Hollow City (35 page)

The first few freaks were standard-issue sideshow fare, and not especially peculiar: an “illustrated” man covered in tattoos; a bearded lady stroking her long chin-whiskers and cackling; a human pincushion who pierced his face with needles and drove nails into his nostrils with a hammer. While I thought this was pretty impressive, my friends, some of whom had traveled Europe in a sideshow with Miss Peregrine, could hardly stifle their yawns.

Under a banner that read
THE AMAZING MATCHSTICK MEN
, a gentleman with hundreds of matchbooks glued to his suit body-slammed a man similarly clothed in matchsticks, causing flames to erupt across the matchstick man’s chest as he flailed in fake terror.

“Amateurs,” Emma muttered as she pulled us on to the next attraction.

The oddities got progressively odder. There was a girl in a long, fringed dress who wore a giant python around her body, which wriggled and danced at her command. Emma allowed that this was at least marginally peculiar, since the ability to enchant snakes was something only
syndrigasti
could do. But when Emma mentioned Miss Wren to the girl, she gave us a hard stare and her snake hissed and showed its fangs, and we moved on.

“This is a waste of time,” said Enoch. “Miss Peregrine’s clock is running out and we’re touring a carnival! Why not get some sweets and make a day of it?”

There was only one more freak to see, though, so we continued on. The final stage was empty but for a plain backdrop, a small table with flowers on it, and an easel-propped sign that read:
THE WORLD-FAMOUS FOLDING MAN
.

A stagehand walked onto the stage lugging a suitcase. He set the case down and left.

A crowd gathered. The suitcase sat there, center stage. People began to shout, “On with the show!” and “Bring out the freak!”

The suitcase jiggled. Then it began to shake, wobbling back and forth until it toppled onto its side. The crowd pressed toward the stage, fixated on the case.

Its latches popped, and very slowly, the case began to open. A pair of white eyes peeped out at the crowd, and then the case opened a little more to reveal a face—that of an adult man, with a neatly trimmed mustache and little round glasses, who had somehow folded himself into a suitcase no larger than my torso.

The crowd burst into applause, which increased as the freak proceeded to unfold himself, limb by limb, and step out of the impossibly small case. He was very tall and as skinny as a beanpole—so alarmingly thin, in fact, that it looked as if his bones were about to break through his skin. He was a human exclamation point, but carried himself with such dignity that I couldn’t laugh at him. He studied the hooting crowd dourly before taking a deep bow.

He then took a minute to demonstrate how his limbs could bend in all sorts of exotic ways—his knee twisting so that the top of his foot touched his hip, then his hips folding so that the knee touched his chest—and after more applause and more bows, the show was over.

We lingered as the crowd filtered away. The folding man was leaving the stage when Emma said to him, “You’re peculiar, aren’t you?”

The man stopped. He turned slowly to look at her with an air of imperious annoyance. “Excuse me?” he said in a thick Russian accent.

“Sorry to corner you this way, but we need to find Miss Wren,” Emma said. “We know she’s here someplace.”

“Peh!” said the man, dismissing her with a noise halfway between laughing and hawking spit.

“It’s an emergency!” Bronwyn pleaded.

The folding man crossed his arms in a bony X and said, “I dunno anything what you say,” then walked off the stage.

“Now what?” asked Bronwyn.

“We keep looking,” said Emma.

“And if we don’t find Miss Wren?” said Enoch.

“We
keep looking
,” Emma said through her teeth. “Everyone understand?”

Everyone understood perfectly well. We were out of options. If this didn’t work—if Miss Wren wasn’t here or we couldn’t find her soon—then all our efforts would have been for nothing, and Miss Peregrine would be lost just the same as if we’d never come to London at all.

We walked out of the sideshow the way we’d come, dejected, past the now-empty stages, past the plain-looking boy, out of the tent and into the daylight. We were standing outside the exit, unsure what to do next, when the plain-looking boy leaned out through the flap. “Wotsa trouble?” he said. “Show weren’t to your liking?”

“It was … fine,” I said, waving him off.

“Not peculiar enough for you?” he asked.

That got our attention. “What’d you say?” said Emma.

“Wakeling and Rookery,” he said, pointing past us toward the far side of the square. “That’s where the
real
show is.” And then he winked at us and ducked back inside the tent.

“That was mysterious,” said Hugh.

“Did he say
peculiar
?” said Bronwyn.

“What’s Wakeling and Rookery?” I said.

“A place,” said Horace. “Someplace in this loop, maybe.”

“Could be the intersection of two streets,” said Emma, and she pulled back the tent flap to ask the boy if this was what he meant—but he was already gone.

So we set off through the crowd, toward the far end of the square where he’d pointed, our one last, thin hope pinned to a couple of oddly named streets we weren’t even sure existed.

*   *   *

There was a point, a few blocks beyond the square, where the noise of the crowd faded and was replaced by an industrial clank and clamor, and the rich funk of roasting meat and animal waste was replaced by a stench far worse and unnameable. Crossing a walled river of Stygian sludge, we entered a district of factories and workhouses, of smokestacks belching black stuff into the sky, and this is where we found Wakeling Street. We walked one way down Wakeling looking for Rookery until it dead-ended at a large open sewer which Enoch said was the River Fleet, then turned and came back the other way. When we’d passed the point along Wakeling where we’d started, the street began to curve and twist, the factories and workhouses shrinking down into squat offices and unassuming buildings with blank faces and no signs, like a neighborhood purpose-built to be anonymous.

The bad feeling I’d been nursing got worse. What if we’d been set up—sent to this deserted part of the city to be ambushed out of view?

The street twisted and straightened again, and then I crashed into Emma, who’d been walking in front of me but had come to a sudden stop.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

In lieu of an answer, she just pointed. Up ahead, at a T-shaped intersection, there was a crowd. Though it had been sticky-hot back at the carnival, many of them were bundled in coats and scarves. They were assembled around a particular building, and stood gazing up at it in dumbfounded wonder—just as we were, now. The building itself was nothing special—four stories, the top three just rows of narrow, rounded windows, like an old office building. It was, in fact, nearly identical to all the buildings around it, with one exception: it was totally encased in ice. Ice coated its windows and doors. Icicles hung like fangs from every sill and ledge. Snow spilled from its doorways, collecting in giant heaps on the sidewalk. It looked like a blizzard had struck the building—from the
inside
.

I peered at a snow-blasted street sign:
R—KERY STRE—
.

“I know this place,” said Melina. “It’s the peculiar archives, where all our official records are kept.”

“How do you know that?” said Emma.

“Miss Thrush was grooming me to be second assistant to the ombudswoman there. The examination’s very difficult. I’ve been studying for twenty-one years.”

“Is it supposed to be covered in ice like that?” asked Bronwyn.

“Not that I’m aware,” said Melina.

“It’s also where the Council of Ymbrynes convene for the annual Nitpicking of the Bylaws,” said Millard.

“The Council of Ymbrynes meets
here
?” said Horace. “It’s awfully humble. I expected a castle or somesuch.”

“It’s not meant to stand out,” said Melina. “You aren’t supposed to notice it at all.”

“They’re doing a poor job of keeping it hidden, then,” said Enoch.

“As I said, it’s not usually covered in ice.”

“What do you think happened here?” I asked.

“Nothing good,” said Millard. “Nothing good at all.”

There was no question we’d have to get closer and explore, but that didn’t mean we had to rush in like fools. We hung back and watched from a distance. People came and went. Someone tried the door but it was frozen shut. The crowd thinned a bit.

“Tick, tick, tick,” said Enoch. “We’re wasting time.”

We cut through what was left of the crowd and stepped onto the icy sidewalk. The building emanated cold, and we shivered and jammed our hands into our pockets against it. Bronwyn used her strength to pull open the door, and it came straight off, hinges flying—but the hallway it let onto was completely obstructed by ice. It stretched from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and into the building in a blue and cloudy blur. The same was true of the windows: I wiped the frost from one pane and then another, and through both I could see only ice. It was as if a glacier was being born somewhere in the heart of the place, and its frozen tongues were squeezing out wherever there was an opening.