Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(10)
We grabbed up our things, thankful now that they were so small and so few. Emma scooped Miss Peregrine into her arms. We tore outside. As we ran into the dunes, I saw behind us a gang of silhouetted men splashing the last few feet to shore. In their hands, held above their heads to keep them dry, were guns.
We sprinted through a stand of windblown trees and into the trackless forest. Darkness enveloped us. What moon wasn’t already hidden behind clouds was blotted out now by trees, branches filtering its pale light to nil. There was no time for our eyes to adjust or to feel our way carefully or to do anything other than run in a gasping, stumbling herd with arms outstretched, dodging trunks that seemed to coalesce suddenly in the air just inches from us.
After a few minutes we stopped, chests heaving, to listen. The voices were still behind us, only now they were joined by another sound: dogs barking.
We ran on.
We tumbled through the black woods for what seemed like hours, no moon or movement of stars by which to judge the passing time. The sound of men shouting and dogs barking wheeled around us as we ran, menacing us from everywhere and nowhere. To throw the dogs off our scent, we waded into an icy stream and followed it until our feet went numb, and when we crossed out of it again, it felt like I was stumbling along on prickling stumps.
After a time we began to fail. Someone moaned in the dark. Olive and Claire started to fall behind, so Bronwyn hefted them into her arms, but then she couldn’t keep up, either. Finally, when Horace tripped over a root and fell to the ground and then lay there begging for a rest, we all stopped. “Up, you lazy sod!” Enoch hissed at him, but he was wheezing, too, and then he leaned against a tree to catch his breath and the fight seemed to go out of him.
We were reaching the limit of our endurance. We had to stop.
“It’s no use running circles in the dark like this, anyway,” said Emma. “We could just as easily end up right back where we started.”
“We’ll be able to make better sense of this forest in the light of day,” said Millard.
“Provided we live that long,” said Enoch.
A light rain hissed down. Fiona made a shelter for us by coaxing a ring of trees to bend their lower branches together, petting their bark and whispering to their trunks until the branches meshed to form a watertight roof of leaves just high enough for us to sit beneath. We crawled in and lay listening to the rain and the distant barking of dogs. Somewhere in the forest, men with guns were still hunting us. Alone with our thoughts, I’m sure each of us was wondering the same thing—what might happen to us if we were caught.
Claire began to cry, softly at first but then louder and louder, until both of her mouths were bawling and she could hardly catch a breath between sobs.
“Get ahold of yourself!” Enoch said. “They’ll hear you—and then we’ll all have something to cry about!”
“They’re going to feed us to their dogs!” she said. “They’re going to shoot holes in us and take Miss Peregrine away!”
Bronwyn scooted next to her and wrapped the little girl in a bear hug. “Please, Claire! You’ve got to think about something else!”
“I’m truh-trying!” she wailed.
“Try harder!”
Claire squeezed her eyes shut, drew in a deep breath, and held it until she looked like a balloon about to pop—then burst into a fit of gasping cough-sobs that were louder than ever.
Enoch clapped his hands over her mouths. “Shhhhhhh!”
“I’m suh-suh-sorry!” she blubbered. “Muh-maybe if I could hear a story … one of the tuh-Tales …”
“Not this again,” said Millard. “I’m beginning to wish we’d lost those damned books at sea with the rest of our things!”
Miss Peregrine spoke up—inasmuch as she was able to—hopping atop Bronwyn’s trunk and tapping it with her beak. Inside, along with the rest of our meager possessions, were the Tales.
“I’m with Miss P,” said Enoch. “It’s worth a try—anything to stop her bawling!”
“All right then, little one,” Bronwyn said, “but just one tale, and you’ve got to promise to stop crying!”
“I pruh-promise,” Claire sniffled.
Bronwyn opened the trunk and pulled out a waterlogged volume of Tales of the Peculiar. Emma scooted close and lit the tiniest wisp of flame on her fingertip to read by. Then Miss Peregrine, apparently impatient to pacify Claire, took one edge of the book’s cover in her beak and opened it to a seemingly random chapter. In a hushed voice, Bronwyn began to read.
“Once upon a peculiar time, in a forest deep and ancient, there roamed a great many animals. There were rabbits and deer and foxes, just as there are in every forest, but there were animals of a less common sort, too, like stilt-legged grimbears and two-headed lynxes and talking emu-raffes. These peculiar animals were a favorite target of hunters, who loved to shoot them and mount them on walls and show them off to their hunter friends, but loved even more to sell them to zookeepers, who would lock them in cages and charge money to view them. Now, you might think it would be far better to be locked in a cage than to be shot and mounted upon a wall, but peculiar creatures must roam free to be happy, and after a while the spirits of caged ones wither, and they begin to envy their wall-mounted friends.”
“This is a sad story,” Claire groused. “Tell a different one.”