Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(12)

*

At dawn we crawled from our shelter. I picked moss out of my hair and tried in vain to brush the mud from my pants, but succeeded only in smearing it, making me look like some bog creature vomited from the earth. I was hungry in a way I’d never experienced, my belly gnawing at itself from the inside, and I ached just about everywhere it was possible to ache, from rowing and running and sleeping on the ground. Still, a few mercies prevailed: overnight the rain had let up, the day was warming by degrees, and we seemed to have evaded the wights and their dogs, at least for the time being; either they’d stopped barking or were too far away to be heard.

In doing so we’d gotten ourselves hopelessly lost. The forest was no easier to navigate by day than it had been in the dark. Green-boughed firs stretched away in endless, disordered rows, each direction a mirror of the others. The ground here was a carpet of fallen leaves that hid any tracks we might’ve made the night before. We’d woken in the heart of a green labyrinth without a map or compass, and Miss Peregrine’s broken wing meant she couldn’t fly above the treeline to guide us. Enoch suggested we raise Olive above the trees, like we had in the fog, but we didn’t have any rope to hold her, and if she slipped and fell into the sky, we’d never get her back again.

Claire was sick and getting sicker, and lay curled in Bronwyn’s lap, sweat beading her forehead despite a chill in the air. She was so skinny I could count her ribs through her dress.

“Will she be all right?” I asked.

“She’s feverish,” Bronwyn said, pressing a hand to the girl’s cheek. “She needs medicine.”

“First we’ll have to find our way out of this accursed forest,” said Millard.

“First we should eat,” said Enoch. “Let’s eat and discuss our options.”

“What options?” said Emma. “Pick a direction and we’ll walk in it. Any one’s as good as another.”

In sullen silence we sat and ate. I’ve never tasted dog food but I’m sure this was worse—brownish squares of congealed meat fat from rusted tins, which, lacking utensils, we dug out with our fingers.

“I packed five salted game hens and three tins of foie gras with cornichons,” Horace said bitterly, “and this is what survives our shipwreck.” He held his nose and dropped a gelatinous nugget down his throat without chewing. “I think we’re being punished.”

“For what?” said Emma. “We’ve been perfect angels. Well, most of us.”

“The sins of past lives, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Peculiars don’t have past lives,” said Millard. “We live them all at once.”

We finished quickly, buried our empty tins, and prepared to go. Just as we were about to, Hugh burst through a thicket of bushes into our makeshift camp, bees circling his head in an agitated cloud. He was out of breath with excitement.

“Where have you been?” Enoch demanded.

“I needed some privacy to attend to my morning never-you-minds,” Hugh said, “and I found—”

“Who gave you permission to be out of visual range?” Enoch said. “We nearly left without you!”

“Who says I need permission? Anyway, I saw—”

“You can’t just wander away like that! What if you’d gotten lost?”

“We’re already lost.”

“You ignoramus! What if you couldn’t find your way back?”

“I left a trail of bees, like I always do—”

“Would you kindly let him finish!” Emma shouted.

“Thank you,” said Hugh, and then he turned and pointed back the way he’d come. “I saw water. Quite a lot of it, through the trees there.”

Emma’s face clouded. She said, “We’re trying to get away from the sea, not back to it. We must’ve doubled back on ourselves in the night.”

We followed Hugh back the way he’d come, Bronwyn carrying Miss Peregrine on her shoulder and poor sick Claire in her arms. After a hundred yards, a glisten of gray ripples appeared beyond the trees: some wide body of water.

“Oh, this is just awful,” said Horace. “They’ve chased us right back into their arms!”

“I don’t hear any soldiers,” said Emma. “In fact, I don’t hear anything at all. Not even the ocean.”

Enoch said, “That’s because it’s not the ocean, you dolt,” and he stood up and ran toward the water. When we caught up with him he was standing with his feet planted in wet sand, looking back at us with a self-satisfied I-told-you-so grin. He’d been right: this wasn’t the sea. It was a misty, gray lake, wide and ringed with firs, its calm surface smooth as slate. But its most distinguishing feature was something I didn’t notice right away; not until Claire pointed out a large rock formation jutting from the shallows nearby. My eyes skimmed it at first but then went back for a second glance. There was something eerie about it—and decidedly familiar.

“It’s the giant from the story!” said Claire, pointing from her place in Bronwyn’s arms. “It’s Cuthbert!”

Bronwyn stroked her head. “Shh, honey, you’ve got fever.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Enoch. “It’s just a rock.”

But it wasn’t. Though wind and rain had worn its features some, it looked just like a giant who’d sunk up to its neck in the lake. You could see clearly that it had a head and a neck and a nose and even an Adam’s apple, and some scrubby trees were growing atop it like a crown of wild hair. But what was really uncanny was the position of its head—thrown back with its mouth open, as if, like the giant in the story we’d heard just last night, it had turned to stone while crying out to its friends on the mountaintop.