A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(51)

“Make it ever hotter,” I said. “I have an idea.”

Emma took a deep breath, tensed, and her flames burned a little higher.

“When I say the word,” I whispered, “you run that way and I’ll run this way.”

The hollow let out a sharp cry and ran at us. I shouted, “NOW!” and Emma jumped right and I leapt left. The hollow’s tongues shot over our heads, and I kept running to the corner. The hollow tried to spin and follow me, but it slipped in the puddle and fell, then cried out and sent its tongues after me, but one of them tangled in the rungs of a metal shelf against the wall. Trying to yank free, the hollow brought the heavy shelf, and all its crates of frozen food, down on top of itself.

I shouted, “GO!” met Emma at the door and pulled it open, and in a moment we were out in the hall and pulling the door closed behind us.

“Lock it!” Emma said. “Where’s that key?”

But this door had a different handle and no lock at all, so we turned and ran down the hall and back into the restaurant’s dining room. It was filled with morning sun and diners in crisp vintage clothes, all turning now to stare at the strangers in their midst, soggy and out of breath. Emma remembered the fire in her hand too late, then tucked it behind her back while three waiters, the only people in the room who hadn’t yet noticed us, went on harmonizing:

“Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gaaaaaa—”

A huge crashing sound came from down the hall, and the waiters stopped mid-gal. The people who had been staring leapt up from their tables.

“Get out!” I shouted. “Everyone get out of here right now.”

Emma brought the flames out in front of her again. “That’s right! Get out, get out!”

It was the next crash that did it—the sound of the metal door flying from its hinges—and now almost everyone was on their feet, panicked and streaming toward the exits.

We spun to look behind us. The hollowgast stomped into the hallway, turned toward us, and howled, its three horrible tongues reeling down the hall like hard-cast fishing lines before snapping taut and vibrating with its scream.

The soda jerk shoved past me and ran for the nearest door. The sound alone was enough to terrify everyone. The nightmarish sight was mine alone to bear.

“Tell me you’re close,” Emma said.

“I’ve almost got him.”

The hollow started toward us down the hall. I shouted at him—

Stop! Lie down! Shut your mouth!

He slowed a bit, as if my words had penetrated his skull but not quite entered his brain, then came at us twice as fast. I wished we could run outside and face him in the parking lot, but the exits were jammed with fleeing diners. We clambered behind the long counter and ran to the far end, by the cash register. I kept shouting at him, trying different variations of the same phrases. Be still! Sleep! Sit down! Don’t move! But I could hear the hollow wrecking the place as it got closer to us. Tables and chairs were flying, people screaming bloody murder. I risked a peek over the counter and saw the hollow lasso a waiter around the waist and throw him through a plate-glass window.

Emma stood up quickly and grabbed a heavy bottle full of green liquid. She unscrewed the top, then began to tear her dress.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Making a Molotov cocktail,” she said, stuffing the torn cloth into the bottle.

The bottle said Bubble Up! “It won’t work—that’s soda!”

She swore, then lit the cloth and lobbed it over the counter anyway.

My compass needle shifted. The hollow was drawing near.

“This way,” I hissed. We scrambled on hands and knees toward the other end of the counter. A moment later the hollow’s tongues raked the wall above where we’d been crouched, and fifty glass bottles came crashing down at once.

I heard a woman scream. People were being hurt, maybe even killed. Looped people, who would never know what had happened to them and had no tomorrows to miss out on—but still. There was no escape, no better way. I had to face the beast, now or never.

I stood up from behind the counter and shouted at the thing. It had a lady in pink hair curlers by the neck, and she was screaming so hard the curlers were shaking loose. When it saw me it let her go. She fell on her side, then scurried off to hide under a booth. And then it came at me, muttering and gibbering. I stood my ground and began to imitate it, noise for noise, repeating what it said, though I didn’t know what it meant.

It paused to knock a table out of its path. My tongue, which was beginning to pick up the tonalities of this hollow’s speech, seemed to start on its own . . .

STOP! LIE DOWN!

It hesitated, then dropped to the ground.

SHUT YOUR MOUTH.

It reeled its three tongues back into its mouth. I picked up a steak knife from a pile of silverware on the floor. Emma approached with her flame high and hot.

DON’T MOVE.

I could see the thing squirming, trying to break free from my commands, but it was frozen now and all we had to do was—

“That’s quite enough!”

The voice was loud and familiar. I spun around to see who it belonged to. It was an older man in a tan suit, seated calmly at a booth in the corner—Abe’s booth—his body angled toward me, one elbow propped casually on the table. He was the only other person left in the restaurant, and he didn’t seem the least bit afraid.