Ransom Riggs - Hollow City

All this happened very quickly, in a matter of seconds.

Then two more soldiers were coming at us. Nearly everyone else was on the train now—all but Bronwyn and the blind brothers, who had never been cuffed and were merely standing by with arms linked. Seeing that we were about to be shot to death, Bronwyn did something I could never have imagined her doing under any other circumstances: she slapped the older brother hard across the face, then took the younger one and wrenched him roughly away from the older.

The moment their connection was severed, they let out a scream so powerful it generated its own wind. It tore through the station like a tornado of pure energy—blowing Emma and me backwards, shattering the soldiers’ glasses, eclipsing most of the frequencies my ears could detect so that all I heard was a squeaking, high-pitched Eeeeeeeeee …

I saw all the windows of the train break and the LED screens shiver to knife shards and the glass light tubes along the roof explode, so that we were plunged for a moment into pure blackness, then the hysterical red flashing of emergency lights.

I had fallen onto my back, the wind knocked out of me, my ears ringing. Something was pulling me backwards by the collar, away from the train, and I couldn’t quite remember how to work my arms and legs well enough to resist. Beneath the ringing in my ears I could make out frantic voices shouting, “ Go, just go! ”

I felt something cold and wet against the back of my neck, and was dragged into a phone booth. Emma was there, too, folded into a ball in the corner, semiconscious.

“Pull your legs up,” I heard a familiar voice say, and from around back of me came trotting a short, furry thing with a pushedin snout and a jowly mouth.

The dog. Addison.

I pulled my legs into the booth, my wits returning enough to move but not speak.

The last thing I saw, in the hellish red flashing, was Miss Wren being shoved into the train car and the doors snapping closed, and all my friends inside with her, cowering at gunpoint, framed by the shattered windows of the train, surrounded by men with white eyes.

Then the train roared away into the darkness, and was gone.

I startled awake to a tongue licking my face.

The dog.

The door of the phone booth had been pulled closed, and the three of us were crammed inside on the floor.

“You passed out,” said the dog.

“They’re gone,” I said.

“Yes, but we can’t stay here. They’ll come back for you. We have to go.”

“I don’t think I can stand up just yet.”

The dog had a cut on his nose, and a hunk of one ear was missing. Whatever he’d done to get here, he’d been through hell, too.

I felt a tickle against my leg, but was too tired to look and see what it was. My head was heavy as a boulder.

“Don’t go to sleep again,” said the dog, and then he turned to Emma and began to lick her face.

The tickle again. This time I shifted my weight and reached for it.

It was my phone. My phone was vibrating. I couldn’t believe it. I dug it out of my pocket. The battery was nearly dead, the signal almost nonexistent. The screen read: DAD (177 MISSED CALLS).

If I hadn’t been so groggy, I probably wouldn’t have answered. At any moment a man with a gun might arrive to finish us off. Not a good time for a conversation with my father. But I wasn’t thinking straight, and anytime my phone rang, my old Pavlovian impulse was to pick it up.

I pressed ANSWER. “Hello?”

A choked cry on the other end. Then: “Jacob? Is that you?”

“It’s me.”

I must’ve sounded awful. My voice a faint rasp.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” my father said. He hadn’t expected me to answer, maybe had given me up for dead already and was calling now out of some reflexive grief instinct that he couldn’t switch off. “I don’t—where did you—what happened—where are you, son?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “I’m alive. In London.”

I don’t know why I told him that last part. I guess I felt like I owed him some truth.

Then it sounded like he aimed his head away from the receiver to shout to someone else, “It’s Jacob! He’s in London!” Then back to me: “We thought you were dead .”

“I know. I mean, I’m not surprised. I’m sorry about leaving the way I did. I hope I didn’t scare you too much.”

“You scared us to death , Jacob.” My father sighed, a long, shivering sound that was relief and disbelief and exasperation all at once. “Your mother and I are in London, too. After the police couldn’t find you on the island … anyway, it doesn’t matter, just tell us where you are and we’ll come get you!”

Emma began to stir. Her eyes opened and she looked at me, bleary, like she was somewhere deep inside herself and peering out at me through miles of brain and body. Addison said, “Good, very good, now stay with us,” and began licking her hand instead.

I said into the phone, “I can’t come, Dad. I can’t drag you into this.”

“Oh, God, I knew it. You’re on drugs, aren’t you? Look, whoever you’ve gotten mixed up with, we can help. We don’t have to bring the police into it. We just want you back.”

Then everything went dark for a second in my head, and when I came to again, I felt such a gut-punch of pain in my belly that I dropped the phone.

Addison jerked his head up to look at me. “What is it?”

That’s when I saw a long, black tongue pressing against the outside of the booth’s glass. It was quickly joined by a second, then a third.

The hollow. The unfrozen hollowgast. It had followed us.

The dog couldn’t see it, but he could read the look on my face easily enough. “It’s one of them, isn’t it?”

I mouthed, Yes , and Addison shrank into a corner.

“Jacob?” My dad’s tinny voice from the phone. “Jacob, are you there?”

The tongues began to wrap around the booth, encircling us. I didn’t know what to do, only that I had to do something , so I shifted my feet under me, planted my hands on the walls, and struggled to my feet.

Then I was face to face with it. Tongues fanned from its gaping, bladed mouth. Its eyes were black and weeping more black and they stared into mine, inches away through the glass. The hollow let out a low, guttural snarl that turned my insides to jelly, and I half wished the beast would just kill me and be done with it so all this pain and terror could end.

The dog barked in Emma’s face. “Wake up! We need you, girl! Make your fire!”

But Emma could neither speak nor stand, and we were alone in the underground station but for two women in raincoats who were backing away, holding their noses against the hollow’s fetid stench.

And then the booth, the whole booth with all of us in it, swayed one way and then the other, and I heard whatever bolts anchored it to the floor groan and snap. Slowly, the hollow lifted us off the ground—six inches, then a foot, then two—only to slam us back down again, shattering the booth windows, raining glass on us.

Then there was nothing at all between the hollow and me. Not an inch, not a pane of glass. Its tongues wriggled into the booth, snaking around my arm, my waist, then around my neck, squeezing tighter and tighter until I couldn’t breathe.

That’s when I knew I was dead. And because I was dead, and there was nothing I could do, I stopped fighting. I relaxed every muscle, closed my eyes, and gave in to the hurt bursting inside my belly like fireworks.

Then a strange thing happened: the hurt stopped hurting. The pain shifted and became something else. I entered into it, and it enveloped me, and beneath its roiling surface I discovered something quiet and gentle.