A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(126)



A terrible fear had invaded me—that there had been truth to Leo’s accusations. That this was my grandfather’s secret: He had not been trying to protect me from a loss of normalcy, or from the hollows, or from some mysterious band of enemies in black cars. He had been protecting me from himself.

I picked myself up off the floor. The hollow was hissing at me, bent over H, blocking him from view. I commanded it in hollowspeak to move, but it was fighting me. Or maybe H and the hollow were both fighting me now.

I ran toward the hollowgast, yelling, Go, go, let him go—and it did, leaping away from H and up to the ceiling, where it clung to a light fixture with its tongues. I fixed, for a split second, on an odd detail: A forest of tree-shaped air fresheners suspended from the ceiling. To combat the smell, of course. Because the hollow lived here.

I knelt down over H. “I’m sorry.” This time I didn’t touch him. “Please. Tell me what he did.”

“They fooled us. Seven times, they fooled us.”

“Who? What?”

“The Society.”

I was half listening. I only wanted to know one thing. “Did my grandfather kill children?”

“No. No.”

“Did he kidnap them?”

“No.” His face swam with pain—and what seemed like regret. “We thought”—he gasped for breath—“that we were saving them.”

I sank back on my heels, suddenly light-headed. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t a bad man. I hadn’t realized how much it had been weighing on me. The very notion.

“We did a lot of good,” he said. “We also made some mistakes. But Abe’s heart was always in the right place. And he loved you very, very much.” His voice had diminished to a whisper.

A rush of tears stung my eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. Don’t be.” With the last of his strength, he touched my arm. “The torch is yours now. I’m just sorry there aren’t more people to help you carry it.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try to do you both proud.”

“I know you will.” He smiled. “Now, it’s time.” He looked up to the ceiling. “Horatio, come down here.”

The hollow strained against my control.

“Let him come down,” said H. “A long time ago I made this poor creature a promise, and it’s got to be done before I die. Let him come.”

I stood up, backed away, and let go. The hollowgast dropped to the floor.

“Come here, Horatio. I can feel myself going. Come here.”

The hollow crept toward H. The old man tried to turn away from me.

“Don’t look. I don’t want this to be your last memory of me.”

The hollowgast straddled H and sat on his chest. When I realized what was about to happen I tried to command the hollowgast to move—I shouted at the thing—but H was blocking me.

I could hear him whispering to the creature.

“You’ve been a real good boy, Horatio. Remember what I taught you. Now, go on.”

The hollowgast whimpered, trembling.

“It’s okay,” H said gently, stroking the creature’s clawlike hand. “I’ll be okay.”

I looked away as it happened, though I’ll never forget the sound it made. When I looked back, his eyes were gone. The sockets looked like ripe plums with bites taken out of them. The hollowgast was chewing, and its shoulders were shaking, and it was making a noise that seemed caught between agony and ecstasy. After a minute it stood and turned slowly away, as if filled with shame.

“I forgive you,” H said. “I forgive you, brother.”

He seemed not to be speaking to the hollow, but to the air. To a ghost.

And then he was gone.



* * *



? ? ?

The hollowgast and I stared at each other across H’s body. I tried to gain control of it.

Sit down.

I had thought, if anything, it would be easier to control now that its master was dead. But my command had no effect.

I tried a second time, and then a third, with no results. I started planning ways to kill the thing, before it got a mind to come after my eyeballs next, and then Noor’s.

The hollowgast ratcheted its jaws open all the way, reeled out its three tongues, and made a terrifying sound—a squeal so high-pitched I thought the windows might crack. I grabbed a brass paperweight from a nearby table and steeled myself for a nasty fight.

But the hollowgast wasn’t coming for me. It was stumbling backward, and after a few steps its back hit the wall and came to a stop. And then the dull, directional pain that told me where the hollow was at all times began, very rapidly, to fade. At the same time, the creature’s tongues began to shrink. They shriveled and curled up and turned a deathly brown, and then they fell off, having withered like dead flowers.

The hollow was leaning against the wall with its head bowed and chest rising and falling as if it had just run a marathon. Then it collapsed to the floor, and its body began to shiver in the grip of a violent seizure.

I began to cross the room slowly, approaching it with careful, measured steps in case this was a trick. Then, as suddenly as they’d begun, the seizures stopped. At that same instant, the pain in my gut vanished.

The hollow began to stir. It turned its head and looked up at me. Its eyes were no longer black, weeping pools; now they were gray and lightening more by the second, gradually turning a pupilless blank.

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