Hollow City (5 page)

Finally the engines’ whine began to dwindle, and when we could hear our own voices again, Claire mumbled into Bronwyn’s lap, “Tell us a story, Wyn. I’m scared and I don’t like this at all and I think I’d like to hear a story instead.”

“Yes, would you tell one?” Olive pleaded. “A story from the
Tales
, please. They’re my favorite.”

The most maternal of the peculiars, Bronwyn was more like a mother to the young ones than even Miss Peregrine. It was Bronwyn who tucked them into bed at night, Bronwyn who read them stories and kissed their foreheads. Her strong arms seemed made to gather them in warm embraces, her broad shoulders to carry them. But this was no time for stories—and she said as much.

“Why, certainly it is!” Enoch said with singsongy sarcasm. “But skip the
Tales
for once and tell us the story of how Miss Peregrine’s wards found their way to safety without a map or any food and weren’t eaten by hollowgast along the way! I’m ever so keen to hear how
that
story ends.”

“If only Miss Peregrine could tell us,” Claire sniffled. She disentangled herself from Bronwyn and went to the bird, who’d been watching us from her perch on one of the boats’ overturned keels. “What are we to do, headmistress?” said Claire. “Please turn human again. Please wake up!”

Miss Peregrine cooed and stroked Claire’s hair with her wing. Then Olive joined in, her face streaking with tears: “We need you, Miss Peregrine! We’re lost and in danger and increasingly peckish and we’ve got no home anymore nor any friends but one another and we
need
you!”

Miss Peregrine’s black eyes shimmered. She turned away, unreachable.

Bronwyn knelt down beside the girls. “She can’t turn back right now, sweetheart. But we’ll get her fixed up, I promise.”

“But
how
?” Olive demanded. Her question reflected off the stone walls, each echo asking it again.

Emma stood up. “
I’ll
tell you how,” she said, and all eyes went to her. “We’ll
walk
.” She said it with such conviction that I got a chill. “We’ll walk and walk until we come to a town.”

“What if there’s no town for fifty kilometers?” said Enoch.

“Then we’ll walk for fifty-one kilometers. But I know we weren’t blown
that
far off course.”

“And if the wights should spot us from the air?” said Hugh.

“They won’t. We’ll be careful.”

“And if they’re waiting for us in the town?” said Horace.

“We’ll pretend to be normal. We’ll pass.”

“I was never much good at that,” Millard said with a laugh.

“You won’t be seen at all, Mill. You’ll be our advance scout,
and our secret procurer of necessary items.”

“I
am
quite a talented thief,” he said with a touch of pride. “A veritable master of the five-fingered arts.”

“And then?” Enoch muttered sourly. “Maybe we’ll have food in our bellies and a warm place to sleep, but we’ll still be out in the open, exposed, vulnerable, loopless … and Miss Peregrine is … is still …”

“We’ll find a loop somehow,” said Emma. “There are landmarks and signposts for those who know what to look for. And if there aren’t, we’ll find someone like us, a fellow peculiar who can show us where the nearest loop is. And in that loop there will be an ymbryne, and that ymbryne will be able to give Miss Peregrine the help she needs.”

I’d never met anyone with Emma’s brash confidence. Everything about her exuded it: the way she carried herself, with shoulders thrown back; the hard set of her teeth when she made up her mind about something; the way she ended every sentence with a declarative period, never a question mark. It was infectious and I loved it, and I had to fight a sudden urge to kiss her, right there in front of everyone.

Hugh coughed, and bees tumbled out of his mouth to form a question mark that shivered in the air. “How can you be so bloody
sure
?” he asked.

“Because I am, that’s all.” And she brushed her hands as if that were that.

“You make a nice rousing speech,” said Millard, “and I hate to spoil it, but for all we know, Miss Peregrine is the only ymbryne left uncaptured. Recall what Miss Avocet told us: the wights have been raiding loops and abducting ymbrynes for
weeks
now. Which means that even if we
could
find a loop, there’d be no way of knowing whether it still had its ymbryne—or was occupied instead by our enemies. We can’t simply go knocking on loop doors and hoping they aren’t full of wights.”

“Or surrounded by half-starved hollows,” Enoch said.

“We won’t
have
to hope,” Emma said, then smiled in my direction. “Jacob will tell us.”

My entire body went cold. “
Me?
”

“You can sense hollows from a distance, can’t you?” said Emma. “In addition to seeing them?”

“When they’re close, it kind of feels like I’m going to puke,” I admitted.

“How close do they have to be?” asked Millard. “If it’s only a few meters, that still puts us within devouring range. We’d need you to sense them from much farther away.”

“I haven’t exactly tested it,” I said. “This is all so new to me.”

I’d only ever been exposed to Dr. Golan’s hollow, Malthus—the creature who’d killed my grandfather, then nearly drowned me in Cairnholm’s bog. How far away had he been when I’d first felt him stalking me, lurking outside my house in Englewood? It was impossible to know.

“Regardless, your talent can be developed,” said Millard. “Peculiarities are a bit like muscles—the more you exercise them, the bigger they grow.”

“This is madness!” Enoch said. “Are you all really so desperate that you’d stake everything on
him
? Why, he’s just a boy—a soft-bellied normal who knows next to nothing of our world!”

“He isn’t
normal
,” Emma said, grimacing as if this were the direst insult. “He’s one of us!”

“Stuff and rubbish!” yelled Enoch. “Just because there’s a dash of peculiar blood in his veins doesn’t make him my brother. And it certainly doesn’t make him my protector! We don’t know what he’s capable of—he probably wouldn’t know the difference between a hollow at fifty meters and gas pains!”

“He
killed
one of them, didn’t he?” said Bronwyn. “Stabbed it through the eyes with a pair of sheep shears! When’s the last time you heard of a peculiar so young doing anything like that?”

“Not since Abe,” Hugh said, and at the mention of his name a reverent hush fell over the children.

“I heard he once killed one with his bare hands,” said Bronwyn.

“
I
heard he killed one with a knitting needle and a length of twine,” said Horace. “In fact, I dreamed it, so I’m certain he did.”

“Half of those stories are just tall tales, and they get taller with every year that passes,” said Enoch. “The Abraham Portman I knew never did a single thing to help us.”

“He was a great peculiar!” said Bronwyn. “He fought bravely and killed scores of hollows for our cause!”

“And then he ran off and left us to hide in that house like refugees while he galavanted around America, playing hero!”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emma said, flushing with anger. “There was a lot more to it than that.”

Enoch shrugged. “Anyway, that’s all beside the point,” he said. “Whatever you thought of Abe, this boy isn’t him.”

In that moment I hated Enoch, and yet I couldn’t blame him for his doubts about me. How could the others, so sure and seasoned in their abilities, put so much faith in mine—in something I was only beginning to understand and had known I was capable of for only a few days? Whose grandson I was seemed irrelevant. I simply didn’t know what I was doing.

“You’re right, I’m not my grandfather,” I said. “I’m just a kid from Florida. I probably got lucky when I killed that hollow.”

“Nonsense,” said Emma. “You’ll be every bit the hollow-slayer Abe was, one day.”

“One day soon, let’s hope,” said Hugh.

“It’s your destiny,” said Horace, and the way he said it made me think he knew something I didn’t.

“And even if it ain’t,” said Hugh, clapping his hand on my back, “you’re all we’ve got, mate.”

“If that’s true, bird help us all,” said Enoch.

My head was spinning. The weight of their expectations threatened
to crush me. I stood, unsteady, and moved toward the cave exit. “I need some air,” I said, pushing past Enoch.

“Jacob, wait!” cried Emma. “The balloons!”

But they were long gone.

“Let him go,” Enoch grumbled. “If we’re lucky, he’ll swim back to America.”

*   *   *

Walking down to the water’s edge, I tried to picture myself the way my new friends saw me, or wanted to: not as Jacob, the kid who once broke his ankle running after an ice cream truck, or who reluctantly and at the behest of his dad tried and failed three times to get onto his school’s noncompetitive track team, but as Jacob, inspector of shadows, miraculous interpreter of squirmy gut feelings, seer and slayer of real and actual monsters—and all that might stand between life and death for our merry band of peculiars.

How could I ever live up to my grandfather’s legacy?

I climbed a stack of rocks at the water’s edge and stood there, hoping the steady breeze would dry my damp clothes, and in the dying light I watched the sea, a canvas of shifting grays, melded and darkening. In the distance a light glinted every so often. It was Cairnholm’s lighthouse, flashing its hello and last goodbye.

My mind drifted. I lapsed into a waking dream.

I see a man. He is of middle age, cloaked in excremental mud, crabbing slowly along the knife tip of a cliff, his thin hair uncombed and hanging wet across his face. Wind whips his thin jacket like a sail. He stops, drops to his elbows. Slips them into divots he’d made weeks before, when he was scouting these coves for mating terns and shearwaters’ nests. He raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes but aims them low, below the nests, at a thin crescent of beach where the swelling tide collects things and heaves them up: driftwood and seaweed, shards of smashed boats—and sometimes, the locals say, bodies
.

The man is my father. He is looking for something that he desperately does not want to find
.

He is looking for the body of his son
.

I felt a touch on my shoe and opened my eyes, startled out of my half-dream. It was nearly dark, and I was sitting on the rocks
with my knees drawn into my chest, and suddenly there was Emma, breeze tossing her hair, standing on the sand below me.

“How are you?” she asked.

It was a question that would’ve required some college-level math and about an hour of discussion to answer. I felt a hundred conflicting things, the great bulk of which canceled out to equal cold and tired and not particularly interested in talking. So I said, “I’m fine, just trying to dry off,” and flapped the front of my soggy sweater to demonstrate.

“I can help you with that.” She clambered up the stack of rocks and sat next to me. “Gimme an arm.”

I offered one up and Emma laid it across her knees. Cupping her hands over her mouth, she bent her head toward my wrist. Then, taking a deep breath, she exhaled slowly through her palms and an incredible, soothing heat bloomed along my forearm, just on the edge of painful.

“Is it too much?” she said.

I tensed, a shudder going through me, and shook my head.

“Good.” She moved farther up my arm to exhale again. Another pulse of sweet warmth. Between breaths, she said, “I hope you’re not letting what Enoch said bother you. The rest of us believe in you, Jacob. Enoch can be a wrinkle-hearted old titmouse, especially when he’s feeling jealous.”

“I think he’s right,” I said.

“You don’t really. Do you?”

It all came pouring out. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” I said. “How can any of you depend on me? If I’m really peculiar then it’s just a little bit, I think. Like I’m a quarter peculiar and the rest of you guys are full-blooded.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she said, laughing.

“But my grandfather was more peculiar than me. He had to be. He was so strong …”

“No, Jacob,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “It’s astounding.
In so many ways, you’re just like him. You’re different, too, of course—you’re gentler and sweeter—but everything you’re saying … you sound like Abe, when he first came to stay with us.”

“I do?”

“Yes. He was confused, too. He’d never met another peculiar. He didn’t understand his power or how it worked or what he was capable of. Neither did we, to tell the truth. It’s very rare, what you can do. Very rare. But your grandfather learned.”

“How?” I asked. “Where?”

“In the war. He was part of a secret all-peculiar cell of the British army. Fought hollowgast and Germans at the same time. The sorts of things they did you don’t win medals for—but they were heroes to us, and none more than your grandfather. The sacrifices they made set the corrupted back decades and saved the lives of countless peculiars.”

And yet
, I thought,
he couldn’t save his own parents. How strangely tragic
.