Hollow City

I knelt, so close to the cliff’s edge now that Emma hooked two fingers through the back of my belt to keep me from falling. Focusing on the hollow, I repeated the mantra to myself—built to kill you, built to kill—and though the hollow was for the moment stationary, hacking away at one spot on the wall, I felt the compass needle in my gut prick ever so slightly to the right of it.

It was like a premonition.

Bronwyn was beginning to tremble under the boulder’s weight.

“I can’t hold this much longer!” she said.

I decided to trust my instinct. Even though the spot my compass pointed to was empty, I shouted for Bronwyn to drop the boulder there. She angled toward it and, with a groan of relief, let go of the rock.

The moment after she let go, the hollow leapt to the right—into the very place my compass had pointed. The hollow looked up to see the rock sailing toward it and poised to jump again—but there wasn’t time. The boulder slammed into the creature’s head and swept its body off the wall. With a thunderous crash, hollow and boulder hit the ground together. Tentacle tongues shot out from beneath the rock, shivered, went limp. Black blood followed, fanning around the boulder in a great, viscous puddle.

“Direct hit!” I yelled.

The kids began to jump and cheer. “It’s dead, it’s dead,” Olive cried, “the horrible hollow is dead!”

Bronwyn threw her arms around me. Emma kissed the top of my head. Horace shook my hand and Hugh slapped me on the back. Even Enoch congratulated me. “Good work,” he said a bit reluctantly. “Now don’t go getting a big head over it.”

I should’ve been overjoyed, but I hardly felt anything, just a spreading numbness as the trembling pain of the Feeling receded. Emma could see I was drained. Very sweetly, and in a way no one else could quite detect, she took my arm and half supported me as we walked away from the ledge. “That wasn’t luck,” she whispered in my ear. “I was right about you, Jacob Portman.”

*   *   *

The path that had dead-ended at the bottom of the wall began again here at the top, following the spine of a ridge up and over a hill.

“The sign on the rope said Access to Menagerie,” said Horace. “Do you suppose that’s what’s ahead?”

“You’re the one who dreams about the future,” said Enoch. “Suppose you tell us.”

“What’s a menagerie?” asked Olive.

“A collection of animals,” Emma explained. “Like a zoo, sort of.”

Olive squeaked and clapped her hands. “It’s Cuthbert’s friends! From the story! Oh, I can’t wait to meet them. Do you suppose that’s where the ymbryne lives, too?”

“At this juncture,” Millard said, “it’s best not to suppose anything.”

We started walking. I was still reeling from my encounter with the hollow. My ability did seem to be developing, as Millard said it would, growing like a muscle the more I worked it. Once I’d seen a hollow I could track it, and if I focused on it in just the right way, I could anticipate its next move, in some felt-more-than-known, gut-instinctual way. I felt a certain satisfaction at having learned something new about my peculiarity, and with nothing to teach me but experience. But this wasn’t a safe, controlled environment I was learning in. There were no bumper lanes to keep my ball out of the gutter. Any mistake I made would have immediate and deadly consequences, for both myself and those around me. I worried the others would start believing the hype about me—or worse yet, I would. And I knew that the minute I got cocky—the minute I stopped being pants-wettingly terrified of hollowgast—something terrible would happen.

Maybe it was lucky, then, that my terror-to-confidence ratio was at an all-time low. Ten-to-one, easy. I stuck my hands in my pockets as we walked, afraid the others would see them shaking.

“Look!” said Bronwyn, stopping in the middle of the path. “A house in the clouds!”

We were halfway up the ridge. Up ahead of us, high in the distance, was a house that almost seemed to be balanced on a cloudbank. As we walked farther and crested the hill, the clouds parted and the house came into full view. It was very small, and perched not atop a cloud but on a very large tower constructed entirely from stacked-up railroad ties, the whole thing set smack in the middle of a grassy plateau. It was one of the strangest man-made structures I’d ever seen. Around it on the plateau were scattered a few shacks, and at the far end was a small patch of woods, but we paid no attention—our eyes were on the tower.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“A lookout tower?” guessed Emma.

“A place to launch airplanes from?” said Hugh.

But there were no airplanes anywhere, nor any evidence of a landing strip.

“Perhaps it’s a place to launch zeppelins from,” said Millard.