Hollow City (8 page)

Emma tossed a rock down the giant’s throat, listening for whatever sound came back. She started to say “I think it might be a …” but then slipped on loose gravel, and her last word was lost as she scrambled and caught herself before she could fall.

“Be careful!” I shouted, my heart racing. “Wait, I’m coming, too!”

I splashed into the lake after her.

“It might be a what?” called Enoch.

“Only one way to find out!” Emma said excitedly, and climbed farther into the giant’s mouth.

“Oh, Lord,” said Horace. “There she goes …”

“Wait!” I shouted again—but she was gone already, disappeared down the giant’s throat.

*   *   *

The giant appeared even larger up close than it had from the shore, and peering down into its dark throat, I swore I could almost hear old Cuthbert breathing. I cupped my hands and called Emma’s name. My own voice came echoing back. The others were wading into the lake now, too, but I couldn’t wait for them—what if she was in trouble down there?—so I gritted my teeth, lowered my legs into the dark, and let go.

I fell for a long time. A full second. Then
splash
—a plunge into water so cold it made me gasp, all my muscles constricting at once. I had to remind myself to tread water or sink. I was in a dim, narrow chamber filled with water, with no way back up the giant’s long, smooth throat; no rope, no ladder, no footholds. I shouted for Emma, but she was nowhere around.

Oh God
, I thought.
She’s drowned!

But then something tickled my arms, and bubbles began breaking all around me, and a moment later Emma broke the surface, gasping for breath.

She looked okay by the pale light. “What are you waiting for?” she said slapping the water with her hand like she wanted me to dive down with her. “Come on!”

“Are you insane?” I said. “We’re trapped in here!”

“Of course we’re not!” she said.

Bronwyn’s voice called from above. “Hellooooo, I hear you down there! What have you found?”

“I think it’s a loop entrance!” Emma called back. “Tell everyone to jump in and don’t be afraid—Jacob and I will meet you on the other side!”

And then she took my hand, and though I didn’t quite understand what was going on, I drew a deep breath and let her pull me underwater. We flipped and scissor-kicked downward toward a person-sized hole in the rock through which a gleam of daylight was visible. She pushed me inside and then came after, and we swam through a shaft about ten feet long and then out into the lake. Above
us I could see its rippling surface, and above that the blue, refracted sky, and as we rose toward it the water warmed dramatically. Then we broke into the air and gasped for breath, and instantly I could feel that the weather had changed: it was hot and muggy now, and the light had changed to that of a golden afternoon. The depth of the lake had changed, too—now it came all the way to the giant’s chin.

“See?” Emma said, grinning. “We’re somewhen else!”

And just like that, we’d entered a loop—abandoned a mild morning in 1940 for a hot afternoon in some other, older year, though it was difficult to tell just how much older, here in the forest, away from the easily datable cues of civilization.

One by one, the other children surfaced around us, and seeing how much things had changed, had their own realizations.

“Do you realize what this
means
?” Millard squealed. He was splashing around, turning in circles, out of breath with excitement. “It means there’s secret knowledge embedded in the
Tales
!”

“Not so useless now, are they?” said Olive.

“Oh, I can’t
wait
to analyze and annotate them,” said Millard, rubbing his hands together.

“Don’t you dare write in my book, Millard Nullings!” said Bronwyn.

“But what
is
this loop?” asked Hugh. “Who do you think lives here?”

Olive said, “Cuthbert’s animal friends, of course!”

Enoch rolled his eyes but stopped short of saying what he was probably thinking—
It’s just a story!
—maybe because his mind was starting to change, too.

“Every loop has an ymbryne,” said Emma, “even mystery loops from storybook tales. So let’s go and find her.”

“All right,” said Millard. “Where?”

“The only place the story made mention of aside from this lake was that mountain,” Emma said, indicating the bluff beyond the trees. “Who’s ready to do some climbing?”

We were tired and hungry, every one of us, but finding the loop had given us a burst of new energy. We left the stone giant behind and set off through the woods toward the foot of the bluff, our clothes drip-drying quickly in the heat. As we neared the bluff, the ground began to slope upward, and then a well-worn path appeared and we followed it up and up through clusters of brushy firs and winding rocky passages, until the path became so vertical in places that we had to go on all fours, clawing at the angled ground to pull ourselves forward.

“There’d better be something wonderful at the end of this trail,” said Horace, dabbing sweat from his forehead. “A gentleman doesn’t perspire!”

The path narrowed to a ribbon, the ground rising sharply on our right side and dropping away on the left, a carpet of green treetops spreading beyond it. “Hug the wall!” Emma warned. “It’s a long way down.”

Just glancing at the drop-off made me dizzy. Suddenly, it seemed, I had developed a new and stomach-clenching fear of heights, and it took all my concentration simply to put one foot in front of the other.

Emma touched my arm. “Are you all right?” she whispered. “You look pale.”

I lied and said I was, and succeeded in faking allrightness for exactly three more twists in the path, at which point my heart was racing and my legs shaking so badly that I had to sit down, right there in the middle of the narrow path, blocking everyone behind me.

“Oh, dear,” Hugh muttered. “Jacob’s cracking up.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I muttered. I’d never been afraid of heights before, but now I couldn’t so much as look off the edge of the path without my stomach doing flips.

Then something terrible occurred to me: what if this wasn’t a fear of heights I was feeling—but of hollows?

It couldn’t be, though: we were inside a loop, where hollows
couldn’t go. And yet the more I studied the feeling churning in my gut, the more convinced I became that it wasn’t the drop itself that bothered me, but something
beyond
it.

I had to see for myself.

Everyone chattered anxiously in my ear, asking what was the matter, was I okay. I shut out their voices, tipped forward onto my hands, and crawled toward the edge of path. The closer I got, the worse my stomach felt, like it was being clawed to shreds from the inside. Inches away, I pressed my chest flat to the ground and reached out to hook my fingers over the ledge, then dragged myself forward until I could peek over it.

It took my eyes a moment to spot the hollow. At first it was just a shimmer against the craggy mountainside; a quivering spot in the air like heat waves rising from a hot car. An error, barely detectable.

This was how they looked to normals, and to other peculiars—to anyone who could not do what I did.

Then I actually experienced my peculiar ability coming to life. Very quickly, the churning in my belly contracted and focused into a single point of pain; and then, in a way I can’t fully explain, it became
directional
, lengthening from a point into a line, from one dimension to two. The line, like a compass needle, pointed diagonally at that faltering spot a hundred yards below and to the left on the mountainside, the waves and shimmers of which began to gather and coalesce into solid black mass, a humanoid thing made from tentacles and shadow, clinging to the rocks.

And then it saw me see it and its whole awful body drew taut. Hunkering close against the rocks, it unhinged its saw-toothed mouth and let loose an ear-splitting shriek.

My friends didn’t need me to describe what I was seeing. The sound alone was enough.

“
Hollow!
” someone shouted.

“
Run!
” shouted another, belaboring the obvious.

I scrambled back from the ledge and was pulled to my feet, and
then we were all running in a pack, not down the mountain but up it, farther into the unknown rather than back toward the flat ground and loop exit that lay behind us. But it was too late to turn back; I could feel the hollow leaping from boulder to crag up the cliffside—but away from us, down the path, to cut us off in case we tried to run past it down the mountain. It was trapping us.

This was new. I’d never been able to track a hollow with anything other than my eyes before, but now I felt that little compass needle inside me pointing behind us, and I could almost picture the creature scrambling toward flat ground. It was as if, upon seeing the hollow, I’d planted a sort of homing beacon in it with my eyes.

We raced around a corner—my fleeting fear of heights now apparently gone—and were confronted by a smooth wall of rock, fifty feet high at least. The path ended here; all around us the ground fell away at crazy angles. The wall had no ladders, no handholds. We searched frantically for some other way—a secret passage in the rock, a door, a tunnel—but there was none, and no way forward but up; and no way up, apparently, other than via hot air balloon or the helping hand of a probably mythical giant.

Panic took hold. Miss Peregrine began to screech and Claire to cry as Horace stood and wailed, “This is the end, we’re all going to die!” The rest looked for last-ditch ways to save ourselves. Fiona dragged her hands along the wall, searching for crevices that might contain soil from which she could grow a vine or something else we could climb. Hugh ran to the edge of the path and peered over the drop-off. “We could jump, if only we had a parachute!”

“I can be a parachute!” said Olive. “Take hold of my legs!”

But it was a long way down, and at the bottom was dark and dangerous forest. It was better, Bronwyn decided, to send Olive up the rock face than down the mountain, and with limp, feverish Claire in one arm, Bronwyn led Olive by the hand to the wall. “Give me your shoes!” she said to Olive. “Take Claire and Miss P and get to the top as quick as you can!”

Olive looked terrified. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough!” she cried.

“You’ve got to try, little magpie! You’re the only one who can keep them safe!” And she knelt and set Claire down on her feet, and the sick girl tottered into Olive’s arms. Olive squeezed her tight, slipped off her leaden shoes, and then, just as they began to rise, Bronwyn transferred Miss Peregrine from her shoulder to the top of Olive’s head. Weighed down, Olive rose very slowly—it was only when Miss Peregrine began to flap her good wing and pull Olive up by the hair, Olive yelping and kicking her feet, that the three of them really took off.

The hollow had nearly reached level ground. I knew it as surely as if I could see it with my eyes. Meanwhile, we scoured the ground for anything that might be used as a weapon—but all we could find were pebbles. “I can be a weapon,” said Emma, and she clapped her hands and drew them apart again, an impressive fireball roaring to life between them.

“And don’t forget about my bees!” said Hugh, opening his mouth to let them out. “They can be fierce when provoked!”

Enoch, who always found a way to laugh at the most inappropriate times, let out a big guffaw. “What’re you going to do,” he said, “pollinate it to death?”

Hugh ignored him, turning to me instead. “You’ll be our eyes, Jacob. Just tell us where the beast is and we’ll sting his brains out!”

My compass needle of pain told me it was on the path now, and the way its venom was expanding to fill me meant it was closing in fast. “Any minute now,” I said, pointing to the bend in the path we’d come around. “Get ready.” If not for the adrenaline flooding my system, the pain would’ve been totally debilitating.

We assumed fight-or-flight positions, some of us crouching with fists raised like boxers, others like sprinters before the starting gun, though no one knew which way to run.

“What a depressing and inauspicious end to our adventures,”
said Horace. “Devoured by a hollow in some Welsh backwater!”

“I thought they couldn’t enter loops,” said Enoch. “How the hell did it get in here?”

“It would seem they have evolved,” said Millard.

“Who gives a chuck how it happened!” Emma snapped. “It’s here and it’s hungry!”

Then from above us a small voice cried, “Look out below!” and I craned my neck to see Olive’s face pull back and disappear over the top of the rock wall. A moment later something like a long rope came sailing over the ledge. It unreeled and snapped taut, and then a net unfurled at the end of it and smacked against the ground. “Hurry!” came Olive’s voice again. “There’s a lever up here—everyone grab hold of the net and I’ll pull it!”

We ran to the net, but it was tiny, hardly large enough for two. Pinned to the rope at eye level was a photograph of a man inside the net—this very net—with his legs folded in front of him and hanging just above the ground before a sheer rock face—this very rock face. On the back of the photo a message was printed:

ONLY ACCESS TO MENAGERIE: CLIMB INSIDE!
WEIGHT LIMIT: ONE RIDER
STRICTLY ENFORCED

This contraption was some sort of primitive elevator—meant for one rider at a time, not eight. But there was no time to use it as intended, so we all dog-piled onto it, sticking our arms and legs through its holes, clinging to the rope above it, attaching ourselves any way we could.