Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(56)
“Hah!” said Enoch. “The only thing commoner here than plain-looking middle-aged ladies are flocks of pigeons. And you want to search all of London for one flock in particular?”
“It does seem a bit mad,” Emma said. “Sorry, Mill, I just don’t see how that could work.”
“Then it’s a lucky thing for you I spent our train ride studying rather than making idle gossip. Someone hand me the Tales!”
Bronwyn fished the book from her trunk and gave it to him. Millard dove right in, flipping pages. “There are many answers to be found within,” he said, “if you only know what to look for.” He stopped at a certain page and stabbed the top with his finger. “Aha!” he said, turning the book to show us what he’d found.
The title of the story was “The Pigeons of St. Paul’s.”
“I’ll be blessed,” said Bronwyn. “Could those be the same pigeons we’re talking about?”
“If they’re written about in the Tales, they’re almost certainly peculiar pigeons,” said Millard, “and how many flocks of peculiar pigeons could there possibly be?”
Olive clapped her hands and cried, “Millard, you’re brilliant!”
“Thank you, yes, I was aware.”
“Wait, I’m lost,” I said. “What’s St. Paul’s?”
“Even I know that,” said Olive. “The cathedral!” And she went to the end of the alley and pointed up at a giant domed roof rising in the distance.
“It’s the largest and most magnificent cathedral in London,” said Millard, “and if my hunch is correct, it’s also the nesting place of Miss Wren’s pigeons.”
“Let’s hope they’re at home,” said Emma. “And that they’ve got some good news for us. We’ve had quite a drought of it lately.”
*
As we navigated a labyrinth of narrow streets toward the cathedral, a brooding quiet settled over us. For long stretches no one spoke, leaving only the tap of our shoes on pavement and the sounds of the city: airplanes, the ever-present hum of traffic, sirens that warbled and pitch-shifted around us.
The farther we got from the train station, the more evidence we saw of the bombs that had been raining down on London. Building fronts pocked by shrapnel. Shattered windows. Streets that glinted with frosts of powdered glass. The sky was speckled with puffy silver blimps tethered to the ground by long webs of cable. “Barrage balloons,” Emma said when she saw me craning my neck toward one. “The German bombers get caught up in their cables at night and crash.”
Then we came upon a scene of destruction so bizarre that I had to stop and gape at it—not out of some morbid voyeurism, but because it was impossible for my brain to process without further study. A bomb crater yawned across the whole width of the street like a monstrous mouth with broken pavement for teeth. At one edge, the blast had sheared away the front wall of a building but left what was inside mostly intact. It looked like a doll’s house, its interior rooms all exposed to the street: the dining room with its table still set for a meal; family pictures knocked crooked in a hallway but still hanging; a roll of toilet paper unspooled and caught in the breeze, waving in the air like a long, white flag.
“Did they forget to finish building it?” Olive asked.
“No, dummy,” said Enoch. “It got hit by a bomb.”
For a moment Olive looked as if she might cry, but then her face went hard and she shook her fist at the sky and yelled, “Nasty Hitler! Stop this horrible war and go right away altogether!”
Bronwyn patted her arm. “Shhh. He can’t hear you, love.”
“It isn’t fair,” Olive said. “I’m tired of airplanes and bombs and war!”
“We all are,” said Enoch. “Even me.”
Then I heard Horace scream and I spun around to see him pointing at something in the road. I ran to see what it was, and then I did see and I stopped, frozen, my brain shouting Run away! but my legs refusing to listen.
It was a pyramid of heads. They were blackened and caved, mouths agape, eyes boiled shut, melted and pooled together in the gutter like some hydra-headed horror. Then Emma came to see and gasped and turned away; Bronwyn came and started moaning; Hugh gagged and clapped his hands over his eyes; and then finally Enoch, who seemed not in the least disturbed, calmly nudged one of the heads with his shoe and pointed out that they were only mannequins made of wax, having spilled from the display window of a bombed wig shop. We all felt a little ridiculous but somehow no less horrified, because even though the heads weren’t real, they represented something that was, hidden beneath the rubble around us.
“Let’s go,” Emma said. “This place is nothing but a graveyard.”
We walked on. I tried to keep my eyes to the ground, but there was no shutting out all the ghastly things we passed. A scarred ruin belching smoke, the only fireman dispatched to extinguish it slouched in defeat, blistered and weary, his hose run dry. Yet there he stood watching anyway, as if, lacking water, his job now was to bear witness.
A baby in a stroller, left alone in the street, bawling.
Bronwyn slowed, overcome. “Can’t we help them somehow?”
“It wouldn’t make any difference,” said Millard. “These people belong to the past, and the past can’t be changed.”