself—now a fully formed wight, and not a bad-looking one—among Caul’s faithful servants?
“Yeah,” Noor said, head bobbing as she stared at him. “What the hell happened to you?”
Horatio conjured a weird smile, a facial expression he was clearly still mastering. “Yes, it’s been . . . eventful. After dropping from the window, I hid myself in the sewer. I stayed there for several days while completing my metamorphosis from hollowgast to wight. I had cultivated certain disciplines of mind during my long years with Harold Fraker King, and by employing them I was able to retain my memories, which many hollows lose.” His language was clinical, he enunciation precise. He had a subtle New York accent, which, combined with his grammatically perfect English, made him sound like an AI bot trying to imitate a cab driver. “I never forgot Harold Fraker King or the generosity he showed me. I was determined to continue his mission—to protect Noor Pradesh and assist in the fulfillment of the prophecy of the seven.”
