Hollow City (9 page)

“Take us up!” I shouted. The hollow very close now; the pain extraordinary.

For a few endless seconds, nothing happened. The hollow bolted around the bend, using its muscular tongues like legs, its atrophied human limbs hanging useless. Then a metallic squeal rang out, the rope pulled taut, and we lurched into the air.

The hollow had nearly closed the distance between us. It galloped with jaws wide open, as if to collect us between its teeth the way a whale feeds on plankton. We weren’t quite halfway up the wall when it reached the ground below us, looked up, and squatted like a spring about to uncoil.

“It’s going to jump!” I shouted. “Pull your legs into the net!”

The hollow drove its tongues into the ground and sprang upward. We were rising fast and it seemed like the hollow would miss us, but just as it reached the apex of its jump, one of its tongues shot out and lassoed Emma around the ankle.

Emma screamed and kicked at it with her other foot as the net came to a jolting stop, the pulley above too weak to raise all of us and the hollow, too.

“Get it off me!” Emma shouted. “Get it off get it off get it off!”

I tried kicking at it, too, but the hollow’s tongue was as strong as woven steel and the tip was covered in hundreds of wriggling sucker-cups, so that anyone who tried to pry the tongue off would only get stuck to it themselves. And then the hollow was reeling itself up, its jaws inching closer until we could smell its stinking grave-breath.

Emma shouted for someone to hold her and with one hand I grabbed the back of her dress. Bronwyn let go of the net entirely, clinging to it with just her legs, then threw her arms around Emma’s waist. Then Emma let go, too—Bronwyn and I being all that kept her from falling—and with her hands now free she reached down and clapped them around the tongue.

The hollow shrieked. The sucker-cups along its tongue, withered
and reeking black smoke, hissed from its flesh. Emma squeezed harder and closed her eyes and howled, not a cry of pain, I thought, but a kind of war cry, until the hollow was forced to release, its injured tentacle unslithering from around her ankle. There was a surreal moment where it was no longer the hollow who was holding Emma but Emma who was holding the hollow, the thing writhing and shrieking below us, the acrid smoke of its burned flesh filling our noses, until finally we had to shout at her to
let go
, and Emma’s eyes flew open again and she seemed to remember where she was and pulled her hands apart.

The hollow tumbled away from us, grasping at empty space as it fell. We rocketed up and away in the net, the tension that had been holding us down suddenly released, and soaring over the lip of the wall, we collapsed in a heap on top of it. Olive, Claire, and Miss Peregrine were waiting there for us, and as we extricated ourselves from the net and stumbled away from the cliff’s edge, Olive cheered, Miss Peregrine screeched and beat her good wing, and Claire raised her head from where she’d been lying on the ground and gave a weak smile.

We were giddy—and for the second time in as many days, stunned to be alive. “That’s twice you’ve saved our necks, little magpie,” Bronwyn said to Olive. “And Miss Emma, I already knew you were brave, but that was beyond anything!”

Emma shrugged it off. “It was him or me,” she said.

“I can’t believe you
touched
it,” said Horace.

Emma wiped her hands on her dress, held them to her nose, and made a face. “I just hope this smell comes off soon,” she said.

“That beast stank like a landfill!”

“How’s your ankle?” I asked her. “Does it hurt?”

She knelt and pushed down her sock to reveal a fat, red welt ringing it. “Not too bad,” she said, touching the ankle gingerly. But when she stood up again and put weight on it, I caught her wincing.

“A lot of help
you
were,” Enoch growled at me. “ ‘Run away!’
says the hollow-slayer’s grandson!”

“If my grandfather had run from the hollow that killed him, he might still be alive,” I said. “It’s good advice.”

I heard a thud from beyond the wall we’d just scaled, and the Feeling churned up inside me again. I went to the ledge and looked over. The hollow was alive and well at the base of the wall, and busy punching holes in the rock with its tongues.

“Bad news,” I said. “The fall didn’t kill it.”

In a moment Emma was at my side. “What’s it doing?”

I watched it twist one of its tongues into a hole it had made, then hoist itself up and begin making a second. It was creating footholds—or tongue-holds, rather.

“It’s trying to climb the wall,” I said. “Good God, it’s like the freaking Terminator.”

“The what?” said Emma.

I almost started to explain, then shook my head. It was a stupid comparison, anyway—hollowgast were scarier, and probably deadlier, than any movie monster.

“We have to stop it!” said Olive.

“Or better yet, run!” said Horace.

“No more running!” said Enoch. “Can we please just kill the damn thing?”

“Sure,” Emma said. “But how?”

“Anyone got a vat of boiling oil?” said Enoch.

“Will this do instead?” I heard Bronwyn say, and turned to see her lifting a boulder above her head.

“It might,” I said. “How’s your aim? Can you drop it where I tell you?”

“I’ll certainly try,” Bronwyn said, tottering toward the ledge with the rock balanced precariously on her hands.

We stood looking over the ledge. “Farther this way,” I said, urging her a few steps to the left. Just as I was about to give the signal for her to drop the boulder, though, the hollow leapt from one
hold to the next, and now she was standing in the wrong place.

The hollow was getting faster at making the holds; now it was a moving target. To make matters worse, Bronwyn’s boulder was the only one in sight. If she missed, we wouldn’t get a second shot.

I forced myself to stare at the hollow despite a nearly unbearable urge to look away. For a few strange, head-swimmy seconds, the voices of my friends faded away and I could hear my own blood pumping in my ears and my heart thumping in the cavity of my chest, and my thoughts drifted to the creature that killed my grandfather; that stood over his torn and dying body before fleeing, cowardly, into the woods.

My vision rippled and my hands shook. I tried to steady myself.

You were born for this
, I thought to myself.
You were built to kill monsters like this
. I repeated it under my breath like a mantra.

“Hurry up, please, Jacob,” Bronwyn said.

The creature faked left, then jumped right. I didn’t want to guess, and throw away our best chance at killing it. I wanted to
know
. And somehow, for some reason, I felt that I could.

I knelt, so close to the cliff’s edge now that Emma hooked two fingers through the back of my belt to keep me from falling. Focusing on the hollow, I repeated the mantra to myself—
built to kill you, built to kill
—and though the hollow was for the moment stationary, hacking away at one spot on the wall, I felt the compass needle in my gut prick ever so slightly to the right of it.

It was like a premonition.

Bronwyn was beginning to tremble under the boulder’s weight.

“I can’t hold this much longer!” she said.

I decided to trust my instinct. Even though the spot my compass pointed to was empty, I shouted for Bronwyn to drop the boulder there. She angled toward it and, with a groan of relief, let go of the rock.

The moment after she let go, the hollow leapt to the right—into the very place my compass had pointed. The hollow looked
up to see the rock sailing toward it and poised to jump again—but there wasn’t time. The boulder slammed into the creature’s head and swept its body off the wall. With a thunderous crash, hollow and boulder hit the ground together. Tentacle tongues shot out from beneath the rock, shivered, went limp. Black blood followed, fanning around the boulder in a great, viscous puddle.

“Direct hit!” I yelled.

The kids began to jump and cheer. “It’s dead, it’s dead,” Olive cried, “the horrible hollow is dead!”

Bronwyn threw her arms around me. Emma kissed the top of my head. Horace shook my hand and Hugh slapped me on the back. Even Enoch congratulated me. “Good work,” he said a bit reluctantly. “Now don’t go getting a big head over it.”

I should’ve been overjoyed, but I hardly felt anything, just a spreading numbness as the trembling pain of the Feeling receded. Emma could see I was drained. Very sweetly, and in a way no one else could quite detect, she took my arm and half supported me as we walked away from the ledge. “That wasn’t luck,” she whispered in my ear. “I was right about you, Jacob Portman.”

*   *   *

The path that had dead-ended at the bottom of the wall began again here at the top, following the spine of a ridge up and over a hill.

“The sign on the rope said
Access to Menagerie
,” said Horace. “Do you suppose that’s what’s ahead?”

“You’re the one who dreams about the future,” said Enoch. “Suppose you tell
us
.”

“What’s a menagerie?” asked Olive.

“A collection of animals,” Emma explained. “Like a zoo, sort of.”

Olive squeaked and clapped her hands. “It’s Cuthbert’s friends!
From the story! Oh, I can’t wait to meet them. Do you suppose that’s where the ymbryne lives, too?”

“At this juncture,” Millard said, “it’s best not to suppose anything.”

We started walking. I was still reeling from my encounter with the hollow. My ability did seem to be developing, as Millard said it would, growing like a muscle the more I worked it. Once I’d seen a hollow I could track it, and if I focused on it in just the right way, I could anticipate its next move, in some felt-more-than-known, gut-instinctual way. I felt a certain satisfaction at having learned something new about my peculiarity, and with nothing to teach me but experience. But this wasn’t a safe, controlled environment I was learning in. There were no bumper lanes to keep my ball out of the gutter. Any mistake I made would have immediate and deadly consequences, for both myself and those around me. I worried the others would start believing the hype about me—or worse yet,
I
would. And I knew that the minute I got cocky—the minute I stopped being pants-wettingly terrified of hollowgast—something terrible would happen.

Maybe it was lucky, then, that my terror-to-confidence ratio was at an all-time low. Ten-to-one, easy. I stuck my hands in my pockets as we walked, afraid the others would see them shaking.

“Look!” said Bronwyn, stopping in the middle of the path. “A house in the clouds!”

We were halfway up the ridge. Up ahead of us, high in the distance, was a house that almost seemed to be balanced on a cloudbank. As we walked farther and crested the hill, the clouds parted and the house came into full view. It was very small, and perched not atop a cloud but on a very large tower constructed entirely from stacked-up railroad ties, the whole thing set smack in the middle of a grassy plateau. It was one of the strangest man-made structures I’d ever seen. Around it on the plateau were scattered a few shacks, and at the far end was a small patch of woods, but we paid no
attention—our eyes were on the tower.

“What
is
it?” I whispered.

“A lookout tower?” guessed Emma.

“A place to launch airplanes from?” said Hugh.

But there were no airplanes anywhere, nor any evidence of a landing strip.

“Perhaps it’s a place to launch zeppelins from,” said Millard.

I remembered old footage of the ill-fated Hindenburg docking to the top of what looked like a radio tower—a structure not so different from this—and felt a cold wave of dread pass through me. What if the balloons that hunted us on the beach were based here, and we’d unwittingly stumbled into a nest of wights?

“Or maybe it’s the ymbryne’s house,” said Olive. “Why does everyone always leap to the awfullest conclusions right away?”

“I’m sure Olive’s right,” said Hugh. “There’s nothing to be afraid of here.”

He was answered right away by a loud, inhuman growl, which seemed to come from the shadows beneath the tower.

“What was
that
?” said Emma. “Another hollow?”

“I don’t think so,” I said; the Feeling still fading in me.

“I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” said Horace, backing away.

But we didn’t have a choice; it wanted to meet us. The growl came again, prickling the hairs on my arms, and a moment later a furry face appeared between two of the lower railroad ties. It snarled at us like a rabid dog, reels of saliva dripping from its fang-toothed mouth.

“What in the name of the Elderfolk is
that
?” muttered Emma.

“Capital idea, coming into this loop,” said Enoch. “Really working out well for us so far.”

The whatever-it-was crawled out from between the ties and into the sun, where it crouched on its haunches and leered at us with an unbalanced smile, as if imagining how our brains might taste. I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal; dressed in rags, it had the body of a man but carried itself like an ape, its hunched form like some long-lost ancestor of ours whose evolution had been arrested millions of years ago. Its eyes and teeth were a dull yellow, its skin pale and blotched with dark spots, its hair a long, matted nest.