by Ransom Riggs
My first thought was to run across the rooftops. If only the hollow had the strength, it could’ve carried us up the side of a building and bounded to Bentham’s out of sight. But right now I wasn’t even sure walking was an option. Instead I suggested we wash off the hollow’s white paint so that no one could see it but me.
“Absolutely not, no way, no sir,” said Sharon, shaking his head vigorously. “I don’t trust that thing. I want to keep an eye on it.”
“I’ve got it under control,” I said, slightly offended.
“So far,” Sharon shot back.
“I agree with Sharon,” said Emma. “You’re doing marvelously, but what happens when you’re in another room, or fall asleep?”
“Why would I leave the room?”
“To relieve yourself?” said Sharon. “Are you planning on taking your pet hollowgast into the water closet?”
“Um,” I said, “I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it?”
“The paint stays on,” said Sharon.
“Fine,” I said irritably. “So what do we do?”
A door banged open down the alley and a cloud of steam came billowing out. A man emerged pushing a wheeled cart, which he parked in the alley before going back inside.
I ran to take a look. The door belonged to a laundry, and the cart was filled with dirty linens. It was just large enough to fit a small person—or a curled-up hollowgast.
I’ll admit it: I stole the cart. I wheeled it back to the others, emptied it, and made the hollow climb in. Then we piled the dirty laundry on top, lifted the bear cubs in, and wheeled the whole thing down the street.
No one gave us a second look.
When we reached the house it was nearly dark. Nim rushed us into the entrance hall, where Bentham waited anxiously. He didn’t even bother to greet us.
“Why have you brought these grims?” he said, his eyes darting to the laundry cart. “Where’s the creature?”
“It’s here,” I said. Lifting out the cubs, I began to pull back the linens.
Bentham looked but kept his distance. The sheets on top were white but grew bloodier as I dug, becoming a black cocoon as I reached the bottom. I pulled back the last and there it was, a small, withered thing in a fetal curl. It was hard to believe this pathetic creature was the same one that had given me such nightmares.
Bentham stepped closer. “My God,” he said, looking at the bloody sheets. “What did they do to him?”
“Actually, I did that,” I said. “I didn’t really have a choice.”
“It was about to swallow Jacob’s head,” Emma explained.
“You didn’t kill it, did you?” Bentham said. “It’s no use to us dead.”
I said, “I don’t think so,” and then told the hollow to open its eyes, and very slowly, it did. It was still alive, but weak. “I don’t know how much longer it’ll last, though.”
“In that case, we’ve not a moment to waste,” said Bentham. “We must send for my healer right away and hope to heaven her dust works on hollows.”
Nim was sent running to fetch the healer. While we waited, Bentham led us into his kitchen and offered us biscuits and canned fruit. Either because of nerves or all the squeamish things we’d seen, neither Emma nor I had an appetite. We picked at the food out of politeness while Bentham filled us in on what had happened while we were gone. He’d made all necessary preparations to his machine, he said, and everything was ready—all he needed was to plug in the hollowgast.
“Are you sure it’ll work?” Emma said.
“Sure as I can be without ever having tried it,” he replied.
“Will it hurt him?” I asked, feeling oddly protective of the hollow, if only because I’d gone to such trouble to rescue it.
“Of course not,” Bentham said with a dismissive wave.
The healer arrived, and upon seeing her I nearly shouted in surprise. Not because she was so unusual looking—though she was—but because I was absolutely certain I had seen her before, though I couldn’t say where or how I’d managed to forget an encounter with someone so strange.
Her only visible body parts were her left eye and left hand. The rest was hidden beneath acres of fabric: shawls, scarves, a dress, and a bell-shaped hoop skirt. She seemed to be missing her right hand, and the left was in the grip of a young man with brown skin and wide, bright eyes. He wore a jaunty silk shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, and he was leading the healer as if she were blind or otherwise disabled.
“I’m Reynaldo,” said the young man in a crisp French accent, “and this is Mother Dust. I speak for her.”
Mother Dust leaned toward Reynaldo and whispered something in his ear. Reynaldo looked at me and said, “She hopes you are feeling better.”
That’s when I realized where I’d seen her: in my dreams—or what I thought had been dreams—while recovering from my attack.
“Yes, much better,” I said, unnerved.
Bentham skipped the formalities. “Can you heal one of these?” he said, leading Reynaldo and Mother Dust to the laundry cart. “It’s a hollowgast, visible to us only where it’s been painted.”
“She can heal anything with a beating heart,” said Reynaldo.
“Then, please,” Bentham said. “It’s very important that we save this creature’s life.”
Via Reynaldo, Mother Dust issued orders. Take the beast out of the cart, they said, so Emma and I tipped the hollowgast onto the floor. Put it in the sink, they said, so Emma and Sharon helped me lift it and place it in the basin of the long, deep sink. We cleaned its wounds with water from the tap, careful not to wash away too much of the white paint. Next, Mother Dust examined the hollowgast as Reynaldo asked me to identify all the places it was hurt.
“Now, Marion,” Bentham said, addressing Mother Dust informally, “you needn’t heal every last cut and bruise. We don’t want the creature in top health; we only want to keep it alive. You see?”
“Yes, yes,” Reynaldo said dismissively. “We know what we are doing.”
Bentham harrumphed and turned his back, making a show of his unhappiness.
“Now she will make the dust,” Reynaldo said. “Stand back, and be careful not to breathe it in. It will put you to sleep instantly.”
We backed away. Reynaldo strapped a dust mask over his nose and mouth and then untied the shawl that wrapped what was left of Mother Dust’s right arm. The stump beneath was only a few inches long, and it came to an end well above what would have been her elbow.
With her left hand Mother Dust began to rub the stump, which released a fine white powder that hung in the air. Holding his breath, Reynaldo combed the air with one hand and collected the dust. We watched, fascinated and slightly repulsed, until he’d gathered about an ounce of the stuff and the size of Mother Dust’s stump had been reduced by the same amount.
Reynaldo transferred the dust into his mistress’s hand. She leaned over the hollow and blew some of it in its face—as I remembered her doing to me. The hollow inhaled and then jerked suddenly. Everyone but Mother Dust leapt back.
Stay down, stay still, I said, but I needn’t have—it was an automatic reaction to the powder, Reynaldo explained: the body downshifting into lower gear. As Mother Dust sprinkled more into the gash on the hollow’s neck, Reynaldo told us that the powder could heal wounds and induce sleep, depending on how much was used. As he spoke, a white foam developed around the hollow’s wound and began to glow. Mother Dust’s dust, Reynaldo said, was her, and of inherently limited quantity. She wore herself away a little every time she healed someone.
“I hope this doesn’t seem like a rude question,” Emma said, “but why do you do it if it hurts you?”
Mother Dust stopped work on the hollow for a moment, turned so that her good eye could see Emma, and spoke as loudly as we’d ever heard her—in the mushy garble of someone who had no tongue.
Reynaldo translated. “I do it,” he said, “because this is how I was chosen to serve.”
“Then … thank you,” E
mma said humbly.
Mother Dust nodded and turned back to her task.
* * *
The hollow’s recovery would not be instantaneous. It was deeply sedated and would wake only after the direst of its wounds had healed, a process that would likely take all night. Because the hollow had to be awake when Bentham “plugged it in” to his machine, phase two of our rescue plan would have to wait several hours. Until then, most of us were stuck in the kitchen: Reynaldo and Mother Dust, who had to reapply her powder to the hollow’s wounds every so often, and Emma and me, because I didn’t feel comfortable leaving the hollow alone, even though it was deeply asleep. The hollow was my responsibility now, the way an unhousebroken pet was the responsibility of whoever brought it home. Emma stayed close, too, because I had in some sense become her responsibility (and she mine), and if I fell asleep she would tickle me awake or tell me stories about the good old days in Miss Peregrine’s house. Bentham checked in occasionally but was mostly off doing security sweeps of the house with Sharon and Nim, paranoid that his brother’s foot soldiers might attack at any time.
As the night wore on, Emma and I talked about what the coming day might hold. Assuming Bentham could get his machine working again, it was possible that in a matter of hours we would find ourselves inside the wights’ fortress. We might see our friends again, and Miss Peregrine.
“If we’re very sneaky, and very, very lucky,” Emma said. “And if …”
She hesitated. We were sitting side by side on a long wooden bench against a wall, and now she shifted so that I couldn’t see her face.
“What?” I said.
She looked back at me, her face pained. “If they’re still alive.”
“They are.”
“No, I’m tired of pretending. By now the wights could’ve harvested their souls for ambrosia. Or realized the ymbrynes are useless and decided to torture them instead, or milk their souls, or made an example of someone for trying to escape …”
“Stop it,” I said. “It hasn’t been that long.”
“By the time we get there it’ll have been forty-eight hours, at least. And a lot of awful things can happen in forty-eight hours.”
“We don’t have to imagine every single one of them. You sound like Horace with all these worst-case scenarios. There’s no use tormenting ourselves until we know for sure what’s happened.”
“Yes, there is,” she insisted. “There’s a perfectly good reason to torment ourselves. If we’ve considered all the worst possibilities and one turns out to be true, we won’t be completely unprepared for it.”
“I don’t think I could ever prepare myself for those kinds of things.”
She put her head in her hands and let out a shaky sigh. It was all too much to think about.
I wanted to tell her then that I loved her. I thought that might help, by grounding us in something we were sure about rather than everything we weren’t—but we hadn’t said the words to each other many times, and I couldn’t bring myself to say them now in front of two perfect strangers.
The more I thought about loving Emma, the shakier and sicker it made me feel, precisely because our future was so uncertain. I needed to imagine a future for myself with Emma in it, but it was impossible to picture our lives even a day from now. It was a constant struggle for me, having no idea what tomorrow held. I’m cautious by nature, a planner—someone who likes to know what’s around the next corner and the corner after that—and this entire experience, from the moment I ventured into the abandoned shell of Miss Peregrine’s house to now, had been one long free-fall into the void. To survive it I’d had to become a new person, someone flexible and sure footed and brave. Someone my grandfather would’ve been proud of. But my transformation had not been total. This new Jacob was grafted onto the old one, and I still had moments—plenty of them—of abject terror and wishing I’d never heard of any damned Miss Peregrine and needing very badly for the world to stop spinning so I could just hang on to something for a few minutes. I wondered, with a sinking ache, which Jacob loved Emma. Was it the new one, who was ready for anything, or the old one, who just needed something to hang on to?
I decided that I didn’t want to think about it right now—a distinctly old-Jacob way of handling things—and focused instead on the distraction nearest at hand: the hollow, and what would happen when it woke. I would have to give him up, it seemed.
“I wish I could take him with us,” I said. “He would make it so easy to smash anyone who got in our way. But I guess he has to stay behind to keep the machine running.”
“So it’s a him now.” She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t get too attached. Remember, if you gave that thing half a chance, it would eat you alive.”
“I know, I know,” I said, sighing.
“And maybe it wouldn’t be so easy to smash everything. I’m sure the wights know how to handle hollows. After all, they used to be hollows.”
“It’s a unique gift you have,” said Reynaldo, speaking to us for the first time in over an hour. He had taken a break from monitoring the hollow’s wound to rummage through Bentham’s cabinets for food, and now he and Mother Dust were seated at a small table, sharing a block of blue-veined cheese.
“It’s a strange gift, though,” I said. I’d been thinking about how strange it was for a while but hadn’t quite been able to articulate it until now. “In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be any hollows. And if there weren’t any hollows, my special sight would have nothing to see, and no one would understand the weird language I can speak. You wouldn’t even know I had a peculiar ability.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’re here now,” Emma said.
“Yeah, but … doesn’t it seem almost too random? I could’ve been born anytime. My grandfather, too. Hollows have existed for only the last hundred years or so, but it just so happens that we were both born now, right when we were needed. Why?”
“I guess it was meant to be,” Emma said. “Or maybe there have always been people who can do what you do, only they never knew it. Maybe lots of people go through life never knowing they’re peculiar.”
Mother Dust leaned toward Reynaldo and whispered.
“She says it’s neither,” said Reynaldo. “Your true gift probably isn’t manipulating hollowgast—that’s just its most obvious application.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “What else could it be?”
Mother Dust whispered again.
“It’s simpler than that,” said Reynaldo. “Just as someone who’s a gifted cellist wasn’t born with an aptitude for only that instrument but for music in general, you weren’t born only to manipulate hollows. Nor you,” he said to Emma, “to make fire.”
Emma frowned. “I’m over a hundred years old. I think I know my own peculiar ability by now—and I definitely can’t manipulate water, or air, or dirt. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t,” Reynaldo said. “Early in life we recognize certain talents in ourselves, and we focus on those to the exclusion of others. It’s not that nothing else is possible, but that nothing else was nurtured.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” I said.
“The point is, it’s not so impossibly random that you have a talent for hollowgast manipulation. Your gift developed in that direction because that’s what was needed.”
“If that’s true, then why can’t all of us control hollows?” Emma said. “Every peculiar could use some of what Jacob’s got.”
“Because only his basic talent was capable of developing that way. In the times before hollows, the talents of peculiars with souls akin to his probably manifested some other way. It’s said that the Library of Souls was staffed by people who could read peculiar souls like they were books. If those librarians were alive today, perhaps they’d be like him.”
“Why do you say that?” I said. “Is there something about seeing hollows that’s like reading souls?”
Reynaldo conferred with Mother Dust. “You seem to be a reader
of hearts,” he said. “You saw some good in Bentham’s, after all. You chose to forgive him.”
“Forgive him?” I said. “What would I have to forgive him for?”
Mother Dust knew she’d said too much, but it was too late to hold back. She whispered to Reynaldo.
“For what he did to your grandfather,” he said.
I turned to Emma, but she seemed just as confused as I was.
“And what did he do to my grandfather?”
“I’ll tell them,” said a voice from the doorway, and then Bentham hobbled in by himself. “It’s my shame, and I should be the one to confess it.”
He shuffled past the sink, pulled a chair away from the table, and sat down facing us.
“During the war, your grandfather was highly valued for his special facility with hollows. We had a secret project, some technologists and I—we thought we could replicate his ability and give it to other peculiars. Inoculate them against hollows, like a vaccine. If we could all see and sense them, they would cease to be a threat, and the war against their kind would be won. Your grandfather made many noble sacrifices, but none so great as this: he agreed to participate.”
Emma’s face was tense as she listened. I could see she’d never heard any of this before.
“We took just a little bit,” Bentham said. “Just a piece of his second soul. We thought it could be spared, or would be replenished, like when someone gives blood.”
“You took his soul,” Emma said, her voice wavering.
Bentham held his finger and thumb a centimeter apart. “This much. We split it up and administered it to several test subjects. Although it had the desired effect, it didn’t last long, and repeated exposure began to rob them of their native abilities. It was a failure.”
“And what about Abe?” Emma said. In her tone was the special malice she reserved for those who hurt people she loved. “What did you do to him?”
“He was weakened, and his talent diluted,” said Bentham. “Before the procedure, he was much like young Jacob. His ability to control hollows was a deciding factor in our war with the wights. After the procedure, however, he found he couldn’t control them any longer, and his second sight became blurred. I’m told that soon afterward he left peculiardom altogether. He worried he would be a danger to his fellow peculiars, rather than a help. He felt he could no longer protect them.”
