Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(16)

The hollow had nearly closed the distance between us. It galloped with jaws wide open, as if to collect us between its teeth the way a whale feeds on plankton. We weren’t quite halfway up the wall when it reached the ground below us, looked up, and squatted like a spring about to uncoil.

“It’s going to jump!” I shouted. “Pull your legs into the net!”

The hollow drove its tongues into the ground and sprang upward. We were rising fast and it seemed like the hollow would miss us, but just as it reached the apex of its jump, one of its tongues shot out and lassoed Emma around the ankle.

Emma screamed and kicked at it with her other foot as the net came to a jolting stop, the pulley above too weak to raise all of us and the hollow, too.

“Get it off me!” Emma shouted. “Get it off get it off get it off!”

I tried kicking at it, too, but the hollow’s tongue was as strong as woven steel and the tip was covered in hundreds of wriggling sucker-cups, so that anyone who tried to pry the tongue off would only get stuck to it themselves. And then the hollow was reeling itself up, its jaws inching closer until we could smell its stinking grave-breath.

Emma shouted for someone to hold her and with one hand I grabbed the back of her dress. Bronwyn let go of the net entirely, clinging to it with just her legs, then threw her arms around Emma’s waist. Then Emma let go, too—Bronwyn and I being all that kept her from falling—and with her hands now free she reached down and clapped them around the tongue.

The hollow shrieked. The sucker-cups along its tongue, withered and reeking black smoke, hissed from its flesh. Emma squeezed harder and closed her eyes and howled, not a cry of pain, I thought, but a kind of war cry, until the hollow was forced to release, its injured tentacle unslithering from around her ankle. There was a surreal moment where it was no longer the hollow who was holding Emma but Emma who was holding the hollow, the thing writhing and shrieking below us, the acrid smoke of its burned flesh filling our noses, until finally we had to shout at her to let go, and Emma’s eyes flew open again and she seemed to remember where she was and pulled her hands apart.

The hollow tumbled away from us, grasping at empty space as it fell. We rocketed up and away in the net, the tension that had been holding us down suddenly released, and soaring over the lip of the wall, we collapsed in a heap on top of it. Olive, Claire, and Miss Peregrine were waiting there for us, and as we extricated ourselves from the net and stumbled away from the cliff’s edge, Olive cheered, Miss Peregrine screeched and beat her good wing, and Claire raised her head from where she’d been lying on the ground and gave a weak smile.

We were giddy—and for the second time in as many days, stunned to be alive. “That’s twice you’ve saved our necks, little magpie,” Bronwyn said to Olive. “And Miss Emma, I already knew you were brave, but that was beyond anything!”

Emma shrugged it off. “It was him or me,” she said.

“I can’t believe you touched it,” said Horace.

Emma wiped her hands on her dress, held them to her nose, and made a face. “I just hope this smell comes off soon,” she said.

“That beast stank like a landfill!”

“How’s your ankle?” I asked her. “Does it hurt?”

She knelt and pushed down her sock to reveal a fat, red welt ringing it. “Not too bad,” she said, touching the ankle gingerly. But when she stood up again and put weight on it, I caught her wincing.

“A lot of help you were,” Enoch growled at me. “ ‘Run away!’ says the hollow-slayer’s grandson!”

“If my grandfather had run from the hollow that killed him, he might still be alive,” I said. “It’s good advice.”

I heard a thud from beyond the wall we’d just scaled, and the Feeling churned up inside me again. I went to the ledge and looked over. The hollow was alive and well at the base of the wall, and busy punching holes in the rock with its tongues.

“Bad news,” I said. “The fall didn’t kill it.”

In a moment Emma was at my side. “What’s it doing?”

I watched it twist one of its tongues into a hole it had made, then hoist itself up and begin making a second. It was creating footholds—or tongue-holds, rather.

“It’s trying to climb the wall,” I said. “Good God, it’s like the freaking Terminator.”

“The what?” said Emma.

I almost started to explain, then shook my head. It was a stupid comparison, anyway—hollowgast were scarier, and probably deadlier, than any movie monster.

“We have to stop it!” said Olive.

“Or better yet, run!” said Horace.

“No more running!” said Enoch. “Can we please just kill the damn thing?”

“Sure,” Emma said. “But how?”

“Anyone got a vat of boiling oil?” said Enoch.

“Will this do instead?” I heard Bronwyn say, and turned to see her lifting a boulder above her head.

“It might,” I said. “How’s your aim? Can you drop it where I tell you?”

“I’ll certainly try,” Bronwyn said, tottering toward the ledge with the rock balanced precariously on her hands.

We stood looking over the ledge. “Farther this way,” I said, urging her a few steps to the left. Just as I was about to give the signal for her to drop the boulder, though, the hollow leapt from one hold to the next, and now she was standing in the wrong place.