Ransom Riggs - Hollow City

We reached the doorway a few seconds later. To my relief, it didn’t lead outside, where we’d never have a hope of catching them, but to a stairwell, down a set of spiral steps.

“Hah!” Enoch said, clapping his pudgy hands. “They’ve gone and done it now—trapped themselves in the basement!”

We sprinted down the stairs. At the bottom was a large, dimly lit room walled and floored with stone. It was cold and damp and almost completely dark, the electricity having been knocked out, so Emma sparked a flame in her hand and shone it around, until the nature of the space became apparent. Beneath our feet, stretching from wall to wall, were marble slabs chiseled with writing. The one below me read:

BISHOP ELDRIDGE THORNBRUSH, DYED ANNO 1721

“This is no basement,” Emma said. “It’s a crypt.”

A little chill came over me, and I stepped closer to the light and warmth of Emma’s flame.

“You mean, there are people buried in the floor?” said Olive, her voice quavering.

“What of it?” said Enoch. “Let’s catch a damned pigeon before one of those bombs buries us in the floor.”

Emma turned in a circle, throwing light on the walls. “They’ve got to be down here somewhere. There’s no way out but that staircase.”

Then we heard a wing flap. I tensed. Emma brightened her flame and aimed it toward the sound. Her flickering light fell on a flat-topped tomb that rose a few feet from the floor. Between the tomb and the wall was a gap we couldn’t see behind from where we stood; a perfect hiding spot for a bird.

Emma raised a finger to her lips and motioned for us to follow. We crept across the room. Nearing the tomb, we spread out, surrounding it on three sides.

Ready? Emma mouthed.

The others nodded. I gave a thumbs-up. Emma tiptoed forward to peek behind the tomb—and then her face fell. “Nothing!” she said, kicking the floor in frustration.

“I don’t understand!” said Enoch. “They were right here !”

We all came forward to look. Then Millard said, “Emma! Shine your light on top of the tomb, please!”

She did, and Millard read the tomb’s inscription aloud:

HERE LIETH SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN BUILDER OF THIS CATHEDRAL

“Wren!” Emma exclaimed. “What an odd coincidence!”

“I hardly think it’s a coincidence,” said Millard. “He must be related to Miss Wren. Perhaps he’s her father!”

“That’s very interesting,” said Enoch, “but how does that help us find her, or her pigeons?”

“That is what I am attempting to puzzle out.” Millard hummed to himself and paced a little and recited a line from the tale: “the birds still went to visit him, now and again, in the land below.”

Then I thought I heard a pigeon coo. “Shh!” I said, and made everyone listen. It came again a few seconds later, from the rear corner of the tomb. I circled around it and knelt down, and that’s when I noticed a small hole in the floor at the tomb’s base, no bigger than a fist—just large enough for a bird to wriggle through.

“Over here!” I said.

“Well, I’ll be stuffed!” said Emma, holding her flame up to the hole. “Perhaps that’s ‘the land below’?”

“But the hole is so small,” said Olive. “How are we supposed to get the birds out of there?”

“We could wait for them to leave,” said Horace, and then a bomb fell so close by that my eyes blurred and my teeth rattled.

“No need for that!” said Millard. “Bronwyn, would you please open Sir Wren’s tomb?”

“No!” cried Olive. “I don’t want to see his rotten old bones!”

“Don’t worry, love,” Bronwyn said, “Millard knows what he’s doing.” She planted her hands on the edge of the tomb lid and began to push, and it slid open with a slow, grating rumble.

The smell that came up wasn’t what I’d expected—not of death, but mold and old dirt. We gathered around to look inside.

“Well, I’ll be stuffed,” Emma said.

W here a coffin should’ve been, there was a ladder, leading down into darkness. We peered into the open tomb.

“There’s no way I’m climbing down there!” Horace said. But then a trio of bombs shook the building, raining chips of concrete on our heads, and suddenly Horace was pushing past me, grasping for the ladder. “Excuse me, out of my way, best-dressed go first!”

Emma caught him by the sleeve. “I have the light, so I’ll go first. Then Jacob will follow, in case there are … things down there.”

I flashed a weak smile, my knees going wobbly at the thought.

Enoch said, “You mean things other than rats and cholera and whatever sorts of mad trolls live beneath crypts?”

“It doesn’t matter what’s down there,” Millard said grimly.

“We’ll have to face it, and that’s that.”

“Fine,” said Enoch. “But Miss Wren had better be down there, too, because rat bites don’t heal quickly.”

“Hollowgast bites even less so,” said Emma, and then she swung her foot onto the ladder.

“Be careful,” I said. “I’ll be right above you.”

She saluted me with her flaming hand. “Once more into the breach,” she said, and began to climb down.

Then it was my turn.

“Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid,” I said, “and just wish you’d stayed in bed?”

Enoch kicked my shoe. “Quit stalling.”

I grabbed the lip of the tomb and put my foot on the ladder.

Thought briefly of all the pleasant, boring things I might’ve been doing with my summer, had my life gone differently. Tennis camp. Sailing lessons. Stocking shelves. And then, through some Herculean effort of will, I made myself climb.

The ladder descended into a tunnel. The tunnel dead-ended to one side, and in the other direction disappeared into blackness. The air was cold and suffused with a strange odor, like clothes left to rot in a flooded basement. The rough stone walls beaded and dripped with moisture of mysterious origin.

As Emma and I waited for everyone to climb down, the cold crept into me, degree by degree. The others felt it, too. When Bronwyn reached the bottom, she opened her trunk and handed out the peculiar sheep’s wool sweaters we’d been given in the menagerie. I slipped one over my head. It fit me like a sack, the sleeves falling past my fingers and the bottom sagging halfway to my knees, but at least it was warm.

Bronwyn’s trunk was empty now and she left it behind. Miss Peregrine rode inside her coat, where she’d practically made a nest for herself. Millard insisted on carrying the Tales in his arms, heavy and bulky as it was, because he might need to refer to it at any moment, he said. I think it had become his security blanket, though, and he thought of it as a book of spells which only he knew how to read.

We were an odd bunch.

I shuffled forward to feel for hollows in the dark. This time, I got a new kind of twinge in my gut, ever so faint, as if a hollow had been here and gone, and I was sensing its residue. I didn’t mention it, though; there was no reason to alarm everyone unnecessarily.

We walked. The sound of our feet slapping the wet bricks echoed endlessly up and down the passage. There’d be no sneaking up on whatever was waiting for us.

Every so often, from up ahead, we’d hear a flap of wings or a pigeon’s warble, and we’d pick up our pace a little. I got the uneasy feeling we were being led toward some nasty surprise. Embedded in the walls were stone slabs like the ones we’d seen in the crypt, but older, the writing mostly worn away. Then we passed a coffin, grave-less, on the floor—then a whole stack of them, leaned against a wall like discarded moving boxes.