Hollow City (27 page)

We reached the doorway a few seconds later. To my relief, it didn’t lead outside, where we’d never have a hope of catching them, but to a stairwell, down a set of spiral steps.

“Hah!” Enoch said, clapping his pudgy hands. “They’ve gone and done it now—trapped themselves in the basement!”

We sprinted down the stairs. At the bottom was a large, dimly lit room walled and floored with stone. It was cold and damp and almost completely dark, the electricity having been knocked out, so Emma sparked a flame in her hand and shone it around, until the nature of the space became apparent. Beneath our feet, stretching from wall to wall, were marble slabs chiseled with writing. The one below me read:

B
ISHOP
E
LDRIDGE
T
HORNBRUSH, DYED ANNO 1721

“This is no basement,” Emma said. “It’s a crypt.”

A little chill came over me, and I stepped closer to the light and warmth of Emma’s flame.

“You mean, there are people buried in the floor?” said Olive, her voice quavering.

“What of it?” said Enoch. “Let’s catch a damned pigeon before one of those bombs buries
us
in the floor.”

Emma turned in a circle, throwing light on the walls. “They’ve got to be down here somewhere. There’s no way out but that staircase.”

Then we heard a wing flap. I tensed. Emma brightened her flame and aimed it toward the sound. Her flickering light fell on a flat-topped tomb that rose a few feet from the floor. Between the tomb and the wall was a gap we couldn’t see behind from where we stood; a perfect hiding spot for a bird.

Emma raised a finger to her lips and motioned for us to follow. We crept across the room. Nearing the tomb, we spread out, surrounding it on three sides.

Ready?
Emma mouthed.

The others nodded. I gave a thumbs-up. Emma tiptoed forward to peek behind the tomb—and then her face fell. “Nothing!” she said, kicking the floor in frustration.

“I don’t understand!” said Enoch. “They were
right here
!”

We all came forward to look. Then Millard said, “Emma! Shine your light on top of the tomb, please!”

She did, and Millard read the tomb’s inscription aloud:

H
ERE LIETH
S
IR
C
HRISTOPHER
W
REN
B
UILDER OF
T
HIS
C
ATHEDRAL

“Wren!” Emma exclaimed. “What an odd coincidence!”

“I hardly think it’s a coincidence,” said Millard. “He must be related to
Miss
Wren. Perhaps he’s her father!”

“That’s very interesting,” said Enoch, “but how does that help
us find her, or her pigeons?”

“That is what I am attempting to puzzle out.” Millard hummed to himself and paced a little and recited a line from the tale: “the birds still went to visit him, now and again, in the land below.”

Then I thought I heard a pigeon coo. “Shh!” I said, and made everyone listen. It came again a few seconds later, from the rear corner of the tomb. I circled around it and knelt down, and that’s when I noticed a small hole in the floor at the tomb’s base, no bigger than a fist—just large enough for a bird to wriggle through.

“Over here!” I said.

“Well, I’ll be stuffed!” said Emma, holding her flame up to the hole. “Perhaps that’s ‘the land below’?”

“But the hole is so small,” said Olive. “How are we supposed to get the birds out of there?”

“We could wait for them to leave,” said Horace, and then a bomb fell so close by that my eyes blurred and my teeth rattled.

“No need for that!” said Millard. “Bronwyn, would you please open Sir Wren’s tomb?”

“No!” cried Olive. “I don’t want to see his rotten old bones!”

“Don’t worry, love,” Bronwyn said, “Millard knows what he’s doing.” She planted her hands on the edge of the tomb lid and began to push, and it slid open with a slow, grating rumble.

The smell that came up wasn’t what I’d expected—not of death, but mold and old dirt. We gathered around to look inside.

“Well, I’ll be stuffed,” Emma said.

W
here a coffin should’ve been, there was a ladder, leading down into darkness. We peered into the open tomb.

“There’s no
way
I’m climbing down there!” Horace said. But then a trio of bombs shook the building, raining chips of concrete on our heads, and suddenly Horace was pushing past me, grasping for the ladder. “Excuse me, out of my way, best-dressed go first!”

Emma caught him by the sleeve. “I have the light, so
I’ll
go first. Then Jacob will follow, in case there are … 
things
down there.”

I flashed a weak smile, my knees going wobbly at the thought.

Enoch said, “You mean things
other than
rats and cholera and whatever sorts of mad trolls live beneath crypts?”

“It doesn’t matter
what’s
down there,” Millard said grimly.

“We’ll have to face it, and that’s that.”

“Fine,” said Enoch. “But Miss Wren had better be down there, too, because rat bites don’t heal quickly.”

“Hollowgast bites even less so,” said Emma, and then she swung her foot onto the ladder.

“Be careful,” I said. “I’ll be right above you.”

She saluted me with her flaming hand. “Once more into the breach,” she said, and began to climb down.

Then it was my turn.

“Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid,” I said, “and just wish you’d stayed in bed?”

Enoch kicked my shoe. “Quit stalling.”

I grabbed the lip of the tomb and put my foot on the ladder.

Thought briefly of all the pleasant, boring things I might’ve been doing with my summer, had my life gone differently. Tennis camp. Sailing lessons. Stocking shelves. And then, through some Herculean effort of will, I made myself climb.

The ladder descended into a tunnel. The tunnel dead-ended to one side, and in the other direction disappeared into blackness. The air was cold and suffused with a strange odor, like clothes left to rot in a flooded basement. The rough stone walls beaded and dripped with moisture of mysterious origin.

As Emma and I waited for everyone to climb down, the cold crept into me, degree by degree. The others felt it, too. When Bronwyn reached the bottom, she opened her trunk and handed out the peculiar sheep’s wool sweaters we’d been given in the menagerie. I slipped one over my head. It fit me like a sack, the sleeves falling past my fingers and the bottom sagging halfway to my knees, but at least it was warm.

Bronwyn’s trunk was empty now and she left it behind. Miss Peregrine rode inside her coat, where she’d practically made a nest for herself. Millard insisted on carrying the
Tales
in his arms, heavy and bulky as it was, because he might need to refer to it at any moment, he said. I think it had become his security blanket, though, and he thought of it as a book of spells which only he knew how to read.

We were an odd bunch.

I shuffled forward to feel for hollows in the dark. This time, I got a new kind of twinge in my gut, ever so faint, as if a hollow had been here and gone, and I was sensing its residue. I didn’t mention it, though; there was no reason to alarm everyone unnecessarily.

We walked. The sound of our feet slapping the wet bricks echoed endlessly up and down the passage. There’d be no sneaking up on whatever was waiting for us.

Every so often, from up ahead, we’d hear a flap of wings or a pigeon’s warble, and we’d pick up our pace a little. I got the uneasy feeling we were being led toward some nasty surprise. Embedded in
the walls were stone slabs like the ones we’d seen in the crypt, but older, the writing mostly worn away. Then we passed a coffin, grave-less, on the floor—then a whole stack of them, leaned against a wall like discarded moving boxes.

“What
is
this place?” Hugh whispered.

“Graveyard overflow,” said Enoch. “When they need to make room for new customers, they dig up the old ones and stick them down here.”

“What a terrible loop entrance,” I said. “Imagine walking through here every time you needed in or out!”

“It’s not so different from our cairn tunnel,” Millard said.

“Unpleasant loop entrances serve a purpose—normals tend to avoid them, so we peculiars have them all to ourselves.”

So rational. So wise. All I could think was,
There are dead people everywhere and they’re all rotted and bony and dead and, oh God …

“Uh-oh,” Emma said, and she stopped suddenly, causing me to run into her and everyone else to pile up behind me.

She held her flame to one side, revealing a curved door in the wall. It hung open slightly, but only darkness showed through the crack.

We listened. For a long moment there was no sound but our breath and the distant drip of water. Then we heard a noise, but not the kind we were expecting—not a wing-flap or the scratch of a bird’s feet—but something human.

Very softly, someone was crying.

“Hello?” called Emma. “Who’s in there?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” came an echoing voice.

Or was it a pair of voices?

Emma brightened her flame. Bronwyn crept forward and nudged the door with her foot. It swung open to expose a small chamber filled with bones. Femurs, shinbones, skulls—the dismembered fossils of many hundreds of people, heaped up in no apparent order.

I stumbled backward, dizzy with shock.

“Hello?” Emma said. “Who said that? Show yourself!”

At first I couldn’t see anything in there but bones, but then I heard a sniffle and followed the sound to the top of the pile, where two pairs of eyes blinked at us from the murky shadows at the rear of the chamber.

“There’s no one here,” said a small voice.

“Go away,” came a second voice. “We’re dead.”

“No you’re not,” said Enoch, “and I would know!”

“Come out of there,” Emma said gently. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

Both voices said at once: “Promise?”

“We promise,” said Emma.

The bones began to shift. A skull dislodged from the pile and clattered to the floor, where it rolled to a stop at my feet and stared up at me.

Hello, future
, I thought.

Then two young boys crawled into the light, on hands and knees atop the bone pile. Their skin was deathly pale and they peeped at us with black-circled eyes that wheeled dizzyingly in their sockets.

“I’m Emma, this is Jacob, and these are our friends,” Emma said. “We’re peculiar and we’re not going to hurt you.”

The boys crouched like frightened animals, saying nothing, eyes spinning, seeming to look everywhere and nowhere.

“What’s wrong with them?” Olive whispered.

Bronwyn hushed her. “Don’t be rude.”

“Can you tell me your names?” Emma said, her voice coaxing and gentle.

“I am Joel and Peter,” the larger boy said.

“Which are you?” Emma said. “Joel or Peter?”

“I am Peter and Joel,” said the smaller boy.

“We don’t have time for games,” said Enoch. “Are there any birds in there with you? Have you seen any fly past?”

“The pigeons like to hide,” said the larger.

“In the attic,” said the smaller.

“What attic?” said Emma. “Where?”

“In our house,” they said together, and raising their arms they pointed down the dark passage. They seemed to speak cooperatively, and if a sentence was more than a few words long, one would start and the other finish, with no detectable pause between. I also noticed that whenever one was speaking and the other wasn’t, the quiet one would mouth the other’s words in perfect synchronicity—as if they shared one mind.

“Could you please show us the way to your house?” asked Emma. “Take us to your attic?”

Joel-and-Peter shook their heads and shrank back into the dark.

“What’s the matter?” Bronwyn said. “Why don’t you want to go?”

“Death and blood!” cried one boy.

“Blood and screaming!” cried the other.

“Screaming and blood and shadows that bite!” they cried together.