Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (31 page)

Her hand came ablaze, and among the flickering shadows I saw it, lurking among the troughs. My nightmare. It stooped there, hairless and naked, mottled gray-black skin hanging off its frame in loose folds, its eyes collared in dripping putrefaction, legs bowed and feet clubbed and hands gnarled into useless claws—every part looking withered and wasted like the body of an impossibly old man—save one. Its outsized jaws were its main feature, a bulging enclosure of teeth as tall and sharp as little steak knives that the flesh of its mouth was hopeless to contain, so that its lips were perpetually drawn back in a deranged smile.

And then those awful teeth came unlocked, its mouth reeling open to admit three wiry tongues into the air, each as thick as my wrist. They unspooled across half the room’s length, ten feet or more, and then hung there, wriggling, the creature breathing raggedly through a pair of leprous holes in its face as if tasting our scent, considering how best to devour us. That we would be so easy to kill was the only reason we weren’t dead already; like a gourmand about to enjoy a fine meal, there was no reason to rush things.

The others couldn’t see it in the way I did but recognized its shadow projected on the wall and that of its ropelike tongues. Emma flexed her arm, and her flame burned brighter. “What’s it doing?” she whispered. “Why hasn’t it come at us?”

“It’s playing with us,” I said. “It knows we’re trapped.”

“We ain’t any such thing,” Bronwyn muttered. “Just gimme one square go at its face. I’ll punch its bloody teeth in.”

“I wouldn’t get anywhere near those teeth if I were you,” I said.

The hollow took a few lumbering steps forward to match the ones we’d taken back, its tongues unfurling more and then splitting apart, one coming toward me, another toward Enoch, and the third toward Emma.

“Leave us be!” Emma yelled, lashing out with her hand like a torch. The tongue twisted away from her flame, then inched back like a snake preparing to strike.

“We’ve got to try for the door!” I yelled. “The hollow’s by the third trough from the left, so keep to the right!”

“We’ll never make it!” Enoch cried. One of the tongues touched him on the cheek, and he screamed.

“We’ll go on three!” Emma shouted. “One—”

And then Bronwyn launched herself toward the creature, howling like a banshee. The creature shrieked and reared up, its bunched skin pulling tight. Just as it was about to lash its trident of tongues at her, she rammed Martin’s ice trough with the full weight of her body and levered her arms under it as it tipped and then heaved it and the whole huge thing, full of ice and fish and Martin’s body, careened through the air and fell upon the hollow with a terrific crash.

Bronwyn spun and bounded back in our direction. “MOVE!” she cried, and I leapt away as she collided with the wall beside me, kicking a hole through the rotten planks. Enoch, the smallest of us, dove through first, followed by Emma, and before I could protest Bronwyn had grabbed me by the shoulders and tossed me out into the wet night. I landed chest-first in a puddle. The cold was shocking, but I was elated to feel anything other than the hollow’s tongue wrapping around my throat.

Emma and Enoch hauled me to my feet, and we took off running. A moment later Emma shouted Bronwyn’s name and stopped. We turned, realizing she hadn’t come with us.

We called for her and scanned the dark, not quite brave enough to run back, and then Enoch shouted, “There!” and we saw Bronwyn leaning against a corner of the icehouse.

“What’s she doing?!” cried Emma. “BRONWYN! RUN!”

It looked as though she was hugging the building. Then she stepped back and took a running start and rammed her shoulder into its corner support, and like a house made of matchsticks the whole thing tumbled in on itself, a cloud of pulverized ice and splintered wood puffing out and blowing down the street in a gust of wind.

We all hollered and cheered as Bronwyn sprinted toward us with a manic grin on her face, then stood in the pelting rain hugging her and laughing. It didn’t take long for our moods to darken, though, as the shock of what had just happened set in, and then Emma turned to me and asked the question that must’ve been on all their minds.

“Jacob, how did that wight know so much about you? And us?”

“You called him doctor,” said Enoch.

“He was my psychiatrist.”

“Psychiatrist!” Enoch said. “That’s just grand! Not only did he betray us to a wight, he’s mad to boot!”

“Take it back!” Emma yelled, shoving him hard. He was about to shove back when I stepped between them.

“Stop!” I said, pushing them apart. I faced Enoch. “You’re wrong. I’m not crazy. He let me think I was, though all along he must’ve known I was peculiar. You’re right about one thing, though. I did betray you. I told my grandfather’s stories to a stranger.”

“It’s not your fault,” Emma said. “You couldn’t have known we were real.”

“Of course he could’ve!” shouted Enoch. “Abe told him everything. Even showed him bloody pictures of us!”

“Golan knew everything but how to find you,” I said. “And I led him straight here.”

“But he tricked you,” said Bronwyn.

“I just want you to know that I’m sorry.”

Emma hugged me. “It’s all right. We’re alive.”

“For now,” said Enoch. “But that maniac is still out there, and considering how willing he was to feed us all to his pet hollowgast, it’s a good bet he’s figured out how to get into the loop on his own.”

“Oh god, you’re right,” said Emma.

“Well then,” I said, “we’d better get there before he does.”

“And before
it
does,” Bronwyn added. We turned to see her pointing at the wrecked icehouse, where broken boards had begun to shift in the collapsed pile. “I imagine he’ll be coming for us directly, and I’m fresh out of houses to drop on him.”

Someone shouted
Run!
but we already were, tearing down the path toward the one place the hollow couldn’t reach us—the loop. We raced out of town in the spitting dark, vague blue outlines of cottages giving way to sloping fields, then charged up the ridge, sheets of water streaming over our feet, making the path treacherous.

Enoch slipped and fell. We hauled him up and ran on. As we were about to crest the ridge, Bronwyn’s feet went out from under her, too, and she slid down twenty feet before she could stop herself. Emma and I ran back to help, and as we took her arms I turned to look behind us, hoping to catch a glimpse of the creature. But there was only inky, swirling rain. My talent for spotting hollows wasn’t much good without light to see them by. But then, as we made it back to the top, chests heaving, a long flash of lightning lit up the night and I turned and saw it. It was off below us a ways but climbing fast, its muscular tongues punching into the mud and propelling it up the ridge like a spider.

“Go!”
I shouted, and we all bolted down the far side, the four of us sliding on our butts until we hit level ground and could run again.

There was another flash of lightning. It was even closer than before. At this rate there was no way we’d be able to outrun it. Our only hope was to outmaneuver it.

“If it catches us, it’ll kill us all,” I shouted, “but if we split up, it’ll have to choose. I’ll lead it around the long way and try to lose it in the bog. The rest of you get to the loop as quick you can!”

“You’re mad!” shouted Emma. “If anyone stays behind it should be me! I can fight it with fire!”

“Not in this rain,” I said, “and not if you can’t see it!”

“I won’t let you kill yourself!” she shouted.

There was no time to argue, so Bronwyn and Enoch ran ahead while Emma and I veered off the path, hoping the creature would follow, and it did. It was close enough now that I didn’t need a lightning flash to know where it was; the twist in my gut was enough.

We ran arm in arm, tripping through a field rent with furrows and ditches, falling and catching each other in an epileptic dance. I was scanning the ground for rocks to use as weapons when, out of the darkness ahead, there appeared a structure—a small sagging shack with broken windows and missing doors, which in my panic I failed to recognize.

“We have to hide!” I said between gasping breaths.

Please let this creature be stupid
, I prayed as we sprinted toward the house,
please, please let it be stupid
. We made a wide arc, hoping to enter it unseen.

“Wait!” Emma cried as we rounded the back of it. She pulled one of Enoch’s cheesecloths from her coat and quickly tied it around a stone plucked from the ground, making a kind of slingshot. She cradled it in her hands until it caught fire and then hurled it away from us. It landed in the boggy distance, glowing weakly in the dark.

“Misdirection,” she explained, and we turned and committed ourselves to the shack’s concealing gloom.

*   *   *

We slipped through a door that was hanging off its hinges and stepped down into a sea of dark, aromatic muck. As our feet sank with a nauseating squelch, I realized where we were.

“What
is
this?” Emma whispered, and then a sudden exhalation of animal breath made us both jump. The house was crowded with sheep taking shelter from the unfriendly night, just as we were. As our eyes adjusted, we caught the dull gleam of theirs staring back at us—dozens and dozens of them.

“It’s what I think it is, isn’t it,” she said, lifting one foot gingerly.

“Don’t think about it,” I replied. “Come on, we need to get away from this door.”

I took her hand and we pushed into the house, snaking through a maze of skittish animals that shied from our touch. We threaded a narrow hall and came into a room with one high window and a door that was still in its frame and closed against the night, which was more than could be said for the other rooms. Squeezing into the far corner, we knelt down to wait and listen, hidden behind a wall of nervous sheep.

We tried not to sit too deeply in the muck but there was really no helping it. After a minute of staring blindly into the dark, I began to make out shapes in the room. There were crates and boxes stacked in one corner, and along the wall behind us hung rusted tools. I looked for anything that might be sharp enough to serve as a weapon. Seeing something that looked like a pair of giant scissors, I stood up to grab it.

“Planning on shearing some sheep?” said Emma.

“It’s better than nothing.”

Just as I was taking the shears down from the wall, a noise came from outside the window. The sheep bleated anxiously, and then a long black tongue drifted through the glassless enclosure. I sank back to the floor as quietly as I could. Emma put her hand over her mouth to silence her breathing.

The tongue poked around the room like a periscope, seeming to be testing the air. Luckily, we’d taken refuge in the most fragrant room on the island. All that sheep aroma must’ve masked our scent, because after a minute the creature seemed to give up and reeled out the window. We heard its retreating steps.

Emma’s hand came away from her mouth and she let out a shuddering breath. “I think it’s taking the bait,” she whispered.

“I want you to know something,” I said. “If we make it through this, I’m staying.”

She grabbed my hand. “Do you mean it?”

“I can’t go home. Not after all that’s happened. Anyway, whatever help I can be, I owe you that and a lot more. You were all perfectly safe until I got here.”

“If we make it through this,” she said, leaning into me, “then I don’t regret one thing.”

And then some strange magnet was pulling our heads together, but just as our lips were about to touch, the quiet was shattered by terrified, bleating shrieks from the next room. We pulled apart as the awful noise set the sheep around us into frantic motion, bounding off one another and pushing us into the wall.

The beast was not as dumb as I’d hoped.

We could hear it coming toward us through the house. If there was a time to run it had already passed, so we screwed ourselves into the reeking soil and prayed it would pass us by.

And then I could smell it, even more pungent than the house’s other stinks, and I could feel it at the threshold of the room. All the sheep pushed away from the door at once, herding together like a school of fish and pinning us against the wall so hard the breath was pressed out of us. We gripped each other but didn’t dare make a sound, and for an unbearably tense moment we heard only the bleating of sheep and the clop of staggering hooves. Then another hoarse scream erupted, sudden and desperate and just as suddenly silenced, broken off by lurid, ripping bone snap. I knew without looking that a sheep had just been torn apart.

Chaos broke out. Panicked animals ricocheted off one another, throwing us against the wall so many times I got dizzy. The hollow let out an ear-splitting screech and began to lift sheep to its slavering jaws one after another, taking a blood-spurting bite from each and then tossing it aside like a gluttonous king gorging at a medieval feast. It did this again and again—killing its way toward us. I was paralyzed with fear. That’s why I can’t quite explain what happened next.

My every instinct screamed to stay hidden, to dig myself even deeper into the muck, but then one clear thought cut through all the static—
I won’t let us die in this shit-house
—and I pushed Emma behind the biggest sheep I could see and bolted for the door.

The door was closed and ten feet away, and a lot of animals stood between it and me, but I plowed through them like a linebacker. I hit the door with my shoulder and it flung open.

I tumbled outside into the rain and screamed “Come get me, you ugly bastard!” I knew I had its attention because it let out a terrifying howl and sheep came flushing out the door past me. I scrambled to my feet and when I was sure it was coming after me and not Emma, I took off toward the bog.

I could feel it behind me. I might’ve run faster but I was still holding the shears—I couldn’t seem to make myself let go—and then the ground went soft beneath me and I knew I’d reached the bog.

Twice the hollow was close enough for its tongues to lash my back, and twice, just as I was certain one was about to lasso my neck and squeeze until my head popped, it stumbled and fell back. The only reason I made it to the cairn with my head still attached was that I knew exactly where to put my feet; thanks to Emma, I could run that route on a moonless night in half a hurricane.