Hollow City (Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, #2)(61)

“Go away,” came a second voice. “We’re dead.”

“No you’re not,” said Enoch, “and I would know!”

“Come out of there,” Emma said gently. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

Both voices said at once: “Promise?”

“We promise,” said Emma.

The bones began to shift. A skull dislodged from the pile and clattered to the floor, where it rolled to a stop at my feet and stared up at me.

Hello, future, I thought.

Then two young boys crawled into the light, on hands and knees atop the bone pile. Their skin was deathly pale and they peeped at us with black-circled eyes that wheeled dizzyingly in their sockets.

“I’m Emma, this is Jacob, and these are our friends,” Emma said. “We’re peculiar and we’re not going to hurt you.”

The boys crouched like frightened animals, saying nothing, eyes spinning, seeming to look everywhere and nowhere.

“What’s wrong with them?” Olive whispered.

Bronwyn hushed her. “Don’t be rude.”

“Can you tell me your names?” Emma said, her voice coaxing and gentle.

“I am Joel and Peter,” the larger boy said.

“Which are you?” Emma said. “Joel or Peter?”

“I am Peter and Joel,” said the smaller boy.

“We don’t have time for games,” said Enoch. “Are there any birds in there with you? Have you seen any fly past?”





“The pigeons like to hide,” said the larger.

“In the attic,” said the smaller.

“What attic?” said Emma. “Where?”

“In our house,” they said together, and raising their arms they pointed down the dark passage. They seemed to speak cooperatively, and if a sentence was more than a few words long, one would start and the other finish, with no detectable pause between. I also noticed that whenever one was speaking and the other wasn’t, the quiet one would mouth the other’s words in perfect synchronicity—as if they shared one mind.

“Could you please show us the way to your house?” asked Emma. “Take us to your attic?”

Joel-and-Peter shook their heads and shrank back into the dark.

“What’s the matter?” Bronwyn said. “Why don’t you want to go?”

“Death and blood!” cried one boy.

“Blood and screaming!” cried the other.

“Screaming and blood and shadows that bite!” they cried together.

“Cheerio!” said Horace, turning on his heels. “I’ll see you all back in the crypt. Hope I don’t get squashed by a bomb!”

Emma caught Horace by his sleeve. “Oh, no you don’t! You’re the only one of us who’s managed to catch any of those blasted pigeons.”

“Didn’t you hear them?” Horace said. “That loop is full of shadows that bite—which could only mean one thing. Hollows!”

“It was full of them,” I said. “But that might have been days ago.”

“When was the last time you were inside your house?” Emma asked the boys.

Their loop had been raided, they explained in their strange and broken way, but they’d managed to escape into the catacombs and hide among the bones. How long ago that was, they couldn’t say. Two days? Three? They’d lost all track of time down here in the dark.

“Oh, you poor dears!” said Bronwyn. “What terrors you must’ve endured!”

“You can’t stay here forever,” said Emma. “You’ll age forward if you don’t reach another loop soon. We can help you—but first we have to catch a pigeon.”

The boys gazed into one another’s spinning eyes and seemed to speak without uttering a word. They said in unison, “Follow us.”

They slid down from their bone pile and started down the passage.

We followed. I couldn’t take my eyes off them; they were fascinatingly odd. They kept their arms linked at all times, and every few steps, they made loud clicking sounds with their tongues.

“What are they doing?” I whispered.

“I believe that’s how they see,” said Millard. “It’s the same way bats see in the dark. The sounds they make reflect off things and then back to them, which forms a picture in their minds.”

“We are echolocators,” Joel-and-Peter said.

They were also, apparently, very sharp of hearing.

The passage forked, then forked again. At one point I felt a sudden pressure in my ears and had to wiggle them to release it. That’s when I knew we’d left 1940 and entered a loop. Finally we came to a dead-end wall with vertical steps cut into it. Joel-and-Peter stood at the base of the wall and pointed to a pinpoint of daylight overhead.

“Our house—” said the elder.

“Is up there,” said the younger.

And with that, they retreated into the shadows.





*

The steps were slimed with moss and difficult to climb, and I had to go slowly or risk falling. They ascended the wall to meet a circular, person-sized door in the ceiling, through which shone a single gleam of light. I wedged my fingers into the crack and pushed sideways, and the doors slid open like a camera shutter, revealing a tubular conduit of bricks that rose twenty or thirty feet to a circle of sky. I was at the false bottom of a fake well.