by Ransom Riggs
We kept backing away, unwilling to run but with no idea yet how to fight him.
“A pity,” he said. “Have it your way, then.”
He swept out one of his long arms, narrowly missing us and crashing into a flower shop’s window display. The glass shattered and huge sprays of flowers turned instantly black at his touch. I glanced at Julius, who was leaning on Horace, struggling to breathe.
Emma shaped a fat new fireball between her hands and threw it at Caul. His neck and spine contorted grotesquely and it sailed past him. He roared, emitting a blast of rotten air that nearly knocked us down, and then he came at us, the black pool beneath him churning as it carried him across the floor.
It was a decision made collectively and without discussion: We turned and ran. Until we knew how to fight him, or could identify some weakness in him, it was our only option.
His arms shot out, grasping for us and missing. We sprinted past a coffee kiosk and an instant later heard it tip and crash. We bolted down a narrow alley of shops, and heard glass shattering behind us in an endless cascade. A quick turn and we were heading for the exit and the street outside. Shocked bystanders fled for their lives.
We burst through the exit, dodging tourists pulling suitcases and crowds waiting for taxis. There was an immense crash behind us—I risked a look back to see Caul flying through a plate-glass window—and the crowds scattered. Bronwyn stopped to pick up someone’s suitcase and fling it at Caul; it bounced harmlessly off his chest. We ran downstairs to street level. His lower half raced after us with no trouble. The street was blocked off for a farmer’s market, and he dragged his hands along the stalls, his necrotizing touch turning all the fruits and vegetables rotten in an instant.
Caul began shouting after us in his strange doubled voice: “Look how they run! Look how they fear us! But how quickly fear turns to hatred, and hatred to killing and purges. Oh, they’ll come for us, no mistake, come for you, young ones, they’ll burn you and hang you and drive stakes through your hands just as they always have!”
There was a wide, shallow fountain in front of us and a surging crowd of terrified market-goers blocking either side. We jumped the fountain’s short lip and splashed straight through, then raced past a barricade and out of the market, where a terrified cop was standing with his gun drawn and aimed at Caul. “Don’t!” Emma shouted. “Just run!” The cop squeezed off three rounds as we ran past him. A few seconds later, I heard him scream. I looked back to see him convulsing on the ground. Caul’s black pool flashed bright blue, then quickly faded.
We skidded around a corner onto a side street. Caul was still sermonizing. “Our war with one another is over! You’ve lost the battles; all that’s left to lose are your lives. But our war with them is just beginning!” He paused to sweep his arms over the heads of some bystanders huddled in a bus shelter, and with a collective groan they all turned the color of lead and slumped to the ground.
I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
“Someone stop him!” Sebbie screamed.
“We can’t just throw ourselves at him,” Noor said, panting, her eyes flicking to Julius. “We’re not ready.”
“And we’ve got to get Julius to a bone-mender,” Horace said.
Caul rounded on us, his arms raised like bat wings, and our group faced him from the opposite end of the short street. We were ready to run if we had to, but we’d never beat him if we couldn’t study him.
“Pledge me an oath and I will make you my soldiers!” Caul bellowed. His back arched and his black pool pulsed bright blue again. Was that the light—the soul—the light-eaters needed to steal? “Defy me and I’ll make you suffer the most painful death imaginable. I am a benevolent god, but this is your last chance at salvation!”
“I don’t think he can cross water,” said Millard, who had shed his clothes as he ran and was now invisible. “That fountain we cut through—he took the long way and went round it.”
“Regent’s Canal isn’t far,” said Addison. “Perhaps we can lose him there!”
Caul was growing again before our eyes. He had raised his arms and thrown back his head as if to channel power from the sky, and now his trunk was fattening as it rose higher out of the inky pool. “Children!” he roared. “Come to me!”
“I don’t think he’s talking to us anymore,” Emma said, her face full of dread.
A wind began to coalesce into a miniature tornado around his trunk, and in the pit of my stomach I felt a queasy hitch.
“He’s calling his minions,” I said.
“More hollows?” Noor said.
“And God knows what else.”
We turned and ran. Caul roared behind us. I was finished looking back. I only cared about getting away with our lives intact.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The canal was a murky swath of dark water bounded by crumbling brick walls. It looked to be thirty or forty feet across. But for the hell-beast behind us, I would never have considered jumping into it.
The water was cold and filthy. We began to swim, but halfway to the other side I heard someone shout from the opposite bank and looked up to see one of the ambro addicts who had recently been on TV. He didn’t make any demands or give us a chance to beg for our lives. He just opened his mouth and began to vomit a stream of silvery liquid metal at us.
“DIVE!” Enoch shouted, flailing in the water.
The addict’s first shot missed: The hot metal sprayed the water near us and sent up a giant plume of steam. We used it as cover and swam down the middle of the canal away from him, Bronwyn pulling the little ones while kicking her powerful legs. Ahead of us the canal disappeared beneath an overpass. Another stream of liquid metal flew over our heads, the blowback spraying us with painfully hot water. Emma flung a fireball through the steam in the addict’s direction—she was getting good at that—while Sebbie dragged light from the air, further obscuring us from view. I could hear Caul raging somewhere nearby, but couldn’t see him through the steam and Sebbie’s dark. Millard had been right: He’d avoided the water.
Meanwhile, I could feel a hollowgast somewhere close by, though I still couldn’t pinpoint it.
We paddled frantically into the overpass tunnel. There was no way for the addict to follow unless he jumped into the water, too, which he must have known would put him at a disadvantage. Once inside the tunnel Bronwyn kicked us toward a wall, and Sebbie coughed up some of the daylight she’d swallowed to give us some light. Bolted to the wall was a small platform, above it a rusted door. We couldn’t swim out through the other side of the underpass; our enemies would be waiting for us there. It was better never to emerge.
We hauled ourselves up onto the platform. Bronwyn gave the door a couple of kicks. It dented, then flew inward to expose a cramped passageway. “I hope none of you’s phobic of small spaces,” she said, but even if any of us had been, our fear of Caul would have won out.
Sebbie ventured in first, blowing new light through her lips in a thin stream. Julius hobbled after her on Horace’s arm. Bronwyn stooped and led Sophie into the passageway by the hand, then Millard, Enoch, Addison, Emma, and Noor followed. Horatio and I took up the rear.
“Can you feel the hollow?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “But I can smell him.”
“Which means he can smell us, too.”
The passage was long, low-ceilinged, and smelled like urine.
“If this is a dead end, I’m going to be very upset,” I heard Horace say.
It was not. The passage terminated at a ladder, and the ladder climbed a long way up a concrete tube to a hatch. Which, Bronwyn discovered while wedged up there with her back against the tube and her feet on the ladder rungs, was locked from the outside. She swore—something she almost never did—and began hammering it with her fists as we waited at the bottom.
That’s when I felt it. I
t was always at the most inopportune times, and in the worst places: A hollowgast had entered the passage with us.
“Hurry up and open it!” I yelled. “Hollow!”
Her banging grew more urgent. I shoved my friends toward the ladder and told them to climb. I could hear the creature running down the passage toward us, the unmistakable triple-step echo of its two feet plus a tongue.
There was a loud metal bang. A shaft of daylight fell down the ladder. Bronwyn had gotten it open, and my friends began climbing toward freedom—or whatever was up there. But there were a lot of them and the rungs were slippery and the hollow was close now. A few of us would have to fend it off while the rest escaped.
Emma shoved Noor up the ladder before she could protest, then lit flames in each hand and assumed a fighting stance beside me. Horatio pulled something the size of a large flashlight from his waistband. With a flick of his wrist, a long, glinting blade extended from it. “One of Master King’s tools,” he said, and then he began shouting commands in the new Hollow dialect that I couldn’t understand. As for me, my words didn’t work on hollows anymore. I was unarmed. But killing hollows was my job, so I stood my ground while my heart hammered against my rib cage.
There was a flash of white teeth in the dark. From our vantage the hollow was just a mouth full of razors racing toward us. Horatio raised his sword. Emma stepped in front of him and cast a wall of fire that filled the passage. That slowed the hollow for a moment. Then Horatio lunged and jabbed his sword through the dissipating wall of flame like a fencer. I heard the hollow screech.
One of our friends shouted from halfway up the ladder—it was our turn to climb. Emma lobbed another fireball down the hall, then nudged me toward the ladder with her back. “GO,” she said, and because at this point arguing would have only slowed us down, I turned, scooped up Addison, who was cowering at the base of the ladder, and climbed with the dog under one arm.
Below me, I could hear Horatio shouting, the hollow growling, and what sounded like a metal blade deflecting off brick. Emma started up the ladder after me. Bronwyn’s hand reached down from the open door overhead and yanked Addison and me up into daylight. We tumbled into her and the three of us rolled. A moment later a commuter train bombed past, so close the wind from it knocked us back. We were in the middle of a busy train yard, and the hatch was smack in the middle of some tracks.
Once the train had passed, we raced back toward the hatch. I peered down the ladder to shout Emma’s name, and a hollowgast tongue shot out of the dark and narrowly missed my face. We stumbled away. A moment later, the hollowgast climbed out, two of its tongues whipping ahead of it to keep Bronwyn and me at bay. Its third tongue was holding Emma by the waist. She hung limp in the air, blood running from a cut on her forehead.
I screamed and ran at it. One of its tongues punched my throat and knocked me down, and I was briefly unable to breathe. Bronwyn grabbed the tongue with both hands and tried to yank it, but it was too slick to hold and slipped right out of her grasp. Then Horatio climbed up from the ladder. He was bleeding from the chest, his shirt torn wide-open. The hollowgast sensed him and spun, and in one balletic motion Horatio swung his sword and sliced off the tongue that had been coming for his throat. It flew clear of him, spraying black blood. While the hollowgast was stunned, he raised the sword with two hands, ran at the hollowgast, and brought the blade down on the tongue holding Emma. It severed the tongue like a hot knife through butter, and Emma fell to the tracks in a heap. Before Horatio could strike again, the hollow’s two remaining tongues knocked the sword from his hands, lassoed him around the neck, and dragged him into its waiting jaws.
The jaws bit down. Horatio’s face contorted into a mask of pain. I tried to stand but could still hardly pull air into my throat. Bronwyn skittered forward and scooped Emma off the train tracks—another train was fast approaching. The hollow crouched down and began to chew his meal, his own inky blood and Horatio’s mixing around his feet.
We would have been forgiven for abandoning Horatio to his death, accepting the sacrifice he’d made for our lives. But I could not, and my friends could not. Noor, knowing all this wight had done for us, could not. She took off sprinting toward the hollow. I shouted after her to stop, but it was no use. Her cheeks were puffed with concentrated light, and it looked like she meant to get close enough to spit it right into the hollow’s face—but she never got the chance: Its two remaining tongues swept her legs out from under her and she hit the gravel. But the attack had left the hollow off balance and momentarily distracted, and Horatio—still in the grip of its jaws but not as dead as he’d been pretending to be—raised his arm and jabbed something into one of the hollow’s eyes. The hollow squealed and fell onto its back. With the next train nearly upon them, and in a move that must have caused him incredible pain, Horatio wrenched his body upward, which forced the hollow’s head down—and onto the track.
The train trumpeted its horn. A cloud of black blood filled the air as the train rocketed past. When it was gone, the hollow was missing the top half of its head, and Horatio, his chest scissored open and his left arm severed at the elbow, lay slack atop what remained of the hollow’s dying body.
We scooped him into our arms, Noor and I, and as we ran out of the train yard, Horatio moaned into my ear. “He showed me things.” His words were slurring. “He showed me . . . everything.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
We ran, hobbling, shoving one another on, until our lungs were bursting, then ran across an open yard of parked train cars, through a peeled-up section of chain-link fence, and down a concrete embankment. Finally, our muscles failing, we collapsed in a pile at the boundary of what looked like an old neglected park, our backs against some stones stacked around the trunk a graceful, wide-boughed tree.
Horatio had slipped into unconsciousness. Blood had darkened his clothes. Emma was awake but groggy, and there was a big fuss over where she was hurt and how badly, but she seemed to have suffered no more than a knock to the head.
“In my pocket,” she said, wincing as she reached her hand into it. She brought out a small package wrapped in cotton and string, which her shaking fingers couldn’t quite untie. Horace’s, deft from decades of sewing, quickly got it open. Out fell a pinky finger and a little toe.
“Is this from Mother Dust?” Millard said.
Emma nodded. “She found me in Bentham’s house, just before we left, and practically forced me to take them.”
Bronwyn rolled the toe carefully between her palms, crushing the toe and finger to powder. She sprinkled some of it onto the cut on Emma’s forehead. Then Enoch, who had no squeamishness about open wounds, spread dust onto the stump of Horatio’s severed arm and the deep cuts in his chest, and right away the bleeding stopped. Next, Horace made a paste by combining the dust with water from a puddle, and that was applied to Julius’s throat and then a bandage improvised from a torn shirt tied over it. His skin was a shade or two closer to normal than before but still ashen, and finger-shaped bruises collared his neck where Caul had gripped him. As the paste sunk in, his eyes fluttered and he began to relax.
Horace eased him back against the stones. “You look better,” he said kindly.
Julius let his eyes fall closed and slowly shook his head. “I can feel his poison spreading,” he said calmly.
Horace bit his lip and turned away.
We sat for a minute, letting our hearts gradually slow. Listening to the breeze move through the trees. A pleasant tingling numbness passed through my head, maybe a symptom of extreme exhaustion. Then I remembered something that jolted me from my half sleep.
“What’s the matter?” Noor asked me.
“Horatio said something in my ear before he passed out. He said, ‘He showed me everything.’”
Emma frowned. “Who showed him? Caul?”
“No—the hollow. I think.”
“Well, wake him
up,” Enoch said with a shrug.
“He nearly died just now!” said Bronwyn.
Horatio’s lips were blue and his chest was rising slowly and shallowly. “He may still,” I said. “Let’s give the dust a minute to work.”
“Did you see those lights in Caul’s muck-puddle?” Sebbie asked. “Julius, can you hear me?”
“I can,” he said through his teeth. “And I did.”
“They flashed every time he killed someone. Like, when he swallowed their soul, that glow was the soul going down.” Sebbie was talking fast. She had torn some of the light away around her head to shield her sensitive eyes, so I couldn’t quite see her expression.
“Perhaps that light is the force which animates him,” suggested Millard. “I remember a similar light suffusing the Library of Souls, glowing from every soul jar.”
“We have to find a way to take it from him,” Noor said. “To steal it—and eat it.”
Sebbie leaned toward Sophie, mute and staring into the distance, and spoke loudly to Pensevus. “Is that right, Penny? We have to eat his little soul-light?”
Sophie’s eyes shifted. She had a deserted look about her. “Penny’s asleep,” she mumbled. “Maybe forever.”
Noor’s head snapped toward her. “What? Why?”
Sophie had been clutching Pensevus to her chest, but reluctantly turned him over to show us that he’d been sliced wide-open and lost half his sawdust stuffing.
Noor scooted closer, her brow pinched. “Is he fixable?” she said quietly. It was the first concern she’d shown for her old doll.
Sophie shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Here.” Enoch picked a handful of grass and offered it to Sophie. “Stuff this into him. Fixed.”
“He doesn’t work that way. He had something old and special inside him, and now it’s gone.”
